Category: Professionalization and democratic participation

Ben Suykens, Filip De Rynck & Bram Verschuere, Ghent University

As previous posts on this blog demonstrate, recent nonprofit management research is preoccupied with the idea that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly becoming ‘business-like’ by incorporating corporate norms, values and practices. Scholars are generally critical of this supposed trend, highlighting that NPOs may well gain resources, influence and the opportunity to deliver more services but at great cost to mission, values and voluntary contribution. Continue reading “Are all nonprofits becoming more ‘business-like’?”

Florentine Maier, Michael Meyer and Martin Steinbereithner, Vienna University of Economics and Business and NVSQ authors.

Our systematic literature review on Nonprofit Organizations Becoming Business-Like is an extremely dense piece of writing. We condensed the essence of 599 research publications into 8000 words. Under no circumstances can we distill it any further into a 600 word blogpost! What we want to do here, instead, is tell about the reasons why we wrote it, and provide some guidance on how to read it.

The article was inspired by the adage “when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade”: for over two years we had been trying to get research funding to conduct empirical research on the consequences of business-like forms of nonprofit organizing, as opposed to possible alternative forms. After three unsuccessful grant applications, each faltering because reviewers criticized us for not having covered the state of research sufficiently, we came to the conclusion that there apparently was no consensus on what actually constituted the relevant field of research. We had extensively read on the issue of NPOs becoming business-like, books piling up on our desks, folders bursting with printouts, our EndNote file getting bigger and bigger, and still reviewers pointing out this or that article that they considered as crucial and that we had failed to cite in our grant applications. Continue reading “Behind the scenes of “Nonprofit Organizations Becoming Business-Like””

Daniel King, Nottingham Trent University and NVSQ Author

Picture the scene. I am in my office at home surrounded by files, folders, spreadsheets, receipts, pieces of artwork and paint pots trying to write the final report for the funding body. For a small organization (which only had 5 part-time creative arts therapists and me managing the project for free), we seemed to have amassed a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy. This was not what I envisaged or set out to achieve when I entered the nonprofit sector. I never intended to be a nonprofit sector professional. But looking around my home office I am left wondering what it is that I have become?

In my recent paper in NVSQ, Becoming Business-like: Governing the Nonprofit Professional, I consider this question by examining the way I changed to see myself as a nonprofit professional. It tells the story of how I founded Creative Arts, a therapeutic arts charity, but also changed in the process of doing it. I narrate the process through which I slowly, and often without realising, over time changed from an idealistic dreamer, someone who Continue reading “How I became a nonprofit sector professional”

Jennifer Dodge, University at Albany—SUNY and NVSQ Author

The pressure for nonprofits to professionalize is enormous. I often think about this in the context of policy advocacy (advocating for particular policy positions using a variety of political strategies and tactics such as research, litigation, coalition building etc.), where the necessity to respond to changing political dynamics places “efficiency” at the top of the list of priorities. Developing a professional staff and relying on it to respond to the whims of a new administration, a change in political climate, or a new opportunity makes a lot of sense. The pressure to professionalize derives from these features of our political culture. It also derives from, or at least is reflected in, recent efforts to formalize nonprofit accountability structures, which require nonprofits to develop specific principles and statements to ensure accountability to the public, such as statements for handling conflicts of interest (this is the case in New York Nonprofit Revitalization Act of 2013, for instance). As with achieving greater efficiency, some form of formalization can make a lot of sense, especially when we are primed to think about high profile scandals where the nonprofit form is abused for personal gain. Continue reading “Participation or professionalization? A call to support democratic practices in nonprofits”