Red Lines and Green Lights: Identity Work of Nonprofit Organizations in Business Partnerships

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly partnering with businesses, a trend that often poses challenges such as accusations of “selling out,” mission drift, and even questions over organizational identity (i.e., “who we are as an organization”). In order to better understand how NPO decision-makers navigate these tensions inherent to business partnerships, this article adopts organizational identity work perspectives. Through a comparative study of two environmental NPOs, we uncover four distinct types of nonprofit identity work: demarcating partnership boundaries , reconciling partnership goals , affirming nonprofit identity , and retracting from partnership . Based on our findings, we develop an empirically grounded model that provides new insights into the content, temporal sequencing, and contingencies of organizational identity work in nonprofit-business partnerships, thereby enhancing our understanding of how NPOs manage identity-related tensions emerging from these partnerships.