Governance in civil society organizations: Church of Sweden and welfare services production
In the last two decades, the Swedish welfare system has been opened up for private providers, among them civil society organizations (CSOs). However, we know surprisingly little about the ways in which production of welfare services is governed and controlled within CSOs, and about the nature of the governance chain in these organizations in general. This project contributes to filling this gap by investigating the processes of formation and transmission of operations-related ownership intentions ("huvudmannaintentioner") in CSOs, and the nature of the steering and control mechanisms through which these intentions are translated into actual operations, in this case welfare services provision. Theoretically, we draw on corporative governance scholarship and on new institutional organization theory. Our empirical focus is the organizational complex of the Church of Sweden, one of the most important private welfare providers in Sweden. The study is qualitative, and the very substantial empirical materials consist of internal documents and interviews collected at three different governance levels in this large organization. The study will make an original and significant contribution to theory development regarding CSO governance, and thus to research concerned with organizational governance in general; and with civil society and social enterprising in particular.
Final report
PROJECT AIM AND DEVELOPMENT
The current research project is theoretically about nonprofit governance ("styrning och kontroll i civilsamhället " in Swedish). The focus is on what is tentatively defined in the application as "ownership intentions" in non-profit organizations. The overall purpose of the study is to identify the nature of the various steering and control mechanisms through which these intentions are translated along "the governance chain" within an idea-based organization. Empirical focus in the project is on the Church of Sweden, and the study should thus be understood as a direct continuation and extension of our previous studies carried out in collaboration with, initially, the Diocese of Västerås and its parishes and pastorates. More specifically, the study focuses on the welfare that is produced within the Church of Sweden's diaconal work, in its refugee reception and child-care (preschool). From previous studies we know that the Church of Sweden is a large and complex nonprofit organization with an extensive and for some time also growing production of various forms of welfare services, which can be assumed to have consequences for organizational governance.
For research on nonprofit governance, we can still note a fragmented knowledge situation internationally in an understudied field of research. This applies especially when compared with corresponding types of studies and relevant knowledge formation for profit-making companies (cf. corporate governance in management studies), as well as for public sector activities: government and public governance respectively (in political science and public administration). An important direct result of the current project therefore came to be an active participation with the project leader as one of the editors and one of the other project members as author of a separate chapter in the very first Research Handbook on Nonprofit Governance (Donnelly-Cox, Meyer & Wijkström 2021).
The project developed along both a theoretical and a more empirical track, and the work in both of its tracks has also continued after the formal end of the project. In the first track, we add to our theoretical results with relevance for nonprofit governance both nationally and internationally. The second area where new knowledge has been contributed concerns the growing involvement of nonprofit organizations in the provision of welfare and how these actors are organized to govern an often new and growing business(area see e.g. Henrekson, Andersson, Wijkström & Ford 2020). These are important areas of operation in the Swedish nonprofit sector which in the very last few decades - just as for the private profit-making welfare companies - have increasingly come to be exposed to various forms of competition as a result of the transformation of the traditional Swedish welfare state and the corresponding changes in the public sector related both to financing (e.g. through procurement) and the introduction of different forms of contracts and agreements with independent actors.
BRIEF ABOUT THE IMPLEMENATION OF THE STUDY
The project has mainly been carried out according to the initial plan, with a number of parallel but coordinated sub-studies at local level (parishes in the Diocese of Gothenburg and Stockholm), which have been combined with extensive document study primarily at national level, which together in a next step have formed the empirical basis for the project's main analysis. In the local empirical work, we have mainly worked in pairs in the research group and then together process our empirical material at internal working seminars and workshops with invited external researchers for our ongoing and more synthesizing meta-analysis.
In terms of planned publications, we have come to present more conference papers than initially planned. Through the project leader's participation as editor, we have also contributed - as a direct and concrete deepening of the project - to the Research Handbook on Nonprofit Governance that emerged during the course of the study and was published in 2021 (Edward Elgar Publishing). We have published a number of chapters in English, based on the study and our results. The publishing of our final results continues and we currently have another article in the pipeline for the journal NML (Nonprofit Management and Leadership), where we await a decision after our submission this spring (April 2024). However, we are not yet finished with the main book in Swedish as initially planned, which remains to be done. Parts of this manuscript are finished, but we are on pause while we search for a suitable publisher and publisher. This work was initiated in close collaboration with the Church of Sweden's research secretariat, with the ambition to facilitate the dissemination of the study's results within the organization.
Worth mentioning under this heading is that the implementation of the study was significantly delayed, barely halfway into the study, when the employee who was supposed to join the project after a short time took sick leave already during the very first months and then chose to drop out of the project. This situation was communicated to RJ in connection with the application for an extension so that we would have time to find a suitable replacement. After the application for an extension was rejected, the delay was difficult to make up for, although we were eventually able to recruit a suitable replacement (disputed deacon in social work instead of doctor in political science). With the new project member, however, the project was broadened in terms of competence, which proved to be successful and led to a clearer focus on specifically diaconia and other social activities within the Church of Sweden. The shift also directly and concretely contributed to significantly simplifying our access to local activities at parish level. We already had a senior political scientist with a PhD in the project, so with the new recruitment, the group became in a positive way broader in terms of subject matter.
Otherwise, both the focus and approach (method, theory, empirics etc.) for the study have been as planned, where above all the theoretical work has come to be deepened as a direct consequence of the good quality and depth of the extensive empirical material that has been gathered in.
THE PROJECT’S THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS, AND A CONCLUSION DISCUSSION
A first important result from the study is that a single kind of theoretical framework is not enough to understand and analyze nonprofit governance, at least not in larger and more complex organizations. On the contrary, our material indicates that approaches and elements from the three main theoretical schools that we start from in the study need to be combined in connection with in-depth analysis of our data. In the empirical material, we have identified clear elements from the three dominant schools of corporate governance (Principal/Agent, Stewardship & Stakeholder theory) in the organizational governance that is actually practiced within the Church of Sweden.
A second result from the study is that for the various types of activity studied (deaconry, refugee reception and child-care) different governance chains have developed within the organization; governance chains that also run parallel to each other without any obvious links between them. Finally, a third result – which directly follows on from the first conclusion – is that these chains also seem to consist of different combinations of the elements identified in the three main theoretical schools. The parallel governance chains identified within the organization therefore neither look the same nor are linked together between areas of activity studied.
All in all, these results are new within nonprofit governance, and also open up further studies, for example more focused studies of how different governance chains within a single organization relate to or interact with each other when it comes to, for example, priorities and follow-ups within the organization. An important limitation for our results is that they apply only to the relatively larger and perhaps also older and more complex nonprofit organizations. The results are thus not necessarily directly transferable to smaller and younger organizations. Also this opens for the need for further studies.
The results can be summarized as that larger and more complex nonprofit organizations seem to have developed parallel and partly differently designed internal governance chains to direct and control the various activities within one and the same organization. This violates traditional assumptions (normative as well as theoretical) about the internal governance of the idea-based organization. The results thus open the way for a re-examination of approaches in previous research into the management and control of idea-based organizations, where significant inspiration has so far been drawn from either profit-making business activities or public sector administration. Rather, our results point to a need to tackle questions about nonprofit governance on the one hand more unconditionally, on the other hand more clearly linked to the organizations' more unique conditions (theory) and needs (practice).
The existence of parallel (and only weakly connected) governance chains in nonprofit organizations is furthermore relevant also for continued studies of the welfare produced by nonprofit actors. This applies because we know from our other studies that this type of activity continues to expand, partly because new welfare activities often appear in the larger (in terms of financial turnover, number of employees and number of unpaid volunteers) organizations. This – parallel and independent governance chains – can thus be expected to have an effect on both the welfare produced and provided (often with public funding) and on the other activities within the organization.
NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND CONTINUATION PROJECTS
On an overall level, we have in our work identified a number of gaps in the existing theory formation that open up for new studies and new questions as a direct continuation of our study. This particular field of knowledge must still be considered in its infancy theoretically. There is considerable scope for new studies with theory development ambitions. For example, the current editorial request to the project leader during the summer of 2024 for a new special issue on nonprofit governance for the journal Voluntas should be understood as an indication of the research group's efforts and progress in this emerging research field.
For the Swedish part, it is furthermore practical and more concrete above all to investigate and demonstrate how governance works in the increasingly large and increasingly complex organizational structures that now seem to be being built, not least as a result of the non-profit sector's steady expansion within welfare. In many cases, various forms of welfare activities have come to be added to an otherwise rich and well-diversified existing activity, which can potentially lead to internal political tensions as well as sub-optimization within the organizations.
Even the issue of governance during a crisis (higher speed, other forms of operations and also different priorities) clearly stands out as a highly relevant area for further studies. We are now following this up in a new study funded by MSB with a budget of approximately SEK 10 million, which deals with idea-driven actors' own organizational learning and their resource mobilization during and between crises (Ideell kraft för ett starkare samhälle). Precisely questions with a focus on inter-organizational governance in close cooperation between a number of idea-driven organizations on a defined organizational level mean that we take on new interesting research questions. The new study, which we have been working on since 2021 at our research center at the Stockholm School of Economics, is the clearest and most comprehensive direct continuation of the study reported here (MSB fact sheet; article spring 2024 in Svensk Kyrkotidning)
Finally, we have also continued with new research questions connected to organizational slack in nonprofit organizations, where the article now under review for Nonprofit Management & Leadership (NML) represents a bridge between the results of this study and continued research. Even parts of our continued work in the area of nonprofit-based welfare (organization, management and governance) should be understood as a direct extension of the project, with our article in the journal Nonprofit Policy Forum (NPF, Henrekson, Andersson, Wijkström & Ford 2020) as the most concrete result. Henrekson has furthermore been one of the project's leading members and this article is also part of her PhD thesis from 2023, and it is obvious that the thesis has been inspired by her participation and work within this project. In her case, it is also obvious that parts of our results have been carried forward into further studies of nonprofit schools and their management.
HOW RESEARCH HAS BEEN DISEMINATED AND THE RESULTS COMMUNICATED
In addition to a substantial number of publications and presentations at scientific conferences, we have also worked to spread our results directly to the Church of Sweden and the rest of civil society through a large number of lectures, seminars and workshops, but also through texts directly aimed at the Swedish nonprofit sector. Managers and other civil servants at public authorities and of course also the leadership within the Church of Sweden (above all at parish and diocese level but also at national level) have been prioritized target groups. This dissemination work was most intensive during the period 2016–2020, but we have continued to present our material also after the formal end of the project. We have also contributed with more popular publications both during and after the project period, e.g. The Church of Sweden and the quest to bounce back better (Wijkström et al 2020) in an anthology written, edited and published at SSE during the pandemic, as well as through interviews and conversations, e.g. documented in the magazine Ducatus (for the Church of Sweden).
As several of the project members also teach in different courses at Swedish universities, the results from our study are also disseminated in this way, for example within the social work program at the University of Social Sciences in Lund, the political science department at Stockholm University and at the Stockholm School of Economics. Under this heading, we should also mention the continuous participation of project members in the Fenix program, a leadership development program aimed specifically at managers and leaders within civil society - where a completely new section now deals with nonprofit governance - and as a standing element in a cross-union training for LOs Ombudsmen on Runö, held twice a year. We have also participated through lectures, for example, within the framework of a training course for future pastors (kyrkoherdar) developed and provided by Lund University, as well as with a inspirational lecture by the project leader related to the installation of a new Archbishop for the Church of Sweden in Uppsala, December 2022.
In varying formats during the formal project span, but also afterwards, we have also carried out different forms of lectures and interventions based on the study's material and results, for example at Uppsala University and for individual pastorates and congregations within the Church of Sweden. Finally, above all, the project leader has been continuously available both during and after the study as scientific support for a number of projects and development initiatives carried out within The Church of Sweden. The focus has often been on new welfare provision, for example, in Västerås Diocese but also on a national level and most recently as support to the Gothenburg Diocese in 2023. These are occasions when our research and our results have been discussed with ambition to contribute to the development of new activities, for example through new perspectives and approaches.
The current research project is theoretically about nonprofit governance ("styrning och kontroll i civilsamhället " in Swedish). The focus is on what is tentatively defined in the application as "ownership intentions" in non-profit organizations. The overall purpose of the study is to identify the nature of the various steering and control mechanisms through which these intentions are translated along "the governance chain" within an idea-based organization. Empirical focus in the project is on the Church of Sweden, and the study should thus be understood as a direct continuation and extension of our previous studies carried out in collaboration with, initially, the Diocese of Västerås and its parishes and pastorates. More specifically, the study focuses on the welfare that is produced within the Church of Sweden's diaconal work, in its refugee reception and child-care (preschool). From previous studies we know that the Church of Sweden is a large and complex nonprofit organization with an extensive and for some time also growing production of various forms of welfare services, which can be assumed to have consequences for organizational governance.
For research on nonprofit governance, we can still note a fragmented knowledge situation internationally in an understudied field of research. This applies especially when compared with corresponding types of studies and relevant knowledge formation for profit-making companies (cf. corporate governance in management studies), as well as for public sector activities: government and public governance respectively (in political science and public administration). An important direct result of the current project therefore came to be an active participation with the project leader as one of the editors and one of the other project members as author of a separate chapter in the very first Research Handbook on Nonprofit Governance (Donnelly-Cox, Meyer & Wijkström 2021).
The project developed along both a theoretical and a more empirical track, and the work in both of its tracks has also continued after the formal end of the project. In the first track, we add to our theoretical results with relevance for nonprofit governance both nationally and internationally. The second area where new knowledge has been contributed concerns the growing involvement of nonprofit organizations in the provision of welfare and how these actors are organized to govern an often new and growing business(area see e.g. Henrekson, Andersson, Wijkström & Ford 2020). These are important areas of operation in the Swedish nonprofit sector which in the very last few decades - just as for the private profit-making welfare companies - have increasingly come to be exposed to various forms of competition as a result of the transformation of the traditional Swedish welfare state and the corresponding changes in the public sector related both to financing (e.g. through procurement) and the introduction of different forms of contracts and agreements with independent actors.
BRIEF ABOUT THE IMPLEMENATION OF THE STUDY
The project has mainly been carried out according to the initial plan, with a number of parallel but coordinated sub-studies at local level (parishes in the Diocese of Gothenburg and Stockholm), which have been combined with extensive document study primarily at national level, which together in a next step have formed the empirical basis for the project's main analysis. In the local empirical work, we have mainly worked in pairs in the research group and then together process our empirical material at internal working seminars and workshops with invited external researchers for our ongoing and more synthesizing meta-analysis.
In terms of planned publications, we have come to present more conference papers than initially planned. Through the project leader's participation as editor, we have also contributed - as a direct and concrete deepening of the project - to the Research Handbook on Nonprofit Governance that emerged during the course of the study and was published in 2021 (Edward Elgar Publishing). We have published a number of chapters in English, based on the study and our results. The publishing of our final results continues and we currently have another article in the pipeline for the journal NML (Nonprofit Management and Leadership), where we await a decision after our submission this spring (April 2024). However, we are not yet finished with the main book in Swedish as initially planned, which remains to be done. Parts of this manuscript are finished, but we are on pause while we search for a suitable publisher and publisher. This work was initiated in close collaboration with the Church of Sweden's research secretariat, with the ambition to facilitate the dissemination of the study's results within the organization.
Worth mentioning under this heading is that the implementation of the study was significantly delayed, barely halfway into the study, when the employee who was supposed to join the project after a short time took sick leave already during the very first months and then chose to drop out of the project. This situation was communicated to RJ in connection with the application for an extension so that we would have time to find a suitable replacement. After the application for an extension was rejected, the delay was difficult to make up for, although we were eventually able to recruit a suitable replacement (disputed deacon in social work instead of doctor in political science). With the new project member, however, the project was broadened in terms of competence, which proved to be successful and led to a clearer focus on specifically diaconia and other social activities within the Church of Sweden. The shift also directly and concretely contributed to significantly simplifying our access to local activities at parish level. We already had a senior political scientist with a PhD in the project, so with the new recruitment, the group became in a positive way broader in terms of subject matter.
Otherwise, both the focus and approach (method, theory, empirics etc.) for the study have been as planned, where above all the theoretical work has come to be deepened as a direct consequence of the good quality and depth of the extensive empirical material that has been gathered in.
THE PROJECT’S THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS, AND A CONCLUSION DISCUSSION
A first important result from the study is that a single kind of theoretical framework is not enough to understand and analyze nonprofit governance, at least not in larger and more complex organizations. On the contrary, our material indicates that approaches and elements from the three main theoretical schools that we start from in the study need to be combined in connection with in-depth analysis of our data. In the empirical material, we have identified clear elements from the three dominant schools of corporate governance (Principal/Agent, Stewardship & Stakeholder theory) in the organizational governance that is actually practiced within the Church of Sweden.
A second result from the study is that for the various types of activity studied (deaconry, refugee reception and child-care) different governance chains have developed within the organization; governance chains that also run parallel to each other without any obvious links between them. Finally, a third result – which directly follows on from the first conclusion – is that these chains also seem to consist of different combinations of the elements identified in the three main theoretical schools. The parallel governance chains identified within the organization therefore neither look the same nor are linked together between areas of activity studied.
All in all, these results are new within nonprofit governance, and also open up further studies, for example more focused studies of how different governance chains within a single organization relate to or interact with each other when it comes to, for example, priorities and follow-ups within the organization. An important limitation for our results is that they apply only to the relatively larger and perhaps also older and more complex nonprofit organizations. The results are thus not necessarily directly transferable to smaller and younger organizations. Also this opens for the need for further studies.
The results can be summarized as that larger and more complex nonprofit organizations seem to have developed parallel and partly differently designed internal governance chains to direct and control the various activities within one and the same organization. This violates traditional assumptions (normative as well as theoretical) about the internal governance of the idea-based organization. The results thus open the way for a re-examination of approaches in previous research into the management and control of idea-based organizations, where significant inspiration has so far been drawn from either profit-making business activities or public sector administration. Rather, our results point to a need to tackle questions about nonprofit governance on the one hand more unconditionally, on the other hand more clearly linked to the organizations' more unique conditions (theory) and needs (practice).
The existence of parallel (and only weakly connected) governance chains in nonprofit organizations is furthermore relevant also for continued studies of the welfare produced by nonprofit actors. This applies because we know from our other studies that this type of activity continues to expand, partly because new welfare activities often appear in the larger (in terms of financial turnover, number of employees and number of unpaid volunteers) organizations. This – parallel and independent governance chains – can thus be expected to have an effect on both the welfare produced and provided (often with public funding) and on the other activities within the organization.
NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND CONTINUATION PROJECTS
On an overall level, we have in our work identified a number of gaps in the existing theory formation that open up for new studies and new questions as a direct continuation of our study. This particular field of knowledge must still be considered in its infancy theoretically. There is considerable scope for new studies with theory development ambitions. For example, the current editorial request to the project leader during the summer of 2024 for a new special issue on nonprofit governance for the journal Voluntas should be understood as an indication of the research group's efforts and progress in this emerging research field.
For the Swedish part, it is furthermore practical and more concrete above all to investigate and demonstrate how governance works in the increasingly large and increasingly complex organizational structures that now seem to be being built, not least as a result of the non-profit sector's steady expansion within welfare. In many cases, various forms of welfare activities have come to be added to an otherwise rich and well-diversified existing activity, which can potentially lead to internal political tensions as well as sub-optimization within the organizations.
Even the issue of governance during a crisis (higher speed, other forms of operations and also different priorities) clearly stands out as a highly relevant area for further studies. We are now following this up in a new study funded by MSB with a budget of approximately SEK 10 million, which deals with idea-driven actors' own organizational learning and their resource mobilization during and between crises (Ideell kraft för ett starkare samhälle). Precisely questions with a focus on inter-organizational governance in close cooperation between a number of idea-driven organizations on a defined organizational level mean that we take on new interesting research questions. The new study, which we have been working on since 2021 at our research center at the Stockholm School of Economics, is the clearest and most comprehensive direct continuation of the study reported here (MSB fact sheet; article spring 2024 in Svensk Kyrkotidning)
Finally, we have also continued with new research questions connected to organizational slack in nonprofit organizations, where the article now under review for Nonprofit Management & Leadership (NML) represents a bridge between the results of this study and continued research. Even parts of our continued work in the area of nonprofit-based welfare (organization, management and governance) should be understood as a direct extension of the project, with our article in the journal Nonprofit Policy Forum (NPF, Henrekson, Andersson, Wijkström & Ford 2020) as the most concrete result. Henrekson has furthermore been one of the project's leading members and this article is also part of her PhD thesis from 2023, and it is obvious that the thesis has been inspired by her participation and work within this project. In her case, it is also obvious that parts of our results have been carried forward into further studies of nonprofit schools and their management.
HOW RESEARCH HAS BEEN DISEMINATED AND THE RESULTS COMMUNICATED
In addition to a substantial number of publications and presentations at scientific conferences, we have also worked to spread our results directly to the Church of Sweden and the rest of civil society through a large number of lectures, seminars and workshops, but also through texts directly aimed at the Swedish nonprofit sector. Managers and other civil servants at public authorities and of course also the leadership within the Church of Sweden (above all at parish and diocese level but also at national level) have been prioritized target groups. This dissemination work was most intensive during the period 2016–2020, but we have continued to present our material also after the formal end of the project. We have also contributed with more popular publications both during and after the project period, e.g. The Church of Sweden and the quest to bounce back better (Wijkström et al 2020) in an anthology written, edited and published at SSE during the pandemic, as well as through interviews and conversations, e.g. documented in the magazine Ducatus (for the Church of Sweden).
As several of the project members also teach in different courses at Swedish universities, the results from our study are also disseminated in this way, for example within the social work program at the University of Social Sciences in Lund, the political science department at Stockholm University and at the Stockholm School of Economics. Under this heading, we should also mention the continuous participation of project members in the Fenix program, a leadership development program aimed specifically at managers and leaders within civil society - where a completely new section now deals with nonprofit governance - and as a standing element in a cross-union training for LOs Ombudsmen on Runö, held twice a year. We have also participated through lectures, for example, within the framework of a training course for future pastors (kyrkoherdar) developed and provided by Lund University, as well as with a inspirational lecture by the project leader related to the installation of a new Archbishop for the Church of Sweden in Uppsala, December 2022.
In varying formats during the formal project span, but also afterwards, we have also carried out different forms of lectures and interventions based on the study's material and results, for example at Uppsala University and for individual pastorates and congregations within the Church of Sweden. Finally, above all, the project leader has been continuously available both during and after the study as scientific support for a number of projects and development initiatives carried out within The Church of Sweden. The focus has often been on new welfare provision, for example, in Västerås Diocese but also on a national level and most recently as support to the Gothenburg Diocese in 2023. These are occasions when our research and our results have been discussed with ambition to contribute to the development of new activities, for example through new perspectives and approaches.