Private goals & organizational routines

“Cui Bono?” (Latin for “who benefits?”) draws upon a five-year ethnographic engagement across two grantmaking foundations and interview data from 25 additional foundations to address several inter-related omissions of current conceptual tools used to study nonprofits. First, through detailed empirical illustration, I challenge the assumption that charitable organizations are driven solely (or even primarily) by philanthropic or publicly-oriented objectives. Second, I identify and theorize the dual and dynamic manner in which public and private goals inform organizational design, highlighting the mediating role of fluctuating participation by organizational members. Finally, I illuminate these contributions through a typology of four ideal type organizations, which vary in their attention to public and private goals. The development of this comprehensive conceptual framework provides a foundational working model that serves as a framework for much of my continuing work. It offers scholars and practitioners a framework to examine nonprofit organizational design with attention to the complex interactions between public and private goals.

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co-opting social movements

I extend the overarching framework presented in my “Cui Bono” paper with an in-depth case study of how philanthropists’ private interests influence the shape and texture of civil society.  “Getting to Scale,” was published in 2016 at the Teacher’s College Record. In the manuscript my collaborators and I identify how private philanthropic funding has co-opted and channeled a particular social movement to serve private goals; in particular, the rise of privately funded ‘Charter Management Organizations’ (CMOs). We draw upon rich observational and interview data on the U.S. charter school movement, complemented with quantitative datasets on school enrollments and foundation grants to education. We illustrate how private funders seized an organizational form (in this case, the charter school), decoupled it from its original ideas (about local control), and therefore made it available to serve a different set of ideas (in this instance, contradictory ideas around “getting to scale” and “tipping the system”).

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supporting ngos in the global south

To complement the in-depth ethnographic work in “Cui Bono” and “Getting to Scale”, I have also embarked upon a project that analyzes how funders’ collective decision-making power influence the landscape of global civil society. Resulting from five years of intense data efforts, I have constructed a novel, longitudinal dataset of all grants given between 2000 and 2012 by U.S.-based private foundations to support international work, totaling USD $53 billion, merged with hand-collected, in-depth coding of nearly 400 foundations and unique foreign NGO data obtained from TechSoup. “Going the Extra Mile” is the first manuscript from this data effort, published in 2020 at Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, with Jesse Lecy (Arizona State University) and Simon Shachter (University of Chicago).

This paper argues that local nongovernmental organizations (local NGOs) based in less economically advanced countries suffer from a “liability of foreignness” in attracting international funding: They are geographically, linguistically, and culturally distant from funders in more economically advanced countries. As a result, although U.S. foundations gave 27,572 grants to support programming occurring within less economically advanced countries between 2000 and 2012, only 10.4% went to local NGOs within those areas. We argue that while favoring NGOs in more economically advanced countries minimizes funder-NGO foreignness, or the distance between the foundation and the grantee NGO, it increases NGO-programming foreignness, or the distance between the grantee NGO and the site of their programming, creating crucial trade-offs. We draw upon organizational theory to predict under what conditions U.S. foundations would fund local NGOs, finding that local NGOs receive more support from older foundations and those with greater geographic and program area experience. Furthermore, local NGOs receive larger, longer grants but with lower probabilities of being renewed. These results identify the conditions under which foundations “go the extra mile” and fund local NGOs.

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Restrictive laws

Foundations are often criticized as private actors wielding public power with little accountability, and researchers have enumerated the challenges of foundation accountability within democracies. However, foundations are transnational actors sending money to, and exerting influence on, foreign countries. In our paper, “The Power of Sovereignty Meets the Power of Philanthropy” (currently under review at VOLUNTAS), we argue that critiques of foundation accountability must include global considerations of national sovereignty. Recently, countries across the globe have introduced efforts to restrict foreign aid. While we might expect governments to desire foundation money, countries are wary of the foreign influences that accompany it. However, it is unknown whether these restrictions impact foundation activity. With data on all grants from U.S.-based foundations to NGOs working in foreign countries between 2000 and 2012, we run a difference-in-difference statistical design to assess the effect of restrictive laws on foundation activity. We find that restrictive laws have an insignificant effect on foundation activity. These results call for attention to transnational considerations of foundation accountability.

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Institutional Learning

“Institutional Learning,” uses advanced social network analysis techniques to examine how foundations’ grant making decisions shape the networks, boundaries, and dynamism of global civil society. We are in the analysis phase of this paper.