Abstract
Currently most of the world's population lives in democratic societies and market-based economies. However too many people are still confronting high levels of inequality, insecurity and uncertainty. The third sector, the voluntary sector or more generally the Nonprofit sector, defined as the "sector is the contested arena between the state and the market where public and private concerns meet and where individual and social efforts are united" (Frumkin, 2002), actually strives to alleviate these situations throughout the world. To achieve their missions, nonprofit organizations need human resources, financial resource and legitimacy that they have to collect outside their organization. Nonprofit organizations are opened systems because they cannot produce their necessary resources internally and have to mobilize resources from other organizations to assure their survival. Hence organizations become dependent on and begin to deal with external organizations and individuals which constitute their task environment and their network of interdependencies. All these interdependencies involve a power relationship that creates uncertainties. In order to reduce these uncertainties, organizations try to manage efficiently their relationship with their environment. With this paper we will try to explore how nonprofit organizations may assure their survival and even their growth by understanding their stakeholders in order to create an appropriate relationship that will allow them to obtain their necessary resources.
