Sonia Ospina

Negotiating accountability: Managerial lessons from identity-based nonprofit organizations

This article explores the emerging conceptualization of accountability in nonprofit organizations. This definition broadens traditional concerns with finances, internal controls, and regulatory compliance. The authors explore how the top-level managers of 4 identitybased nonprofit organizations (IBNPs) faced accountability and responsiveness challenges to accomplish their mission. The organization-community link was the core relationship in their accountability environment, helping the IBNP managers achieve what the literature calls “negotiated accountability.” The managers favored organizational mechanisms to sustain this relationship in the midst of the accountability demands they experienced daily. Communication with the primary constituency tended to drive the organization’s priorities and programs, helped managers find legitimate negotiation tools with other stakeholders, and helped develop a broader notion of accountability. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for other nonprofit organizations and propose questions to further clarify the concepts of broad accountability, negotiated accountability, and the link between accountability and responsiveness in nonprofits.

FROM CONSENT TO MUTUAL INQUIRY: BALANCING DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY IN ACTION RESEARCH

The Leadership for a Changing World (LCW) program is a joint endeavor between the Ford Foundation, the Advocacy Institute, and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. This paper focuses on the experiences of the Research and Documentation component of LCW – lead by a research team from the Wagner School – during the initial implementation phases of the research. This component formed an inquiry group consisting of both academic researchers and social change practitioners to collaboratively explore and discover the ways in which communities doing social change engage in the work of leadership. We used group relations theory to understand a series of critical dilemmas and contradictions experienced by the coresearchers. This paper identifies four such paradoxes that center around issues of democracy and authority.

Paradox and Collaboration in Network Management

Qualitative evidence from action networks is used to answer the research question, How do leaders of successful networks manage collaboration challenges to make things happen? This study of two urban immigration coalitions in the United States found that their leaders developed practices as a response to two paradoxical requirements of network collaboration: managing unity and diversity when doing inward work and confrontation and dialogue when doing outward work. By illuminating how leaders responded to these complex demands inherent in action networks, the authors open up the black box of managing whole networks of organizations and underscore the role of leadership in interorganizational collaboration.

APPRECIATIVE NARRATIVES AS LEADERSHIP RESEARCH: MATCHING METHOD TO LENS

This chapter explores the potential of appreciative inquiry for doing empirical work on leadership. We use a framework that matches a constructionist theoretical lens, an appreciative and participative stance, a focus on the work of leadership (as opposed to leaders), and multiple methods of inquiry (narrative, ethnographic and cooperative). We elaborate on our experiences with narrative inquiry, while highlighting the value of doing narrative inquiry in an appreciative manner. Finally, we suggest that this particular framework is helping us see how social change leadership work reframes the value that the larger society attributes to members of vulnerable communities.

Understanding Cooperative Behavior in Labor Management Cooperation: A Theory-Building Exercise

This article proposes a theory of how mandated institutional cooperation transforms into individual cooperative behavior. Using qualitative strategies, we draw insights about cooperation in three public-sector efforts of labor-management cooperation (LMC). We report an association between critical shifts in the roles of stakeholders and the change from adversarial to cooperative labor relations. While managers became team players along with their employees, labor representatives assumed managerial responsibilities. These changes were also associated with a service-oriented perspective, better understanding of the others experiences, and a view of cooperation as partnership. At the heart of these transformations, we found critical changes in communication patterns associated with incrementally growing levels of trust. We propose a model that depicts the links between collective and individual levels of organizational action related to LMC. We conclude that the positive shifts in mental models regarding work and the value of cooperation justify the promotion of LMC efforts.

Performance evaluation, public management improvement and democratic accountability

The results-oriented management reforms fostered by the New Public Management movement are often argued to emphasize the search for efficiency, quality and other typical market values at the expense of democratic accountability. On the other hand, challenging this view, some authors claim that results-based management reforms have the potential to enhance political accountability and representative democracy. There is however, limited empirical evidence of this relationship. This article uses some of the findings from a comparative study of public management evaluation systems in four Latin American countries to illuminate this relationship in practice. We discuss the fact that, in two of the four countries surveyed, the design features of the new systems were based on the explicit search for increased political accountability and the deepening of democracy. We also discuss the possible causes for the finding that the outcome and performance information generated is not being applied for decision-making purposes yet, as expected.

Integrated Managerial Training: A Program for Strategic Management Development

The notion of strategic training is premised upon the idea that organized developmental activities must be directly linked to the mission or the core business of the organization. This article presents a case study of a managerial training program implemented in a large nonprofit organization. The training program encouraged dialogue among managers of different hierarchical levels with different areas of expertise, to help improve the processes of vertical and horizontal integration required for effective performance. The program enabled participants to link their local decisions and daily operations to the broader organizational mission, consequently improving organizational effectiveness and learning. This paper suggests that human resource managers and trainers can enhance the effectiveness of managerial training programs by making a conscious effort to provide opportunities for horizontal and vertical integration within the training experience, independent of the content areas addressed in the program. Some of the consequences of implementing this approach include a more open and expanded communications process, the generation of professional attachments, bonding between members of the managerial team, and better coordination of services among participants from the various hierarchical levels and functional areas.

Cooperative Inquiry for Learning and Connectedness.

There has been rising concern about the disconnect between universities, their communities and society at large. This is of special interest to professional schools, whose missions are founded on connecting practice and theory. We argue that cooperative inquiry, an action-based methodology, can help foster connectedness and contribute to healing the university-society schism. Doing this requires more than mere replication of the methodology; it entails engaging in dialectics with practitioners, a process that is mediated both by democratic aspirations and claims of authority. We share our experience working with social change practitioners on collaborative research about leadership, highlighting the dialectics and implications for academics wishing to capitalize on cooperative inquiry for connectedness.

Nonprofits as “Schools of Democracy” A Comparative Case Study of Two Environmental Organizations

This article presents a comparative case study of two nonprofit organizations that do community organizing in the environmental field and asks how do nonprofits school citizens in democracy? Although the literature suggests the importance of social capital, a practice approach surfaces important political dimensions that have not been sufficiently explored. We find that distinct organizational practices create contexts for participants to exercise specific ways of being and doing—called “subject positions”—vis-à-vis the state and their political community. These practices support member participation by serving to construct “citizens”—rather than customers or clients—who develop skills in critical thinking and who exercise agency in the organization and the policy field they seek to influence. These practices represent key mechanisms for schooling citizens in democracy in these nonprofit organizations and link participation in the organization with broader political participation. We discuss implications for theory and practice.

Information Technology and Organizational Change: The Role of Context in Moderating Change Enabled by Technology

This study uses data from 140 Information Systems projects implemented in public organizations to analyze the role of organizational context in moderating change enabled by the introduction of computer-based technologies. The analysis supports the notion that neither technology nor managerial action alone can be considered deterministic forces in shaping organizational change and consequently in determining the outcomes of the introduction of IT. The findings provide some evidence to suggest that as managers mature with the use of technology, they will be in a better position to coordinate the human and the technological aspects of organizational change. Additionally, the findings indicate that while managers seek alignment between the organizational mission and the use of computer-based information systems, there is a narrow and limited application of information technology to solve organizational problems.