E-Book Overview
Local nonprofit organizations are often small, loosely structured, and democratically governed, and therefore do not fit conveniently into traditional theories of organizational behavior that are rooted in administrative science and bureaucratic structure. Treating community organizations as parts of larger systems--organizational fields or ecologies and communities--this collection of papers presents various perspectives on local nonprofit organizations from the standpoint of organizational theory. The essays draw on an array of methods and theoretical approaches taken from population ecology theories of organizations, laying the foundation for the structural analysis of community organizations.
E-Book Content
COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS YALE STUDIES ON NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS Program on Non-Profit Organizations Institution for Social and Policy Studies Yale University JOHN G. SIMON, CHAIRMAN PAUL DiMAGGIO, DIRECTOR PAUL DiMAGGIO Nonprofit Organizations in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint DANIEL C. LEVY Private Education: Studies in Choice and Public Policy SUSAN ROSE-ACKERMAN The Economics of Nonprofit Institutions: Studies in Structure and Policy Other titles to be announced Community Organizations Studies in Resource Mobilization and Exchange Edited by CARL MILOFSKY New York • Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1988 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1988 by Yale University Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Community organizations. (Yale studies on nonprofit organizations) Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Voluntarism—United States. 2. Community organization—United States. 3. Corporations, Nonprofit— United States. I. Milofsky, Carl. II. Series. HN90.V64C645 1988 307'.06 87-18499 ISBN 0-19-504680-3 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Series Foreword This volume and its siblings, comprising the Yale Studies on Nonprofit Organizations, were produced by an interdisciplinary research enterprise, the Program on Non-Profit Organizations, located within Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies. * The Program had its origins in a series of discussions initiated by the present author in the mid-1970s while serving as President of Yale—discussions that began with a number of Yale colleagues, especially Professor Charles E. Lindblom, Director of the Institution, and Professor John G. Simon of the Law School faculty. We later enlisted a number of other helpful counselors in and out of academic life. These conversations reflected widespread agreement that there was a serious, and somewhat surprising, gap in American scholarship. The United States relies more heavily than any other country on the voluntary nonprofit sector to conduct that nation's social, cultural, and economic business—to bring us into the world, to educate and entertain us, even to bury us. Indeed, the United States can be distinguished from all other societies by virtue of the work load it assigns to its "third sector," as compared to business firms or government agencies. Yet this nonprofit universe had been the least well studied, th