Coopetition Engagement and Capability Configurations for Social Reach: An fsQCA Study of a Pakistani Nonprofit Network

Abstract

Networked nonprofit organisations often cooperate in service delivery and advocacy while competing for grants, donor attention, legitimacy and visibility. This cross-sectional study examines whether alternative combinations of study-specific coopetition engagement and organisational capabilities are associated primarily with social reach and secondarily with perceived commercial performance. An organisation-referenced key-informant survey collected in July 2018 yielded 418 usable observations from a Pakistani nonprofit network. A seven-factor confirmatory factor analysis preceded fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The primary theory-guided analytical specification used direct calibration at 2.00, 4.01 and 6.00, a five-case truth-table frequency threshold, .80 consistency and .70 proportional reduction in inconsistency. No single condition was necessary. Eight overlapping pathways were associated with high social reach (overall consistency = .801; PRI = .753; coverage = .909). Four were coopetition-anchored pathways, in which high coopetition engagement was a core condition combined with analytical, emotional or executional capability, or with the absence of strong knowledge-boundary capability. Four were capability-centred pathways in which coopetition engagement was configurationally irrelevant rather than demonstrably absent