Abstract
For a long time, research has shown that nonprofit organizations face challenges associated with a changing institutional environment. Today, these challenges are intensifying, as nonprofit organizations are, for example, expected to become more efficient, more professional, and increasingly bureaucratic. In responding to these demands, often reflecting different and sometimes conflicting institutional logics, nonprofit organizations face a growing risk of what the literature refers to as mission drift. In this thesis, rather than associating mission drift with specific activities or resources, it is conceptualized as a perception-based phenomenon, linked to how organizational representatives interpret the mission. Drawing on a case study of Sweden’s largest nonprofit organization, a former state church where welfare provision is at times integrated with traditional religious activities, the thesis explores the characteristics and challenges of mission drift, and shows how it can be mitigated in practice. The findings suggest that mitigating mission drift under conditions of institutional complexity is not primarily a matter of balancing resources or activities. Instead, it involves the ongoing work of integrating, bridging, and at times separating different institutional logics in order to accommodate multiple and sometimes competing interpretations of the mission. In this way, mission drift emerges not as a fixed deviation, but as a dynamic and contested process significant for multiple dimensions, shaped by both perceptions and organizational arrangements over time.