Aaron Leib Litovsky
Whether organizations stray from their founding purpose as they grow is a long-standing question in organizational research, yet most empirical work infers “mission drift” from financial ratios that can move for reasons unrelated to purpose. This study measures drift directly, from organizations’ own words. Using the publicly filed mission and program descriptions in U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 returns, drift is operationalized as the semantic change between each organization’s earliest and latest stated mission across a three-to-six-year window. On an analytic panel of 22,638 longitudinally observed full-990 filers, drawn from a random sample of 25,000 organizations within a measured population of 292,351, three independent text measures agree closely with one another (rank correlations 0.85–0.99) but are uncorrelated with a financial-efficiency comparison (ρ ≈ 0.02), indicating that the measure captures stated-mission change rather than relabelled efficiency. Stability is the norm: 63.9% of organizations show effectively no change in their stated mission. Among the organizations that do change, pre-specified regressions show that faster revenue growth is associated with greater drift and that older organizations drift less, both net of size, sector, and funding mix; a hypothesized effect of shifting funding composition is not supported. Observable structure explains only a small share of the variation in drift, so most of it is idiosyncratic. The contribution is a transparent, reproducible, public-data instrument for studying mission fidelity over time, together with what is, to the authors’ knowledge, one of the first large-sample maps of which organizational characteristics accompany holding versus drifting from a stated purpose.