Browsing by Author "Walk, Marlene"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 40
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    Activating Community Resilience: The Emergence of COVID-19 Funds Across the United States
    (Sage, 2020-11) Paarlberg, Laurie E.; LePere-Schloop, Megan; Ai, Jin; Ming, Yue; Walk, Marlene; Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
    This article draws upon concepts of community resilience to explore the antecedents of community philanthropic organizations’ response to COVID-19. Although the pandemic is a global threat, responses have been local. We test a model of community resilience activation in the context of the emergence of local COVID-19 funds. We find that a philanthropic organization’s capacity to act in a crisis and respond to the needs of the community depends on the stock of community capitals and organizational capacity. The importance of economic, cultural, and political factors in predicting the emergence of a fund raises important questions about disparities in resilience along class and race lines and the role of political ideology in shaping perceptions of crises. Our research contributes to our understanding of community philanthropic organizations’ capacity to activate community resources during a crisis.
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    Aiming at a data driven definition of volunteer types: The key to improved volunteer management practices
    (International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR), 2014) Walk, Marlene; Willems, Jurgen
    Due to the huge heterogeneity of volunteering, generalizability of context specific findings from the literature regarding volunteer management practices is often limited. Furthermore, it seems that practitioner recommendations are consequently often too narrow or at times contrasting. To deal with this gap, we aim at a data driven approach to cluster volunteers into more homogeneous types, in order to enable (a) comparability of various volunteer contexts, and (b) differentiation of volunteer management strategies. Therefore, we apply an exploratory factor analysis, a cluster analysis and a canonical correlation analysis on a representative nationwide survey in Germany regarding volunteering behavior. Findings are however not robust and not suitable for further substantial interpretation, as the multivariate characteristics of the constructs probed for in the German Survey on Volunteering (GSV) are of limited quality (at least for our statistical analysis). Hence, we clarify the value of more elaborate questions in future large-scale data collection, and we discuss the remaining trade-off in the literature regarding generalizable but limited findings, versus more robust but context specific findings.
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    Can children break the cycle of disadvantage? Structure and agency in the transmission of education across generations
    (Springer, 2016-12) Burger, Kaspar; Walk, Marlene; School of Public and Environmental Affairs
    Research has shown that parents tend to pass educational advantage or disadvantage on to their children. However, little is known about the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of education involves children’s agency. In this study we drew from two traditions in sociological and social psychological theorizing—the theory of cultural and social reproduction and the theory of human agency—to examine whether agency influences children’s educational performance, and if so, whether this influence can be observed among children across social classes. We used data from the Spanish sample of the Program for International Student Assessment (N = 25,003 15-year-olds). Results indicate that the level of child agency was weakly positively related to social class, that child agency impacted on a child’s educational performance, and that the positive effect of agency on educational performance did not vary by social class. This suggests that strategies to enhance disadvantaged children’s agency may prove useful in reducing social gradients in educational performance. More generally, our findings may ignite a debate about the role that social structure and human agency play in shaping social inequality and mobility.
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    Codes of Conduct: Ein Gütesiegel für die Legitimität von NGOs? Eine Untersuchung anhand der Diskurstheorie des Rechts von Jürgen Habermas
    (Rainer Hampp Verlag, 2008) König, Nina; Ojinnaka, Judith; Ritzenhoff, Carola; Walk, Marlene
    Many internationally active nongovernmental organizations face a legitimacy deficit as the distance to those concerned by their actions is growing. This article examines different approaches to solve this problem. The discourse theory of rights by Juergen Habermas serves as a red thread and discussion basis. It is according to the same theory that the suitability of the currently developing Codes of Con-duct of Nongovernmental Organizations as a solution to the problem is discussed. It is made clear that in spite of the Codes of Conducts´ great potential to provide legitimacy to Nongovernmental Organizations there are several shortcomings to be addressed.
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    Competition and Collaboration in the Nonprofit Sector: Identifying the Potential for Cognitive Dissonance
    (2021) Curley, Cali; Levine Daniel, Jamie; Walk, Marlene; Harrison, Nicky
    Nonprofits compete with collaborators and collaborate with competitors regularly. Collaboration, a long-standing normatively preferred strategy for nonprofits, is utilized as modus operandi without thought to the potential unintended consequences. While competition, long deemed a dirty, word for nonprofits is a necessary but undesirable reality, avoided without consideration to the potential benefits. Nonprofits leaders may not be willing to explicitly acknowledge the use of competition as an operational strategy, which makes room for cognitive dissonance to impact the study of nonprofits. This piece identifies impacts of cognitive dissonance offering direction for future research exploring the interactive nature of competing with collaborators.
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    Competition is on the rise: to what extent does traditional fundraising performance research apply in competitive environments?
    (2022-01-14) Walk, Marlene; Curley, Cali; Levine Daniel, Jamie
    Research on fundraising performance links organizational size, professional donor engagement, and legitimacy with fundraising outcomes. But can we assume the same factors will positively impact fundraising performance in light of increasing competition among nonprofits? This study explores whether and how traditional factors known to impact fundraising performance perform in the context of online fundraising tournaments, an environment that is explicitly competitive as those who lose drop out. Our analysis draws on data from 596 US nonprofits that participated in such tournaments. This inquiry addresses increasing competitive pressures placed on nonprofits as they likely cannot avoid competition in the future.
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    COVID-19 as a nonprofit workplace crisis: Seeking insights from the nonprofit workers’ perspective
    (Wiley, 2021-03-17) Kuenzi, Kerry; Stewart, Amanda J.; Walk, Marlene; School of Public and Environmental Affairs
    Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofit organizations face increased demands for services alongside decreased revenues and must make tough choices on how to weather these stressors. Alongside these organizational changes, COVID-19 impacts nonprofit workers and could be a career shock for these individuals, potentially altering how they think of their work and career intentions, even jeopardizing their commitment to the sector. Therefore, this paper outlines a research agenda to understand how the pandemic impacts nonprofit workers and their commitment to working in the sector. Several areas for future research are identified including human resource policy, leadership development, generational differences, gender effects, nonprofit graduate education, and mission-specific work effects.
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    Critical Juncture of Unification – Window of (missed) opportunity for the German Welfare State?
    (University of Duisburg-Essen, 2013) Walk, Marlene
    [Excerpt] This analysis focuses on the role of free welfare associations (FWAs) in the unification process, which was mainly characterized as an institution transfer from the west to the east. FWAs are a major force in the German nonprofit sector and the main provider of social services and health care in the country (Zimmer, 1999). Moreover, they play a special role in the German welfare state under the principle of subsidiarity. This principle allows them to act on behalf of the government in the provision of social services and health care (Zimmer, et al., 2004). Incorporating FWAs in the process of institution transfer after unification was essential for the German government, due to the valuable political knowledge of East Germany that the FWAs held (Angerhausen, Backhaus-Maul, Offe, Olk, & Schiebel, 1998). This paper draws on the concepts of path dependency, critical juncture, and window of opportunity (Hacker, 2002; Ebbinghaus, 2005; Marcussen et al., 1999) and analyzes to what extent the process of German unification was a successful or a missed opportunity for the unified welfare state, with particular consideration to the role of FWAs.
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