Nonprofit organizations in between the nonprofit and market spheres: Shifting goals, governance and management?

• Published date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21347
• Author: Ben Suykens,Bram Verschuere,Filip De Rynck
• Date: 01 June 2019

RESEARCH NOTE

Nonprofit organizations in between the nonprofit

and market spheres: Shifting goals, governance

and management?

Ben Suykens | Filip De Rynck | Bram Verschuere

Faculty of Economics and Business

Administration, Department of Public Governance

and Management, Ghent University, Ghent,

Belgium

Correspondence

Ben Suykens, Department of Public Governance

and Management, Ghent University Faculty of

Economics and Business Administration,

Henleykaai 84, Ghent 9000 Belgium.

Email: ben.suykens@ugent.be

In spite of the belief instilled by the New Public Manage-

ment reforms that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can

benefit from more management, more measurement and

more market practices, systematic knowledge on the orga-

nizational effects of NPOs incorporating business prac-

tices in their day-to-day functioning remains absent to

date. This research note addresses this limitation by

reviewing 49 research articles. The focus lies on the redef-

inition of nonprofits' mission and income streams, chang-

ing governance arrangements and shifting management

practices. We find that, despite numerous detrimental

effects cited in the literature, (a) generating commercial

income can contribute to the financial stability of NPOs,

and (b) hybridization towards the market domain can

strengthen the organizational legitimacy of NPOs, sug-

gesting that imitating for-profit enterprises might contrib-

ute to nonprofit functioning in perception, rather than in

practice.

KEYWORDS

commercialization, hybrid, managerialization,

marketization, nonprofit organization

1|INTRODUCTION

What happens when nonprofit organizations (NPOs) incorporate practices and values that are ideal-

typically associated with for-profit enterprises? This question has occupied nonprofit scholars for a

long time, and the literature has documented ample evidence of NPOs increasingly relying on profit-

able market activities (McKay, Moro, Teasdale, & Clifford, 2015), corporate management tools

(Hvenmark, 2013) and performance measurement practices (Arvidson & Lyon, 2014), thereby

Received: 14 September 2017 Revised: 7 November 2018 Accepted: 9 November 2018

DOI: 10.1002/nml.21347

Nonprofit Management and Leadership. 2019;29:623–636. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nml © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 623