Filip Wijkström

This article contributes to and develops the previous literature on excess resources (“slack”) in nonprofit organizations through a conceptual analysis of the implications that the organizational distinctiveness of nonprofits carries for our understanding of slack in these organizations. We argue that this distinctiveness has important implications for (i) the threshold level at which resources become slack in nonprofit organizations; (ii) the type of resources that can be considered to constitute slack in nonprofits; and (iii) the different categories of slack to which nonprofit researchers should pay special attention. In particular, we propose an additional slack category to expand the classical typology: tappable slack. Importantly, we also suggest that in order to be relevant and useful also in the nonprofit context, the concept of organizational slack needs to be analytically linked to the mission of the organization. As an empirical illustration of these theoretical points, we discuss the resource use of the Church of Sweden and its parishes during the European refugee reception effort in 2015–2016.

The case for theoretical scrutiny of philanthropy's achievements and problems, in the institutional settings in which it operates, has never been stronger. In this introduction to IJMR’s special issue on philanthropy, we examine the developing levels and directions of institutional philanthropy scholarship, together with the consensual and contradictory themes they exemplify and the theoretical leads to which they give rise. Modern philanthropic theory is still largely based on archetypes developed in the early 20th century that accord a central role to foundations in addressing social challenges, yet the complex health, education and social service fields within which philanthropy operates have changed dramatically. We argue for the elevation of, and deepening directions for, theoretical study of institutional philanthropy. At present, institutional philanthropy has a modest theoretical literature, at the same time as we can notice an extensive and growing grey literature in the philanthropic community, often grounded in traditional strategic management. We reflect on the grey literature's potential development into theoretical scholarship, drawing on and fusing with a broader range of academic disciplines and organizational theories, and the linked study of the field as a discourse community. Here, the challenges of visibility and transparency in relation to privacy are significant, whether for accountability or research access. © 2021 The Authors. International Journal of Management Reviews published by British Academy of Management and John WileyXX1Sons Ltd

This article deals with the policy discourse on social innovation at the European Union (EU) level as well as across nine European countries. We perform an exploratory analysis of relevant policy documents focusing on articulated policy authority, suggested actors, and key outcomes of social innovation. We also conduct an explanatory testing of the applicability of the varieties of capitalism as a traditional innovation classification system to social innovation. We find that the policy discourse across Europe lacks systemization and that EU agendas are only incompletely replicated at the individual country level. We also find that social innovation policies largely defy the principles governing traditional innovation policy regimes, which necessitates new or revised classification frames.

We examine the effects of school choice reforms implemented in the early 1990s in two different settings: Sweden and Milwaukee (WI, U.S.). We show how both the ideological and theoretical arguments for choice reform were similar in the two contexts, yet the consequences in terms of the organizational outcome and institutional sector configuration ended up strikingly dissimilar. While the new group of actors in the Swedish school system consisted primarily of large-scale for-profit schools, with only a minor share of the expansion being catered to by nonprofit actors, the Milwaukee school choice program became dominated by small-scale nonprofit schools operated by religious communities. We seek to explicate these differences by drawing on the welfare state literature and social origins theory, as well as from organizational and historical institutional theory. We argue that the resulting composition of providers is directly related to the deep-seated differences in the civil society regimes operating in the two contexts.

The article applies a field theory approach to further the analysis of grassroots movements in an urban context. By employing the theoretical framework of Strategic Action Fields merged with the concept of norm entrepreneurs and combined with an idea of networks of challengers, two parallel but different social movement networks in Poland are analyzed. In this comparison the authors discuss differences in strategy and political–discursive–opportunities mobilized within respective fields between the more established housing movement and an emerging Polish urban renewal movement in the light of on-going change in the urban realm. By comparing the networks of challengers in both fields and simultaneously trying to identify the dominant institutional logics within each, we test the usefulness of the Strategic Action Field approach.

Foundations and philanthropy currently play a very limited role in the Swedish welfare. The same is true in fields like Culture and Recreation or International Activities. Only in the case of funding of research do Swedish foundations exhibit a role possible to define in terms of substitution rather than weak complementarity in relation to government. Despite marginal positions for philanthropy, Sweden displays a wealthy as well as growing foundation population, which seems like a paradox, at least in comparison to the situation in Germany and the United States where foundations traditionally play a more visible and pronounced role in society. A striking difference between the Swedish foundations and their U.S. or German counterparts is their weak bonds to religious communities or causes. Instead, we can identify in our new data set a growing segment of the Swedish foundation world that is affiliated with other parts of civil society. The same is true for the category of independent foundations, which points toward the U.S. model. We find in the article some limited support for a “philanthropic turn” in Sweden, but overall the foundation world is still deeply embedded in the social contract and strong Social-Democratic regime of the 20th century. In comparison to neighboring Scandinavian or Nordic countries, both similarities and differences are identified where, for example, the Norwegian case display a much larger segment of operating foundations, closely affiliated with government, while in Denmark, on the other hand, the corporate-owning foundation seems to be a much more important form than in Sweden.

In recent years, many Polish cities have become the sites where a new urban movement emerges, shaped in the meeting between the engagement of neighborhood activists around what Mergler (2008) has called a "concrete narrative" of particular space and everyday needs, and the inspiration of internationally connected "norm entrepreneurs" (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). As part of the movement formation, a number of small groups and local associations have become important in the process of linking local issues to the global dispute over quality of life in urban areas. Although the process is multi-faceted and the involved actors diverse in nature, we claim that it can be described and analyzed by using the recently developed framework of Strategic Action Fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2011, 2012). We illustrate how this new group of civil society actors have become important in the "game of the city" in Poland-thus re-negotiating the public private divide, which is a crucial part of the urban policy field in-between a retreating city-level public sector and the entrance of corporate actors.

This article focuses on transnational intermediary organizations in higher education and research. We conceive of intermediaries as organizations that are actively involved in transnational university governance without having formal access to or control over policy or governmental funding. Such intermediary organizations have in previous research been shown to play central roles in the development and circulation of new themes and ideas for how to manage universities and measure university performance. Intermediaries link different types of actors and act as translators of global themes. In this respect, they are decisive in policy formulation.