Abstract This study examines how grassroots gender NGOs in China navigate online fundraising amid tightening regulations and declining external funding. Drawing on a longitudinal analysis of 463 crowdfunding projects by 124 gender NGOs on Tencent Charity, it shows how these organizations pursue gender equality under pressure from the state and the platform economy. The study identifies two interrelated strategies: (1) strategic conformity through issue reframing to ally with state agendas for algorithmic visibility and (2) strategic stealth in intersectional boundary-spanning, calibrating (in)visibility while leveraging cross-sectoral collaboration to sustain gender advocacy. These practices reflect how gender NGOs continually negotiate visibility, legitimacy, and autonomy. The findings suggest that digital philanthropy, rather than diversifying fundraising, often reproduces hierarchies of attention and access. Conceptualizing strategic stealth in intersectional boundary-spanning as adaptive, issue-expanding practices, this study deepens understanding of NGOs’ constrained agency and highlights platform governance as a key force channeling state priorities in civic fundraising.
Informal volunteering remains underrecognized in both research and public discourse, partly due to two interconnected issues: an analytical focus on who volunteers and what they gain from volunteering, and persistent measurement challenges that make it difficult for respondents and researchers to define and identify informal volunteering. Both issues originate from frameworks of volunteering developed in the context of formal volunteering and the assessment of informal volunteering through the conceptual lens of formal volunteering, emphasizing individual benefits and organizational affiliation. This article argues for a shift in analytical attention from a volunteer-centered framework to a task-centered framework that focuses on what volunteers do and accomplish through volunteering. Such a task-centered framework contributes to volunteering literature by including recipients of volunteering, and by providing a framework to approach informal volunteering on equal terms with formal volunteering.
This article examines democracy-related attitudes of German sports club members. It employs a framework derived from the neo-Tocquevillian theoretical works about democracy to argue that the depth of individual involvement in a club, in conjunction with the club's political and democratic culture, is crucial for determining attitudes conveyed by members. A representative sample of the population (N = 3,049) indicates that there is only a slight difference in the levels of political interest, political efficacy beliefs, cosmopolitan orientations, or satisfaction with democracy between sports club members and non-members. However, more nuanced models for sports club members indicate that active participation, as well as a club culture that encourages initiative, open political debate, and diversity, is predictive of pro-democratic attitudes. Based on these findings, we propose a perspective that no longer treats sports clubs as a homogeneous group, but acknowledges the existence of a range of club cultures.
Family businesses play an important role in philanthropic responses to disasters due to their distinctive combination of business, family, and community logics. Drawing on an institutional logics perspective and based on interviews with family business owners, we assess how three key logic features-collective identities, resources, and governing practices-affect the philanthropic responses of family businesses following the Beirut port explosion in 2020. The findings demonstrate the importance of non-financial contributions and reveal the inventiveness of family businesses in mobilizing a variety of assets distinctive to their business. This creativity, coupled with their knowledge of and embeddedness in community, resolves the paradox of how family businesses can respond so effectively to disasters with seemingly limited financial resources. Socioemotional wealth serves as a building block in the creation of civic wealth and is a key factor in explaining the enduring engagement of family businesses in later stages of disaster response. While family businesses pay significant attention to integrating institutional logics in their governance of disaster philanthropy, they often struggle with striking an appropriate balance between a personal, family-held approach and a more professionalized one. Practical implications for family businesses in Lebanon point to the challenges of resilience of philanthropic efforts in the context of a weak state and recurring crises.
The article aims to provide an analytical and empirical reassessment of the transformation of post-socialist political activism, with implications for the general analysis of civil society. Based on a distinction between two types of political activism-transactional and participatory-we seek to illustrate how these help us understand the development of the key aspects of post-socialist civil society. First, we conceptualize a general mode of activism with three dimensions: mobilization, transactional capacity, and strategic capacity. Using a unique protest event dataset (1989-2022), we empirically examine this activist mode in two thematic areas of activism-economic and environmental ones-over the course of three decades. We show, first, how each dimension of the activist model is linked to different contextual or intra-organizational factors, and second, that these two fields of activism, which were considered dramatically different, are slowly converging in all three dimensions.
Debt financing plays a critical role in the financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations, yet scholarly understanding of the factors influencing nonprofits' access to debt remains limited. This study explores the antecedents of creditworthiness among Chinese nonprofits, focusing on the role of political connections, revenue diversification, and organizational size. Drawing on signaling theory, we argue that these factors serve as credible signals to lenders, reducing information asymmetry and thereby enhancing nonprofits' access to debt. Using survey data from Chinese nonprofits, we find that political connections and organizational size significantly improve creditworthiness, while revenue diversification does not. The findings also reveal a heavy reliance on debt among Chinese nonprofits, highlighting the importance of debt financing as a useful financial tool in resource-constrained environments. This study adds to the literature on nonprofit debt by presenting evidence from the unique and underexplored authoritarian context of China and by offering practical insights for nonprofits seeking to enhance their creditworthiness.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with climate activists who initiated, monitored, or engaged with citizens' assemblies (CAs) across Poland, this article addresses a gap in the deliberative democracy literature on the bottom-up adoption of democratic innovations in Central and Eastern Europe. Our analysis shows that activists played a pivotal role in promoting CAs as a participatory tool for climate policymaking. Certain features of CAs, such as the random selection of participants, were strategically employed, while others, deliberation and expert input, were valued intrinsically. Their strategic use of assembly outcomes revealed both potential and transparency gaps, highlighting the need for institutional safeguards. As activists found their involvement exhausting, our findings suggest that the future of CAs will rely less on grassroots mobilization and more on institutional support and a robust implementation framework.
