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The Pyramid of Nonprofit Responsibility: The Institutionalization of Organizational Responsibility Across Sectors

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Abstract

Observers have noted that organizations in all sectors, whether business, nonprofit, or government, have been moving toward rationalized structures that presuppose and express empowered organizational actorhood. We draw upon neo-institutional theory in this paper to extend the argument: The arrival of organizational actorhood has precipitated a concomitant, cross-sectoral movement toward organizational social responsibility. Whereas existing research has tended to theorize the social responsibilities of businesses, we develop a pyramid conceptual schema to array the social responsibilities of nonprofits. We then document the coevolution of organizational actorhood and responsibility across both sectors with a metastudy of nearly 200 extant surveys. We chart the institutionalization of a slate of formal structures that express organizational actorhood (i.e., mission statements, vision statements, and strategic plans) and that profess and define organizational social responsibilities (i.e., core values, ethics codes, and responsibility communications). We close with implications and future directions for organizational studies and research on corporate social responsibility.

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Fig. 1
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Note 1: See the discussion in the text about our coding of strategic plans

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Notes

  1. These objects are not exhaustive of the structures by which organizations can institute the idea of actorhood, but are perhaps the ones most directly related to actorhood in their basic purposes. We have selected them (and analogous ones for organizational responsibility) also for practical reasons—they are the most well studied. A large survey literature on these structures permits our metastudy methodology that compiles time-point estimates across years of the prevalence of these documents for comparable samples of companies and nonprofits.

  2. We have carried over lawfulness, ethics, and citizenship from Carroll’s pyramid and have arrived these dimension relative to one another in the same ascending order.

  3. We note that public companies in America have been required since 2003 by the Securities and Exchange Commission to have a code of conduct or to explain why one is not necessary, but are not required to publish their codes of conduct on their websites.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business and Economics, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Christian Magnus Falsens vei 18, 1432, Ås, Norway

    Shawn Pope

  2. Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Patricia Bromley

  3. Department of Sociology, Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Alwyn Lim

  4. Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    John W. Meyer

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Pope, S., Bromley, P., Lim, A. et al. The Pyramid of Nonprofit Responsibility: The Institutionalization of Organizational Responsibility Across Sectors. Voluntas 29, 1300–1314 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-018-0038-3

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