Walter W. Powell - The Nonprofit Sector

THE NONPROFIT SECTOR

A Research Handbook

THIRD EDITION

Edited by Walter W. Powell and Patricia Bromley

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Powell, Walter W., editor. | Bromley, Patricia, editor.

Title: The nonprofit sector : a research handbook / edited by Walter W. Powell and Patricia Bromley.

Description: Third edition. | Stanford, California : Stanford University Press 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021227 | ISBN 9781503608047 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503611085 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Nonprofit organizationsManagement. | Nonprofit organizations. | Charitable uses, trusts, and foundations.

Classification: LCC HD62.6.N67 2020 | DDC 338.7/4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021227

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Text design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Typeset by Newgen in 10/13 Minion Pro

CONTENTS

Introduction

Walter W. Powell

Benjamin Soskis

Aaron Horvath and Walter W. Powell

Patricia Bromley

Daniel J. Hemel

Ted Lechterman and Rob Reich

Elisabeth S. Clemens

Sarah Reckhow

Nicole P. Marwell and Maoz Brown

Jennifer E. Mosley

Christof Brandtner and Claire Dunning

Irene Bloemraad, Shannon Gleeson, and Els de Graauw

Maitreesh Ghatak

Johanna Mair

Magali A. Delmas, Thomas P. Lyon, and Sean Jackson

Paul Brest

Jill R. Horwitz

Richard Arum and Jacob L. Kepins

Francie Ostrower

David Surez

Edward T. Walker and Yotala Oszkay

Mike Ananny

Pamela Paxton

Laura K. Gee and Jonathan Meer

Nina Eliasoph

Brad R. Fulton

Evan Schofer and Wesley Longhofer

Kendra Dupuy and Aseem Prakash

Breno Bringel and Elizabeth McKenna

Helmut K. Anheier, Markus Lang, and Stefan Toepler

PREFACE

The previous two editions of this handbook appeared at particular points in the history of nonprofit activity, and they reflect the scholarly attention of those specific periods. The first edition, published in 1987, brought together scholarship on a newly emerging space that was generally referred to as the independent sector. That effort was supported by Yale Universitys Program on Nonprofit Organizations (PONPO), led by the indomitable John G. Simon, Augustus Lines Professor at Yale Law School, who helped galvanize the first generation of scholarship on nonprofits. The first edition charted the terrain of the burgeoning domain of civic organizations. As this voluntary domain expanded, it evolved from informal activities of charitable citizens to highly formalized endeavors by enterprising individuals. Nonprofits became more professional.

I co-edited the second edition of the handbook, published in 2006, with economist Richard Steinberg. The task of surveying the research landscape was more than could be done alone. That edition focused on the ways in which nonprofit organizations attempted to influence society, interact with governments, influence public policy, and find new sources of revenue. One line of attention focused on why there was a particularly large nonprofit presence in certain sectors of society, such as health care, education, the arts, and social services. The second volume drew on work from scholars in the newly established Center on Philanthropy at Indiana UniversityPurdue UniversityIndianapolis (IUPUI) and Stanford University. James R. Wood, professor of sociology at Indiana University, and Robert L. Payton, founding director of the Center on Philanthropy, were both very supportive of the volume.

The current edition arrives at a time when scholars are arguing that civic action and social purpose can be found not only in nonprofit organizations but also in the public and business domains, and that nonprofits are increasingly intertwined with both. Many of the chapters in this edition reflect the age of fracture in which we live, grappling with questions of power, access, and inequality. The contributors also reflect on the changing expectations that social purpose organizations face. The Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, which supported this edition, has a mission to explore how and when civil society organizations contribute to or contravene the public good and to examine the role of philanthropy in enhancing, channeling, or diverting these efforts.

Woody Powell

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It takes commitment and care from an extended network of people to create a volume like this, and we are grateful to all those involved along the way. As a start, we are deeply appreciative of our forty-five authors for their hard work and bearing with us through multiple rounds of revisions and deadlines. We know it wasnt an easy task to produce chapters that are simultaneously forward-looking and convey the rich history of prior research, but they have done it and we are proud of the result. We are also indebted to the remarkable editors who read the chapters and commented on themElisabeth Andrews, Kelly Besecke, Adrienne Day, James Holt, Mike Levine, Kathleen Much, and Michael Slind. They provided excellent advice in helping shape the chapters in the volume. We have also had the great fortune of expertise from past and present editors at Stanford University Press, especially Margo Fleming and Kate Wahl, whose support and advice was instrumental in shaping the volume.

Organizationally, we have relied on the exceptional team at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and we particularly want to thank Valerie Dao, who helped organize the conference at which initial draft chapters were presented. Val has been involved in every stage of the book development process, continuously going above and beyond to ensure its success. Without her, this volume would not have come to fruition in a timely fashion. We are indebted to her for her steady hand. We also appreciate the encouragement from colleagues at the Center to move ahead with the volume, especially Faculty Co-Directors Paul Brest and Rob Reich and Executive Director Kim Meredith. Importantly, both the Center and the volume have benefited from generous support from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundations work to promote high-quality academic research on the nonprofit sector will be seminal in shaping the future of the field.

Although the volume looks to the future, we build on the prior contributions of several decades of nonprofit scholarship. We owe intellectual debts to the authors and co-editor who contributed to previous editions of the Handbook, many of whom provided advice on presentations and drafts of the chapters here. We also relied on feedback from many nonprofit scholars beyond our past and present authors, as is evident in the acknowledgments in each chapter. The graduate students in the workshop on Philanthropy and Civil Society also contributed by commenting on many of the chapters. We very much appreciate the wider interest and engagement with ideas in the chapters, and hope the work here contributes to stimulating and productive future research. These scholarly exchanges are what make taking on a large, collective, and collaborative project like this worthwhile. Relatedly, Tricia and Woody want to thank each other. This was a huge undertaking that could not have been done without a lot of faith and support by one another. Colleagueship does not get any better than this. Finally, we are thankful that our respective families have tolerated us over the past year as we mumbled that we have to work on the Handbook. Without their support, the work could not have happened.