Overview
Broadly speaking, my research examines the intersection of market strategy and nonmarket strategy from a political perspective. In ongoing projects, I center on the implications of political risks, political status, and political ideologies that structure inter-organizational relationships. Public-private partnerships, social impact, and social activism are among the substantive topics through which I contextualize my theoretical pursuits. My research adopts a mixed methods approach, which draws on qualitative methods, regression frameworks, and computational text analysis.
Broadly speaking, my research examines the intersection of market strategy and nonmarket strategy from a political perspective. In ongoing projects, I center on the implications of political risks, political status, and political ideologies that structure inter-organizational relationships. Public-private partnerships, social impact, and social activism are among the substantive topics through which I contextualize my theoretical pursuits. My research adopts a mixed methods approach, which draws on qualitative methods, regression frameworks, and computational text analysis.
Dissertation: The Architecture of Grassroots-Oriented Corporate Philanthropy in China
Early Career Workshop Award, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), 2021
Social Impact Best Dissertation Prize, Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation Research, 2021
Center for International Social Science Research Dissertation Fellowship, 2021
Center for East Asian Studies Dissertation Fellowship, 2021
Charles R. Henderson Research Grant, 2020
This dissertation explores why and how firms partner with politically marginalized nonprofit organizations prone to government surveillance, predation, and repression. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that low political status of nonprofits helps firms turn corporate philanthropic initiatives into core business activities, in particular market risk mitigation, business networking, and product marketing. In the second chapter, I show that structural characteristics of locality-specific performance ratings—namely, evaluation frequency and ambiguity—condition capacity building and agenda versatility of politically marginalized nonprofits, which have implications for their attractiveness in the eyes of potential corporate donors. In the third chapter, I document that breadth of corporate support that a nonprofit can possibly garner—a measure of resource mobilization base for social impact—also varies according to the organization’s political status. Through an empirical investigation of grassroots nonprofits in contemporary China, on the basis of a mixed-methods design, this dissertation advances a demand-side, nonprofit-centered perspective on corporate social responsibility and points to the significance of political contestation and commerciality in market-society collaborations.
Early Career Workshop Award, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), 2021
Social Impact Best Dissertation Prize, Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation Research, 2021
Center for International Social Science Research Dissertation Fellowship, 2021
Center for East Asian Studies Dissertation Fellowship, 2021
Charles R. Henderson Research Grant, 2020
This dissertation explores why and how firms partner with politically marginalized nonprofit organizations prone to government surveillance, predation, and repression. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that low political status of nonprofits helps firms turn corporate philanthropic initiatives into core business activities, in particular market risk mitigation, business networking, and product marketing. In the second chapter, I show that structural characteristics of locality-specific performance ratings—namely, evaluation frequency and ambiguity—condition capacity building and agenda versatility of politically marginalized nonprofits, which have implications for their attractiveness in the eyes of potential corporate donors. In the third chapter, I document that breadth of corporate support that a nonprofit can possibly garner—a measure of resource mobilization base for social impact—also varies according to the organization’s political status. Through an empirical investigation of grassroots nonprofits in contemporary China, on the basis of a mixed-methods design, this dissertation advances a demand-side, nonprofit-centered perspective on corporate social responsibility and points to the significance of political contestation and commerciality in market-society collaborations.
Working Papers:
1. Grassroots-Oriented Corporate Philanthropy as Extension of Firms' Core Business Activities in China. In preparation for submission.
Early Career Workshop Award, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), 2021
Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation Research Funding, 2019-2021
Prior research has established that corporate philanthropic donations in politically repressive environments are predominantly received by the government and its affiliates. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from China, I develop a theory of firms’ partnership with grassroots nonprofits, which are politically disadvantaged organizations unaffiliated with the state. An analysis of original nonprofit philanthropic activity data shows that, in comparison with state-controlled nonprofits, grassroots nonprofits are more likely to subject their projects to firm donors’ core business practices. Findings based on interviews and participant observation further point to two mechanisms underlying the grassroots nonprofits’ susceptibility to firms’ business needs. Precisely due to lack of access to quasi-coercive means and failure to legitimize work as political necessity, grassroots nonprofits are first open to corporate donors’ requests to secure control of donation allocation and leverage such control to buffer against market uncertainties. Second, grassroots nonprofits also become expedient targets of firms seeking to turn philanthropic events into cost-saving opportunities of business networking and product marketing. These findings connect political disadvantage of firms’ nonprofit partners with commerciality of corporate philanthropy, contributing more broadly to work on political embeddedness, hybridity, and corporate-society relation.
Online Appendix
2. Who Select into Political Voids?: Theory and Evidence from Nonprofit and For-Profit Aid Intermediaries (with Marieke Huysentruyt and Bertrand V. Quélin).
Substantial development aid is channeled to recipient countries with varying levels of political development and implemented by organizations from civil society and the private sector. The nonprofit and for-profit intermediaries may differentially respond to an aid delivery opportunity in a country with political voids—that is, interstices in political institutions that grant policy favors disproportionally to the privileged few rather than the majority. We develop a conceptual framework of the selection of nonprofits and firms into a country with political voids, and test it using a proprietary dataset of 1,166 bids for international development aid contract initiated by the United Kingdom’s bilateral agency. We show that, holding constant the nature of the project and the economic development of the target country, nonprofits as champions of neglected populations are more willing to compete for contracts in countries distinguished by political voids, compared to for-profit firms. We also show that the purely socially-oriented nonprofits, not the hybrid ones, with an unaggressive agenda of social change are most willing to fill political voids and most likely to win the contract. Further, peer competition pressure mediates the relationship between political voids and contract winning by nonprofits: The stronger the presence of transnational social organizations in the target countries with political voids, the more likely the purely socially-oriented, unaggressive nonprofits secure the contract. Our results underline the critical role of nonprofits in development aid delivery for politically challenging contexts, suggesting that a purely social under-the-radar approach pays off most for nonprofits seeking to advance the most needed public welfare while circumventing unwanted political interventions.
3. The Make or Buy State: Cost Efficiency, Capacity Lock-In, and Partisan Asymmetry in Federal Contracting (with Elisabeth Clemens). In preparation for submission.
Government contracting reconstitutes boundaries of the public sector through ever-deepening engagement of business firms and nonprofit organizations. Despite a legion of sociological accounts documenting implications of the contracting regime, it is rarely investigated in the first place when outsourcing of state functions is prioritized over “in-house” performing and how configuration of contracting award allocation varies over time. Regression analysis of U.S. federal contract spending across both granting administrative agencies and grantee states from 1979 to 2018 demonstrates that delegatory relationships are sustained by the need to incentivize contractors’ specialized capacities and to maneuver partisan politics. Instead of optimizing cost efficiency in service delivery, the federal government contracts out more responsibilities to nonstate organizations that are able to facilitate building of the administrative state and help absorb uncertainties within the political system. Furthermore, this capacity lock-in process is augmented by laissez-faire presidential administrations, which at the same time more readily leverage market transactions to expand electoral support for the presidential party.
4. Nonprofit Status Hierarchies and Grassroots-Firm Collaborations. Working paper.
5. The Breadth of Corporate Support for the Nonprofit Sector. Working paper (dissertation chapter).
6. Proximate Cohesion: Physical Copresence and Political Suturing in China’s Social Sector. Paper writing.
7. Phantom of the Past: Resurgence of Totalitarian Discourses in Post-Socialist Propaganda (with Tong Ju). New data collection underway.
8. Redistributive Solidarity and Business Engagement: Experimental Evidence (with Marieke Huysentruyt). Research design and conceptualization.
9. Federal Contracting as a Political Project for Small and Minority Businesses (with Elisabeth Clemens). Data collection.