Some nonprofit economists tend to see nonprofit commercialization as a moral dilemma because commercial activities may secure organizational survival at the cost of undermining the mission orientation. The present paper argues that this type of moral framing of the commercialization debate is hardly adequate for the transitional context of the Czech nonprofit sector which is still struggling to develop its distinct institutional identity. Given that financial independence is part of this identity, commercial activities help nonprofits to emancipate themselves from the state that used to be paternalistic in the past. On this basis, the paper underscores the institutional nature of the commercialization phenomenon in the Czech Republic. Commercialization decisions of Czech nonprofit managers are shown to be heavily influenced by the current institutional and regulatory environment that explicitly promotes nonprofit self-financing initiatives. If nonprofit commercialization is understood as an institutional phenomenon, then its moral significance is best captured in terms of institutional ethics rather than individual ethics of nonprofit managers which seems to be predominant in the Anglo-Saxon literature. After presenting the recent empirical findings on self-financing, the paper concludes by stressing the interrelation between the semantic and ethical aspects of the commercialization concept.

Sustainability of nonprofit organizations is a key concern for today’s nonprofit scholars and practitioners. Building upon the nonprofit economics literature, the present paper introduces the distinction between the demand-side and supply-side determinants of nonprofit sustainability and makes the case for the discrepancy between them. This discrepancy presents not only a generic conceptual explanation of the nonprofit sustainability problems but is also applicable to the context of the European rural nonprofit sector. Three arguments are advanced. First, the notorious implementation problems of LEADER partnerships can be explained as a manifestation of the above discrepancy. Second, and related, the rural context implies the tendency of the supply-side determinants of nonprofit sustainability to undermine the demand-side ones. Third, recent empirical findings from the Czech Republic show that this tendency does not necessarily imply the possibility of a clear classification of the demand-side and supply-side sustainability determinants. Rather, those features of rural areas and communities that significantly affect the size of the local nonprofit sector exhibit a controversial entanglement of demand-side and supply-side identities.

The paper contributes to the research on social enterprises. Based on historical institutionalism, we map the evolution of social enterprises in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the collapse of communist rule. The findings indicate that the historical-evolutionary trajectories differ, despite their common path during the totalitarian regime. There is some convergence based on significant political changes that resulted mostly in the need to create integrated legislation and to reflect the common European policy; the divergent trends occur after exogenous economic shocks, the effects of which might result from the differing initial macroeconomic situations in both countries.

The aim of financial controlling is to secure liquidity and financial stability of an organization. It is very important especially for NPOs. They are not founded primarily for the purpose of making profit, so their financial policy gives priority to continuously provide liquidity. The paper presents partial results of a pilot primary research of utilization of financial controlling tools in governmental and nongovernmental non-profit organizations in the conditions of Slovak Republic. Primary data were obtained by the sociological method of a structured questionnaire. The analysis was carried out by adequate mathematical and statistical methods for processing qualitative data and ordinal variables. The presented paper provides a new insight into the studied problem while generating a primary information basis for further scientific study and research work in this field.