ACCOUNTABILITY IN SOUTH KOREAN NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS: STAKEHOLDER EXPECTATIONS AS PERCEIVED BY NONPROFIT LEADERS

[摘要] My dissertation attempts to identify the major societal and strategic forces that shape the development of South Korea’s nonprofit sector as perceived by Non-profit Organization (NPO) leaders and managers.I began with a reflection on Lester Salamon’s (2012) theoretical framework, which specifies four impulses—civic activism, voluntarism, professionalism, and commercialism—that have historically exerted pressure on the U.S. nonprofit sector and, consequently, shaped its present structure and behavior.My first research question is: what are the impulses shaping the South Korean NPO sector? I seek to discover if Salamon’s framework is transferable to the South Korean context. South Korea has a distinct social foundation and history of civil society, which may generate different impulses than those in the U.S. My dissertation delves into the universalities and particularities of the driving forces that South Korean NPOs face. My second research question is: what specific accountability obligations are perceived by NPO leaders to be implied by the various impulses? For the purpose of this study, accountability is defined as the management of diverse stakeholder expectations on nonprofit management (Kearns, 1996; Romzek & Dubnick, 1987). This study focuses on how NPO leaders and managers align the organization with perceived stakeholder expectations. This study is comprised of two phases: employing mixed methods of the Repertory Grid Method and organizational surveys.The first phase aims to identify what a sample of NPO leaders believe to be the driving forces impacting their accountability environments. In phase II of the study, the survey is designed to determine how NPO leaders perceive the driving forces that are shaping their accountability environment and, further, to identify the ways that they are responding to these forces.This study found that the reinforcing influence and countervailing interchange between the social movement and strategic management impulses have been significant and tangible in the South Korean context. It also observed that the duality structure, which refers to the split between advocacy-focused NPOs and service-focused NPOs in the nonprofit sector, prevails in the South Korean nonprofit sector in terms of the nonprofit leaders’ perceptions of their accountability obligations towards their main stakeholders.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh