This Ph.D. Thesis is focused on knowledge about capacity to act and performance in the concrete case of those organizations in the nonprofit field of economy. Their characteristics are analyzed when facing provision of welfare services, as well as their contribution to the creation of community social capital. Thus, the stakeholder management model in Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) is suggested, as promoting social capital generation, as well as allowing sustainable competitive advantages for organizations at output provision.
Specifically, main questions to highlight in the first part of the research relate to issues as for example: which are the characteristics of those organizations in the associative field with a bigger potential to generate community social capital?, which are the characteristics of the social capital so generated?, which challenges and dilemmas must NPOs face when providing services for social welfare?
In the second part of the research a management model is suggested aiming generation of social capital by NPOs, as well as allowing them to achieve their intended goals, observing their original values.
In this context, the core center and general aim of this section is to answer the following question: to what extent management of stakeholders is having influence on the achievement of goals in NPOs, through the generation of social capital?
Taking in mind the continuously changing environment in which organizations perform, the sustainability of competitive advantages relies on a continuous creation of new worthwhile resources according to involved agents’ perception.
As a consequence, all kind of organizations should develop their dynamic capacity of absorption, that is, their ability to indentify, assimilate, combine and exploit the knowledge that is generated in the system.
The structural dimension of the social capital in an organization is determined by existing networks with different stakeholders, allowing identification and assimilation of valuable knowledge.
In a similar sense, stakeholder management allows a development of the relational and cognitive dimension of social capital, they both resulting from membership to a cohesive group of the system. On the other hand, stakeholder management could also provide clear advantages in the process of combining and exploiting acquired knowledge.
The empirical work was done by means of a case study related to nonprofit organizations. The suitability of this method in order to fulfill the research objectives is justified on the basis of its focus: to provide in-deep knowledge on those dynamics that are characterizing individual scenarios, as well as to discover new relations and concepts, much more than to verify or check out propositions that were previously established.