Abstract
A key feature of strategic action field (SAF) theory is the importance attached to collective identity, group membership, and social skills in understanding social orders. Gender is part of a SAF’s social order. This study investigates the relationship between credit union SAF choice and the percentage of women on boards. The setting is community credit unions in Northern Ireland where three distinct SAFs are explicitly identifiable, where board gender diversity is not subject to regulation, and where prior research identified financial management benefits from women on boards. The findings are that common understandings of the social order in community credit union SAFs are an important determinant of women on boards in credit unions. Credit unions belonging to the Orange Order SAF, a conservative religious organization, reveal a preference for a lower percentage of women on boards relative to credit unions not belonging to a SAF that emphasizes religious identity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 08997640251344845 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-28 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly |
| Early online date | 5 Jul 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published online - 5 Jul 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Data Access Statement
The data are not publicly available due to ethical, legal, or other concerns.Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Keywords
- Cooperatives
- Credit Unions
- Identity
- Internal governance
- Religion
- Women on Boards
- Fields
