Dyana P Mason

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Oregon

Collaborative governance has been discussed extensively in the public administration and management literatures, but there has been limited focus on structure and on the platforms supporting ongoing efforts. This article explores thirty collaborative groups over a 12-year period, using surveys, interviews, financial reports, and other data. The stu...

Experiential learning has become a fundamental pillar of higher education, particularly in public administration and nonprofit management programmes. This approach purposefully aims to engage learners directly in (a) concrete experiences; (b) focused, personal reflection; (c) abstract conceptualizations and (d) active experimentation. As universiti...

The literature in nonprofit management can help sharpen museum visitors’ understanding of issues around governance, specifically by reconciling management practices with participation and inclusion. Participation in the art museum is a complex issue that includes community involvement in educational programs, content creation, and artistic practice...

The benefits of entrepreneurial mentorship are well documented, but there is limited research on how entrepreneurs connect with mentors, especially in digital settings. We partnered with an online platform that connects entrepreneurs to potential mentors to conduct a field experiment in online mentoring. Drawing on literature on entrepreneurial men...

The study of nonprofit advocacy has evolved significantly over the past two decades, yet gaps still remain in our understanding of the processes and roles of nonprofit organizations in policymaking and policy change. In part, these gaps may be exacerbated by limitations in the methodologies and research designs used to examine advocacy, despite the...

Nonprofit organizations often partner with government agencies to deliver public services. As communities adapt to new transportation options and technologies, nonprofit organizations and the services they provide need to be kept accessible to their clients. This exploratory research note is among the first of its kind to consider the impact of tra...

Nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can play important roles in supporting and facilitating community development projects, improving community well-being. This study uses the theoretical framework provided by institutional logics to evaluate the competing value structures and ideologies held by multiple stakeholders in an internatio...

Over the last decade, scholars and practitioners have advocated for nonprofits to develop operating reserves to help them survive economic shocks, but questions about what can be considered financial reserves remain. To understand what it takes to build reserves, most previous studies used Liquid Unrestricted Net Assets (LUNA) calculated from organ...

Experimental studies have just begun to diffuse slowly in nonprofit research, reflecting the general recognition that experimental studies can help nonprofit researchers overcome some limitations of the methods that have traditionally been used. This special issue includes four papers that consider the diversity of experimental research in nonprofi...

Over the past two decades, attention has focused on the increasing professionalization of the nonprofit sector. Hwang and Powell’s article on professionalization and rationalization of the nonprofit sector laid the theoretical foundations for robust scholarship in this area. This study makes use of a unique dataset that offers the opportunity to st...

Volunteer management practices have been shown to have positive effects on employees in terms of skill development, job success, organizational identity, and morale in the public, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. Despite considerable research on volunteering, questions remain about how management practices of volunteer programs may affect voluntee...

Scholars and practitioners have argued that effective financial management, particularly the development of operating reserves, can help nonprofits survive economic shocks. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a significant impact on the nonprofit sector, provides an opportunity to test whether nonprofits have followed that recommendation, and if s...

Nonprofit organizations that engage in advocacy strengthen their ability to meet their mission by supporting systematic change. As such, students enrolled in nonprofit management programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels should develop both the knowledge of and the skills to engage in advocacy. Students should be trained to consider advocac...

Nonprofit boards of directors are responsible for the governance of their organizations. Despite a wide literature on board governance, empirical studies have focused primarily on board characteristics such as board size, frequency of board meetings, or board member characteristics. Building on prior literature, we use qualitative interview and sur...

Purpose Many empirical studies have focused on whether public funding leverages (crowds in) or discourages (crowds out) private giving behavior, finding mixed results. Recent studies suggest the need to examine how nonprofits adjust their fundraising efforts after experiencing cuts or increases in government funding, which can then influence donor...

Since the early 1990s, diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts have received increasing attention among management scholars. Although the benefits and challenges of implementing D&I practices are now well established, few studies have explored the extent to which nonprofit associations, in particular, engage in D&I efforts. As such, we have no knowle...

Within higher education, there is mounting pressure for increased discussions of diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Although these topics are particularly relevant to nonprofit management education (NME), instructors have expressed uncertainty about how they should proceed in incorporating these topics into their courses. Here, we argue a cr...

Due to myriad applications of the nominal group technique (NGT), a highly flexible iterative focus group method, researchers know little about its optimal scoring procedures. Exploring benefits and biases that such procedures might present, we aim to clarify how NGT scoring systems can privilege consensus or prioritization. In conducting the first...

In recent years, arts and culture nonprofits have sought to make themselves more relevant to community issues by engaging in advocacy. Based on survey data drawn from a national sample of arts nonprofits, this study compares the different levels of advocacy carried out by all arts nonprofits and by minority-led arts nonprofits. To explain the varyi...

Nonprofit education and management programs often recognize the efficacy of including experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad in their curricula. In addition, higher education institutions increasingly prioritize global citizenship as a learning outcome. However, challenges abound for educators who want to evaluate study abroad cou...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Latent constructs are the unobservable characteristics of individuals, groups and organizations. Although researchers use many tools to measure latent constructs, including scaled-items and factor analysis techniques, this study offers a different way to measure these characteristics in nonprofit research. Using Item Response Theory (IRT), this stu...

Local governments prioritize spending on various types and levels of public services. Although scholars have shown that citizen preferences and institutional factors, such as economic, political, and legal arrangements, play a role in resource allocation, scholars have not systematically examined the impact of local elected officials’ own ideologic...

Traditional views of the nonprofit–government relationships suggest that while government may depend on nonprofit organizations to provide human services, nonprofits must also conform to government standards, monitoring, and regulation. In this paper, we argue that through specialized investments in capacity building, nonprofit providers can become...

Most theories of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit leadership recognize the multitude of stakeholders—including board members, donors and volunteers, funders, the media, and policy makers—that organizational leaders must contend with in doing their work. For nonprofits engaged in advocacy, demands from stakeholders may be even more challenging...

The influence of nonprofit leaders in organizational advocacy strategies and outcomes has not been fully explored in the literature, despite the recognition that political or policy entrepreneurs are crucial to the American policy process. These leaders are placed squarely in the political arena with other political elites, including elected offici...

Most models of charitable giving and volunteerism assume that individuals give to receive some type of benefit, which can range from the receipt of a small extrinsic reward (such as a material reward) to being rewarded with a feeling of doing good, a sense of pride, a strengthened reputation, or an expectation of reciprocity. One incentive that has...

Studies of distributive public policy claim that electoral incentives shape the geographic distribution of government grants to individuals and organizations, such as those in arts and culture. Public management scholarship suggests that managers bring value to their communities and stakeholders within them through their capacity and skill. This st...

Public management researchers are interested in many characteristics of organizations that cannot be directly captured, making aggregated attitudes from surveys an attractive proxy. Yet difficulties in measuring meaningful attributes over time and across organizations have frequently limited statistical designs to a single organization or time. We...

Most nonprofit organizations rely on gifts of time and money to support their operations. However, research by nonprofit scholars on the behavioral mechanisms of charity remains underdeveloped. One methodological tool, the randomized and controlled field experiment, has not been fully embraced by nonprofit scholars publishing in nonprofit journals....