Social Innovation in Disability Nonprofits: An Abductive Study of Capabilities for Social Change
- Authors: Taylor, Rachel , Torugsa, Nuttaneeya , Arundel, Anthony
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly Vol. 49, no. 2 (2020), p. 399-423
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- Description: This study uses an abduction-based approach to identify the capabilities harnessed by nonprofit organizations (NPOs) as they develop social innovations. The context of this study is the Australian disability sector currently undergoing a once-in-a-generation social policy reform with the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Data from extensive field observation and 52 interviews were collected during “researcher-in-residences” at two disability NPOs and analyzed using thematic coding and practice–theory iteration to arrive at a “working” hypothesis. The findings reveal many capabilities used by disability NPOs on the path to social innovation development. The complex interplay of these capabilities forms five pivotal capabilities (i.e., transformational empathy, place-based relationing, diversity learning, paradoxical change making, and complexity leadership) for eliciting nonprofit social innovation (NSI) with community and system-level impacts. © The Author(s) 2019.
Leaping into real-world relevance: An “abduction” process for nonprofit research
- Authors: Taylor, Rachel , Torugsa, Nuttaneeya , Arundel, Anthony
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly Vol. 47, no. 1 (2018), p. 206-227
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- Description: Positioned in the midst of the heated debate about the production of relevant and usable knowledge for practitioners in the nonprofit sector and a serious shortage of high-impact research that speaks to practice, the purpose of this Research Note is to direct nonprofit scholarship toward embracing “abduction,” which is the initial creative stage in scientific inquiry that facilitates the formulation of testable explanatory hypotheses and makes new discoveries in a sensory and logically structured way. We use an emerging interest in social innovation by the nonprofit sector as an illustrative example to show the advantages of using abductive reasoning as the primary method of reasoning for discovering new knowledge of a nascent but vital phenomenon. The novel contribution of this Research Note lies in encouraging scholarship on the nonprofit sector to an applied “practice-led” research process that is intellectually relevant and has the potential to bridge the scholar–practice divide.