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Causes of Dissolution Among Spanish Nonprofit Associations

University of California, Berkeley

Voluntary associations play increasingly important roles in many industrialized societies. However, little is still known about why they die. This article attempts to fill this gap. It reconstructs the history of 41 closed Spanish voluntary associations of Madrid's metropolitan area through archival research and semistructured interviews to define the causes of their dissolutions. The conclusions indicate that the majority of the organizations dissolved due to mission completion (particularly goal fulfillment) and resource insufficiency. This article also uses central predictions of new institutionalism, population ecology, and resource dependence theories and shows that these three models provide valuable insights to account for these dissolutions. As each theory respectively predicts, those organizations with lower sociopolitical legitimacy, that were younger and smaller, or that were funded by only one source dissolved younger.

Key Words: nonprofit organizations • voluntary associations • organizational theory • failure • dissolution

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