The Challenges of Organizational Classification: A Research Note

Abstract

Social movement, civil society, and world polity scholars use counts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to evaluate important theoretical and empirical claims. To construct these measures, researchers often classify NGOs by their goals and/or domains. However, over time, the ways organizations describe and orient themselves change, blurring boundaries between organizations and complicating measurement. In this research note, we identify methodological challenges of organizational classification in the context of our work constructing a longitudinal dataset of transnational social movement organizations. We draw attention to an understudied cause of measurement error: overcounting of organizations. We suggest that as automated methods for classifying data become widespread, devising strategies for dealing with these challenges becomes even more pressing.

Women's movements and female board representation

“…To test these hypotheses, we primarily rely on the ASSET4 ESG ("Environmental, Social, and Governance") dataset from Thomson Reuters, which includes more than 400 individual environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) measures created by expert coders using publicly available information. We merge this dataset with country-level data provided by Smith et al (2019) (see also Plummer et al, 2020) as well as the World Development Indicators (WDIs) and the World Values Survey (WVS). The final dataset contains information on more than 2000 companies from 10 European and North American countries over a period of 10 years (2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011).…”

“…Our main explanatory variable is the strength of a women's movement. We operationalize this variable as the number of Women's Transnational Social Movement Organizations (WTSMOs) present in a country in a given year (Plummer et al, 2020; Smith et al, 2019). We divide this number by the respective country's total population in the same year to ensure that our measure captures the strength of a country's women's movement, rather than acting as a proxy for country size.…”

Diversity and Inclusion Practices as a Booster for Firm Sustainability: Evidence from the Czech Automotive Sector

“…According to a study by Plummer et al (2020), inclusion creates conditions that leverage differences-race, gender, education, age, job level, personality traits, thoughts and expression, and any other human and social differences. Plummer's research resulted in 8 inclusion factors: shared purpose, trust, appreciation of individual attributes, sense of belonging, access to opportunity, equitable reward and recognition, cultural competence of the organization, and respect.…”