Abstract:
Nonprofit organizations are said to play important roles in the
reproduction of social capital, although research suggests that
some types of nonprofits add more to stocks of social capital than
others and that they vary in the types of social capital they reproduce.
Such findings typically come from surveys of individuals
or households, as opposed to surveys of nonprofits themselves.
In this research article, we draw on a survey of a sample of
Australian nonprofit organizations to demonstrate a method
of empirically testing some of the ways that nonprofit organizations
are said to reproduce social capital and to assess differences
in any contributions by important organizational characteristics
such as industry or primary beneficiary. We aim to show how
surveys of organizations might add to our understanding of the
contribution of nonprofits to stocks of social capital.
