The scholar of philanthropy and nonprofit groups talks to Michael E. Hartmann about some risks in foundations’ uses of history, including potentially to constrain current choices; philanthropy’s need to justify itself to the public and policymakers and the role of historical narratives in providing legitimacy; ways in which foundations can better preserve and use their institutional memories, and philanthropy’s tendency to present old ideas as innovations; and the recurring tensions between presentism, long-term thinking about the future, and the “dead hand” of the past.
Peter C. Weber is an associate professor and program coordinator of the Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies Program at Auburn University. He also currently serves as president of the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council.
Among other things, Weber researches nonprofits’ organizational capacity and history. His “The Constructed Past of Philanthropic Foundations: A Conceptual Framework,” in the most-r Philanthropia journal, examines the creation and use of “narratives of the past to support and justify their organizational strategies,” as he describes it.
“Existing nonprofit scholarship treats history as background context or as a source of empirical evidence, rather than as an object of strategic use,” Weber writes in the article.
This limits our ability to explain how organizations actively mobilize the past to justify decisions, construct identity, and influence broader institutional environments. This article addresses this gap by conceptualizing the strategic use of history through two distinctions—between history-as-precedent and history-as-narrative, and across levels of analysis (individual, organizational, and field)—and by illustrating how these uses shape organizational outcomes.
He was nice enough to join me for a recorded conversation last month. In the first part of our discussion, which is here, he talks about Auburn’s distinctive approach to teaching philanthropy and his new article—as well as, in particular, the difference between a constructed narrative and a false or non-objective one, foundation history as something like a pendulum of interpretation, and who actually constructs foundation histories. He also offers an example of history being used to improve grantmaking, rather than merely help rationalize it.
The just less than 19-and-a-half-minute video below is the second part, during which we discuss some risks in foundations’ uses of history, including potentially to constrain current choices; philanthropy’s need to justify itself to the public and policymakers and the role of historical narratives in providing legitimacy; ways in which foundations can better preserve and use their institutional memories, and philanthropy’s tendency to present old ideas as innovations; and the recurring tensions between presentism, long-term thinking about the future, and the “dead hand” of the past.
Asked whether foundations can selectively construct their histories for institutional self-justification, Weber says, “I think we all have the tendency to present rosier pictures” of ourselves, yes, but “I think the way you phrase the question kind of leads to the answer, because the emphasis is more on self-justification.”
There’s another risk, he says. Past practices and institutional memory can help foundations make decisions, but challenges may arise if and when they “are used as constraints—if it is sort of path-dependency if you want. … I think that’s when it becomes a problem. That’s more of a normative than an effective-ineffective point.” The past “becomes not an occasion for organizational learning, but it becomes a space that narrows options,” and that can have adverse consequences.
Philanthropy has also long felt pressure to justify itself, according to Weber, citing the late 1960s and early ’70s—including the Tax Reform Act of 1969, Congressional hearings and investigations, and the scrutiny of foundations generally. “On the one hand, maybe less people are looking because everything is kind of in a ‘black box’ of decision-making,” he says. “But on the flip side,” then as now, “I think there is a keen eye of the public and politicians and journalists looking.
“When we talk about theories that explain, why does the nonprofit sector exist?, we always rely on the so-called civil-society theories and Tocquevillian approach, right? We need civil society, we need the nonprofit sector because it seems fundamental to democracy … There is another side to it,” notes Weber, whose dissertation examined civil society in Weimar Germany. He points out that voluntary organization is not necessarily always so benign, pointing to groups throughout history that have illegal and/or anti-social ends.
As for the regular scholarly invocation of Tocquevillian civil society in defense of the nonprofit sector, he says,
I think the origin of the [philanthropy-scholarship] field is in a specific moment of history where the institutions of the sector were under attack and felt the need to justify itself, so that early on, maybe the figure of the nonprofit scholars and the nonprofit advocate were kind of overlapping.
Weber quickly adds, “I’m not meaning to say that early scholars were not rigorous scholars,” but he leaves open a provocative question about whether scholars of philanthropy can themselves help construct the narratives that justify it.
So how can philanthropy use history better? Weber points to foundations that have created internal libraries or archives, so staff can consult earlier reports and documentation of support for programs, as well as publicly available repositories such as the Rockefeller Archive Center and those of the Carnegie philanthropies’ records at Columbia University.
“I think those are the positive examples of organizations maintaining records” and also “making them publicly accessible,” Weber says. “I think those are good practices, which would be nice if more foundations would follow.
“I think we have the tendency of not looking at the past, not learning from the past,” he laments. “[E]very new thing” is praised and replicated, “until you look and you see that somebody did it 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, right?”
In addition to a risk of too much presentism in philanthropy, might there also be one of too much futurism? “I think we have this tendency of talking about big visions, long-term impact,” Weber answers. “Why do foundations or universities have this huge endowment for the future, if you could use it right now and solve a pretty large set of problems? …
“All those kinds of criticisms and concerns are nothing new,” he says. Foundations have always tried, and will continue to try, to look decades ahead while remaining governed by or beholden to the “dead hand” of the past, through missions and endowments established by donors decades and generations earlier.
