Abstract
NGO/NPO effectiveness remains a prominent concern for scholars and practitioners, but the literature on this issue is increasingly fragmented along disciplinary lines. We address this problem by presenting a comprehensive and interdisciplinary review of the literature on NGO and NPO effectiveness using citation analysis. In order to uncover commonalities across disciplines concerned with similar questions, we deploy a structured literature review using snowball sampling within citation networks. This approach limits author biases, fosters an interdisciplinary perspective, and adds a different methodological approach to conventional content-based literature reviews. Our review uncovers three trends: (1) there is broad scholarly consensus that unidimensional measures of effectiveness are not useful-even though such measures are commonly used by NGO/NPO rating agencies; (2) the scholarship on NGO/NPO effectiveness is dominated by conceptual works, while empirical studies remain rare; (3) a consensus on how to operationalize effectiveness remains elusive. These results suggest that progress in our understanding of NGO/NPO effectiveness requires enhanced efforts at crossing disciplinary divides, adding empirical analyses, and increasing attention to develop shared categories and methodologies.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 434-457 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Voluntas |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2012 |
Keywords
- Non-for-profit organizations
- Non-governmental organizations
- Structured literature review
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Business and International Management
- Sociology and Political Science
- Public Administration
- Strategy and Management