Skip to main content

The Commons


This is a Jossey-Bass book and it's getting a wee bit long in the tooth. It is copyright 1992 but feels much older than that. It is quite theoretical and academic, not that there's anything wrong with that. NB: I got a little tired of it and just skimmed thru so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

To cut to the chase, the "theory of the commons" is based on nine assumptions, so let the debate begin.

1. Social Action: that a characteristic of a nonprofit and/or voluntary service is its intangibility.

I think this is not really true. I think a lot of junior league types spend a lot of time on "intangibles," but a lot of people I know in the nonprofit sector are awful worried about outcomes. My perspective is that it's a crappy nonprofit that assuages its conscience with complaints of its work being "intangible." Every nonprofit should come up with some kind of indicator or deliverable to justify its existence. Otherwise, leave the money for someone who can.

2. Affluence: This one seems like a hierarchy of needs issue. If people don't have their basics down pat, no one can participate in the betterment of society. Makes sense to me.

3. Authenticity: the theory "assumes that actors operating in nonprofit and voluntary settings are authentic, that is, they are what they appear to be to informed others operating in the same context." So anyone who is not authentic is subject to excommunication from the commons, and laws help inforce this (e.g. IRS's enforcement of charitable tax fraud).

4. Continuity: This part is really wordy and marginally comprehensible. But basically, I take from it that these are "traditional" organizations--the past matters, and people know have a duty to plan for the future to preserve the heritage of the community.

5. Rationality: That people aren't crazy. Shouldn't I have this?

6. Near-Universality: that the whole democratic idea of a "commons" is near-universal, "known in some manner in most, possibly all, human cultures." I suppose that this position seemed pretty sensible in 1992, before the postmodern neo-hippies of 2003 convinced us that really, some people must not be cut out for self-governance.

7. Autonomy: volunteers and such in these organizations are free to act for themselves. Or rather, that they are "capable" of doing so. "The ability to act with others to create and sustain and autonomous social world is one of the most fundamental characteristics of nonprofit and voluntary action." This part makes sense to me.

8. Intrinsic Valuation: whoa, on the lingo there. Evaluations of a given "commons," or "an autonomous common world," should be made from the values that arise from it. Is that like in the Bible "you shall know them by their fruits?" Or, is it the values that the group espouses. Those are different sometimes. Anyway, basically this one denies that a group should have to be accountable in any practical way for any of its outcomes. I'm not a fan of that idea.

9. Ordinary Language: "a satisfactory theory of nonprofit and voluntary action must be stated in language that philanthropic, charitable and altruistic actors can recognize and understand." This is pretty unclear, and doesn't quite rank with the other points listed.

So that's a resume of the "theory of the commons." I'm kind of an outcomes-oriented nonprofit/trade association/lobbying type so naturally I'm probably not the target audience for this work. Maybe if I were more of a charity, foundation environment it would be more useful.

By Roger A. Lohmann

Popular posts from this blog

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of ...
Read more

Managing the Nonprofit Organization (Part Three)

1. What is the bottom line when there is no bottom line? Businesses as a default can rely on profit as an effectiveness measure. Nonprofits cannot use this concrete measure meaningfully. There are many different ways of looking at measurements that can serve as bottom lines of sorts, but the trick is to pick the right measurement to look at. And that can change over time, so it needs to be incorporated into the strategic planning (or whatever you want to call it) process. Nonprofits have many different customers which all need to be pleased to differing degrees. Drucker talks about the difficulty nonprofits have abandoning lost causes. Nonprofits have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes. A moral cause is an absolute good. Preachers have been thundering against fornication for five thousand years. Results, alas, have been nil, but that only proves how deeply entrenched evil is. The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased. This is the essen...
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more