Abstract
This paper outlines a collective action approach to study nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We contend that while political scientists and sociologists have extensively written about NGOs, they have not systematically examined fundamental collective action issues such as why and where NGOs emerge, how they function, how they are structured, and what strategies they employ to mitigate agency conflicts and ensure accountability. Instead of theorizing about NGOs as a category, NGO scholars have developed descriptive typologies relevant to study small subsets of the NGO population. In contrast, the non-profit literature, which studies broadly the same actor category, has systematically focused on fundamental questions inherent in any collective endeavor. We conclude that by employing a collective action perspective, specifically the theories of firm, NGO scholars will be able to develop explanations about NGO origin, structure, and strategy that have superior explanatory power and are generalizable across NGOs.
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Notes
In this context, the “economics of religion” literature, which conceptualizes the religion sector as a market characterized by producers (religious organizations) and consumers (religious adherents), is instructive. Scholars have applied the theories of firm to understand why denominations vary in their organizational forms, outreach strategies, and the supply of religious goods. For an overview, see Iannaccone (1998).
By this we refer to beyond-compliance policies adopted by firms with the explicit objective of creating positive social externalities (Prakash and Potoski 2006).
We do not subsume the social capital literature (Putnam 1993) under NGO politics literature because we are less interested in how social capital is created and deployed, and more interested in engaging with scholars who study how non-governmental actors directly influence public policy and provide collective goods and services.
We recognize that some political scientists have produced exceptional work on governance and collective action that has the potential to be labeled as non-profit scholarship. Professor Ostrom (1990) is an obvious example, as her work focuses on governance of common-pool resources by non-market and non-state mechanisms. While some self-governance institutions studied by Professor Ostrom have characteristics of non-profits—they operate under the non-distributional constraint—some do not. For example, a farmers’ cooperative established to manage a common pool resource might distribute all of its profits to its member. While it is a self-governing institution, it is not a non-profit because it violates the non-distributional constraint. In sum, while various governance literatures in political science might overlap with the non-profit literature, the former cannot be subsumed under the latter.
Social movement literature is popular in political science as well. Incidentally, Professor Tarrow is a Professor of Political Science (Government) and Sociology at Cornell University.
Political scientists and sociologists have tended to view NGOs primarily as physical organizations, not as rule structures. Consequently, they tend not to focus on the institutional dimensions of these actors. In contrast, the non-profit literature implicitly recognized that prior to examining non-profits as organizations, scholars must figure out these organizations’ institutional foundations. Non-profit scholars therefore have paid considerable attention to collective action issues germane for this institutional category.
While we respect the heterodoxy of views on generalizable theories, we do not think that this “area studies approach” is an analytically useful way to study NGOs. Lessons from one “area” are seldom useful for the study of other areas because every area is supposed to be analytically unique and therefore needs a different theory. As a result, NGO scholars tend to overlook opportunities to cumulate knowledge about NGOs as a category of collective actors and employ insights from other types of collective action to study NGOs.
Chandler (1977) identifies two phases in the development of the American business organization: the pre-1850 phase of the market economy and the post-1850 phase of managerial capitalism. Chandler masterfully documents how the “visible hand” of the modern firm economized on administrative costs in relation to economic exchanges via the “invisible hand.” For him, the railroads were the first modern industrial enterprise embodying managerial capitalism.
Moreover, other non-profit scholars point to an inverse relationship between trust in the government and non-profit formation and participation. In this view, higher numbers of non-profits emerge when trust in government is low (Brooks and Lewis 2001) or when dissatisfaction with the quality or quantity of public or private services is high (Douglas 1987).
The U.S. regulatory environment has anticipated this problem. To discourage “excessive” executive compensation in non-profits, the 1996 Federal Taxpayer Bill grants the IRS the authority to impose penalties in this regard (Barragato 2002).
Research on executive compensation in non-profits is seeking to explore this issue. Frumkin and Keating (2004) find that executive compensation is higher in non-profits with free cash flows and with stronger financial performance. This violates the non-distributional constraint and therefore is indicative of agency problems.
Also, see Niskanen’s (1971) budget maximizing model of public bureaucracies.
For different types of accountability, also see Grant and Keohane (2005, pp. 35–37).
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Acknowledgment
We thank Matt Auer, Kristin Bakke, David Baron, Brenda Bushouse, Margaret Levi, Tom Lyon, Elinor Ostrom, Steve Pfaff, Gary Segura, and Oran Young for comments. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2006 annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association and the University of Michigan Business School.
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Johnson, E., Prakash, A. NGO research program: a collective action perspective. Policy Sci 40, 221–240 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-007-9043-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-007-9043-x