Nonprofit Organizations in an Age of Uncertainty: A Study of Organizational Change
By Joseph Galaskiewicz and Wolfgang Bielefeld
After examining more than 300 non-profit organizations in Minneapolis and St. Paul from 1980 to 1994, the authors write that it is their own analysis that has raised the most uncertainty.
“If readers are looking for the ‘silver bullet’ that can explain change among non-profits, they will not find it here,” write Mr. Galaskiewicz and Mr. Bielefeld, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a professor of philanthropic studies at the University of Indiana, respectively. “On the other hand, if they are up for a little contest among ideas, they may find this book attractive.”
Those ideas are embodied in different theories aimed at deciphering why some charities in the Twin Cities prospered while others plodded. The charities studied represent a cross-section of sizes and types of services provided; an appendix lists them all by name.
Mr. Galaskiewicz and Mr. Bielefeld explain sociological models they used to predict organizations’ actions, and they note if those predictions came true.
For example, the authors report that “adaptation theory,” which posits that groups will always change to insure survival, correctly forecast an increase in donations and volunteers among many charities. Yet “embeddedness theory,” which holds that an organization’s proclivity to change is tied to its size and reputation, flopped. Any group in the study was as likely to implement change as another, the authors discovered.
Another conclusion: The non-profit groups analyzed tended to look to one another when adopting new tactics for fund raising, contradicting a theory that says groups remain insular when hunting for new resources.
The authors admit their findings are “incomplete,” and they fault themselves in retrospect for not investigating comparable case studies or historical precedents. Yet they find enough merit in the organizational approach to recommend applying it to future study -- with the adjustments they cite.
This book won the American Academy of Management Book of the Year Award in the public and non-profit sections and Independent Sector’s 1999 Virginia A. Hodgkinson Research Prize.
Publisher: Aldine de Gruyter, 200 Saw Mill River Road, Hawthorne, N.Y. 10532; (914) 747-0110; fax (914) 747-1326; http://www.degruyter.de/aldine; 290 pages; cloth, $49.95 plus $4.50 postage and handling; paper, $23.95 plus $4.50 postage and handling; I.S.B.N. 0-202-30565-1, cloth, I.S.B.N. 0-202-30566-x, paper.