Historical institutionalism: a tool for researching the nonprofit sector in times of pandemic

Abstract

Historical institutionalism is increasingly acknowledged as a promising theoretical platform in the field of nonprofit sector studies. The main goal of the paper is to review major applications of historical institutionalism to the nonprofit sector, with a particular focus on how this theoretical platform illuminates the responses of Czech nonprofit organizations to the Covid-19 crisis. In addition, the paper contributes to the conceptual toolbox of historical institutionalism, a novel approach of the retrograde analysis of events. Drawing on the Luhmannian systems theory, the events are taken to reflect system-building processes occurring at the level of nonprofit organizational fields, and comprise the mutual succession of critical junctures and the periods of relative stability in the evolution of the nonprofit sector. Applied to the context of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, the proposed approach allows to infer the high probability of new critical junctures. Given the enormous challenges and the growing resource deficits faced by Czech nonprofit organizations, many of their existing path-dependencies will be likely broken, with new ones being called into life.