Symposium Introduction

Abstract

This issue of ATP is Part II of a symposium on critical approaches to understanding nonprofits, volunteerism, and philanthropy (for Part I, see the March 2013 issue). In an environment of government cutbacks and privatization, nonprofits, volunteerism, and philanthropy are increasingly important to public administration and governance in the United States and around the world. Yet relatively few scholars have taken critical approaches to understanding and assessing their impact. The articles in this symposium do an outstanding job of challenging many of our assumptions about nonprofits, volunteerism, and philanthropy, or providing new insight into how we frame the field and its roles and effects. The articles in this part of the symposium focus in particular around issues related to managerialism and marketization. Johan Hvenmark’s article provides a critical examination of a Swedish civil society organization’s managerialization—its adoption and reliance on corporate management knowledge and practices. The organization is the Swedish Union of Tenants (SUT), traditionally known for its governance structure based on democratic principles, federative structure, and large membership base. Hvenmark examines the effect on the organization of SUT’s adoption of managerialist reforms, including the balanced scorecard. His findings suggest that the adoption of corporate management knowledge and practices involves a dialectic relationship with centralization and professionalization, institutionalizes the idea that the corporate world provides valid solutions for how to assess and develop civil society organizations, and creates or widens the potential divide between internal democratic governing and executive structures. Hvenmark’s findings align well with others in the first part of the symposium (e.g., Balanoff, Sandberg, & Mirabella), as well as with other work in the field (Dart, 2004; Dey & Steyaert, 2010; Edwards, 2008; Eikenberry, 2009; Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004), that raise concerns about the effect of managerialization and marketization on other values, especially democratic values, located within nonprofit and civil society organizations. However, the articles by Pascal Dey and Simon Teasdale and by Ola Segnestam Larsson in this second part of the symposium complicate some of the assumptions and conclusions of this critical managerialization and marketization literature.