Part of a bigger picture. Cognitive sensemaking as a way to understand nonprofits’ corporate volunteering collaborations

Description

In this paper we focus on corporate volunteering (CV) from the perspective of the nonprofit organization. The phenomenon has scarcely been researched from this viewpoint and little knowledge exists about why and how different CV collaborations evolve. We propose the concept of cognitive sensemaking as a means to demonstrate how different underlying understandings of CV trigger different decisions in this respect. Drawing on expert interviews with staff responsible for CV in nonprofit organizations, our results clearly demonstrate that decisions about CV collaborations generally go beyond the direct resources acquired through CV, suggesting that such partnerships should be regarded in a more holistic way. We identify three different frames about CV, labelled the market-based, resource-dependent and idealisticframe and show how they lead to very different CV types. Our results thus contribute to the literature on cross-sector collaboration in general and CV in particular by offering a framework for evaluating the connectivity between different understandings of a partnership and the resultant partnership type.

Period	10 Jul 2018 → 13 Jul 2018
Event title	ISTR
Event type	Unknown
Degree of Recognition	International