ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Public Administration
Description
In many respects, the current public child welfare system closely resembles that of over 100 years ago. Then, as well as now, nonprofit child welfare agencies are the critical providers of service delivery to vulnerable children and their families. Contemporary nonprofits, however, are confronted with social and fiscal pressures to conform to normative practices and behaviors of governmental and for-profit organizations. Simultaneously, these agencies may also feel compelled to behave in accordance with a nonprofit normative ethic. Yet, scholars and practitioners are often unaware of how these different forces may be shaping the practices of child welfare agencies and, the nonprofit sector in general. This multi-paper dissertation examines how managerial and organizational practices of child welfare nonprofits are influenced business, government, and other nonprofit organizations and the extent to which processes process of institutional isomorphism in child welfare nonprofits are happening. Data was collected from a national ample of 184 child welfare administrators to explore marketization practices, collaboration behaviors, and managerial priorities of these agencies. Multinomial logistic, ordered logistic, and ordinary least squares regression, and historical analysis help shed light on the contemporary practices of these agencies. The results reveal that these agency's behaviors are shaped by government control, influences from the business community, identification with a nonprofit mindset (i.e., nonprofitness), funding streams, and various other factors. One key finding is that identification with a nonprofit mindset encourages certain behaviors like collaboration with other nonprofits and placing greater importance on key managerial priorities, but it does not reduce the likelihood of adopting business management strategies. Another important finding is that government control and funding does not have as strong as an influence on child welfare nonprofits as expected; however, influence from the business community does strongly affect many of their practices. The implications of these findings are discussed for child welfare agencies and the nonprofit sector in general. The consequences of nonprofits operating similarly to business and government are considered.
ContributorsRobichau, Robbie Waters (Author) / Catlaw, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Nahavandi, Afsaneh (Committee member) / Gustavsson, Nora (Committee member) / Wang, Lili (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Knowledge advancement occurs when the creation of new and useful knowledge encompasses and supersedes earlier knowledge. A rapidly growing number of scholars with state-of-the-art research tools has led to the growth of knowledge exploration in almost every field. It, however, has been observed that the findings of new studies frequently differ from previously established evidence and even disagree with one another. Conflicting and contradictory results prevail in the literature. This phenomenon has puzzled many people with respect to which findings are reliable and which should be considered as valid. Inconclusive results in the literature inhibit, rather than facilitate, knowledge advancement in sciences. Meta-analysis, which is referred to as the analysis of analyses, designed to synthesize findings from a large collection of quantitative analyses that produce inconsistent results has become a major research method in the fields of medicine, education, and psychology; however, the method has been slow to penetrate research in nonprofit and public management (NPM). This study, therefore, discusses how meta-analysis contributes to knowledge advancement in the fields of nonprofit and public management by using nonprofit commercialization as an example to examine its impact on nonprofit capacity and donations, respectively. The attention of this discussion is directed toward how the use of meta-regression models is able to offer new and useful knowledge that encompasses and supersedes earlier knowledge in the literature with evidence-based results. Moreover, this study examines whether the use of SEM-based meta-analysis produces equivalent results when compared with results from traditional meta-regression models. The comparison results suggest that the use of SEM-based meta-analysis is able to produce equivalent results even when missing data are present. Overall, this study makes at least two contributions. First, it introduces a newly-developed method for conducting meta-analysis to the field of NPM. This method is especially useful when there are missing data in data sets. Second and most importantly, this study demonstrates how knowledge advancement in NPM can be achieved by conducting meta-analysis.
ContributorsHung, Chia-Ko (Author) / Hager, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Lecy, Jesse (Committee member) / Wang, Lili (Committee member) / Calabrese, Thad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019