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Reframing Nonprofit Organizations: Democracy, Inclusion and Social Change

Wed, July 17, 4:00 to 5:30pm, TBA

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel will present chapters from a newly revised textbook to provide a critical perspective on nonprofit and voluntary organization management that is not typically included in most nonprofit management textbooks but is often relevant to what people working in nonprofit or voluntary organizations face daily. Each paper on this panel addresses a key topic or area of practice covered in nonprofit and voluntary organization management-related courses—such as history, governance, planning, or evaluation—but moves beyond the surface of the instrumental, one-size-fits-all approach often presented on these topics, to discuss issues related to power, politics, oppression, and the possibility of systemic change. This panel will present chapters from a newly revised textbook to provide a critical perspective on nonprofit and voluntary organization management that is not typically included in most nonprofit management textbooks but is often relevant to what people working in nonprofit or voluntary organizations face daily.

Our intent is that this critical perspective will enable us to prepare our students to be better leaders in the field and be a more engaged and active member of society. Because the textbook takes an inclusive approach to critical theory, it can be challenging to draw a through line across all the forms of critical theory to devise some basic, shared understandings and assumptions about what it means to adopt a critical perspective about nonprofit and voluntary organization management. Challenging, but not impossible. Highlighted in the book are those understandings and assumptions leading to the social construction of the field; issues of power, control, and authority; and ideas about identity formation and difference.
• The Field is (Being) Socially Constructed - Critical theorists operate from a perspective known as historical realism. From this perspective we understand reality not to be fundamentally true, but rather shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, ethnic, gender, and other values which, through the application of shifting power structures (discussed in more detail below), crystallize over time so that they appear real (Lincoln, Lynham and Guba, 2018).
• Issues of Power, Control, and Authority Abound - The purpose of critique is to expose power and control in nonprofit and voluntary organizations, to raise consciousness to enact social change. As such, critical perspectives provide an opening for conceptualizing a practice that acknowledges the value-based, normative character of nonprofit and voluntary organization management. The nonprofit manager “who perceives a contradiction between current public practices and a future with reduced inequity and oppression may use critical theory as a guide for taking action to create social change” (Box 2005, 21).
• Who Do We Think We Are? Identity Formation and Difference - This is a key concept for understanding, in particular, the notion of difference. Critical scholars believe that difference is “a social construction ‘that has been used to classify human beings into separate value-based categories’” (Orbe and Harris 2001, as cited in Mumby 2013, 230).

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