The Commercialization of the Nonprofit Sector: A General Systems Theory Perspective (original) (raw)

Toward a holistic nonprofit economics: insights from institutionalism and systems theory

Journal of Bioeconomics, 2012

The main thrust of the current nonprofit economics literature is that nonprofit organizations exist to correct market failures. However, the methodological individualism of the market failure theories of nonprofit organizations makes these theories unable to take account of the complex institutional embeddedness of the nonprofit sector. To fill this gap, the present paper outlines an approach of holistic nonprofit economics by building upon the insights from Thorstein Veblen's institutionalism and Ervin Laszlo's contribution to the general systems theory. From the Veblenian dichotomy, holistic nonprofit economics benefits by recognizing the limitations of the profit motive in ensuring a high quality of community life. From the systems theory conception of the multi-level universe, holistic nonprofit economics borrows the insight that the key to a high quality of community life is in the integration between man, society, and nature. Accordingly, holistic nonprofit economics locates the role of the nonprofit sector in ensuring this integration by counteracting the profit motive. Thus, in contrast to the market failure theories of nonprofit organizations, holistic nonprofit economics generates a research program exploring the embeddedness of the nonprofit sector into the encompassing societal and natural systems.

Conceptualizing Nonprofit Commercialism: A Case Study

Public Administration and Management, 2004

In recent years, the American nonprofit sector has increasingly shifted towards using more market-based financing mechanisms, in what has been variably termed nonprofit commercialization or social entrepreneurship trends. While this development may either be seen as positive or negative, the growing consensus is that nonprofit organizations have come to adopt entrepreneurial or commercial activities for purposes of cross subsidizing mission-related activities and largely in reactions to shifts in the funding and institutional contexts beginning in the 1980s. Providing an overview of the current debate, this paper uses data from a museum case study to probe some of the underpinnings of the commercialization discussion.

Building a Policy Fields Framework to Inform Research on Nonprofit Organizations

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector …, 2009

While the importance of the public policy environment for strategic action of nonprofit organizations has become increasingly clear, research on nonprofits is often divorced from their policy context. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretically-informed framework for analyzing policy environments that can inform nonprofit research. Drawing on insights from political science, organization theory, public management and nonprofit studies, we propose that the framework reflects a policy field which is an identifiable set of elements in a specific environment that directly shapes local public service provision. These elements include the structures created by institutions that deliver public programs and the ways in which state and local actors interact with and shape these structures as they work on public problems. Through a research example, the paper presents the policy field framework's analytic steps.

From nonprofit diversity to organizational multifunctionality: a systems-theoretical proposal

Administration and Society, 2017

The remarkable feature of the nonprofit sector is its astonishing diversity. This feature gets short shrift in the traditional market or governmental failure theories of the nonprofit sector. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's concept of functional differentiation, we demonstrate that these theories are implicitly economy-and politics-biased. In seeking to overcome these biases, we show that nonprofits and NGOs are better understood as those varieties of organizations whose primary focus is on function systems other than the economy and politics. We summarize this argument in the concept of organizational multifunctionality which turns out to be likewise applicable to the for-profit sector.