The Nonprofit Review
Print ISSN : 1346-4116
Volume 12, Issue 1
Displaying 1-3 of 3 articles from this issue
Articles
  • Shuhei Shiozawa
    2012 Volume 12 Issue 1 Pages 1-8
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: April 06, 2013
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    In an aging and matured society, services such as regular medical examinations, care for elderly and handicapped people, child care, or supporting artistic activities become more important, since people are more concerned with quality of life and preferences are diversified. Such services or goods are called merit goods or quasi-public goods, which are between private goods and pure public goods. Consumption of these goods is desirable in a social point of view. Such goods may be supplied by private firms, public sectors like local governments, or nonprofit organizations (NPO). For consumers, it does not matter that what kind of organization supplies these goods. Only price and quality may matter for consumers. In this paper, we discuss the problem that what kind of organization can supply more efficiently or desirably merit goods by using simple economic models. It is shown that the more consumers prefer quality of the private good, the more social benefit of the merit good is supplied by the firm as philanthropy. It suggests that philanthropy by profit seeking firms becomes more important and efficient as the society becomes more affluent. And for the NPO, if volunteers can be used at lower factor price, it can supply merit goods more efficiently than public sectors. Therefore, it depends on a character of goods and some kind of maturity of the society which organization is more appropriate. This paper may provide some point of view for analyzing problems such as tax exemption for NPO and corporate philanthropy, or regulations on entry in various fields.
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  • Hironobu Sugawara
    2012 Volume 12 Issue 1 Pages 9-20
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: April 06, 2013
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper studies six workers' collectives in Hokkaido which passed ten years or more after the establishment, and analyzes how those workers' collectives develop their management. It is found from the result that six workers' collectives develop their management effectively on the following points; 1) they cooperate with various groups of community, 2) they recognize various competitors, and seek to differentiate themselves, 3) they share mission and goal among their members, 4) they build the system to motivate and satisfy their members, and 5) they build the system to share information of their client and business. Moreover, it was found that workers' collectives should develop their management on the following points; 1) they strengthen cooperation with other workers' collectives, and make various activities, 2) they keep a balance between client-oriented and particular-oriented management, 3) they keep the compatibility of fairness with quickness in decision making, 4) they reinforce the function of their joint organization, and share mutual roles clearly, 5) they secure human resources in wide sphere, and 6) they develop their successors.
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  • Hiroki Noguchi
    2012 Volume 12 Issue 1 Pages 21-33
    Published: 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: April 06, 2013
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This study aims to investigate missions of NPO in Japanese contexts. With little previous quantitative research due to its difficult approach, this study focuses on missions of NPO in terms of text mining in order to show the differences between NPOs which are registered by prefecture. We use text mining and network analysis for this study. Mission statements are collected from Japanese NPOs (data is collected from 1,036 Japanese NPOs certified by the Kyoto Prefecture and 6,544 Japanese NPOs certified by the Tokyo Metropolis) and frequently used words are extracted to compare those NPOs. Also, the network of the words frequently used is examined for NPOs certified by the Kyoto Prefecture. The result shows the following features; First, there is ambiguity of missions. Second, the mission may have been affected in its creation by each prefecture as certification authorities in terms of the institutional theory. Finally, there are possibilities of cross-sectional collaboration with other NPOs. Findings from this study suggest that text mining is one important analytical way to know about missions of NPOs, although the difficulty of conducting text mining should be pointed out.
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