Three schools of not-for-profit management thought - exploring the infleunce of management ideologies on mangerial responses

Not-for-profit organisations face an increasingly complex environment. As a response, they explore and adopt diverse management approaches. This paper begins by suggesting that these approaches can be classified into three distinct schools of thought, each of which represents a particular ideology towards managing not-for-profit organisations. It then examines the influence of these ideologies on the responses of not-for-profit decision-makers. The findings highlight five key challenges integral to not-for-profit practice and provide evidence that depending on the ideology, not-for-profit managers define and respond differently to the challenges in the sector. This paper makes a contribution by providing a deeper understanding of the conflicts and ambiguity that exists within the not-for-profit sector and the implications it has for not-for-profit practice