"The specter of capitalism haunts nonprofit rhetoric"

Why am I mentioning it today? Because the issue that the article addresses has not gone away. If anything, it's reaching critical mass right now. The culture clash inherent in the social enterprise movement has been surfacing throughout the discussion of the Givewell controversy on MeFi, and in his latest comment Phil Cubeta at Gifthub hits it dead on:

The question is whether what we are seeing here is pushback against the Marketization of Philanthropy, or the Emergence of the MBA Elite as Masters of all Three Sectors.

Definitely, no question. And as Phil notes, it's an issue that "needs careful research and documentation." My next article--which I think given the circumstances I'll post serially here--develops the themes of the one posted here in more depth, but folks interested in the question may find this 2002 piece a useful introductory analysis. Information design, the medieval corporation, Renaissance art and Barney the Dinosaur--it's all here, and more. A few excerpts:

The effects of nonprofit reform increasingly resemble the programmed illusory dreamspace of The Matrix: a green hue colors the world created by a hidden code. In the movie this offputting glow reflects the hue of a digital screen; for nonprofits, it is the color of money.

The core design flaw within modern nonprofit legal theory is its constricted perspective: the assumption that we must cut to an essence behind the fictional mask. It is a methodology that excels at further breaking down nonprofit form into its separate parts, but it has lost sight of how these individual elements compose a greater whole.

The more we encourage the rules of segmentation to dominate the scene, the faster the distinctiveness of nonprofit style will degrade. Advising nonprofits is a task that requires an intuitive grasp of history, culture, and the rhetoric of form--in short, a comprehensive view of nonprofit law as a humanistic discipline.