Motives and Meanings: Whose Clay and Which Hands Shape Strategic Planning in Nonprofit Organizations?

The nonprofit sector in the U.S. has recently experienced widespread moves at importing business practices, resulting in isomorphism among otherwise disparate nonprofits committed to wide-ranging missions. Some organizations successfully appropriate managerial tools for their own purposes, discovering novel uses and meanings of the practices translated from the business sector. Focusing on the practice of strategic planning among a representative sample of nonprofits, we combine quantitative and fsQCA analyses to demonstrate how strategic plans are instantiated and imbued with divergent meanings through various pathways in concrete settings. Edited scripts and heterogeneity in institutionalized practices, therefore, accompany diffusion and isomorphism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]