"Peter Drucker, Frances Hesselbein and the “Discovery” of Nonprofit Management"

In 1988, the prominent business theorist Peter Drucker declared in the Wall Street Journal that the nonprofit sector had “discovered management.” Volunteers and paid employees alike, he wrote, were working toward concrete objectives in an increasingly professionalized environment. Soon afterward, he partnered with Frances Hesselbein, the longtime head of Girl Scouts of the USA, to start an organization dedicated to advancing management practices at nonprofit organizations. Drucker and Hesselbein stepped into a decades-long debate over the distinctiveness of the nonprofit workplace in the United States. As the proportion of American workers employed at nonprofits grew, a variety of historical actors—labor unions, prospective volunteers, managers, and policymakers—wrestled with tensions between the supposed service motive at the core of their work and the ways in which it was embedded in a market economy. This paper situates Drucker and Hesselbein in this historical trajectory and examines the ways in which they sought to resolve these tensions through the new field of nonprofit management.