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Modalities of Managerialism: The "Double Bind" of Normative and Instrumental Nonprofit Management Imperatives

Administration & Society

Published online on

Abstract

Nonprofit managers are influenced by managerial logics that guide their everyday understandings, decisions, and behaviors. This article identifies, conceptualizes, and examines these logics through the lens of institutional theory, which implies a distinction between normative and instrumental modalities of nonprofit managerialism. These modalities are contrasted across seven domains of nonprofit management—portfolio management, organizational growth and capacity-building, fundraising, collaboration and competition, effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability—generating insights for managers, scholars, and society at large. Specifically, the framework identifies contradictory managerial imperatives that can create a "double bind" for practitioners, provides a mechanism for organizing and positioning nonprofit management scholarship, and raises fundamental questions about the attainability of nonprofit missions and the function of the nonprofit sector in society.