By Julia Classen. From The Nonprofit Quarterly. Posted on 5/24/18.
I was talking with an executive the other day about the problems she was having with her board, when she declared, “I’ve been here a long time and I’ve seen all this behavior before. I’m just so tired of it!” At that moment, I remembered an article by Miriam Wood, titled, “Is Governing Board Behavior Cyclical?”
While digging out the article to reread it, I thought about all the changes that have occurred since the article was first published in 1992. Since then, the nonprofit sector has seen exponential growth, increased professionalism, and an explosion in academic research, with a concomitant number of undergraduate and graduate degrees awarded in the field. Nonprofit governance research and practice have grown to the point that there is now a biannual conference that brings together scholars and practitioners to explore and advance the body of knowledge in the field. I found myself wondering whether the board behavior framework advanced by Wood was still as applicable today as it was in 1992. To address this question, I have drawn upon information from NPQ’s 2011 reader survey, and my own experience serving on nonprofits for more than 30 years as well as working for nonprofit boards as a consultant.
While digging out the article to reread it, I thought about all the changes that have occurred since the article was first published in 1992. Since then, the nonprofit sector has seen exponential growth, increased professionalism, and an explosion in academic research, with a concomitant number of undergraduate and graduate degrees awarded in the field. Nonprofit governance research and practice have grown to the point that there is now a biannual conference that brings together scholars and practitioners to explore and advance the body of knowledge in the field. I found myself wondering whether the board behavior framework advanced by Wood was still as applicable today as it was in 1992. To address this question, I have drawn upon information from NPQ’s 2011 reader survey, and my own experience serving on nonprofits for more than 30 years as well as working for nonprofit boards as a consultant.
RSS Feed
