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

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

The Music of Management: Applying Organization Theory

With the exponential growth of social media and the internet, and growth of the global economy, the very nature of organizations has changed. Organizations are now flatter, substitutions have been made between staff work and technological infrastructure, organizations have greater global reach, competition for resources is fiercer, and organizations have become more embedded in complex networks, with boundaries blurring between one organization and another. While this landscape is much changed and the solutions to organizational management may be different, the basic organizational functions and challenges, as analyzed in this book, remain the same. Organizational activities must be coordinated to achieve their intended impacts, leaders and staff must be highly motivated, organizations must find their special niches where they can excel relative to their competitors and contribute their unique value in collaborations, and organizations must constantly focus on innovation if only to stay abreast of the accelerating pace of change in the contemporary world around them. These are the universal and timeless themes of The Music of Management. Moreover, the metaphor of music continues to apply with full force. The numerous variations on musical ensembles that the book uses for illustration continue to suggest that organizational forms can be applied to new circumstances and adapted to promote new ideas, products and services. We can now contemplate ensembles whose members are far-flung geographically but still require coordination, motivation, distinctiveness and adaptation according to basic principles of organizational life. While the popular tunes change, the classics endure and variations on themes will continue to drive organizations as they do musical ensembles of every description.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/facbooks2014/1000/thumbnail.jp

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

Evidence of a Plasmoid-Looptop Interaction and Magnetic Inflows During a Solar Flare/CME Eruptive Event

Observational evidence is presented for the merging of a downward-propagating plasmoid with a looptop kernel during an occulted limb event on 2007 January 25. RHESSI lightcurves in the 9-18 keV energy range, as well as that of the 245 MHz channel of the Learmonth Solar Observatory, show enhanced nonthermal emission in the corona at the time of the merging suggesting that additional particle acceleration took place. This was attributed to a secondary episode of reconnection in the current sheet that formed between the two merging sources. RHESSI images were used to establish a mean downward velocity of the plasmoid of 12 km/s. Complementary observations from the SECCHI suite of instruments onboard STEREO-Behind showed that this process occurred during the acceleration phase of the associated CME. From wavelet-enhanced EUVI, images evidence of inflowing magnetic field lines prior to the CME eruption is also presented. The derived inflow velocity was found to be 1.5 km/s. This combination of observations supports a recent numerical simulation of plasmoid formation, propagation and subsequent particle acceleration due to the tearing mode instability during current sheet formation.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, ApJ (Accepted

Computation of the Scharlau Invariant, I

The Scharlau invariant determines whether or not a finite group has a fixed point free representation over a field:\ \ if $0$, yes, otherwise, no. Until now it was known to be one of $0$, $1$, $p$, $p^2$ for $p$ a prime dividing the order of the group. We eliminate $p^2$ as a possibility. Work of Scharlau [Sch] reduces the question to the above list with $p^2$ being possible for the groups $\text{SL}_2({\Bbb Z}_p)$ for $p$ a Fermat prime larger than $5$. A computation using GAP in the Senior Thesis [Y] of the second author solves the problem for $p = 17$. With this motivation, we found a short proof of the result not requiring a computer.Comment: 7 page