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Private
Action and the Public Good
Walter W. Powell and Elisabeth S. Clemens, eds. (Yale
University Press, 1998)
Can private nonprofit organizations provide more and higher-quality
services than governments or for-profit businesses? Will nonprofits really
increase social connectedness and civic engagement? This book, a sequel
to Walter W. Powell's The Nonprofit
Sector: A Research Handbook, brings together an original collection
of writings that explores the nature of the "public good" and
how private nonprofit organizations relate to it. Sociologists, political
scientists, management scholars, and others consider the nature of the
"public good" and how private or charitable organizations relate
to it. With a wide range of specialties (history, sociology, economics,
organizational behavior, political science, religion, and public health),
contributors take on philosophical issues (the meaning of central terms
such as altruism and
the public good); institutional
form (how ownership differences like religious affiliation and external
influences such as regulation and competition affect nonprofit performance
in fields such as health care and day care); nonprofits' changing environment
around the world (new relationships with government and business, the
impact of sponsors/donors in defining constraints, the potential for NGOs
to help people in developing nations build "social capital");
and internal organization behavior (the impact of bureaucracy and of feminism,
the tension between altruism and self-interest in nonprofits). Although
these essays are demanding, they position concerns of particular nonprofits
within the context of the sector's larger trends. Hardcover,
320 pages, $45
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