External environmental change and transparency in grassroots organizations in China

• Published date: 01 June 2018
• Author: Mengli Chen,Guosheng Deng,Chien‐Chung Huang,Shuang Lu
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21305
• Date: 01 June 2018

RESEARCH NOTE

External environmental change and transparency

in grassroots organizations in China

Shuang Lu

1

| Guosheng Deng

2

| Chien-Chung Huang

3

| Mengli Chen

3

1

Department of Social Work and Social

Administration, The University of Hong Kong,

Hong Kong

2

School of Public Policy and Management,

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

3

School of Social Work, Huamin Research Center,

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Correspondence

Guosheng Deng, School of Public Policy and

Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing,

China.

Email: dgs@tsinghua.edu.cn

As the nonprofit sector emerges in China, so too do the

concerns about nonprofit transparency. In response to calls

for increased nonprofit information disclosure and the lack

of related research, this study examines changes in trans-

parency of Chinese grassroots nonprofit organizations.

Using the first national Survey of Transparency on Grass-

roots Organizations (2013–2015), this study finds that

Chinese grassroots nonprofit transparency has increased in

the past few years. Applying resource dependence theory

in China-specific social contexts, this study highlights the

importance of external resource to nonprofit transparency.

These findings contribute empirical evidence to the

nascent literature on nonprofit transparency and provide

implications for enhancing nonprofit transparency in

China and beyond.

KEYWORDS

environment, grassroots organization, information

disclosure, nonprofit, transparency

1|INTRODUCTION

The nonprofit sector in China has grown substantially in the past few decades. By the end of 2016,

there were more than 693,000 nonprofit organizations (excluded 5,523 foundations), which received

CNY 19.4 billion (approximately USD 2.9 billion) of public donations in 2016 (Yang, 2017).

Increasingly, Chinese nonprofit organizations have been actively engaged in diverse aspects of

social development, such as poverty alleviation, disaster relief, environmental protection, child ser-

vice, gender equality, and elderly care (Deng, Lu, & Huang, 2015). Amid their fast growth, non-

profits in China are challenged by a credibility crisis due to a series of recent nonprofit scandals

(Deng et al., 2015).

An important approach to accountable nonprofit performance is information disclosure, or trans-

parency (BoardSource, 2010; Saxton & Guo, 2011), which denotes the “continuous information

Received: 16 March 2017 Revised: 24 January 2018 Accepted: 25 January 2018

DOI: 10.1002/nml.21305

Nonprofit Management and Leadership. 2018;28:539–552.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nml © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 539