Abstract:
One of the current key challenges for nonprofit social service
organisations is how to diversify resource mobilisation practices in order
to build sustainable organisations that can innovatively achieve social
mission. Two approaches to resource mobilisation that are promoted
within Australia are social enterprise and partnering with business. Both
of these approaches involve a re-orientation toward business, either in
management practices or through an enduring relationship.
Despite an increased interest in business-focused resource mobilisation
strategies there are few successful examples of social enterprise and
partnering with business emerging across the nonprofit sector. There is
also scant empirically based research to understand what it takes to adopt
these practices, what the consequences of adoption might be and how
governments, nonprofits and business stakeholders might support their
emergence. This research aims to build an evidence base to provide
greater understanding of these issues.
The thesis analyses data from fourteen organisational case studies of
nonprofit social service organisations located across Australia. Seven of
these organisations were selected because they had adopted an
enterprising form of resource mobilisation and had been recognised for
their achievements in this area. The other seven organisations matched
these adopters in terms of mission, location, size and stage of
organisational development, though had less diversified resource streams
and had not attempted or successfully managed to develop a social
enterprise or business partnership. Case-orientated research and
qualitative comparative analysis was used in order to achieve causal
complexity and a 'configurational' view of the cases (Ragin 1999).
The thesis details the conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for
business-focused resource mobilisation .processes to be adopted.
Organisational capacity and self-efficacy are critical conditions that open
up resource innovation possibilities; there is a range of other sufficient
conditions that work in combination with these. There are value and
ideological challenges to be negotiated by nonprofit social service
organisations as they are called upon, both internally and from without,
to reinvent the means with which they achieving organisational
sustainability. This tension creates the need for new thinking atthe level
of policy and practice - across all sectors - in order that these critical
organisations that bear responsibility for the social good can successful
organise within the contemporary context.
