Peter Dobkin Hall

A Historical Overview of Family Firms in the United States

How do dynastic families adopt to social and economic forces restricting attempts to transmit family wealth from one generation to the next?

Abandoning the Rhetoric of Independence: Reflections on the Nonprofit Sector in the Post-Liberal Era

This paper argues that nonprofits scholarship before 1980 was premised on unex amined assumptions about the independence of the sector from government, business, and private wealth. These assumptions shaped the direction of empirical and theoretical research into nonprofits. They also underlay public policy towards nonprofits, particularly the 1969 Tax Reform Act. Only when the Reagan admin istration proposed massive cuts in federal spending did scholars begin to appreciate the dependence of the sector on government revenue. At the same time, they became aware of the importance of other kinds of dependency. The 1969 Tax Act had, in encouraging the professionalization of nonprofits management, created conflicts between professional managers and traditional financial, governance, and consumer constituencies, which in turn raised serious questions regarding organizational dependency. From within history and the social sciences came other theoretical and empirical insights that belied the sectors assertions ...This paper argues that nonprofits scholarship before 1980 was premised on unex amined assumptions about the independence of the sector from government, business, and private wealth. These assumptions shaped the direction of empirical and theoretical research into nonprofits. They also underlay public policy towards nonprofits, particularly the 1969 Tax Reform Act. Only when the Reagan admin istration proposed massive cuts in federal spending did scholars begin to appreciate the dependence of the sector on government revenue. At the same time, they became aware of the importance of other kinds of dependency. The 1969 Tax Act had, in encouraging the professionalization of nonprofits management, created conflicts between professional managers and traditional financial, governance, and consumer constituencies, which in turn raised serious questions regarding organizational dependency. From within history and the social sciences came other theoretical and empirical insights that belied the sectors assertions of independence. The paper concludes by suggesting that the rhetoric of independence be replaced by an appre ciation of the reality of dependency, by a concerted scholarly examination of organi zational interdependence, and by an understanding of the range of dependency choices organizations confront according to the services they offer and the constitu encies they serve.

Theories and Institutions

Historically, the emergence of new polities, economies, and social and organizational forms has been accompanied by the appropriation or construction of theories, sometimes to explain or justify their existence, sometimes to resist their power. It is not surprising to find that along with the emergence of nonprofit organizations (the vast majority of which have come into existence since World War II), communities of scholars, managers, and policy makers have attempted to explain and justify or to critique and resist their growing centrality in public life. Theory is not value-neutral. It is inevitably appropriated, constructed, or appealed to for purposes related to the configuration of institutional power and the interests of stakeholders.

The Work of Many Hands: A Response to Stanley N. Katz on the Origins of the "Serious Study" of Philanthropy

Stanley N. Katz’s “Where Did the Serious Study of Philanthropy Come from, Anyway?” (1999) highlights the truth of the old adage, “what you see depends on where you stand.” It also calls attention to the tendency of new enterprises to stress “their uniqueness or superiority” to similar or antecedent efforts (Sarason, 1979). Academic scholarship on charity and philanthropy began to appear as early as the 1890s, when students at Brown, New York University, and Yale produced dissertations on history (on charity among the Romans and fresh air charities in the United States) and sociology (on indiscriminate charity) (Dennis, 1895; Knapp, 1897; Ufford, 1897)—not an insignificant number at a time when fewer than 300 doctorates were awarded annually by American universities (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1975, p. 386).

Commentary on Van Til's "Independence of Research": Another View

It is a truism that the nonprofit sector and the inquiry fostered in its research organizations are both independent of the government and profit sectors and interdependent with them. Since everything in the world can be connected by a sufficiently imaginative observer, whether one sees the sectors as integrated or separated has to do with one’s reasons for collecting data and commenting on them. Similarly, when one imposes distinctions, one does so to achieve purposes whether they be political, explanatory, or artistic. Whether research on nonprofit organizations should view members of the sector as independent or as integrated with other sectors, like the question of whether research in the area should extol the unique virtue of voluntary association, has to do with who asks the question and with the purposes being served. Nonprofits research has become a growth industry primarily because people in the foundation world and representatives of nonprofit industries like hospitals, universities, museums, and other arts organizations and representatives of community social services feel that there is a need for &dquo;knowledge.&dquo; Such custodians of knowledge on nonprofit organizations as the Independent Sector and the Association of Voluntary Action Scholars are concerned primarily with generating resources for research and with legitimating research that has been done-making it seem scholarly, scientific, and germane to crucial

Why Should Men Leave Great Fortunes to Their Children

In an important 1988 article, legal historian John Langbein identified what he regarded as fundamental shifts in the contemporary ethos and practice of wealth transmission in America. Langbein wrote, Whereas of old wealth transmission from parents to children tended to center upon major items of patrimony such as the family farm or the family firm, today for the broad middle classes, wealth transmission centers on a radically different kind of asset: the investment in skills. In consequence, intergenerational wealth transmission no longer occurs primarily upon the death of the parents, but rather, when the children are growing up, hence, during the parents’ lifetimes (Langbein, 1988, p. 723).

Of Books and the Scholarly Infrastructure

This article suggests that among the impediments to the institutionalization of nonprofit and voluntary action research is the inability of publishers of scholarly books to effectively market them. The chief obstacle to this effort is the failure of general readership periodicals and scholarly journals to comprehensively review the growing literatures on these subjects. In the hope of taking on this task, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly solicits the assistance of its readers.

Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America

Because the central paradigm of modernization has treated the rise of the modern economic and political order as a process of secularization, the study of religion has until recently stood outside the mainstream of scholarly interest. Over the past thirty years, however, this has begun to change. Historians have begun to challenge modernization theory’s facile assumptions with studies of communities, institutions, and social movements that suggest that religion remained a powerful force in urbanizing and industrializing societies (Bender, 1978). Sociologists, psychologists, and economists studying complex organizations have both questioned the pervasiveness of rationality and stressed the centrality of cognitive factors-including religious beliefs-in shaping organizational structures and processes (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). Nonprofits research, influenced by the social science mainstream, initially contributed little to this effort, despite the fact that churches and religious institutions were the largest nonprofit recipients of donations of cash and volunteer time; were key players in the delivery of health, educational, and human services; and antedated their secular counterparts by centuries (Hodgkinson, Kirch, and Weitzman, 1988; Wuthnow, Hodgkinson, and others, 1990). Since the late 1980s, however, the subfields of nonprofits and voluntary action research have become one of the major common meeting grounds for historians and social scientists interested in the organizational dimensions of religious institutions and in broader questions focusing on the origins and nature of civil society’ Inevitably, religion scholars-who heretofore had made up their own relatively self-sufficient academic subculture-have been drawn into the conversation. Some, such as James Wood (19811, Thomas Jeavons (1993), and David Nygren and Miriam Eukeritis (1993). have been concerned with practical issues of management and governance. Others, such as Robert Wuthnow (1988, 1989), Jay Demerath, Rhys Williams (1992). Patricia Chang (1993), and Mark Chaves (in press), have found religion a rich ground for exploring their interests in social movements, organization theory, and the changing nature of American communities.

Architecture and the After-Life

Scholars have become increasingly willing to go beyond the written record to enrich our understanding of culture and the forces that drive its development (Deetz, 1977; Schlereth, 1985; St. George, 1987). Butdespite the fact that the physical structures produced by eleeinosynary institutions are often their most tangible and enduring legacies-there has been disappointingly little of this kind ofwork in the study of philanthropy, volunteerism, and nonprofit organizations. The lack of this kind of work may be symptomatic of the more general reluctance of nonprofit scholars to examine the broad institutional universe of civic culture. Despite the pleas ofsuch leading scholars as Lester Salamon (19871, who urged that we needed new conceptual lenses that would allow us to appreciate the enormous significance of government-nonprofit ties, and Paul DiMaggio and Woody Powell (19911, who stressed the need for perspectives that embrace the interrelationships of for-profit, government, and nonprofit actors, most scholarship on nonprofits continues to ignore the interpenetration and overlap of sectors. In failing to broaden its perspectives, nonprofit scholarship has diminished its capacity to appreciate the extent to which philanthropy and volunteerism have both created and been sustained by the civic cultures characteristic of democratic capitalist societies. Civic culture and the public values associated with it often find their most compelling expression in art, architecture, and public space. These not only demarcate the boundaries between public and private domains of activity, but, in particularly self-conscious ways, they have expressed what societies define as the common good. To fully grasp the forms of civic culture-and the place of nonprofit and voluntary enterprise in its creation and survival-we need to examine the looming bulk of penitentiary, hospital, and insane asylum; the soaring spires of churches; the impressive classical solidity of banks and public buildings; the Gothic pretensions of universities; and the verdant spaces of parks and playgrounds.

Review Essay: The Scholar Practitioner Gap and the Dilemma of Expertise and Democracy

Despite major efforts, the gap between scholars and practitioners in the fields of nonprofit and voluntary action research remains unbridged. A recent volume by New York University cultural historian Thomas Bender suggests that the problem is due less to the peculiarities of these fields than it is to the institutional configuration of American intellectual life. Changes in occupational structures since the 1 970s that have led people with advanced academic training to seek careers in community-based nonprofit organizations may constitute a basis for reconstructing American public culture.