Showing papers by "Paul DiMaggio published in 2002"

Measuring the Impact of the Nonprofit Sector on Society Is Probably Impossible but Possibly Useful

Abstract: Although we often contrast the cool scientific temperament of modernity to the superstition, ignorance, and magical thought of premodern eras, modern culture is notable less for the degree to which ritual and myth are important than for the kinds of myths and rituals that have been substituted for the religious and nationalist orthodoxies of the past (Meyer, 1988). As Weber foresaw in The Protestant Ethic, first published in 1904, the most powerful of modern icons is “rationality,” the deliberative, instrumental orientation that Weber warned would confine humanity within “an iron cage” until “the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt” (Weber, 1958, p. 181). Impelled by economic competition, sponsored by state bureaucrats and policy elites, supported by an industry of consultants, techniques aimed at maximizing instrumental rationality— by which I mean the systematic attempt to understand and act on one’s understanding of systems of cause and effect—have proliferated (Meyer & Gupta, 1994). Today, the United States is a society in which cost-benefit analysis, performance assessment, and the pursuit of efficiency represent a cultural system that is as much taken for granted and as tightly linked to society’s most powerful institutions as was Buddhism in medieval Japan or the divine right of kings in early modern France (Meyer, Boli, & Thomas, 1987; Dobbin, 1994).

Data to Support Scholarship on Nonprofit Organizations: An Introduction

Abstract: This two-part special issue of American Behavioral Scientist (that is, this volume and the one that will follow it in July 2002) emerged from the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Research on Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector. The purpose of the committee is to help research on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector to achieve greater visibility, greater coherence, intellectual momentum, and intellectual direction. A central part of this fieldbuilding initiative is to promote the development of intellectual and material resources for studying philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Toward this end, the committee decided early in its work to examine the quality and availability of data on nonprofit organizations and philanthropy by commissioning the essays included in this volume.