When everyone loses: Exploring the emotional cost of broken trust and nonprofit wrongdoing

ABSTRACT

This project explores narratives of nonprofit wrongdoing through media coverage and organizational responses exhibited in four individual cases, representing four common types of nonprofit organizations and four distinct types of wrongdoing. Through a thematic analysis of over 450 texts, the findings from this study provide an initial examination of how nonprofit wrongdoing has been conceptualized and the discourses surrounding issues of trust, focusing on the emotional cost and fallout of nonprofit wrongdoing as a key component of broken trust.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The leading social media outlets of today were all created or became widely used after the specific cases of wrongdoing examined in this study. The cases of wrongdoing examined here occurred between 2004 and 2007. Today’s social media outlets gained widespread popularity in the years following. For example, Facebook was opened to all users regardless of university affiliation in 2006 and by 2009 was ranked as the ‘most used social network worldwide.’ Twitter was created in 2006 and had 100 million users by 2012. Instagram was created in 2010, and the first hashtag was used in 2007 (Edosomwan, Prakasan, Kouame, Watson, & Seymour, 2011).

² While auto-coding capabilities exist within this qualitative software, I did not use this.

function but, instead, personally conducted all coding and analysis at each stage of the process.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of Mississippi, College of Liberal Arts [CLA Research and Creative Achievement Grant].