Afterward: Communication Dynamics of Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations

When Brittany and Lacy asked me to write a brief essay to cap off this special issue on NPVO scholarship, they indicated “we really value your voice and would be honored if you would agree to contribute to our special issue in whatever way moves you.” That was quite a remarkable invitation. I’m still a bit shocked by an invitation that positions me somewhat in a role as grand dame of NPVO communication scholarship! I’m indeed humbled by the implication. To the extent that this characterization of my role might hold, it is due to two things. First, I have sustained a scholarly interest in nonprofits and volunteers throughout a good portion of my career and have made contributions to research and editing roles related to the body of work that has been discussed in this forum. Second, and perhaps even more critically, I authored a think-piece that was published in Management Communication Quarterly back in 2005 (Lewis, 2005) that established me as an identifiable trailblazer in calling attention to the need for NPVO communication research (I hope one lesson of my experience is the value of “think pieces” and the encouragement to young scholars to pursue them).

I was an associate professor at the time I published that article and was eager to have a role in influencing the direction of scholarship in an area I thought was understudied and undervalued in the communication discipline. The more I read and learned about the important roles that NPVOs played in society and the world, the more I was bothered by the stereotype of nonprofit organizational research as “lite” or “less than” corporate-focused research. I claimed the following as my central theme, “. . .to make the case that complex and, perhaps, unique communication dynamics take place within this sector and organizational communication scholars have multiple rationales for deepening their interest in it” (p. 241). The article develops a research agenda spanning across four areas: social capital; NPO mission/accountability; governance and decision-making; and volunteer relationships. I argued that this context was “rich with possibility” and “deeply neglected from a communication theory standpoint” (p. 262). I argued that although we’d spent a lot of time in nonprofit organizations, “like distracted tourists, we seemed to have missed much” (p. 262). In my view, we had used nonprofits as a substitute (perhaps due to ease of access) to stand in for the more interesting, more standard large corporate organizations. I concluded my article, “I look forward to the day when we might garner enough interest to justify a special forum in Management Communication Quarterly, regularly sponsor panels at national communication conferences on nonprofit communication issues, and see regular contributions to [nonprofit academic conferences and journals]” (p. 263).

Looking back now, I see I was fairly prescient. I’m quite happy about how that turned out–although my role in spawning this scholarly trajectory was more witness than instigator. Many strong scholars (some more senior and some more junior than I) have moved this sub-area along to what it is today. This sub-area of scholarship has taken impressive turns. Scholars embracing a wide variety of perspectives and goals are a part of the domain of civil society organizational scholarship. This is as it should be and the forum in this special issue yields insight into the tensions and contributions of this diversity. In the past few decades a lot has been said to defend this domain of scholarship as reasonable and important. That work, I think, has now been largely accomplished.

As I turn my attention to what might come next and what I would hope to see, and since I’ve been granted the luxury of indulging my own thoughts and voice in this essay, I offer the following short wishlist. First, I think our work in this domain of scholarship is too much like a bake sale and not enough like a catered meal. In other words, I crave programmatic research. While the bake sale is nearly certain to contain marvelous items, tasty and unique, one might end up over-indulging in a mix of sweets that although enjoyable in the moment, do not add up to a nutritious and complete dining experience. In contrast, the catered meal (if prepared by well-trained and exceptionally talented chefs), builds course-by-course in a way that not only pleases the palate, but provides balance in complementary food types, flavors, textures, and presentation. In the world of scholarship, a program of research gets us somewhere. It moves from starters, through a set of increasingly substantive components, to eventual side interests and afters. I wish that programs of research were more clearly defined and dominant in the NPVO domain. Too much of the work that is published appears to be of the bake-sale variety. While good and even great, the list of future directions too often is unfulfilled either by the authors or others who read the work. There are, of course, exceptions to this in our field of research. Several strong scholars have long threads of work devoted to carefully laying out a set of propositions and testing them or elaborating them over time. I just think this should be more the norm than it seems that it is.

Second, I still feel that we have too great a tendency to study NPVOs one at a time. I wish that we were able to gather some larger data sets with multiple organizations and garner a more complex descriptive databases about the communication patterns, practices, preferences, and structures across them. Although I value the deep ethnographic tradition embraced by many of the scholars who study NPVOs, I still see the importance of getting the landscape view of these phenomena in larger descriptive studies. I would love to see data collection that enables powerful empirical claims about trends across dozens or even hundreds of NPVOs. Even if observations gathered through large samples, survey methods, and/or archival research provides only the birds-eye view of complex communication behavior, it does help us to form those initial questions and perhaps lead us into focus on questions that may be better explored through closer examination in one or a few organizations.

Third, in the debate (and perhaps in part due to initial defensiveness about focusing scholarship in the civil society sector) we have overly narrowed our focus of study on NPVOs alone. Part of my wish list is that we expand our examination of how NPVOs interact with organizations in other sectors. There is increasing interest, it seems, in cross-sector alliances and partnerships (which is great), but I think we can extend this type of inquiry to understanding the whole eco-system in which many (most?) NPVOs exist, which is by nature at the cross-section of business, government, and civil society. NPVOs contend with a lot of translational work as they move between discourses of enterprise, society, advocacy, and charity etc. Situating our understanding of NPVOs within these larger crisscrossed discourses is important to fully account for the communication that occurs within and around them.

Fourth, as is true with most of our organizational communication research, it would be useful to study the dynamics of NPVOs over time. Both in the case of large data-set descriptive study as well as small sample qualitative inquiry, it is critical to follow these organizations and their staff (paid and volunteer) over time. We certainly already have strong examples of scholars who have developed relationships with informants and organizations over time and have detailed the journeys of these individuals and organizations. I wish that we could see more of this kind of research. As NPVOs adapt to the changes in their environments, the shifting resources and needs, the altered discourses about their work, relevance, success, and importance, there is much to capture and understand. Organizations viewed as background noise in one phase of their lifespan can be transformed into the most urgently needed community resource with an incoming hurricane, tornado, or pandemic. Similarly, activist organizations might be discursively re-framed from pro-social noise-makers, to threatening terrorists within the matter of months. How organizations manage the transitions and how it impacts the ways in which they communicatively constitute themselves and their stakeholder relationships are best understood through analysis of dynamics in real time.

Finally, I feel very tied to practice as I think about NPVO scholarship. I started my career –my first job after my undergraduate education—working for the American Red Cross. Ever since that experience and after other volunteer roles I held as a young person, I’ve wanted to help make nonprofit organizations better. In a piece I wrote for MCQ (Lewis, 2012) about moving nonprofit organization scholarship forward, I wrote, “While we have succeeded in being interesting in our NPO scholarship, I think we have been less useful. That is we are not necessarily tackling problems, puzzles, and possibilities that those in practice would find relevant and important” (p. 187). I posed a few ideas about how we might embrace a practice of engagement in collaboration with those who perform their labor in NPVOs. I would like to see us move intentionally in this direction—especially given the critical importance that so many NPVOs play in our society, communities, and daily lives. NPVOs touch us even when we do not work there. They support us, provoke us, engage us, feed and clothe us, and bind us together in ways different from other sectors. They are deserving of our scholarly interest; and they are sites in which we should become useful.