Becoming Business-Like

Abstract

How do nonprofit practitioners learn to understand themselves as nonprofit professionals? Although the literature has explored the extent and repercussions of nonprofits becoming more business-like and professionalized, little attention has been placed on the process through which this professionalization occurs. Using an autoethnography based on my practice as cofounder and eventual manager of a small nonprofit organization, this article narrates the range of practices and mechanisms through which I came to understand myself as a nonprofit professional. Following Mitchell Dean, who draws heavily on Michel Foucault’s later work, this article argues that professionalization is taught to nonprofit practitioners through two intertwined mechanisms: the “technologies of performance,” which include funding, and evaluation and monitoring procedures; and “technologies of agency,” which involve the often subtle socialization mechanisms into the sector. It thus deepens our understanding of how the transition toward being more business-like is occurring.

Keywords

nonprofit managerialism Foucault autoethnography governmentality

Introduction

The extent and related repercussions of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) becoming more business-like (Carnochan, Samples, Myers, & Austin, 2014; Coule, 2015; Dart, 2004; Maier, Meyer, & Steinbereithner, 2016; Sanders, 2015) and professionalized (Keevers, Treleaven, Sykes, & Darcy, 2012) have given rise to a considerable debate within nonprofit studies (Maier et al., 2016). The introduction of performance management techniques, imported from the public and private sectors (Aiken & Bode, 2009; Carnochan et al., 2014), is widely argued to have led to an increased “focus on outcomes, and the introduction of competitive practices” (Garland & Darcy, 2009, p. 757), requiring NPOs to “demonstrate cost-effective and professional management” (Tomlinson & Schwabenland, 2010, p. 102).

Supporters claim business-like and professionalized approaches make NPOs more effective and efficient, accountable, and financially disciplined (Kaplan, 2001), overcoming the perceived failures of nonprofits run by passionate, well-meaning, but ineffective, amateurs (Hwang & Powell, 2009). Critical voices, however, argue that it places isomorphic pressure transforming the nonprofit sector (Carey, Braunack-Mayer, & Barraket, 2009; Carmel & Harlock, 2008), threatening its distinctiveness (Sanders & McClellan, 2014), resulting in an increase in managerialism and bureaucratization (Fyfe & Milligan, 2003; Jenkins, 2005). As Carmel and Harlock (2008) claim, NPOs are

embedded in a system of governance that tends to institute them as technocratic and generic service providers. In doing so it renders their specific social origins, ethos and goals absent, as if these are politically and socially irrelevant to their activities and role in relation to the state. (p. 156)

At stake therefore is the nature of the nonprofit sector itself.

Yet what is the nature of the nonprofit sector? First, claims to NPOs’ distinctiveness are more contested than the above discussion portrays. The sector is far from homogenized (Alcock & Kendall, 2011), exacerbated by the increasing blurring of boundaries between the traditional sectors, particularly with government (Bromley & Meyer, 2014). NPOs vary significantly in terms of size (i.e., grassroots, informal associations to multinational charities), purpose (service providers, through to advocacy and activism), and funding arrangements (i.e., contracted service providers through to unfunded groups run exclusively by volunteers).

Second, the term “business-like” is contested. However, Dart’s (2004) definition is helpful. Dart’s typology suggests four distinct categories of being business-like, these are “business-like”: goals as programs, organizational service delivery, organizational management, and organizational rhetoric. Furthermore, Dart distinguishes the operating values of nonprofits (voluntaristic and prosocial) with the more instrumental and managerial values of being business-like. Fundamental for Dart, these changes are shifting in the outlook and management practice of NPOs toward those common within the for-profit sector. Consequently, this article takes the term “business-like” as the implementation of organizational tools, largely derived from and utilized within the for-profit sector, that contain philosophical principles that differ from the traditions of mutual aid and prosocial behaviors that are more common, although not universal, within NPOs (for a discussion, see Hwang & Powell, 2009).

Third, what was the traditional nonprofit sector like prior to the introduction of business-like practices? While the historiography and origins of the nonprofit sector are contested, NPOs are broadly rooted in philanthropy and mutual aid, the latter including self-help and “conviviality [communal socializing including eating]; non-party politics; and the pursuit of serious leisure” (Rochester, 2013, p. 8). Mutual aid in particular underpins claims to the nonprofit sector’s distinctiveness, including its innovative approach (Lindsay, Osborne, & Bond, 2014), community involvement (Boateng, 2002), flexibility and client-led services (Clarke, Newman, Smith, Vidler, & Westmarl, 2007), and mission rather than profit focus (Sanders, 2015; Sanders & McClellan, 2014).

Although the nature of the sector is contested, many researchers have argued there is a general trend that NPOs are becoming more “business-like” and professionalized (Bish & Becker, 2016; Bromley & Meyer, 2014). This process is common in the United Kingdom (Aiken & Bode, 2009); the United States (Carnochan et al., 2014; Dart, 2004; Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004; Maier et al., 2016); Europe, for instance, Sweden (Edlund & Johansson Sevä, 2013); and Asia, such as South Korea (Kim, 2013). Consequently, while the claims made in this article are specific to the United Kingdom, with its particular funding and policy arrangements (Carmel & Harlock, 2008), similar tendencies can be seen elsewhere.

This shift toward business-like practice and professionalization has given rise to a substantial literature (see Maier et al., 2016, for a comprehensive review). This literature has focused on three levels: first, examining whole sector changes, particularly the decline in distinctiveness (Carey et al., 2009; Jenkins, 2005; Lindsay et al., 2014); second, the effects on individual organizations, particularly resulting from increased managerialism (Golden-Biddle & Rao, 1997); and third, impacts on individual practitioners’ identity (Sanders, 2015; Sanders & McClellan, 2014). Consequently, as Maier et al. (2016) argue in this journal, the ongoing debate whether “business-like approaches . . . better serve the public good lies at the heart of nonprofit management studies” (p. 65).

Yet, despite this wide-ranging debate, insights into the actual practices through which professionalization occurs remain largely unexplored. Salient questions include the following: How does the professionalization process occur in practice? How do nonprofit practitioners learn to see themselves and their practice through the mind-set of professionalization? How do business-like management practices shape the professionalization process? How do these practices affect nonprofit practitioners’ subjectivity? For despite the quantity of current debate, there are limited empirical accounts which explain how individual practitioners learn to see themselves as professionals.¹ This is important as it reveals the processes through which the sector is changing.

To answer these questions, this article takes a practice-based approach, exploring what people actually do in everyday life (Miettinen, Samra-Fredericks, & Yanow, 2009) and how taken-for-granted practices shape nonprofit practitioners’ understandings (Mutch, 2009; Vaara & Whittington, 2012). It does this through a detailed 3-year autoethnography of the emergence of a small NPO of which I was the cofounder and manager. Using the theoretical lens of governmentality (Foucault, 1991b), through this case study, it examines how I was taught to see my small NPO as something that should be business-like and professional (Maier et al., 2016). This account contributes by providing a rich, thick description of the lived experience and struggles through which professionalization occurred. It illuminates the complexity of this professionalization process by narrating the often subtle and complex processes through which I was transformed from an “idealistic dreamer” interested in doing “social good” to perceiving myself as a nonprofit professional. Theoretically, it adds a more nuanced understanding of professionalization, specifically by examining the socialization and self-disciplinary practices through which NPO practitioners learn to govern themselves. It argues that professionalization and business-like practices are not only a new way of managing NPOs but a specific art of governing nonprofit practitioners that make them self-disciplined and less likely to resist (Rose, 1996b). Furthermore, it contributes to the governmentality literature, which examines how conduct is shaped by a variety of techniques and knowledges through our beliefs, aspirations, and desires (Dean, 1999) through a worked empirical example of governmentality in practice (McKinlay, 2010; Mennicken & Miller, 2014).

The article proceeds as follows: First, I adopt a Foucauldian governmentality approach to examine how professionalization constitutes particular ways of thinking about the self. Then I turn to the case which narrates the process through which I learned to think about myself as a nonprofit practitioner focusing on the actual everyday practices. I conclude by arguing that these everyday practices through which nonprofit professionals manage their projects are also ones through which they are taught to manage themselves.

Governing the Professional

To examine how nonprofit practitioners understand themselves as professionals, Michel Foucault’s (2010) notion of governmentality is useful. Governmentality can broadly be defined as examining the “conduct of conduct” (Foucault, 2000). It focuses on the everyday practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which groups and individuals are taught to see themselves as particular types of subjects (e.g., nonprofit professionals; Clarke, 2005; Foucault, 1991b; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 1996a). This formation of subjectivities is not imposed, top-down by force, control, or domination (Cruikshank, 1999), and neither do they force people to be particular ways, rather the professionalization process guides and shapes the field of possible actions that one can take (Vallentin & Murillo, 2012).

The governmentality perspective therefore is particularly apt in exploring how professionals are governed and govern themselves (Hodgson, 2002). As Fournier (1999) argues, “being a professional is not merely about absorbing a body of scientific knowledge but is also about conducting and constituting oneself in an appropriate manner” (p. 287). It is specifically focused on how practices shape the professionalization process (Mennicken & Miller, 2014).

Applying the concepts of governmentality to the nonprofit sector, through four vignettes (Learmonth & Humphreys, 2012) drawn from my own practice as a voluntary sector manager, this article argues that professionalization is taught to nonprofit practitioners through two mechanisms. First, through the discursive technologies of performance management (Keevers et al., 2012), including funding mechanisms (Brown, 1997; Fyfe & Milligan, 2003; Salamon, 1997), which following Mitchell Dean (1999; who draws heavily on Foucault’s work), I call the “technologies of performance.” As Vignettes 3 and 4 illustrate, these performance management criteria include the business-like practices of funding, and monitoring and evaluation procedures (Maier et al., 2016; Sanders, 2015). Second, it occurs through socialization practices, which Dean calls the “technologies of agency.” As Vignette 2 illustrates, these practices are developed, mediated, and taught by fellow nonprofit practitioners that socialize nonprofit practitioners, particularly those who come to occupy management positions, into behaving and acting in particular appropriate ways, through ongoing processes of professionalization identity work (Fournier, 1999; Noordegraaf, 2011). In the following ethnographic account, this article empirically illustrates Dean’s claim that the “technologies of performance” intertwine with the “technologies of agency” to develop practitioners into self-managing and responsible nonprofit professionals. In other words, this research focuses on how a particular form of self, the nonprofit professional, becomes constituted.

Methodology and Case Introduction

I turn to the case which centers on my experiences as the cofounder and eventual manager of Creative Arts (CA; a pseudonym), and how I became increasingly professionalized. The largely subtle way in which the technologies of performance and agency operate to shape practitioners’ self-understanding means that those who undergo, and even desire to be professionalized, may not always be conscious of the subtle, unintended changes in aims and outlook that professionalization can introduce. Although, in principle, insights into the professionalization process may be accessible through interviews and observations, understanding how these processes work is difficult to access externally. Therefore, an insider account, of someone undergoing professionalization, provides an opportunity to become conscious of, and reflect on, the often subtle and seemingly insignificant features of the professionalization processes.

Although still a “relatively young and contested field” (Denshire, 2014, p. 832), autoethnography offers an effective way of producing insider accounts. By balancing auto (self), ethnos (culture), and graphy (research process; see Reed-Danahay, 1997, for a discussion), autoethnography uses the author’s personal experiences (see, for example, Learmonth, 2007) to investigate and reflect on experiences, particularly emotions, that are not easily accessible through other means (Coffey, 1999). They can offer “highly personal accounts that draw upon the experience of the author/researcher for the purposes of extending sociological understanding” (Sparkes, 2002, p. 21). In doing so, they increase the representational richness and reflexivity of research that can resonate with readers (Cohen, Duberley, & Musson, 2009) and communicate “intangible and complex feelings and experiences that somehow can’t be told in conventional ways” (Muncey, 2010, pp. 2-3). It enables researchers to inquire into their own lives and behavior by turning the research focus “from the dramatically different ‘them’ and towards the agonizing familiar ‘us’” (Bell & King, 2010, p. 432).

Autoethnographies, however, have been criticized, including that the researcher can “go native” (Alvesson, 2009) or produce self-indulgent (Sparkes, 2002), narcissistic (Coffey, 1999), or simply biographical material, offering naive realism, in which accounts merely replicate the insider’s experiences (Coghlan, 2007) and do not create wider sociological understandings (Sparkes, 2002). Many of these criticisms are centered on evocative autoethnography, which privileges telling the story over theoretical insight. Conscious of these concerns, and following Learmonth and Humphreys’s (2012) call to combine evocative and analytical autoethnography, this article “weave[s] story and theory” together (Cohen et al., 2009, p. 233). Each vignette provides a personal narrative from which wider theoretical insights will be drawn (Muncey, 2010). Therefore, the purpose of this account is to immerse myself and reflect on the process of becoming professionalized.

Introducing CA

This research arose from a wider investigation into the management of NPOs (King, 2006). I was in the field between 2000 and 2004, working approximately 2 days a week, running CA. Based in the East Midlands (the United Kingdom), CA ran 16 therapeutic arts courses, employed six part-time creative therapists, worked with many national agencies, and received approximately £65,000 funding. I worked, unpaid, conducting wide-ranging tasks, including applying for funding, creating and operating performance management systems, conducting day-to-day management, and liaising with, among others, trustees, partner agencies, suppliers, creative therapists, clients, and funders. I attended meetings, designed websites, wrote reports, and developed the project management material for the organization. I therefore had a good insight into the practices of setting up and running a small NPO.

During this process, I took fieldnotes, writing up details of the meetings I attended, the work I undertook in the office, and the various decisions and choices we faced as we founded and established CA. In particular, especially the more I began to question my initial beliefs, I recorded my experiences in a reflexive diary to examine and reflect on the professionalization processes I was experiencing (King & Learmonth, 2015). My participation in CA did not arise out of an instrumental aim of critiquing professionalization (see Vignette 1); instead, professionalization retrospectively became a preoccupation during and after my experiences in the sector. The first two vignettes therefore offer reconstructions of my experiences, whereas Vignettes 3 and 4 were written at a period when I was increasingly conscious of, and preoccupied by, professionalization. While in the field, I checked my experiences and insights with fellow practitioners through discussions to see whether they had resonance beyond my immediate experience. Such conversations were used to deepen my reflections and to transcend the views of a single author.

The first stage of analysis was developed by reading and rereading the fieldnotes and reflexive diaries, reflecting on which experiences were most salient (Hay, 2014). The second stage involved crafting these experiences into ethnographic stories. This involved examining why these experiences felt important, allowing issues to emerge and then develop into provisional categories (Rictchie & Spencer, 1994). The third stage involved “performing” the stories (Ellis & Bochner, 1992) at academic and practitioner conferences, exploring which aspects resonated with others, subjecting them to critical scrutiny and reflection, and integrating the feedback into the analysis. This deepened the analysis and further extended the authenticity and trustworthiness of the stories. Finally, I reread the stories, fieldnotes, and reflexive diaries, analyzing them based on the categories of the technology of agency and performance.

Throughout the fieldwork period, as cofounder and manager of CA, I occasionally had doubts about the way I ran CA. However, I generally dismissed these doubts as I focused on the challenges of running the organization. It is only since leaving CA that I have been able to stand back and deeply reflect on how these everyday, organizational, business-like practices, which at the time I took for granted, shaped what I considered was important for CA, including its goals and purpose and how it professionalized me. Through this analytical process, I have therefore sought to become a critically reflexive practitioner, questioning the practices I was involved in and the way it altered my self-perception as a nonprofit professional (Cunliffe, 2004).

The Case

Vignette 1—Initial Beginnings: Naïve, Idealistic Dreams

On a long-hot summers’ day, Lois (my cofounder of Creative Arts and recent therapeutic arts graduate) and I are sitting in the park discussing our beliefs about the causes of homelessness and drug addiction. “I think that they are just like you and me, it is just that that their coping mechanisms of drug and alcohol are not as socially acceptable as something like workaholism,” Lois muses. “I mean,” she continues, drawing on concepts from the therapeutic arts, “they need help building up their internal resources to be able to cope with their difficult life experiences—express and explore their emotions in a way that is healthy, find a safe space to explore how they really feel and then, maybe, they can build a new way of living.” We continue the discussion exploring how homelessness and drug addiction can be as much a result of inequality, stigma (particularly around mental health), and lack of affordable housing.

“I really want to do something to help them,” Lois declares. “I want to use the creative arts to help people express and explore their emotions and find creative ways to tackle their problems and heal themselves.” She enthuses about how she would like to use what she learnt on her therapeutic arts degree to help people—just by volunteering in a local drugs charity. “Why don’t you go and talk to DrugAction [a pseudonym for the local branch of a national drug treatment charity] and see if you can run some sessions with them?” I ask.

A couple of weeks later, Lois returned from her meeting with DrugAction. “They love it,” Lois declared breathlessly. “It really fits their service—we just need to provide a project outline to send to their funders and say that we will attend a local networking meeting, then they will let us run it!”

I never set out to be a nonprofit professional. Before entering the sector, we never intended CA to be anything more than a few creative therapeutic art sessions. Our time was spent imagining how we could improve people’s lives and debating the underlying beliefs, politics, and philosophy of therapeutic, expressive art. We had little thought toward becoming nonprofit professionals. Having never run an NPO before, we were led by our ideals of what we thought it could achieve rather than our knowledge of running an NPO. Indeed, we were little more than idealistic dreamers, arguing about the nature of capitalism, the root causes of poverty, and how we wanted to change things. However, by engaging with the sector, our beliefs gradually changed.

Vignette 2—Entering the Field and Being Exposed to the “Technologies of Agency”: First Exposure to the Cognitive and Socializing Mechanisms of the Nonprofit Sector

I feel lost and confused. Standing alone in a cold, run down community building, I am in my first education networking event. Why I am here? I was told this event would be useful, currently it just feels horrible!

A man in his mid-40s approaches me and asks where I am from. Creative Arts, I sheepishly reply. We are not really an organization, just two people with an idea, but that seems too complicated to explain. He asks what sector we work in. Again I am unsure how to respond, therapeutic arts, I offer. He seems a little confused with this, and asks who our client group are. I don’t really know what he means—drug addicts, I cautiously suggest, thinking back to our interaction with DrugAction. I feel out of my depth. To avoid further embarrassment, I ask him what he does. He rattles off a really clear description of his organization, who they serve, what funding they have received, and what outcomes his projects hit. He had done this before! He gives me his business card—I’m impressed.

Suddenly we are all called to sit down. We start with a “1-minute go-round” where we introduce ourselves. I am first. Panicking I say I am from Creative Arts and we want to do therapeutic arts courses. As I listen to the other contributions, I realize everyone else says their funders (and often how much), their target group, and outcomes. They are so much more focused than me. After the meeting I notice that some of these “service providers,” as I learn to call them, not only have business cards but brochures with logos and details of their projects. We have a lot to learn.

The above vignette captures the workings of the “technology of agency” (Dean, 1999), a process through which I was socialized into the nonprofit sector and learned to consider myself a nonprofit professional. During the 3 years I ran CA, I attended numerous networking events, including education, health and arts forums, training programs, and community events. Through them, I exchanged knowledge, discovered training and education opportunities, funding possibilities, promoted CA, met fellow nonprofit professionals, and learnt about the sector.

Techniques like the 1-minute go-round or the elevator test² meant I had to develop a script about myself and CA in a succinct and appealing way. Over coffee breaks, I listened to (heroic) stories of funding success, but also challenges, including funders not really understanding them and the difficulties of hitting targets. As I listened to success stories, I imagined CA undergoing the same experiences.

This socialization process, following Noordegraaf (2011), had both cognitive and symbolic mechanisms. The “cognitive mechanisms” included attending training courses and consultancy sessions in how to run a successful NPO delivered by the local Council for Voluntary Services (CVS), being lent nonprofit magazines, books on funding and nonprofit management, and reading other organizations’ leaflets, brochures, and websites. The “symbolic mechanisms” included rites of passage (i.e., 1-minute go-round) and stories of successful funding bids. Although a few of these practices (except by the second-tier organization CVS) were explicitly intended to develop a nonprofit professional ethos, and none were obligatory, they all had subtle, yet dramatic, impacts on my self-perception.

Through these networking events, I acquired a certain disposition, appearance (smart casual with a degree of individuality), manner of talking, and social attitudes and behaviors, subtly mirroring those around me. I internalized my CA script so it gradually became an important part of my identity. These networking events were thus spaces, following Bell and King (2010), where bodily learning occurred, “whereby proficiency as a member of this culture is acquired and appropriate skills and dispositions” of being a professional are developed (p. 430). I identified with the struggles other nonprofit professionals presented and gradually began seeing my experience through this discourse (Noordegraaf, 2011). Thus, following Rose and Miller (1992), I came “to understand [my] situation according to a similar language and logic, to construe [my] goals and their fate as in some way inextricable” (p. 184).

Indeed, it is notable that these networking events were not a compulsory funding requirement. They did have some instrumental benefits, including discovering potential funding sources, meeting potential partner agencies, and learning ways to “pitch” CA. However, I was attracted to these events because I enjoyed connecting with and envisioning myself as a nonprofit professional. I found their challenges fascinating and I became intrigued by the prospect of facing them myself.

Networking events are, following Foucault, part of a set of disciplinary regimes that constitute individual subjectivities, creating self-disciplining and self-regulating behavior (Grey, 1994). These “technologies of agency” (Dean, 1999) set the norms through which I began to judge myself and CA. Most importantly, they laid the groundwork for our acceptance of the necessity and benefits of seeking funding.

Vignette 3—Applying for Funding: First Exposure to a “Technology of Performance”

“Your ideas are fundable. You should really apply,” a manager of a local education project tells us. At most networking meetings, we kept receiving this consistent message—apply for funding.

“I think we should go for it,” I state enthusiastically, excited by the positive vibes coming from the meeting. “Getting funding could be great. We could actually run Creative Arts the way we want and turn our dream into reality.” Lois looked less certain. “Do we really want the hassle with all that paperwork? Or setting up an organization?” she replied hesitantly.

The more we considered it, the more enticing the prospect became. Getting money to turn our dreams into reality seemed a good one. Completing one form shouldn’t hurt. “Mark [from DrugAction] said it was just about ‘jumping through hoops,’ putting our ideas into the funder’s language. He said we would still be able to run the project largely how we like,” Lois enthused.

Yet, we soon found applying for funding harder than we were led to believe. Finding a suitable funder was difficult. We attended numerous meetings, looked through the Directory of Grant Making Trusts and FunderFinder,³ and spent hours searching for various sources that might fit. Then one day, Lois arrived full of excitement. “I’ve found one. A new funding stream that is just right for us.” It looked good. An education project to help people access education or training. “It’s not perfect,” she said, “but not far off,” I agreed. “With a bit of tweaking we could change the wording to make it look like what the funders want.”

We set about reshaping the course. Out went the language of personal healing, self-expression, and creativity, and instead in went “communication skills, teamwork, and self-confidence.” We also put in extra stages of accessing education and training, just to meet the funders’ objectives. “Well they will need to have something positive to go on to when they have finished the course,” we justified these changes to ourselves.

Completing the funding form had a powerful effect on my professionalization. Some (but certainly not all) of the changes included the following:

placing CA work into predefined categories, an education provider instead of therapeutic arts;

translating personal principles and beliefs into manageable, solvable, fundable, and pragmatic questions;

setting the course within a framework of aims, outcomes, measurement, and risk management;

translating the therapeutic discourse into more fundable terms such as self-esteem, barriers to learning, teamwork, and communication skills; and

setting up an organization with policies and practices such as grievance procedures, supervisory structures, minutes for meetings, budgets, and cost structures.

These “technologies of performance” (Dean, 1999) began shaping our self-perception. By completing the funding form, we began imagining CA as an NPO and ourselves as nonprofit professionals. It forced us to frame CA within predefined categories, which, following Foucault (1994), are ways of ordering the world. It also taught us to see complex social problems not as a result of social inequality (see Vignette 1) but as more manageable, solvable issues (Cruikshank, 1999) that we could provide solutions to (Rose, 1998). Furthermore, writing down our ideas made us imagine what running CA would be like (Rose & Miller, 1992), thereby helping us imagine and commit to future practice.

This process was not conducted in isolation, as we were part of a network of “support.” We showed drafts to other nonprofit professionals and advisors from the local CVS, who showed us how, with tweaking, we could adjust our “offer” to “meet the funder’s requirements.” Although we had some concerns that applying for funding was changing our ideas, our focus centered on gaining the funding.

Funding acts as what Noordegraaf (2011) calls a “normative mechanism” (p. 470)—through which the nonprofit professional’s identity is shaped and mobilized. It acts as a gatekeeper, as most organizations cannot survive without it, and consequently is how NPOs are selected, and codes of conduct and sanctions and discipline agreed. Funding forms act as a promise, by which, in exchange for certain resources, the nonprofit professional vows to hit certain targets. It inscribes the nonprofit professional into a network of accountability to funders, clients, and the organization. In small organizations, where the boundary between the individual and the organization is particularly ill-defined, this process is intensified because the promise is largely cast between the individual and the funder. By applying for funding, the nonprofit practitioner crosses a threshold and consequently submits to a network of power relations and responsibilities, entering the world of nonprofit professionals.

Vignette 4—Technologies of Performance Are Intensified: The Power of Evaluation and Monitoring Forms

“How do they expect us to do this?” Lois asked me with puzzlement. We had been poring over the evaluation and monitoring requirements for hours. “I know we are supposed to improve self-esteem, how on earth do you measure it?”

It had been a couple of weeks since we had received our funding and the euphoria had long since dissipated as we faced the nitty-gritty of setting up the project. While we had been assured that gaining funding was “just a process of jumping through hoops,” upon receiving funding we realized it was just the first of many hoops. Our funders wanted us to monitor and evaluate the learners’ progress throughout the course, set benchmarks for every target with clear, quantifiable outcomes at the end.

The truth was we had no idea how to monitor and evaluate the project, as we had only written the targets to get the funding. We hadn’t considered how to capture them. Indeed, we were skeptical that things like self-confidence, self-esteem, and teamworking skills were measurable. They felt difficult to translate into numbers. The funding manager was of little help, simply stating it was our responsibility. How we did it was up to us, just so long as we were monitoring the course.

To create forms, we talked to friends and family who were teachers and social workers. We created pictorial representations of self-esteem, session evaluation forms for clients to identify their learning and progress, and session report forms for the facilitator to detail every session’s outcomes. We created goal-setting agreements for the clients to set their own goals (in ways that mirrored our funding requirements), milestones for assessment, and “witness statements” for clients’ key worker to describe their progress, and created spreadsheets and folders for every course and client. Hard work, but it felt good being organized.

The evaluation and monitoring forms further strengthened the “technologies of performance” (Dean, 1999) and were a central mechanism through which I became professionalized. Creating and implementing them was time-consuming and it also transformed how I saw my practice.

At the center of the evaluation and monitoring process, everything on the project had to fit within the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timebound) framework. Making the course SMART required breaking it down into manageable chunks, with set outcomes, milestones, and identified risks, and disturbing the free-flowing and emergent, client-led approach by having preestablished session outcomes. Every course had a

goal setting agreement for every client;

course plan with overall aims, milestones, and risks;

session plan with aims, resources, and outcomes;

session report from the creative therapist;

session evaluation report from each client;

witness statement from client’s key worker; and

twenty-five page course report, including artwork, graphs, and tables demonstrating individual and group progress.

Creating these forms also established a layer of course management. This was intensified when Lois became ill and I solely managed the project, employing therapeutic artists to run the sessions. Consequently, I saw the clients less, and trustees, partner agency project workers, and funders more, focusing my attention on course management and hitting the targets.

Even given the quantity of reports I generated, I was continually anxious they were insufficient. The funder never revealed whether we satisfied their requirements, merely stating they required more evidence. As the project continued, they increased the regularity of the reporting from quarterly to monthly. To complete this monitoring form, I even created meetings with other agencies simply to have something to report back, fearing that blank sections would look bad.

The funder also was only interested in the official targets on “the approved application form.” This narrowed my focus, resulting in the therapeutic intentions (which were not funded) becoming marginalized. My role centered on capturing the data for reports. This regularly became a source of internal tension within CA, as I needed the creative therapists to complete the monitoring forms, but they were reluctant, replying, “I suppose we have to do your evaluation forms.” My narrowed focus was also mirrored in meetings. In supervisions, I steered conversations away from (potentially fruitful and interesting) therapeutic developments toward the narrowly defined funded targets. Evaluation and monitoring therefore provided the framework through which I judged CA, directing my attention only toward fundable targets.

It also taught me to manage myself and the project in specific ways. I employed tools such as filing, budgeting, diaries, target setting, and to-do-lists to manage myself. Monitoring and evaluation of my own activity and the regular reporting to others for their approval helped me to feel more established and comfortable within my managerial role.

Through these evaluation and monitoring activities, the principles and practices of Management by Objectives, which underpins the SMART framework, became infused in how I behaved. First, it drew my attention to specific, visibly measurable criteria on the “approved application form” (Townley, 1994) that could be rendered into data. The discourse of aims, outcomes, outputs, milestones, and risks began to be infusing into every aspect of the project, teaching me to think about CA within these project management terms (Lyon-Callo, 2004). It taught me to see the clients through their capacity to improve (in measurable ways), and taught me and the clients to articulate ourselves according to prescribed categories that are attainable, realistic, and knowable in advance. It made us time-bound, focusing attention on outcomes that could arise during the duration of the course (Townley, 1994).

My role shifted to that of mediator between the funders and the clients/practitioners. With my name on the funding forms, I felt unable, or maybe simply unwilling, to question the principles of evaluation and monitoring. Therefore, instead of questioning these procedures, I accepted them and sought to make them work to promote CA (by making it appear successful to the funders).

Completing the monthly monitoring and evaluation form involved writing down all the activities of the period. This act of writing is an important feature of the constitution of a nonprofit professional. As Rose and Miller (1992) argue,

making people write things down, and the nature of the things people are made to write down, is itself a kind of government of them, urging them to think about and note certain aspects of their activities according to certain norms. (p. 200)

By writing down our goals, and formulating mechanisms to monitor them, I became actively responsibilized, not only for the running of projects but responsible for the outputs.

Inputting target data and recording CA’s successes gradually, and subtly, changed my behavior and responsibilized me (Morison, 2000). Through this process, I restructured myself, becoming one of those who “demonstrate that they are capable of governing themselves, both collectively and individually, in ways that reflect these wider demands [of society]” (Atkinson, 2003, p. 118). Evaluation and monitoring forms thus acted as ways of “evaluating and acting on our selves so that the police, the guards and the doctors [or funders] do not have to” (Cruikshank, 1999, p. 91).

Discussion and Conclusion: Professionalization Through the Technologies of Performance and the Technologies of Agency

It has been widely claimed that the pressure to be more “business-like” and professional (Sanders, 2015) is changing the nature of the nonprofit sector and the practitioners within it (Carmel & Harlock, 2008; Tomlinson & Schwabenland, 2010). Yet little has been said about how this change is actually occurring. The above narrative describes the processes of how I was gradually transformed from an “idealistic dreamer” to a “nonprofit professional.” It is important to emphasize that at no point through this process did anyone tell me to become a nonprofit professional, nor did I receive training or consciously decide to become a nonprofit professional. Paradoxically, I was never paid, so while I became more professionalized, I always remained a well-meaning amateur (Hwang & Powell, 2009).

My experience of becoming professionalized was often positive. I generally enjoyed making CA more business-like and professional, networking and meeting fellow nonprofit professionals, envisioning CA through completing funding forms, and running a business-like organization. I felt good when recording my activities, writing up success stories, and hitting targets, and when fellow nonprofit professionals commented how organized our program was. I was attracted to the professional image and perceiving CA as organized, financially responsible, and disciplined.

Yet professionalization came with certain costs. The more I saw myself as a nonprofit professional and became more committed to achieving the funders’ aims, the more distant I became from CA’s original ethos. As I have described elsewhere (King, 2009; King & Learmonth, 2015), I became preoccupied by completing paperwork and hitting targets rather than serving the clients’ interests: focusing on funder’s outcomes rather than participant’s needs. Accountability thus shifted from clients toward funders, who may “not [be] more democratic or accountable in a political sense” (Hwang & Powell, 2009, p. 292). My attention also shifted from an “idealistic dreamer” concerned with social inequality (Lyon-Callo, 2004) to (as a nonprofit professional) seeing the course clients as self-regulating subjects (Dean, 1999), responsible, and responsibilized for their own conditions. This was reflected in the shifting language, goals, and social attitudes that I and CA adopted, from the original, therapeutic arts outlook, aiming to help people cope with the challenges produced by capitalist society, to being a nonprofit professional, helping individuals fix their problems and become responsibilized for their outcomes (Clarke, 2005). Furthermore, the wider socialization process means that such attitudes become common within the sector as a whole, reducing the possibilities for resistance and further inscribing the nonprofit sector in a model of service delivery rather than of advocacy or more democratic goals (Dodge & Ospina, 2016; Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004; Rochester, 2013).

The fundamental point here is that “technologies of performance,” the everyday practices, such as funding forms, do not simply reflect reality, they produce it. They are “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1991b, 2010), which change the conditions of possibility for personhood and action. The professionalization process taught me to be a particular type of person and see the world through this framework. Mundane, quotidian, and taken-for-granted routine practices are thus politicized.

Consequently, these business-like practices such as “goals, targets and measurements [are] part of a new way not only of managing professional-client relations, but of managing professionals themselves” (Rose, 1996a, p. 349). Such “technologies of performance” regulate and codify conduct, through standardized reporting forms, and are indirect means of regulating and transforming professionals into “calculating individuals” within “calculable spaces,” subject to particular “calculative regimes” (Dean, 1999, p. 169). They are part of “a plethora of indirect mechanisms that can translate the goals of political, social and economic authorities into the choices and commitments of individuals” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 214). I was given considerable freedom over what could be included in the forms, the funders only specified that they needed data. Performance measurements are thus “used to govern their [nonprofit sector professionals] conduct while according them a certain autonomy of decisional power and responsibility for their actions” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 213).

Governing thus occurs at a distance, where practitioners “govern themselves, master themselves, care for themselves” (Rose, 1996b, p. 45). Professionalization is not imposed but professionals are governed through “freedoms, their choices, and their solidarities rather than despite these. It means turning subjects, their motivations and interrelations, from potential sites of resistance to rule into allies of rule” (Rose, 1998, p. 117). Subjectivities are thus cultivated that align with “specific governmental aims” (Garland, 1997). For small NPOs, which often have few paid staff, this process is powerful because it is the staff themselves who are often personally involved in the development, implementation, and judging of the performance measurements (albeit to meet an externally imposed requirement), and therefore act in ways that manage themselves.

Similarly, the “technologies of agency” (Dean, 1999) are informal but powerful networks provide occasions where one learns how to be a nonprofit professional. They “engage us as active and free citizens . . . members of self-managed communities and organizations, as actors in democratizing social movements, and as agents capable of taking control of our own risks” (Dean, 1999, p. 168).

Following Dean (1999), this article argues the “two distinct, yet intertwined technologies: technologies of agency, which seek to enhance and improve our capacities for participation, agreement and action; and technologies of performance, in which these capacities are made calculable and comparable that they might be optimized” (p. 173). These two technologies combined to encourage certain dispositions, attitudes, and ways of being in the world that produce the nonprofit professional. For Foucault (1991a), the combined technologies of performance and agency constitute the mechanisms through which knowledge and power fundamentally develop into action. These taken-for-granted, mundane, and ordinary practices that often get overlooked have significant but hidden effects (Vaara & Whittington, 2012), shaping a practitioner’s self-perception. From this practice perspective, “consciousness is not situated inside the head of the individual but, instead, exists in the interaction between the individual and the objective forms of culture created by human labour” (Miettinen et al., 2009, p. 1318). Routine practices, like completing a funding form, can be seen as mechanisms through which “meanings are internalized by an individual through participation in collective material activities in a given society” (Miettinen et al., 2009, p. 1318) and become “‘reified’ into cultural artifacts-concepts, instruments, methods, and rules. These, in turn, serve as the means for further practice” (Miettinen et al., 2009, p. 1318). Practices produce professionalization.

While the experiences described in this article are unique to me, and set within the U.K. context with its own specific funding and regulatory environment, the practices that they draw from are more widespread. Consequently, while professionalization cannot be seen as inevitable, the technologies of performance and agency present the conditions of possibility for professionalization. Focusing on these routine practices opens up a deeper understanding of how professionalization occurs. Further research could examine how nonprofit practitioners buy into, adopt, or resist the professionalization process. In doing so, it could offer insights into how alternative practices could develop that provide the possibility of resisting, at least the wholesale, adoption of professionalization and maybe even recover the idea of being idealistic dreamers. In doing so, it may broaden our vision of what NPOs can do and inspire a stronger commitment to social transformation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the clients and facilitators of Creative Arts (CA) and the various nonprofit practitioners who shaped the ideas and experiences that formed the basis of this article. I would like to thank Dr. Damian O’Doherty for supporting the initial research, Professor Alistair Mutch for his insights with the ideas to develop the article, and Stephanie King for her encouragement. I would also like to thank the Editor of Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Quarterly and the reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (Grant R42200134283).

Notes

Author Biography

Daniel King is senior lecturer in Organizational Behaviour at Nottingham Trent University, UK and research co-ordinator for the HRM division. Dr. King’s research focuses on three main, interconnected areas: the contribution critical perspectives of management can make to transforming organizational practice; alternative organizations and alternative ways of organizing; and critical perspectives of managing in the Third Sector. He has published in Human Relations, Organization Studies, Management Learning and Scandinavian Journal of Management and recently written an undergraduate textbook Organizational Behaviour 2nd Edition, with Scott Lawley (Oxford University Press). [Email: daniel.king@ntu.ac.uk]

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