Elevator schaft

Yesterday on the way up to my office I overheard two students talking about the assigned reading for their class--a philosopher who kept talking about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, though the students weren't exactly sure about the difference between the two.

Ah, memories . . .

Nonprofits embody the dueling cultures that sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described as gemeinschaft (“community”) and gesellschaft (“society”). From one angle, nonprofits represent the emotional, spiritual, and even familial values of a communal realm outside state and market: the Metropolitan Opera is art, but Les Miserables is commercial pop; a museum Lichtenstein is superior to a Batman comic; church transcends group therapy; NPR offers “intelligent talk” while Rush Limbaugh is a pitchman. And yet in direct contrast, the nonprofit as gesellschaft embodies the impersonal world of contract and commodity. Vague talk of transcendent values must give way to a crisp, quantifiable metric, and the role of the nonprofit expert is to educate the public in what the term “nonprofit” truly means.