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1. Introduction
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are intriguing and complex bodies that have long attracted the interests and curiosity of researchers all around the world. Year after year and era after era, NGOs are experiencing increased attention in different societies and for different reasons. It is for this reason that researchers seek to learn more about these organizations and build empirical evidence that allows to make strong claims on the topic of NGOs management. In the past and nowadays, NGOs have been mainly based on philanthropy and volunteering. A little attention has been dedicated to rationality, effectiveness, efficiency, economic sustainability, in other words, to the management system and the managerial culture. Different research and frameworks were mainly based on sociology, psychology and ethics. In the period of the 1980s and 1990s of the past century, few elements of management systems and tools have been introduced in the public sector and NGOs sector as well. Still, the lack of specificity caused not so relevant results and the improvement was little; hence, it is necessary to elaborate a new framework.
This paper first goes over the different important definitions for the NGO jargon, to align understandings and establish a ground level of basic knowledge about the topic on hands, which mainly revolves around the different business disciplinary areas of NGOs, which is an important added value to our methodology. The suggested framework in this paper is based on linking together different management areas. These areas include: strategic management, marketing, human resources, logistics and supply chain management, project management, organizational culture, performance measurements and financial management. These areas are all derived from business practices, which also heavily impact the operations and related to higher performance of NGOs. The scrutiny of the above-mentioned areas in NGOs is done by running an extensive review of the existing literature, from the past till the present date and from different authors and different points of view.
2. NGOs definitions
To define NGOs, authors differ in evaluating the criteria to include. Morris (2000) suggests that the third sector aims at supplying public goods, as a substitute to what the government is responsible for, to cut costs. The non-profit sector occupies the role of transforming the economy, as it provides services that cannot be offered...