Defining moments: too much (non-distribution) constraint?

Columnists who keep at their trade, or hobby as in the present case, usually present their work as though it is their sole creation. Here's a professional secret: This column has been a collective product for years. The argument's core is often presented to the ARNOVA-L list-serv, an electronically linked discussion group of many hundreds of academics and thinkers interested in voluntary action and nonprofit organizations.

The feedback to ideas helps to refine a statement for NPT readers.

This time the process will be more transparent. It will begin with the first statement, and you'll see what colleagues bad to say about it.

Things start here somewhere around 1980, in the dawning of the age of Reagan and George H.W. Bush and the associated triumph of corporation values, when scholars and practitioners began to talk less about "voluntary action" and more about "nonprofit organization." Associations, journals, and conferences began to change their names to signal this change in focus, and a spate of new academic programs began to emerge, their shingles announcing a newfound focus on "nonprofit management."

Leading scholars entered the field, determined to identify the structure and function of nonprofit organizations, which they defined around a legal concept called the "non-distribution constraint," a principle that asserts that members can't divide up an association's assets upon its demise. What's left when the organizational lights go out, rather, becomes the property of other nonprofit organizations.

Defining the field of interest in this way provided some gains, but also some costs. The biggest gain involves the conformance to governmental certification of nonprofit standing, and the associated ability then to count organizations and measure their size. Scholars such as Virginia Hodgkinson, Lester Salamon, Helmut Anheier and their colleagues and students in maw lands, devoted much of their careers to this measurement process. The result is that it is now possible to compare the dimensions of the nonprofit sector to those of business and government more precisely than was possible a quarter-century before.

On the negative side, one can tally the cost by noting that we have essentially followed IRS guidelines in defining a sector, but have largely ignored many stalwart organizations that advance human welfare without much connection to section 501(c) of the tax code. Among the missing:

* 9 million informal and neighborhood and other grassroots organizations are defined away from the sector, as David Horton Smith has shown;

* Religious institutions, often excluded, as in the earlier definitions of Salamon, on grounds that they essentially serve to benefit their members rather than broader society;

* Cooperative organizations, in spite of their critical ability to link voluntary action with economic self-determination, associational self-governance, and the enhancement of community--all excluded purely on grounds of nonconformance to the nondistribution constraint.

What is included in the sector comes largely to represent big organizations in health, education, and arts, which often grossly over-compensate their executives in comparison to social serving voluntary and nonprofit organizations. They often pay scant attention to the culture, values, and traditions of voluntary social action and service or to the literature and academic programs generated around the "nonprofit" moniker.

Such organizations often take the form of tax-exempt businesses, largely serving clients with an ability to pay for their services.

In other words, it may be argued that we have come to invent a sector (as Peter Dobkin Hall put it) that excludes many small social-serving, citizen-directed organizations, and glorifies a lesser number of larger self-serving, elite-directed nonprofit businesses.

At the recent ISTR conference in Toronto, a number of colleagues (most prominently Adalbert Evers of German), Jean-Louis Laville of France, Saad Ibrahim of Egypt, and Kathleen McCarthy of the U.S.) asserted that time might be overdue to accept an alternative conception of the field. The conception is one-based, as Victor Pestoff has put it, "both according to the social values and goals (of organizations), as well as how they distribute their surplus."

When a draft of these thoughts was shared with several hundred academic colleagues on the electronic discussion list-serv ARNOVA-L, a number of responses were well worth sharing with readers:

* Historian and ARNOVA President-elect David Hammack welcomed the idea of placing a stronger focus on the purposes of nonprofit organizations.

* Political scientist Siegrunn Freyss observed that "From my perspective in public administration I would like to suggest another reason for the drift in the Association from voluntary action to nonprofit organizations, and that is the academic market place. There are few jobs to be had in voluntary action, but quite a few in nonprofit organizations."

* An Australian colleague, Ted Flack, asks: "Is there a word that means something like 'religious' but in a secular sense? I keep coming back to the notion that people who help found nonprofit organizations (or reinvigorate them) do so because they 'believe in their cause' and re-identify themselves through 'having to do something about it personally'."

* Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam weighed in, and observed that "I think you are focused on the single biggest hurdle to the advancement of this field, and I strongly urge you forward. The conflation of big bureaucratic "non-profits" and grassroots social organizations is utterly fallacious and misleading.

* And Richard Steinberg, Indiana University economist and past-president of ARNOVA, cautioned that "There is no definition that is best for every purpose. Nondistribution is very valuable for analyzing incentives within organizations and for analyzing certain interactions between internal and external stakeholders."

* Steinberg then added: "We study voluntary action outside of formal organizations--social movements, grassroots and small organizations, informal organizations. We study it (too little, but we do study it) inside two kinds of formal organizations--nonprofits and government agencies. We have neglected voluntary action within other types of formal organizations--worker-managed firms, consumer cooperatives, clubs."

There's no clear conclusion to this column, just an invitation to readers to give some thought on their own to these considerations regarding the central image of our field.

But for now, let's contemplate, and even celebrate, processes of thought and analysis that underlie, justify, and challenge the work that gets done in the voluntary, nonprofit, third, independent (and so on) sector of our very complex society.

Jon VanTil is professor of Urban Studies at the Camden, N.J. campus of Rutgers University and is the author of the books "Critical Issues in American Philanthropy" and "Mapping The Third Sector," and "Growing Civil Society: From Nonprofit Sector to Third Space."