Abstract
As a young graduate student in the 1980s studying public administration, I bemoaned the almost complete absence of curricular materials about the nonprofit sector. Given my work experience prior to my doctoral studies, I was hungry for content and material about the nature of the sector. How pleasantly surprised I was when re-entering the academy in the 1990s after a stint in government to find an explosion of literature about nonprofit organizations and voluntary action. As Kirsten A. Grønbjerg notes in the Foreword to the newest edition of The Nature of the Nonprofit Sector, while there were fewer than 300 peer-reviewed articles per year from 1980 to 1983, by 2019, that number of publications ballooned to over 31,000, with a concomitant rise in the number of dissertations, books and research reports published by a “growing number of individual scholars now specializing in the field” (p. xiii). Therefore, it is not surprising that the fourth edition of The Nature of the Nonprofit Sector weighs in at over 2 pounds and 600 pages!
While the newest edition of the book has certainly grown in heft and length, Ott and Dicke have edited this new volume substantially, paring down some sections, eliminating selections from previous editions, and combining sections to make room for newer material. For example, Part VI combines what were previously two sections on Community and Civil Society Theories adding new pieces and eliminating others. There is a completely new section focused on the global context of the nonprofit sector and the internationalization of the sector (Part III). This new section complements the section on the nature and configuration of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector in other countries that had been included in previous editions but is completely revised here with all new selections (Part X). Ott and Dicke have also made major changes to the section dealing with relations and collaborations within and between sectors in recognition of the swiftly moving environment within which nonprofit organizations must currently operate, drawing attention to the “blurring of boundaries” between the government and nonprofit sector as well as between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
In this fourth edition, the editors have included more content proposing alternative ways of understanding the history and performance of nonprofit organizations reprinting selections by Kallmann and Clark, Sandberg, and Mascarenhas that adopt a more critical perspective on the origins and logics of the nonprofit sector. Current pressures that act on the nonprofit sector are traceable to neoliberalism and the new political culture that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s according to Kallmann and Clark (p. 37). They identify these pressures as institutional logics—clientelism, paternalism, bureaucracy, activism, and professionalization—each of which is present in civil society organizations worldwide and can be employed to understand how activism changes in particular settings. In contrast to traditional theories of the evolution of the nonprofit sector, the selection by Sandberg provides a critical history of the American nonprofit sector. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “effective history,” she problematizes the ways in which the nonprofit sector has become quite businesslike which “involves the professionalization, rationalization, commercialization, and marketization of nonprofit and voluntary organizations and their functions” (p. 102). She argues that when seen through this new alternative lens, our understanding of what we have previously considered to be “right” voluntary action can now be seen as “changeable.” Similarly, Mascarenhas draws our focus to the crisis of charity, asking us to question the assumption that the road to “help” is paved with good intentions, reflecting the instrumentalism of new humanitarianism that conditions the granting of aid to those in need on wider political and economic objectives. He wonders if this is merely a new configuration of imperialism in our current corporatized global world. The addition of these selections to the volume represents a concerted effort by Ott and Dicke to present alternative theories and histories alongside more traditional work in the field.
As I read through the volume, I questioned the editors’ decision to use the terms nonprofit and nongovernmental interchangeably as they suggest the difference between the two is slim and “NGOs are essentially the same entities as nonprofit organizations and civil society organizations” (p. 112). While the theories and theorists included in the work are drawn from particular fields of study—economics, sociology, political science, management, and so on—referring to NGOs and nonprofits as indistinguishable assumes a universality of the macro theories included in the volume. While there are three sections of the book with a geographic focus, one on the United States and two in the global context, are we to understand that the other sections on taxation, theories of the sector, and ideas about giving have global application? In short, tacitly concluding that nonprofits and NGOs are essentially the same may be imposing a hegemony of the Western universal on third-sector organizations operating in non-Western contexts.
Looking at the historical trajectory of the collection, the first volume (and perhaps the second and third) was primarily focused on the nonprofit sector in the United States. With this new edition, the authors have attempted to incorporate more international content including a new Part III focused on exploring international dimensions and an expanded final section on the sector in other countries. However, the overall approach to understanding the nature of the sector continues along the trajectory established in earlier editions with a predominantly U.S. focus. In particular, the readings regarding economic theories of the sector are introduced as “useful economic theories [that] have withstood the test of time” (p. 215), proffering that nonprofits as functional entities exist to fill gaps created by the market and government. This mainstream view substantially ignores socio-economic inequalities and power imbalances maintained and enforced by unjust systems. In short, areas rich for exploration and understanding lie outside mainstream economic approaches to our understanding of the nonprofit sector, which the editors largely overlook.
This critique leads me to a suggestion for the fifth edition of this work if I might be so bold as to propose. Given that it is well established, both in the Foreword by Grønbjerg and in the introductory sections by Ott and Dicke, that there is now a voluminous amount of literature for this growing field, it may be time to separate classical understandings of the sector from current issues and concerns. One way to approach this would be to “park” the classics of nonprofit organizations and theory in a separate volume similar to the Classics of Public Administration first published in 1978 and edited by Jay Shafritz and Albert Hyde. The Nature of the Nonprofit Sector volume in its next iteration would then have space to tackle current issues in the sector including voices from indigenous and marginalized communities that are non-Western and non-English speaking that heretofore have been absent in these spaces.
Still, there is much to recommend about this new edition. Ott and Dicke have done a great service to our field by editing The Nature of the Nonprofit Sector and its companion volume on micro approaches Understanding Nonprofit Organizations. By providing content on macro and micro understandings of leading and managing in the sector, students of nonprofit organizations have a concise understanding of the field at their fingertips. My hope is that the editors will add a third volume, Classics of the Nonprofit Sector, that will provide room for new, emerging understandings in the other two volumes resulting in a powerful trilogy with voices from noteworthy scholars in the field as well as elevating voices of those yet to be heard.
