Abstract: Nonprofit organizations, as a kind of the most important organizations, are crucially criticized for their badly operation. This paper describes the organizational characters by comparing the difference between nonprofit organizations and for-profit organizations by three dimensions: industry environment, organization elements and public relationships, classifies the four types of corporation organization, structures typed governance structure in China context, and analyses the governance structure difference between corporate and nonprofit organizations. We find it is the residual claim not fit for the residual control and multi-monitoring bodies that why the governance of nonprofit organizations are badly operated.

Key words: nonprofit organizations, for-profit organizations, governance, governance structure, residual claim, residual control