Understanding Nonprofit Work E-Book

Matthew A. Koschmann

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 426

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Offers a valuable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and nonprofit practitioners interested in understanding nonprofit work from a communication perspective

This sophisticated yet accessible book explores the dynamics of organizational communication in the context of nonprofit work. It delves deeply into the subjects of communication and social construction and develops several key subject areas and issues including leadership, management, and governance; the marketization of nonprofit work; collaboration and organizational partnerships; meaningful labor; and international nonprofit work.

Understanding Nonprofit Work: A Communication Perspective is the first resource to bring together the considerable and voluminous amount of communication scholarship and nonprofit research available in academia. Moving beyond the simplistic notion of communication as merely the transmission of information, it instead develops a more insightful approach to nonprofit work based on the concept of communication as social construction, explaining the implications and applications of this distinct communication perspective in ways that will benefit both communication scholars and nonprofit practitioners. Additionally, this book:

• Brings together a wealth of information in communication theory and nonprofit organizations in a thoughtful, approachable style
• Demonstrates the application and utility of a communication perspective across several key aspects of nonprofit work
• Written by two well-known scholars in the field with considerable experience in nonprofit work—teaching, research, volunteering, consulting, and board membership

Understanding Nonprofit Work is an ideal book for advanced undergraduate and graduate level students in courses on nonprofit work, or broader classes on organizational communication and public administration that have units on the nonprofit sector. This book is also perfect for nonprofit professionals looking to develop a more sophisticated and insightful approach to their work.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Preface

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

1 Developing a Communication Perspective on the Nonprofit

Introduction

Rethinking Communication

Implications of Communicative Constitution for the Nonprofit

Communication Among the Disciplines

Preview of Chapters

2 Communicative L‐M‐G: Leadership, Management, and Governance

Introduction

What's the Difference?

Questioning Underlying Assumptions

Communicative L‐M‐G and the Nonprofit

3 The Marketization of Nonprofit Work

Introduction

Nonprofit Marketization

Economic Understandings of Nonprofit Marketization

A Communicative Explanation of Nonprofit Marketization

Conclusion

4 Collabrocation: Thinking Communicatively about Collaboration

Introduction

Setting the Stage

Defining Collaboration (Sort of)

Collabrocation (or “Thinking Communicatively” About Collaboration)

Putting It All Together

5 Meaningful Work and the Nonprofit

Introduction

A Brief History of Work

Communicative Explanation of Meaningful Work

Communicative Practices of Meaningful Work

Ethical Understandings of Meaningful Work

Conclusion

6 International Nonprofit Work

Introduction

Language and Terminology

Knowledge and Knowing

Religion

Financial Arrangements

Conclusion

Conclusion: Understanding What it Means to be Nonprofit

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 1

Table 1.1 Comparing theoretical approaches to communication.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Understanding Nonprofit Work

A Communication Perspective

Matthew A. Koschmann

and

Matthew L. Sanders

This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The right of Matthew A. Koschmann and Matthew L. Sanders to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Koschmann, Matthew A., author. | Sanders, Matthew L., author.Title: Understanding nonprofit work : a communication perspective / Matthew A. Koschmann, University of Colorado Boulder and Matthew L. Sanders, Utah State University.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2020008777 (print) | LCCN 2020008778 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119431251 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119431275 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119431329 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Nonprofit organizations. | Business communication.Classification: LCC HD62.6 .K668 2020 (print) | LCC HD62.6 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/5–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008777LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008778

Cover Design: WileyCover Images: © enjoynz/iStockphoto, © Alexey Blogoodf/Shutterstock

To Laurie Lewis, scholar, mentor, and friend who got us started on this journey and supported us along the way.

To Matthew Isbell, our partner for so much of this journey, valued friend and colleague.

To the countless nonprofit folks we've worked with over the years – managers, volunteers, clients, donors, board members – who are the inspiration and motivation for so much of our work.

And to our families, who give meaning and purpose to everything we do. We love you all.

Preface

We have two main goals for this book: First, to develop a distinct communication perspective on nonprofit work; and second, to then apply this communication perspective to a number of key issues that are at the heart of organizing to promote the common good – all of which will lead to a better understanding of nonprofit work. Throughout this book, we will often say “the nonprofit” instead of nonprofit organizations or the nonprofit sector to signal something more than just the tax status of a company or a collection of organizations in our economy. Instead, we have in mind a more profound ethos or character, a spirit of civic and political engagement, cooperation and social entrepreneurship, service delivery and welfare provision, and religious faith and ideological expression. This certainly involves specific organizations that can be identified as a particular economic sector of our society – both of which are important manifestations of the nonprofit that we will address as we frame each chapter. But the soul of the nonprofit is much more than this. And for the nonprofit to thrive and flourish, we need to develop a deeper sense of its core values and beliefs, and then see how these play out in our attempts at forming and managing organizations to carry out the critical task of the nonprofit. We also emphasize the notion of nonprofit work, as you'll notice in the title. We want to focus more on the doing or practice of the nonprofit, rather than just the “thing” of an abstract sector or a static organization. This is a big part of what a communication perspective is all about.

The nonprofit is near and dear to our hearts, and we bring a fair amount of experience and expertise to this book. We've worked for nonprofit organizations, we volunteer and donate to nonprofits, we've served on nonprofit boards, we teach classes on communication and the nonprofit sector, and much of our research has been with or in or about nonprofit organizations. Echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth century French diplomat who famously wrote about America democracy, we see the nonprofit as essential to our republic and critical for human flourishing. The nonprofit represents the core of civil society and democratic life. The voluntary association of citizens in free nations to organize and address their own needs and improve their collective wellbeing has been at the heart of all civil, political, and economic progress of the past 300 years.

Yet despite being so central to civil society, the nonprofit is also harder to understand and manage because of its unique relationship with both the market and the state. Being nonprofit means working with significant economic constraints while also trying to tackle difficult, complex, and even intractable problems. Being nonprofit means operating with both private autonomy and public accountability. This isn't easy or straightforward; it's a distinctly challenging organizational environment and thus calls for a more sophisticated understanding of organizational communication. Many people have been working on understanding what it means to be nonprofit for a long time, and we have made great strides in concepts and theories that explain how we can best engage in nonprofit work. Our objective in this book is to add our disciplinary voice of communication to this important conversation and expand our collective knowledge and understanding of nonprofit work.

We represent a burgeoning group of communication scholars doing a substantial amount of theoretical, empirical, and applied research on the nonprofit sector and with nonprofit organizations. Communication scholars have been doing work in and with the nonprofit for decades, but since the early 2000s there has been a more deliberate effort to build a scholarly community and develop a distinct line of research and applied knowledge. More specifically, in our academic subfield of organizational communication, there is a strong and growing interest in the nonprofit. That's because the unique dynamics of the nonprofit magnify several key communication issues, making this a great site to study the complexities of organizing and enhance our understanding of human interaction. Additionally, developments in communication scholarship have given us new intellectual resources to comprehend and explain a variety of organizational phenomena, and there is much about the nonprofit that would benefit from fresh thinking and new perspectives.

As you'll see throughout this book, we offer a different and more complex way of understanding communication. We go beyond the conventional wisdom of communication that it is a simple process of message transmission, that misunderstandings are fairly easy to resolve with just a bit more clarity, and that organizational communication is mainly about sharing information “in” organizations. After all, sometimes the more we communicate the less we understand and work well together. So there has to be more to communication than just making sure everyone gets the memo and is on the same page. Instead, we present a more sophisticated approach to communication as the fundamental process that constitutes all social realities and organizational phenomena. This means thinking about communication in a way that is very different from what you might be used to, and giving up easy answers that rarely work well in practice. Instead, we'll use this alternative perspective of communication to tackle some of the most challenging questions and offer a novel way to account for the complexities of human interaction and the nonprofit.

While this book is based on research and scholarship on communication and nonprofit organizations, we put all the references in footnotes so that the narrative we share is not cluttered with citations. This will allow for a smoother read, and those who wish to review the sources can easily find them at the bottom of each page. But our review and application of communication scholarship here is intended to be representative and demonstrative, not exhaustive. We will review and apply research that best helps us illustrate the value of a communication perspective and the explanations it provides to key issues in the nonprofit, and our citations will point readers to further resources that develop these ideas in more depth. And even though this book is a coauthored project, you'll notice that we alternate authorship of Chapters 2–6. Chapter 1 is our collective statement on nonprofit organizational communication and serves as the foundation for the rest of the book. Then Chapters 2–6 are individually authored, which reflects our personal experience and scholarly expertise on these subjects, even though we worked with each other on the final editing. We come back together in our coauthored conclusion to wrap up the book and discuss the broader implications of our contributions.

For the scholars who read this book, we hope to offer you a distinct look at the nonprofit that will expand your view and augment your own perspectives. Our purpose is not to advocate that a communication perspective is necessarily better than others are, but rather to show that this lesser‐known field of study offers distinct and useful ways of understanding and enhancing nonprofit work. And with that knowledge, we can together promote more interdisciplinary scholarship. For the nonprofit executives, managers, and other practitioners who read this book, we hope to empower you with new ideas for everyday practices and problems that will enable you to better understand and manage your organizations, build their capacity, and more fully realize your social missions. We want to help you see and address common concerns in a new way that expands the repertoire of skills that makes your work successful. Ultimately, we hope that we can empower you to ask new questions that will provide more solutions to the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead.

There is much to gain from developing a communication perspective on the nonprofit. Rather than just studying communication events or episodes, as important as that may be, we can begin “thinking communicatively” about our organizations and nonprofit work. Thinking this way helps us see that we have influence and responsibility over how we talk and interact in the nonprofit, and that our communication then shapes what our organizations are and do. We're not at the mercy of communication and its challenges, but have the opportunity to engage our work in ways that will create more positive, productive, and impactful outcomes. If you maintain that belief throughout this book, and begin to develop the ideas and practices we explain, then our work will have been a success. Let's get started.

About the Authors

Matthew A. Koschmann is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on organizational communication and collaboration, especially in the civil society sector. His work has been published in numerous scholarly outlets such as Management Communication Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Communication, Journal of Applied Social Science, and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction; plus, his research has been funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. Professor Koschmann teaches classes on organizational communication, leadership communication, group interaction, persuasion, conversation, and research methods. He is also a Fulbright scholar and worked as a visiting research professor at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Professor Koschmann and his wife Jennifer live near Boulder, Colorado with their sons Søren and Anders.

Matthew L. Sanders is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Utah State University. His research focuses on communication and nonprofit organizations. He also writes about communication and teaching. His research has been published in scholarly outlets such as Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Organization, Management Communication Quarterly, and The Review of Communication. He is also the author of Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education, and Studying Communication: An Invitation to Purposeful Learning. Professor Sanders teaches classes on organizational communication, nonprofits and social change, leadership, interpersonal communication, qualitative research methods, and teaching communication. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018 from the Western States Communication Association. Professor Sanders and his wife Julie live near Logan, Utah with their children Dallin, Spencer, Henry, Clara, and Lucy.

Acknowledgments

We know that a project like this book is always a team effort and we acknowledge the many people who helped make it possible.

We are grateful to our editorial team at Wiley, especially Todd Green, Ajith Kumar, and Sakthivel Kandaswamy who believed in our project and supported us every step of the way.

We are thankful for our colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder and Utah State University who support our work and provide great scholarly environments. It is a pleasure to work with you each day.

Also, for years we have been involved with a wonderful network of scholars in the field of organizational communication whose research and teaching focus on nonprofit work. This has been a great community for developing ideas, improving our work, and fostering invaluable personal and professional connections. We greatly appreciate the many people in this network including (alphabetically): Yannick Atouba, Katherine Cooper, Sarah Dempsey, Maria Dixon, Beth Eschenfelder, Kirsten Foot, Shiv Ganesh, Renee Heath, Renee Houston, Matthew Isbell, Joel Iverson, Erika Kirby, Laurie Lewis, Kirstie McAllum, Rebecca Meisenbach, Alexandra Murphy, Stephanie Norander, Brittany Peterson, Michelle Shumate, Consuelo Vasquez and many others who have participated in the various professional gatherings and conversations about nonprofit organizational communication. We are especially thankful to Lacy McNamee and Jennifer Mize Smith for reading early versions of our book chapters and offering invaluable feedback that made the final product even better.

And finally, we acknowledge you, the reader. You are the reason we wrote this book and we are grateful for your interest in our work. We assume you have some important connection to the nonprofit world – as a nonprofit worker, volunteer, researcher, board member, educator, or something else – and we hope our ideas in this book help you in that endeavor. Thank you for considering what we have to say, and please contact us if you have something to add to the conversation.

1Developing a Communication Perspective on the Nonprofit

Matthew A. Koschmann and Matthew L. Sanders

Introduction1

What exactly is a communication perspective, and how could it enhance our understanding of nonprofit work? How is a communication perspective different from other approaches to the nonprofit, and what can we gain from this alternative perspective? These are questions that have guided our research and teaching for years, and provide the foundation of our work in this book. We think there is much to gain by “thinking communicatively” about the nonprofit, but it will require rethinking some common assumptions we have about communication, organizing, and the nonprofit sector. Our goal in this chapter is to develop the intellectual foundation and justification for a communication perspective as it relates to the nonprofit, which sets the stage for the ideas we expand upon in subsequent chapters. Overall, we want to enlarge the territory from which we understand nonprofit work by developing an explanatory framework centered on communication as the fundamental process that constitutes all social and organizational phenomena.

* * *

It should be obvious that communication is central to nonprofit organizations and the activities of the nonprofit sector. Things like fundraising and donor relations, client relationships and service delivery, volunteer management and board governance, collaboration and cross‐sector partnerships – just to name a few – all involve dynamic processes of human interaction, language, symbols, and interpretation. There are numerous books and research articles on nonprofit communication, communication consultants are in high demand for nonprofit organizations, and nonprofit professionals consistently cite “effective communication” as a key aspect of organizational success, while also listing “communication problems” as the root of so many struggles and complications. Surely, there is much to gain by studying various messages of the nonprofit sector, and many aspects of nonprofit organizations can be improved through more effective communication.

But we think communication is important for another reason. We believe the prevalence and significance of communication points to a more central, underlying reality: the nonprofit is fundamentally communicative, and therefore we should seek to understand the nonprofit “communicationally,” from a perspective that is distinctly “communicational.” Conversely, we are likely to miss important aspects of the nonprofit if we are not thinking from a communication perspective, and we limit our ability to account for the role of human interaction in creating and sustaining the social realities of nonprofit organizing. Our main goals in this book are to explain what a communication perspective means, why it is important, and how it can enhance our understanding of nonprofit work.

In order to accomplish these goals, we need to do two initial things in this chapter. First, we need to develop an alternative way of thinking about communication, one that goes beyond the conventional wisdom of seeing communication as merely the transmission of information between senders and receivers through various channels. Instead, understanding communication as a process of social construction improves our ability to account for the complexities of human interaction and better explain a variety of nonprofit phenomena. Therefore, this opening chapter will be the most theoretical and conceptual as we lay the intellectual foundation for a communicative approach to the nonprofit. Second, we need to juxtapose this alternative approach to communication with other perspectives that are commonly employed to explain and understand the nonprofit, especially economic, psychological, and sociological perspectives. Our intent here is not to argue for the intellectual superiority of our communication approach, but rather to expand and take a seat at an already impressive table and offer a contribution that we believe will enrich the overall conversation about the nonprofit.

Rethinking Communication

Certainly most people recognize the importance of communication in all aspects of life, though we don't always think about the theories of communication that shape how we understand our world and influence how we interact with other people. Yet we all have a theory of communication; we all have underlying assumptions and explanations about what we think communication is, what people are doing when they communicate, and the role of language, symbols, and interaction – even if we don't always acknowledge these assumptions or cannot articulate them clearly. Much of the time, our taken‐for‐granted or “native” theories of communication work just fine and help us get along in our daily lives. But there are also times when these theories reach a limit – when they are no longer capable of explaining a particular situation, when they cannot help us fully understand our experiences, when they prevent us from developing appropriate responses, or they restrict our ability to see new possibilities. In this way, theories are sort of like the operating system on your computer, tablet, or smartphone, humming along in the background, enabling you to run various programs and applications, and something you usually don't think much about until you run into a compatibility problem – there's something you want to accomplish or some new possibility you could explore that your current operating system prevents. When this happens you need an update or an upgrade, either a newer version or a completely new operating system. Otherwise you're stuck with the limitations of your current system.

When it comes to communication, we think that many people are running an outdated operating system, so to speak – a system that may have worked well in the past and still has some utility in certain situations, but overall is ill‐suited for all the complexities and complications of human interaction. We think it's time for an upgrade, and depending on what “version” of the previous system you're running this may involve a big change or a minor adjustment. Either way, changing how we think about communication affords us many new and exciting possibilities, especially to enhance our understanding of the nonprofit.

Communication as Transmission

Today the dominant theory (i.e. operating system) of communication in our society is the transmission model of communication, with a philosophical orientation toward human interaction known as functionalism. Here, communication is understood as the transmission or exchange of information between senders and receivers through certain channels, and subject to noise and feedback loops, with the functional purpose of achieving some sort of instrumental goal or outcome. This is also known as the sender–receiver model of communication. Communication‐as‐transmission is the taken for granted, conventional wisdom about communication in much of our society; the factory‐installed operating system, if you will. The transmission model of communication is based on the groundbreaking work of Claude Shannon in the field of information theory in the 1940s, and later published with his colleague Warren Weaver2 (sometimes referred to in textbooks as the Shannon and Weaver model of communication). The transition model is popular and prevalent for several reasons. It certainly has a simple, intuitive feel, as it seems to describe much of our day‐to‐day communication experiences. Furthermore, it became institutionalized in the field of communication throughout the twentieth century as our academic discipline sought to align with dominant scientific paradigms, and thus the foundation for most communication research, instruction, and consultation (communication scholar Everett Rogers wrote a fascinating book about the history of how communication developed as an academic field in American universities in relation to information theory and the transmission model of communication3).

The transmission model of communication works very well when messages are accurate and clearly represent the meanings of the sender, and are interpreted by the receiver in the way they were intended; and when both sender and receiver have compatible perspectives on the underlying norms, values, and beliefs that shape the communication situation – which is the context for much of our communication, like sending quick updates or clarifying various details. The transmission model explains this process well (e.g. people are conceived as senders and receivers and interaction is information exchange), it suggests helpful ways to improve our communication (e.g. clarify the message content or change the communication channel), and it enables us to make fairly accurate predictions about the outcomes of various interactions (e.g. if this kind of message is transmitted via this channel, it will likely have this effect on the receiver). Consequently, “information” became a central concept in the academic study of communication (in communication departments and beyond), and “message effects” the primary outcome of interest. Thus the idea of functionalism has emerged as a prevailing intellectual paradigm for much communication research and practice (i.e. What is the function of communication in this situation? Or how can we make communication function more effectively in this context?). A functionalist approach to communication – based on a model of message transmission and information exchange – offers a straightforward way to comprehend human interaction in ways that adhere to many of our experiences and overall common sense; it's a decent factory‐installed operating system that enables us to perform a variety of basic tasks and applications. Certainly much of our communication could be improved if we thought more critically about the messages we send, the channels we use, the noise that interferes, and the feedback loops that develop. And considerable work has been done to improve nonprofit organizations and the broader work of the nonprofit sector by attending to communication from a functionalist approach that is informed by the transmission model.

Subsequently, this line of thinking leads to a particular conception of organizational communication that shapes our understanding of the nonprofit: the container metaphor. Organizations are conceived as containers and communication as flows of information within the container. Just as containers exist independently from what flows within them, and the shape of the container dictates how things flow, so do organizations exist separately from communication, while organizational “shapes” or structures determine how information flows. Thus, we often think of communication happening within organizations, with the functional purpose of enabling the organization to operate more effectively. And from a certain (though limited) vantage point, this approach to organizational communication rings true. After all, organizations seem so stable and real, with their imposing buildings, organizational charts, bureaucracies, hierarchies, legal charters, and persistence over time. And much of what we observe on the surface certainly looks like information flowing within the organization (i.e. the container) – people sharing emails, having meetings, delivering messages, conversing with colleagues – all within the confines or boundaries of the organization.

As you might expect, this way of thinking about communication is very prevalent in the existing nonprofit research literature and practitioner writings. This material generally presents an instrumental or functional approach to communication that is focused on message transmission and information sharing – communication used as a tool to achieve some notion of organizational effectiveness. For example, studies look at how advocacy organizations use social media as a communication tool to execute various message strategies, or investigate message strategies that affect the likelihood of charitable donations, or examine information sharing as an important management strategy for effective nonprofit mergers and restructuring, just as a few examples.4 This instrumental approach to communication is also evident in the term communications (with an “s”), which is common across this literature and implies a message‐centered view of communication (e.g. email communications, nonprofit communications planning, nonprofit organizational communications). Also prevalent is an emphasis on information communication technologies and communication channels, which reinforces assumptions about message transmission and functionality. The clear implication from this nonprofit literature is that communication is primarily about message transmission and information exchange in order to accomplish strategic goals and improve organizational effectiveness.

But is that really all that's happening? Is communication only about message transmission and information exchange? Is communication only a functional endeavor in service of some vague notion of organizational effectiveness? Is this a sufficient operating system (i.e. theory of communication) to run all the programs and applications we need? As we will see, this simplistic notion of organizational communication doesn't stand up to scrutiny, nor is it well‐suited to account for the complexities of human interaction in today's organizational world. Furthermore, it limits our ability to understand and explain key aspects of the nonprofit, and may prevent us from achieving the sort of creativity and innovation needed for nonprofits to thrive in modern society. Yes, the transmission model can explain many of our communication experiences, especially when things are going well and we're getting along with the people around us. This is one reason we're tempted to think that communication is easy and straightforward; there are times when communication seems effortless and works well with reasonable people who are on the same page. But this ignores the fact that we don't get to live and work in situations that are always going smoothly or interact with people who understand us well. In particular, nonprofit work requires significant coalition building and working with diverse people who often see the world differently than us.

In a perfect world, we could create more efficient structures of message transmission so that the right people would always have the right information and miscommunication would be a thing of the past. But a funny thing happened on the way to communication paradise. Turns out different people interpret the exact same message very differently; that people can be deceptive in their communication and their motives are incredibly difficult to figure out; that the meaning of language changes depending on the context; that what you don't communicate is often more important that what you do communicate; or that what you say is often much less important than how you say it; and that people often (if not usually) communicate for many other reasons than to just transmit information. And these are not just aberrations; this is the normal state of affairs for human interaction. Why is it, after all, that “communication problems” are continually mentioned as one of the main difficulties for most organizations? Is it just that people aren't getting the right information? If so, this is merely a technical problem that should improve as we develop new ways to get better information to more people more efficiently. But it seems like almost the opposite is happening, that the more sophisticated our communication technologies have gotten over the years, the more communication problems we have. Now why is that? Perhaps it's because there is more going on with communication than just transmitting information.

Despite its intuitive appeal, the functionalist approach to organizational communication – based on a transmission model of communication – is rooted in several faulty assumptions about communication that we should examine. First and foremost, information theory (the basis for the transmission model of communication) was never really intended as a theory of human interaction. Claude Shannon always claimed that his model did not apply well to human communication. His model was designed for static, technical systems that involved intentional, formal, explicit, and logical transmission of information. Things like nonverbal communication, unintentional messages, and interpretive differences had no place in Shannon's model – these were all considered “noise” that interfered with channel capacity and the efficient transmission of information. Communication scholars responded with adaptations of Shannon's model that transformed engineering concepts in human terms; for example, conceptualizing message receivers as having the capacity for emotion and sense‐making. These adaptations worked fine for some communication scholars, but others grew increasingly dissatisfied with adapting a theoretical model that was never intended for human interaction in the first place.

The primary critique of a functionalist approach to communication is that it fails to account for the complexities of human interaction that are essential to many communication practices and situations. People communicate for so many more reasons than to transmit information, and communication is rarely just a linear process that can be assessed solely in terms of message effects. Also, communication is filled with intricacies such as nonverbal behavior, unintended messages, multiple interpretations, conflicting motivations, and changing contexts that cannot be easily explained in terms of a straightforward sender–message–channel–receiver model of communication (even if we include components like noise and feedback).

At a deeper, more philosophical level, the problem with functionalism is that it depicts communication as a relatively neutral conduit that transmits already‐formed realities – inner psychological states that merely await expression through communication. Communication from this perspective is seen as separate from social realities themselves and not significantly involved in their production. This renders communication as epiphenomenal, a surface‐level manifestation that is driven by other structural mechanisms or the “natural” order of events, a byproduct that does not have any causal influence on the process. Communication is seen as the way we transmit pre‐existing meanings between people, but those meanings are formed and reside elsewhere – and thus understood psychologically, sociologically, or even biologically, but not communicatively. However, this idea of meaning as a psychological substance located within people and transmitted via communication is misguided because it ignores how meaning is fundamentally a social process, created and sustained through our interactions with other people. As communication scholar Timothy Kuhn explains:

Communication… is not a vehicle for representing, externalizing, transmitting, and reproducing preexisting meanings; it is the dynamic process of meaning production, and meanings are “in” communicative action.5

The problem is that meaning and information are not synonymous, and any approach that reduces the complex processes of meaning‐making through human interaction (communication) to the mere transmission or exchange of information (functionalism) is troublesome. That's one reason why the eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, “Nothing is more wrong‐headed than calling meaning a mental activity.”6 The point here is that the social world is mainly about what things mean, not simply what they are, and we are sorely mistaken if we think that meaning is just something mental we figure out on our own and then straightforwardly transmit to other people through our communication. Instead, the very process of communicating with people is what creates meaning and where meaning resides – meaning is “in” the interaction, not simply in our heads.

By now, we hope you can see the shortcomings of the transmission model theory of communication/operating system and the functionalism it entails. Yes, it does enable us to run a variety of basic programs and applications that involve exchanging information with people where issues of meaning, interpretation, and understanding aren't at stake or are not as problematic. However, most of us want and need to run more advanced programs and applications because many of our communication situations are fraught with issues of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. In that case, we need an upgrade to a more sophisticated operating system; we need a different theory of communication. Instead of viewing communication as merely the transfer of information, an alternative approach goes deeper and sees communication as the fundamental process that creates and maintains our social reality. Communication is not just about transmitting already‐formed data between senders and receivers, but rather a complex process of continually producing and negotiating the meanings and interpretations that shape our lives. We (and many others) call this the social construction model of communication, and we believe it's the alternative theory or operating system needed to enhance our understanding and practice of nonprofit organizational communication.

Communication as Social Construction

Social construction is a broad concept that has developed over several decades in a variety of academic fields and applied contexts. Like any big concept, social construction has no standard definition that everyone agrees with. There are strong, moderate, and weak versions of social construction among scholars and practitioners, and there are ongoing debates about the meaning and application of social construction. But the basic idea that most everyone supports is that our social realities (or social worlds) are constructed through our interactions with other people. And the key point for our purposes here is that pretty much everything that composes the nonprofit are social realities that are constructed by people through our communication with each other. Therefore, if we want to change, improve, create, or maintain any aspect of the nonprofit – like leadership, collaboration, international work, organizational strategies, or labor relations – we need to focus on the communication practices and processes that construct them, and we need to put communication at the center of our understanding of the nonprofit.

Now, this idea of social construction can get quite philosophical and complicated, and we don't want to get bogged down here in academic debates about the nature of reality. But since this book is all about developing a communication‐as‐social construction perspective for the nonprofit, and since this chapter provides the theoretical foundation for the rest of the book, we do need to say a bit more about social construction, especially how it developed as a concept and how it has been taken up in the field of organizational communication. If you're already on board with the basic idea of social construction, you may want to skip ahead to the implications for the nonprofit we explain later in this chapter. But if social construction is new to you, or you're still somewhat skeptical, hopefully these next few paragraphs will clarify the main ideas and provide a sufficient foundation for the key concepts that underwrite everything else in this book.

To begin, let's clarify what we mean by social reality or our social worlds. By social realities, we're talking about all the norms, values, beliefs, institutions, interpretations, understandings, concepts, etc. that govern modern life and make our day‐to‐day world what it is. In contrast to the natural world of mountains, rivers, lakes, and trees that is just “there” and exists independently of human activity (though human activity certainly can alter this reality), the social world is made by us and would not exist if not for human activity. Social realities like democracy, capitalism, bureaucracy, our legal system, or our education system (just to name a few) are things we made through countless human interactions and decisions. They are not natural and they would not exist if we didn't make them; they are subject to change and they could have been otherwise. For example, what counts as “legal” has changed over time and will continue to do so as long as humans are involved; legality doesn't just exist “out there” like some objective feature of the natural world that is the same for all people in all places at all times. Thus, to approach things from a social construction perspective (or upgrade to the communication‐as‐social construction operating system, to continue the metaphor) means to focus on the processes of human interaction by which our social realities are made, altered, sustained, and resisted. It also means understanding and explaining various phenomena in terms of communication patterns and practices, as well as foregrounding communication as a primary site for intervention and improvement. That's what we're trying to do in the remaining chapters of this book regarding the nonprofit.

Two important caveats before we move on. First, just because social realities are socially constructed does not mean they are easy to make or take apart, or that we're suggesting some simplistic notion of “perception is reality” or “just imagine and it will be.” Not at all. Social constructions are real and consequential, and they are not easily created or dismantled. Race is certainly a social construction, for instance. Although there is no scientific basis for racial differences (what has counted as “white” or “black” in the United States, for example, has changed over the centuries), race as a concept is incredibly “real” in our society; it may not be a biological reality, but it certainly is a political, legal, and cultural reality. Certain constructions of race required a lot of time and effort to make (like how Italians in America “became” white7), and other constructions have proven incredibly stubborn and difficult to undo (like perceptions of black and brown men as more violent, despite much evidence to the contrary8). And many social constructions are much more persistent and impenetrable than actual physical constructions – sometimes it's actually easier for a company to build a new building or tear one down than it is to change the organizational culture or penetrate the glass ceiling. At the same time, the processes of social construction are always in relation to the materiality of the physical world. When you cross the street, it’s you or the bus and the bus will always win, regardless of what you imagine or try to speak into existence! So it's not as easy as just talking things into or out of existence. But we are saying that to the extent that social realities do come into existence, they are made by people and we need to examine the social process that gave rise to their existence if we want to intervene in any meaningful way. That is our focus in this book regarding several key aspects of the nonprofit.

Second, we readily acknowledge that the boundaries between the social and natural world are a bit fuzzy. This distinction between social and natural is an analytical division to help clarify some of the clear differences we see in our day‐to‐day lives, even if some of those divisions might break down upon deeper philosophical investigation. After all, we humans are part of the natural world, and everything we do in the social world is somehow connected (though not necessarily reduced) to the materiality of our biology. Plus, much of what we see in the natural world is dependent on human activity, and we'll never fully know exactly how our actions affect the natural world we take for granted as just “there.” Yet, at an intuitive level, there is something obviously different between the trees I'm looking at from my office window and the notion of “workplace satisfaction” that a consultant is trying to measure on a survey. Both are real and consequential in our lives, but it's helpful to distinguish trees as “natural” and concepts like workplace satisfaction as “social.” Furthermore, we humans bring something unique to the table that is categorically different from anything else we see in the natural world: our capacity for language, meaning, interpretation, and symbol use have enabled us to create a realm of existence (what we're calling social reality or social worlds) that is unparalleled by anything else in the world. In particular, this capacity has helped us to coordinate our actions with other people to build societies and institutions that govern our subsequent actions. That's what the nonprofit is, and we believe it is helpful and worthwhile to distinguish nonprofit phenomena as social realities to improve our analysis and enhance our insights.

That should provide a sufficient foundation of social construction for what we're doing in this book. If you want to learn more, we highly recommend several great resources that explore these ideas in more depth. Three of our favorite books are different variations of the same phrase: Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman's seminal text The Social Construction of Reality, John Searle's popular book The Construction of Social Reality, and Dave Elder‐Vass's more recent The Reality of Social Construction, all of which offer slightly different perspectives on social construction but share a commitment to the centrality of human communication in the making of our social worlds.9 It's also important to remember that social construction didn't just come out of nowhere or arise naturally; it is itself a social construction (now we're getting very meta!), emerging from a history of ideas and debates across many decades and continents. The idea of social construction is rooted in early twentieth‐century, Western studies of linguistics and philosophy that challenged modernist conceptions of language, knowledge, and society. These include ideas from European continental philosophy, American pragmatist philosophy, phenomenological approaches to psychology and sociology, and the so‐called “linguistic turn” across the broader social sciences. Social construction is thus an important attempt to bring together many different but related ideas into a coherent framework for analysis and explanation. And this refinement continues as scholars in a variety of fields appropriate the ideas of social construction in ways that are relevant for their work, while also revising key assumptions, challenging perceived limitations, and pushing the boundaries of our understanding of social constructionist thinking. This is precisely what has happened in our field of communication.

Social Construction in the Field of Communication

Now let's transition and look at how ideas of social construction have been taken up in the field of communication, which provides the foundation for what we're doing in the rest of this book. Recall the shortcomings of the transmission model of communication and the growing critique of functionalism we explained above. These challenges to the transmission model and mounting frustrations with functionalism led many communication scholars to develop alternative conceptions of human interaction across a variety of subjects and fields of inquiry (e.g. interpersonal, intercultural, organizational). As this work developed – and as is often the case in academic fields – leading scholars sought to provide additional clarity and direction by synthesizing a number of these related ideas and articulating an overarching theme to inform subsequent research and teaching. In particular, Robert Craig and Stanley Deetz10 identified that what these ideas all had in common was a constitutive approach to communication. That is, we constitute – not just express – our social realities in our interactions with others. Communication is a dynamic, interactive process that involves constant negotiation over interpretation and meaning, not just the transmission of information. Social realities are not “fixed” such that they can be reflected or expressed unproblematically, and things we take for granted in the social world – organizations, institutions, relationships – only maintain their existence through sustained patterns of interaction. Communication scholars have come to call this underlying philosophical theme communicative constitution because communication constitutes, or makes up our social world. Basically, communicative constitution is a more precise articulation of the broad ideas of social construction, but specifically for the field of communication.11 In a seminal essay published in Communication Theory, Craig articulated this notion of communicative constitution (or communication as constitutive) as a meta‐theoretical framework to encompass all communication scholarship.12 In fact, many prominent scholars now see communicative constitution the “overarching principle that guides the discipline [of communication] today.”13 Thus communicative constitution provides the underlying philosophical orientation for our work, the way functionalism provided a similar orientation and institutional identity for previous communication scholarship. Communicative constitution gives communication scholars a broad framework to guide research, an intellectual coherence across different schools of thought within our discipline, and a clear theoretical stance in relation to other perspectives outside the field of communication.

Ok, that's a lot of scholarly material to digest, so let's step back and review where we're at before we move on to some of the implications of this alternative approach to communication for the nonprofit. Remember that we're using an operating system metaphor to understand and explain the notion of communication theory; we all have underlying assumptions about what communication is and what we're doing when we interact with people that enable or constrain our ability to do or see certain things in those interactions – just like a computer operating system humming along in the background allows or restricts our ability to run certain programs or applications. On the one hand, we have the transmission model of communication and the subsequent functionalism it entails. This approach theorizes communication as the efficient transmission of messages between senders and receivers to achieve instrumental goals. On the other hand, we have the social construction model of communication and the corresponding notion of communicative constitution. Here the emphasis is on interpretation and understanding, how our interactions with each other produce the meanings that constitute the realities of our social worlds. Table 1.1 provides a visual representation of all this and will be a handy reference for the rest of the book.

And just to clarify: we're not saying that the transmission model is completely wrong and the social construction model is absolutely right, or that functionalism is all bad and communicative constitution is all good. It's not quite that simple. We readily acknowledge that communication‐as‐transition is an adequate theory to understand and explain many of our communication practices, especially when we're dealing with relatively straightforward message exchanges between people who already have a shared understanding of the situation, and when issues of meaning and interpretation really aren't at stake. Just like the factory‐installed operating system isn't “wrong” or “bad” – it may work just fine for the programs and applications you want to run. However, we are saying that the transmission