Becoming Business-Like

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

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.