Puppet Leadership: An Essay in honor of Gabor Hegyesi

Abstract not available. Working Paper 08-0

Mission-Market Tension in Managing Nonprofit Organizations

Private not-for-profit organizations combine characteristics of a public sector agency with those of a private, proprietary firm. In particular, nonprofits are required to address designated social missions while breaking even financially. This structure underlies the difficulty that nonprofit organizations face in making decisions with important resource implications. Specifically, choices that would achieve maximal mission impact may differ from choices that reward the organization in purely financial terms. As result, nonprofit managers face a variety of trade-offs between mission responsive and financially rewarding actions. This paper considers some of these tradeoffs by exploring how tensions between mission and market manifest themselves in a variety of nonprofit decision making applications. The analysis is based on a set of task forces assembled by the National Center on Nonprofit Enterprise in eight areas of nonprofit decision making. The paper suggests the development of metrics to reconcile mission goals with market incentives and research on appropriate nonprofit practices in areas such as pricing, employee compensation, outsourcing, collaboration, investment, fund raising and the undertaking of commercial ventures. Working Paper 06-2

Mission-Market Tensions and Nonprofit Pricing

Private not-for-profit organizations combine characteristics of a public sector agency with those of a private, proprietary firm. In particular, nonprofits are required to address designated social missions while breaking even financially. This structure underlies the difficulty that nonprofit organizations face in making decisions with important resource implications. Specifically, choices that would achieve maximal mission impact may differ from choices that reward the organization in purely financial terms. As a result, nonprofit managers face a variety of trade-offs between mission responsive and financially rewarding actions. This paper considers some of these tradeoffs in the context of pricing decisions by nonprofit organizations. In particular, the paper draws on alternative theories of nonprofit pricing from the literature. In one theory, nonprofits are viewed as revenue maximizers, pricing their services to garner as much net revenue as possible to support their organizations. In an alternative theory, nonprofits are conceived as mission maximizers, pricing their services to achieve maximum mission impact within the constraint of financial solvency. The efficacy of these theories is explored through five case studies of organizations offering a variety of services within the context of a local social services federation. Evidence from these cases suggests that the forgoing theories apply in some combination for any given nonprofit organization. Several different behavioral patterns are found, including nonprofits seeking to balance financial and mission impacts in the pricing policies for each of their service offerings and others pursuing a strategic mix of pricing policies for profitable and mission-impacting services. It is clear from all cases observed that nonprofit managers struggle with mission-market tensions as they relate to pricing and that they can benefit from metrics to help them sort through these decisions in ways that resolve these tensions. Working Paper 08-0

Odors: from chemical structures to gaseous plumes

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity

A Poetics of Student Writing

Focusing on student reflective essays about learning writing, I rely on depth psychology and hermeneutics to illustrate the image-making, poetic dimension of student work

Re-Visioning Psychology in the Writing Class

With its emphasis on soul-work and the imaginal frames of psyche, archetypal psychology helps teachers more fully interpret the motivations and intricacies of writing and learning

Exploring the Revenue Mix of Nonprofit Organizations -- Does it Relate to Publicness

Nonprofit organizations offer a wide range of goods and services and seek funding from a variety of revenue sources. Our working theory n this paper is that the sources of funding are related to the services a nonprofit provides - specifically whether services are public, private, or mixed in the nature of their benefits. Using multiple subfields from three major fields in the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), this study divides nonprofits according to service type, and estimates the impact of service character on particular revenue streams and overall level of revenue diversification. Generally, the proportion of revenues generated by program fees is lowest for the category deemed public, highest for those with mostly private benefits, and midway for "mixed" services which are private in character but entail substantial public benefits. Similarly, the more public a nonprofit's services, the greater the proportion of revenues it generates through donations. However, we also identify some puzzling results that suggest the need for continued investigation of the determinants of the sources and mixes of nonprofit income. Working Paper 07-3

Casebook of Management for Nonprofit Organizations

This book offers a robust set of detailed case studies of entrepreneurship in the human services, originally developed for research leading to the publication of If Not for Profit, for What? [Young, Dennis R., If Not for Profit, for What? (2013). 2013 Faculty Books. Book 1. http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/facbooks2013/1], a book which established a supply-side theory of the nonprofit sector based on the behavior of those whom we now call social entrepreneurs. The full book contains fourteen cases, divided into four categories: new nonprofit organizations started from scratch, new organizations parented by existing nonprofit organizations, new programs of existing nonprofit organizations, and new state and local government ventures. The selection reproduced here electronically includes one case from each of these categories. (The full book may be obtained from The Haworth Press.) Each case describes in detail, the entrepreneurs involved, the organization of interest, the chronology of events, the social, political and economic contexts in which the ventures took place, the choices faced by the entrepreneurs and key decision makers, the risks and constraints faced by those actors, the outcomes of the venture, and an analysis of why the venture turned out as it did. As such these cases offer rich material for coursework and training in social entrepreneurship and social enterprise as well as material for continuing research in these fields.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/facbooks2013/1001/thumbnail.jp

If Not for Profit, for What?

The primary purpose of this book is to develop the rudiments of a theory of behavior of nonprofit organizations on which public policies that govern the use of these organizations for public service can be intelligently based. A review of literature on nonprofit organizations is presented to give the reader a sense of the state of existing theory and knowledge about these agencies. The function of entrepreneurship serves as the point of departure for theory development, necessitating considerable review and discussion of this subject. Thus clarification of the entrepreneurial process and its role in the nonprofit sector occupies a major part of this book and is presented as an important ancillary contribution.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/facbooks2013/1000/thumbnail.jp