EGOS Colloquium 2012Subtheme 20: Rationalization and Professionalization of the Nonprofit Sector
5 – 7 July - Helsinki, Finland
Co-exist, Colonize, or Combine?Accounting for patterns of discourse on nonprofit evaluation
Carrie Oelberger, Achim Oberg, Karina Kloos, Valeska Korff, Woody Powell
Is talk cheap?
Language is a constitutive feature of social life
• creates cohesion and enforces social boundaries
• reflects and reinforces common systems of norms
• serves to enroll and exclude
Creates communities
Crossing Boundaries
Boundary work as the establishment of local interlanguages – pidgins and creoles – that emerge in the interstices between social domains (Galison 1997).
Interlanguage• facilitates local communication across social and linguistic
boundaries.
• enables coordination of action across place, time and context.
Connects communities
Influences from the domains of • Civil society and associations• Science• Management
Confluence of disparate world views and languages
Nonprofit evaluation discourse is an illuminating case to analyze communication at the interface of social spheres
Nonprofit Evaluation
Research Questions
Who is contributing what to the discourse on nonprofit evaluation?
1. What kind of discourse patterns form when different languages come into contact?
Does a boundary-spanning interlanguage emerge?
2. What organizational features influence an entity’s proclivity to use such interlanguage?
Websites as self-representation
• Websites constitute purposeful presentations of organizations• Information provided on websites has the capacity to travel
across spatial and symbolic distances• Symbolic representation of an organization whose structure
and content reflect the features of a particular entity (Pollach, 2004)
• Comparable in its signaling character to national symbols: flags and anthems (Cerulo, 1993)
Language used on websites reflects an organizations intentional portrayal of itself to diverse audiences
Sample selection by use of Webcrawler
• Focus on websites:Websites as purposeful self-presentations
• Crawler network: Websites are added based on number of incoming references by identified members of the relevant sample. Snowball sample
• Inclusion/exclusion decision: Collective analysis of website content to appraise extent of contribution to non-profit evaluation discourse.
• Coding of entities:Websites are aggregated and core organizational features are coded.
Sample Characteristics
419 highly interconnected entities involved in nonprofit evaluationDemography• Age: 2 to over 200 years old
• Size - Scale: one person blogs to 250,000 employee global organizations;
Scope: local, regional, national and scale
Institutional Properties• Form: 56% nonprofits, 13% for-profits, 3% branches of state or national government, 14%
transnational organizations, and 14% non-organizational forms• Activity: evaluation, funding, consulting, networking, media, advocacy, research, social services
Resources and Constituencies• Revenue Streams: foundation grants, government grants, corporate funding, individual donors,
fee-for-services, membership fees, endowment, public equity market and taxes• Target Audiences: social service beneficiaries, donors, nonprofits, for-profits, (transnational)
government and the public
Collecting Keywords
Keywords are “significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought” that make up a distinctive, domain-specific vocabulary (Williams 1969: 14)
1) Iterative process of identifying keywords to develop a vocabulary of nonprofit evaluation:• Mined the discourse on the websites and consulted experts• Created word clusters (associational, scientific, managerial) Process resulted in 196 terms categorized in 3 clusters (e.g. participation, social
change, justice = associational; data, systematic, framework = scientific; performance, benchmarks, outcomes = managerial)
2) Counting of occurrences of each term on all websites to calculate relative percentage of language used by an entity.
3) Co-occurrence analysis to affirm validity of clusters. Assessment of entities’ individual language use, and the collective pattern of
language use among all entities in the sample
Models of Discourse Patterns
Option 1: Entities co-exist, separated into linguistic factions
Option 2: Entities combine and blend different languages.
Option 3: One language colonizes and dominates the discourse.
Observed Distribution of DiscourseRe
lativ
e la
ngua
ge u
se
thesroinetwork.org
swtgroup.net
cerise-m
icrofinance.org
mullagofoundation.org
efqm.org
corostrandberg.com
ladb.org
sphereproject.org
wdi.umich.edu
usaid.org
fbheron.org
rainforest-alliance.org
organizationalresearch.co m
eandco.org
compasspoint.org
arnova.org
iisd.org
robinhood.org
broadfoundation.org
joycefnd.org
gistfunders.org
gmfus.org
americanprogress.org
hfpg.org
alliance1.org
aecf.org
seechangeevaluation.co m
ncvo-vol.org.uk
nonprofitquarterly.org
unstats.un.org
onphilanthropy.com
gatesfoundation.org
worldofgood.org
usip.org
cofinteract.org
africagrantm
akers.org
unwomen.org
komen.org
sunlightfoundation.com
350.Org
cafonline.org
Entirety of entities involved in nonprofit evaluation
Interlanguage?
Frequency analysis: Terms used by 85% of entities Co-occurrence analysis: Non-particularity of terms, but used in combination with diverse languages
No random blending of discourses
Ubiquitous and multi-lateral interlanguage vocabulary
Interlanguage
Characteristics of the Interlanguage
Interlanguage is…
• Ubiquitous in being used by all contributors
• Composed of elements of original languages
• Distinctive to nonprofit evaluation discourse
AccountabilityCommitmentParticipatorySocial changeTransparency
Trust
AccountabilityQuantitativeAssessmentEvaluationFrameworkWhat worksIndicatorsMethodsSurvey
Lessons learnedM&E/Monitoring
(& evaluation)EffectivenessPerformanceTransparencyBest practiceCertification
OutcomesEvidence
Impact
39%38%
23%
Interlanguage enables communication and coordination across social and linguistic boundaries.
Explaining Interlanguage Use
• H1: Younger organizations use more interlanguage.
• H2: Larger entities, both in terms of a) scale (size) and b) (geographic) scope use more interlanguage.
• H3: Organizations engaged in activities which involve competition or coordination with organizations of a different legal form – specifically evaluation, networking and consulting - use more interlanguage.
• H4: Organizations with a) diverse revenue sources or b) a heterogeneous audiences use more interlanguage.
Interlanguage Use - Findings
• H1: Younger organizations use more interlanguage.
• H2: Larger entities, both in terms of a) scale and b) scope use more interlanguage.
• H3: Organizations engaged in activities which involve competition or coordination with organizations of a different legal form – specifically evaluation, networking and consulting - use more interlanguage.
• H4: Organizations with a) diverse revenue sources or b) a heterogeneous target audience use more interlanguage.
Interlanguage Use - Discussion
• The youngest organizations use less interlanguage, and more managerial.• Size does not affect interlanguage use, suggesting that structural features
do not condition language use.• Organizations engaged in evaluation, networking, consulting, and research
use more interlanguage.• Type of revenue source and audience affects interlanguage use.
– Organizations that speak to an audience of social service beneficiaries and the general public use less interlanguage, while those speaking to for profits use more interlanguage.
– Organizations that draw resources through grants or endowments use more interlanguage.
• Standard features (form, size, revenue sources) remain influential on use of original discourses, yet not on interlanguage use.
Observed Distribution of Interlanguage
Entirety of entities involved in nonprofit evaluation
Rela
tive
lang
uage
use
Conclusion
• Broad use of interlanguage across organizational forms• Interlanguage as a channel through which ideas get
transported across social boundaries
• Evidence of integration in combination and interlanguage use• Evidence of colonization in composition of interlanguage• Different discourses remain relevant: Rational – Normative
Interesting times ahead!
Future Plans
• Relational analysis of the application of keywords – Nonprofit evaluation context as a densely interconnected
reputation network among organizations and URLs– Identification of clusters
Topic clustersSome topics are clustered in specific regions of the reputation network.
Philanthropy
Positioning of clustersOther topics are positioned on the top and in the center.
Civil Society
Positioning of clusters… some connect center and periphery with an inverse distribution of size (marginalized term?)
Social Service
Civil Society
Philanthropy
Social Service
Thank youfor your attention!
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