Web Appendices For: What Do We Know About Nonprofit Collaboration? A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

This document contains two appendices for an article titled "What do We Know about Nonprofit Collaboration? A Systematic Review of the Literature," co-authored by Beth Gazley and Chao Guo.

This systematic literature review reports on the content of past empirical studies of nonprofit collaboration within and across the sectors, published between 1972 and 2015 (n=657). An analysis of these articles reveals four major themes: diverse but “siloed” data; imbalance in research coverage; dominance of “big four” organization theories; and limited improvement in research sophistication. It further identifies five specific research gaps: the insufficient attention to the forms and intensity of nonprofit collaboration; the divergences and contradictions in theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence; the lack of attention to the moderators and/or mediators of collaboration; the lack of understanding of collaborative failure; and the lack of comparative studies. These findings help to inform collaboration research and practice by observing the value in using a broader scope of literature and methods to build knowledge in this area.

Keywords: Nonprofit, collaboration, systematic literature review