Environmental influences on local nonprofit and for -profit market structure: A national study of the nursing home industry.

The coexistence of nonprofit and for-profit organizations within a number of industries, particularly health and social assistance fields, has prompted substantial interest in and research on the implications of ownership for organizational behaviors. The emerging consensus is that ownership influences a range of organizational behaviors; however the nature and scale of these differences appears to be affected by other factors including the nonprofit and for-profit organizational composition of the local market. For-profit entities adopt nonprofit sector traits (e.g. higher quality) in areas with more nonprofit organizations and vice versa. The implications for service delivery suggest a need to better understand the factors affecting the distribution of nonprofit and for-profit sector organizations within local markets. Using data from the nursing home industry, this research seeks to advance our knowledge of mixed sector industry structure by examining the relationship between certain environmental conditions and the absolute and relative sectoral presence in local markets (measured by the number of total nursing home beds operated by each sector). For this research, local markets are conceptualized at the level of the county, with 2765 counties throughout the United States included in the primary analyses. To help assess the universality versus contingency of identified relationships between the environment and the sectoral presence in a county, the analyses were conducted using two different time periods (1992 & 2002) and three different classes of counties (metropolitan, micropolitan, and rural). Fundamental differences between the sectors become evident when viewed across multiple analyses. The nonprofit and for-profit sector presence responded similarly to certain characteristics, however significant differences were apparent. From an ecological perspective, the for-profit sector appears to be more sensitive to competition than the nonprofit sector. Additionally, institutional mechanisms also tended to be differentially experienced by the sectors such that certain areas appear to prefer a particular organizational form. Overall, the findings validate the value of incorporating institutional and ecological theory and approaches into mixed sector analyses. Future research initiatives on mixed sector industries may benefit from adopting an institutional ecology perspective in which ecological processes are viewed as embedded within a broader institutional environment.Ph.D.Organizational behaviorSocial SciencesSocial workSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126971/2/3287636.pd