Rustandy Center Awards First PhD Research Dissertation Prize

In spring 2021, the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation invited University of Chicago PhD students and recent graduates pursuing research on social impact topics to apply for its inaugural Social Impact Dissertation Prize. The prize—$10,000 in funding—was open to recent UChicago graduates (up to one year after receipt of a doctoral degree) and current doctoral students in their third year or higher in the advanced stages of writing their dissertation. In this Q-and-A, the Rustandy Center sits down with this year’s winner Yuhao Zhuang for the paper, “Varieties of Competition: Nonprofit Status Hierarchies and Grassroots-Oriented Corporate Philanthropy in China.” Zhuang is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in Sociology and Business.

How did you come up with/settle on the topic for your dissertation?

Yuhao Zhuang: My earlier research projects focused on social services organizations in contemporary China and their various tactics to cope with the authoritarian state’s increasing interventions. In an interview with a services organization leader, I incidentally learned that local firms were increasingly donating to grassroots nonprofits—bottom-up, politically precarious charitable groups that were not spin-offs of any government agencies. This sounded surprising to me at that moment, as prior research assumed that firms in China primarily supported government-led philanthropic initiatives. I then began to analyze national corporate donation data available, and preliminary results suggested that more than 40 percent of total corporate donation amount in China was received by grassroots nonprofits recently. To explain this unanticipated yet intriguing donation pattern, I decided to study this grassroots-oriented corporate philanthropy for my dissertation and use it as an illuminating case to shed light on novel forms of corporate social responsibility in emerging markets.

How would you describe the goal of your research?

This particular dissertation paper investigates what kinds of Chinese grassroots nonprofits are able to receive larger donations from corporate sponsors. I hypothesize that the attractiveness of grassroots organizations is conditioned by social status hierarchies that they are exposed to, usually in the form of local nonprofit performance ratings systems. In cities where frequent exposure to performance ratings induces intense interorganizational competition for higher standings, grassroots nonprofits are more incentivized to invest in technological and organizational capabilities that in turn provide means for firms’ philanthropic programs. Besides, when local performance contests are characterized by ambiguous criteria, grassroots nonprofits are more flexible to corporate donors’ commercial goals pertinent to core business interests, which have been previously discounted by civil society. To test these propositions, I am conducting a comparative qualitative study of corporate donations flowing to three coastal Chinese cities. In total, I intend to draw on 92 interviews with nonprofit workers, corporate donors, and state officials and 15 months of participant observation from related charitable events. This project is innovative, as it is one of the few empirical studies that will show how interorganizational competition for social status differs across ratings systems with various structural characteristics. It will also demonstrate why some politically fragile social organizations get to form partnerships with companies in an authoritarian regime.