In many respects, the current public child welfare system closely resembles that of over 100 years ago. Then, as well as now, nonprofit child welfare agencies are the critical providers of service delivery to vulnerable children and their families. Contemporary nonprofits, however, are confronted with social and fiscal pressures to conform to normative practices and behaviors of governmental and for-profit organizations. Simultaneously, these agencies may also feel compelled to behave in accordance with a nonprofit normative ethic. Yet, scholars and practitioners are often unaware of how these different forces may be shaping the practices of child welfare agencies and, the nonprofit sector in general. This multi-paper dissertation examines how managerial and organizational practices of child welfare nonprofits are influenced business, government, and other nonprofit organizations and the extent to which processes process of institutional isomorphism in child welfare nonprofits are happening. Data was collected from a national ample of 184 child welfare administrators to explore marketization practices, collaboration behaviors, and managerial priorities of these agencies. Multinomial logistic, ordered logistic, and ordinary least squares regression, and historical analysis help shed light on the contemporary practices of these agencies. The results reveal that these agency's behaviors are shaped by government control, influences from the business community, identification with a nonprofit mindset (i.e., nonprofitness), funding streams, and various other factors. One key finding is that identification with a nonprofit mindset encourages certain behaviors like collaboration with other nonprofits and placing greater importance on key managerial priorities, but it does not reduce the likelihood of adopting business management strategies. Another important finding is that government control and funding does not have as strong as an influence on child welfare nonprofits as expected; however, influence from the business community does strongly affect many of their practices. The implications of these findings are discussed for child welfare agencies and the nonprofit sector in general. The consequences of nonprofits operating similarly to business and government are considered.

This dissertation studies the role of organizational politics and power and their role in the success of public service Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). By doing so, it addresses two areas of research in network governance and organizational theory. On one hand it explores the role of public private partnerships in the emerging network governance paradigm of public administration. On the other hand it studies the widely discussed but considerably under-researched role of organizational power in network governance. The literature review establishes public service PPPs as a sub type of governance networks, and provides an initial framework to study the nature and dynamics of power in these PPPs. The research is descriptive in nature and uses inductive reasoning in the tradition of Kathleen Eisenhardt. Case studies in rural areas of Punjab, Pakistan are conducted on two very similar PPPs. A replication logic is used to understand how power contributed to the success of one of those projects and lack of success in the other. Based on analysis of the findings, the dissertation concludes that public service PPPs succeed when the goals of the PPP are aligned with the goals of the most powerful collaborators. This is because regardless of its structure, a public service PPP pursues the goals targeted by the sum total of the power of its politically active collaborators. The dissertation also provides insight into the complexity of the concept of success in public service PPPs and the donor control on the operation and outcomes of public service PPPs.

This research project provides a unique perspective of the role of the concept of collaborative leadership between the Arizona Subsidized Child Care Program and its key stakeholder network. The process involved was to frame the research and its findings using the Team Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire's (TMLQ's) Assessment Scales. The research project sought to explore whether collaborative leadership in the policy-making process between the Arizona Subsidized Child Care Program and its key stakeholders actually does exist and, if so, to what extent. The research questions for the dissertation are, as follows: (1) What leadership styles does the Arizona Subsidized Child Care Program, through its various managers, exhibit and are these styles truly collaborative?; and (2) Are the leadership relationships between the key child care stakeholder groups and the Arizona Subsidized Child Care Program actually collaborative? The study employed a mixed-method approach (both quantitative and qualitative research methods) by means of an online survey, interviews, and document analysis. ii Based on this study's findings, the program exhibits collaborative leadership concepts with its stakeholder network. In addition, a positive correlation between the use of collaborative leadership concepts and participant perceptions of satisfaction, extra effort, and effectiveness was documented.