By Stuart C. Mendel
In 1990, Peter Drucker asserted
that “nonprofit institutions are
central to American society and
are indeed its most distinguishing
feature.” Since then, as if to amplify
Drucker’s point, the academic study of the
nonprofit sector has grown at an impressive
rate. When Drucker made his observation,
there were an estimated 19 US-based programs
that offered training related to the
nonprofit sector. In 2012, by one count, the
number of US colleges and universities that
offered such training stood at 295.
A primary objective of these programs
is to produce the next generation of nonprofit-
sector leaders. But as the number of
programs has grown and as the quality of
their offerings has matured, they have also
emerged as important centers of scholarship.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve come to know
this field well through close involvement in
academic research on the nonprofit sector—
first as a student, then as a paid staff member
at Case Western Reserve University, and
now as the founding director of a nonprofit-studies
research center at Cleveland State
University. I was among the first scholars to
pursue a doctoral degree in nonprofit management,
and I have watched and participated
in the process by which this field of inquiry
has evolved and matured. Recently, I was
named president-elect of the Nonprofit Academic
Centers Council (NACC); my tenure
in that post will begin this coming summer.
In advance of taking on this new role, I have
begun thinking about the place of nonprofit-sector
studies in higher education.
Since its founding in 1991, NACC has
expanded to include nearly 60 member institutions.
The growth in the number of
nonprofit-studies programs, as I’ve noted, is
an important indicator of a transformation
that is well under way. Even so, I see an opportunity
to advance the frontier of nonprofit-sector
knowledge creation still further.
Today, for instance, published scholarship
on nonprofit organizations continues
to cover primarily matters of interest to public
management, business, social work, and
other fields that each have their own research
agenda. In my view, though, a leading-edge
approach to nonprofit-sector scholarship
should address all aspects of what is variously
called the “nonprofit,” “independent,”
“voluntary,” “charitable,” or “third” sector.
The academic study of the nonprofit sector
began in earnest in the late 1970s. Four
decades later, signs that nonprofit studies
is approaching a tipping point—that it is
ready to become an autonomous field of
study—are plain to see. The Lilly Family
School of Philanthropy at Indiana University,
the Lodestar Center for Philanthropy
& Nonprofit Innovation at Arizona State
University, and other academic centers of
this kind offer examples of a deepening commitment
to nonprofit studies as a distinct
field of knowledge. At the same time, students
have shown an increasing interest in
pursuing field placements and internships
at nonprofit organizations, and university
leaders have come to believe that practice-oriented
learning of that kind not only provides
a valuable classroom experience for
students, but also serves the public service
mission of their institution.
These developments have created the
conditions to support two important innovations
of this field. First, there is an opportunity
to advance a nonprofit studies approach
to learning that broadens its focus beyond
nonprofit management. Second, there is an
opportunity to develop a nonprofit-first perspective
on research as well as pedagogy.
Nonprofit Management—and Beyond
Typically, educators in the more mature
fields of business management, public administration,
and social work view nonprofit
management as a derivative
subfield of their discipline.
A sampling of nonprofit-oriented
topics in business
management programs, for
example, would include budgeting
and finance, social
enterprise, evaluation of social
outcomes, cause-related
marketing, business ethics,
and corporate social responsibility.
Programs in public
administration and public
management, meanwhile,
often include instruction in
proposal development for
subcontracted services, program
assessment and performance
evaluation, budget
accountability, and human resources management. Social work programs
also address nonprofit-oriented topics,
particularly in the training that they offer for non-clinical degree specialties.
Scholars in these management-oriented
fields, likewise, generally treat the study of
nonprofits as a younger, dependent sibling of
their particular discipline. A review of recent
scholarly literature on the nonprofit sector
would reflect an overwhelming emphasis on
matters of narrow interest to public managers,
business leaders, and the like: How can
public managers modify the behavior of their
nonprofit partners? What are the best strategies
for holding nonprofits accountable to
performance standards and operational efficiencies?
What are the best models for drafting
service contracts? And so forth.
This emphasis on the management of
nonprofits in both education and research
may have been necessary for the generation
of nonprofit scholars who did pioneering
work in the field during the late 1970s and
1980s. They, after all, had to invent ways to
study nonprofits using the methodological
tools available to them. Today, however, we
can see that a management-focused model is
too limiting as a means of understanding the
inner workings and the defining characteristics
of the modern nonprofit organization.
Those of us who closely watch this field
have noted a call by experienced nonprofit
and philanthropic leaders for a new approach
to professional training. Recently,
for a new research project, I spoke with a
number of nonprofit executives. From those
interviews, I took away one clear message:
Leadership in the nonprofit organization
of the 21st century requires a skill set that
extends well beyond the management of
transactional accountability.
To meet the needs of both current and
future nonprofit leaders, we urgently need
to develop a nonprofit studies pedagogy
that encompasses a wide range of issues
and challenges. Here are just a few nonmanagement
topic areas that teaching about
the nonprofit sector can and should cover:
the study of civil society; the dynamics of
advocacy, community organizing, and public
policy development; the political nature of
the social sector; and the role that nonprofits
play as places of employment.
Sector-First Scholarship
Developing a truly autonomous field called
nonprofit studies will lead to the adoption
of a nonprofit-first approach to research. A
nonprofit-first perspective is one in which
the unique role and nature of the nonprofit
sector and its institutions rise to the center of
inquiry. It takes into account the professional
conventions and behavioral nuances that are
common to the nonprofit sector. And it opens
the way to pursuing research on understudied
aspects of nonprofit life—the importance of
emotional intelligence for professionals who
work regularly with volunteers, the role that
nonprofits play as intermediaries and facilitators
in public-private partnerships, and the
challenges associated with public advocacy,
to name a few. Equally important, nonprofit-first
inquiry will advance our understanding
of how nonprofits enable, nurture, and
strengthen civil society, and how they empower
people to build democratic institutions.
By way of example, consider a line of research
that I am pursuing with Jeffrey L.
Brudney, a professor at the University of
North Carolina at Wilmington. We explore
how nonprofit organizations that receive government
contracts to deliver services must
contend with the difficult and frequently
uncompensated task of managing relationships
with public-sector agencies. That’s an
important perspective that is essentially
absent from traditional public management
studies. Other topics that I’ve covered in my
own published research as a nonprofit studies
scholar include the following: the relationship
between philanthropy and the creation
of public value, the role of cross-sector partnerships
in the creation of public value, and
the role of nonprofit organizations in public-private
partnerships.
Today, a new generation of scholars is
creating pressure for a shift toward nonprofit-centric
research. These scholars have made
a conscious decision to study nonprofit organizations
as part of their doctoral-degree
research, and their methods incorporate
theory drawn from the social sciences and
even the humanities. That development reinforces
the need to break away from a research
framework that embeds the study of
nonprofits within traditional management-oriented
disciplines.
A nonprofit-first approach to scholarship
will provide a broad context for the study and
teaching of best practices in nonprofit management.
As Peter Drucker and others have
observed, effective nonprofit leaders possess
a deep understanding of the role that nonprofit
organizations play in society, and of the
context in which their own organization operates.
By creating and promoting a distinct
theory of the nonprofit sector, scholars will
be able to offer students and professionals
precisely that kind of deep understanding.
Changing the way that institutions of
higher education treat the nonprofit sector
is no small undertaking. But the rewards for
doing so are worth the effort. A nonprofit-first
perspective will have beneficial effects
for multiple stakeholder groups. Educators,
researchers, and thought leaders will deepen
the base of knowledge that they convey to
succeeding generations of scholars, policy
makers, and nonprofit professionals. At a
practical level, they will advance insight
on how to turn a nonprofit organization
into a strategic learning organization that
also excels at fulfilling its mission. Leaders
in philanthropy and public policy, for their
part, will find new ways to form meaningful,
transformative partnerships with nonprofit
organizations. Rather than engaging
in shallow collaborations that lead to short-term
transactional gains, they will join with
nonprofits to set goals and to achieve real
social impact.
The time is right to move nonprofit-sector
pedagogy toward a more holistic and comprehensive
framework—and to shift scholarly
research in this area toward a nonprofit-first
framework. This new framework will change
how people throughout the nonprofit sector
teach, learn, and study. It will change how
they develop new best practices and how they
understand this field at a deep level.