Disciplines Offer to Nonprofit Management Education

For at least three decades, scholars and administrators have been working to develop courses and curricula designed to prepare individuals to manage nonprofit organizations. Today, these courses are housed throughout universities, yet they, like all management and organization studies, share a common ancestry in traditional social science disciplines— sociology, political science, economics and anthropology. This paper examines whether there remains a place for traditional social science disciplinary approaches in the teaching of nonprofit management, and if so, what such a place might look like. Before schools of management existed, the study of organizations was headquartered in the social sciences, and before the specialization and fragmentation of social sciences over the course of the 19th and 20th century, we were all scientists of society. The fathers of organization theory—figures like Max Weber