Abstract
Dan Ryan’s Ghost of Organizations Past is a fascinating and useful account of nonprofit organizations and voluntary action in a specific time and place—New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1990s. The nonprofit organizations in question range from ephemeral “neighborhood groups” to Yale University. The voluntary action was the countless hours people contributed to a vision of comprehensive, community-wide commitment to substance abuse reduction.
The premise of the book is “to better understand community-level interventions we have to stop thinking of organizations as if they were individuals and of communities as if they were mere collections of individuals” (p. 22). With that as a starting point, it is not surprising that the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of volunteers and others who worked for, in, or with New Haven’s “Fighting Back” project are less fully realized than the organizational issues Ryan describes. (Many of the volunteers might better be called “quasi-volunteers”—people who are paid to work for an organization, municipal or nonprofit, who nonetheless find themselves recruited into a venture neither of their own making nor closely aligned with their primary affiliation.) The book will, though, provide comforting, if not exactly reassuring, new understanding of the situation to anyone who has ever been baffled by how hard it is to generate enduring and effective support for efforts to achieve a common goal in a community setting. It offers (among many other insights) explanations of the challenges inherent in collaboration (Chapter 6), the mysterious difficulty of scheduling meetings (Chapter 10), and the long-lasting effects of past efforts at community mobilization (Chapter 11)—“unsettled scores, unburied hatchets, and the unavoidable material consequences of paths taken or avoided by earlier attempts at renewal” (p. 202). This chapter on “organizational detritus” sometimes struggles to separate participants’ personal histories from the book’s focus on organizations per se, but it nonetheless adds a valuable inventory of the ways the past can entangle the best of intentions for the future.
As the title makes clear, the focus of this book is on organizations, or, more specifically, one organization, a project funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation in New Haven (and in 14 other cities). “Fighting Back” had the goal of reducing demand for alcohol and illegal drugs by creating a community-wide culture of resistance to the many forms of damage that flow from abuse. Drawing on years of close observation of the struggles of this project, Ryan assembles a list of things that can, and too often do, go wrong in an effort to mobilize multiple organizations around a common mission; hence, the book has relevance for projects operating under the banner of “collective impact.” Furthermore, he places the elements of that list in a clearly articulated theoretical framework. To “try to do things with organizations in communities of organizations” is critically different from undertaking a project that depends on concerted action by a group of individuals (p. 237). He calls this list of things that go wrong “generic organizational effects”—that is, things that happen in and with organizations because they are organizations. His book is a strong case against “methodological individualism” (p. 21).
Ryan’s book does not provide personal narratives of the many participants in New Haven’s version of Fighting Back, and hence, offers no portraits of heroes to be emulated or villains to be condemned. What it does is to widen the lens on the dynamics of voluntary action in a way that offers insights and cautions to both activists and researchers. Its argument, well made, is that it is almost never sufficient to look at the personalities involved when attempting to understand the difficulties encountered by, or the failures of, coalition building, collaboration, or even simple coordination when the cats being herded are organizations within a community.
A large part of the work of nonprofit organizations often, of course, entails participating in, maintaining, or creating coalitions, collaborations, or coordinated efforts. So it is useful to be encouraged to see past the personalities of the participants (and other individualistic causes) to look for generic organizational and generic institutional effects that may well be—in fact, to hear Ryan tell it, almost always will be—getting in the way of those efforts. Alongside the organizational technologies (his term) of coalitions, collaboration, and coordination, there are technologies for overcoming these generic effects. They will work better, it is reasonable to expect, if the possibility of their existence is recognized and attention is paid to overcoming the ways they can interfere with, or even completely derail, projects undertaken with the best of intentions.
Ghosts of Organizations Past is, therefore, a book that speaks directly to some of the core interests of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. And, it does so in a revealing and stimulating way, opening up new possibilities for research and interpretation while presenting an interesting and well-documented case study of a complex effort to do something to a community (reduce damages from substance abuse) by working with a wide range of notionally allied organizations. New Haven, in the 1990s, was not the last place or time where such an effort was launched. Attending to the frustrating dynamics of what happened there may be of some help in future efforts that have similar characteristics.
The fact that the book is well written—blending elements of storytelling skillfully into its theoretical development and presentation of data, along with some sly humor (Do “good meetings make good neighbors”? [p. 229])—is a welcome bonus.