Partnering with firms: Do non-profit organizations sell their soul to the devil?

Collaboration between nonprofit and business sectors has been widely researched from the business perspective. However, to date, the literature on social alliances has not examined the models of conversion of capitals used by nonprofits in deciding to form alliances with businesses. To address this gap, we propose a theoretical framework based on Bourdieu’s theory of forms of capital and the mechanisms of capital conversion in order to analyze the models of conversion by the nonprofit in social alliances. Since firms now have to become more socially responsible through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the traditional model of capital conversion for nonprofits changed when corporation and allied foundations became an alternative source of funding to them. Through alliances with firms, Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) can convert their symbolic capital into economic capital, but in doing this, they run the risk of losing their symbolic capital as Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) organizations. Based on a cluster analysis and a multinomial probit regression, the preliminary findings indicate that NPOs have developed four models of conversion to deal with businesses and the main explanatory factor for belonging to one of the four models of conversion is the symbolic capital of the nonprofit.