A History of ARNOVA at Fifty

Abstract

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), this article reviews the association’s history, from its 1971 founding by a small group of scholars interested in voluntary action to the current association of more than 1,000 members who study a broad range of nonprofit, civil society, voluntary action, and philanthropic topics. To inform the history, we recorded oral histories and reviewed the ARNOVA collection of historical records at the Ruth Lilly Archives and internal files provided by ARNOVA. Our article is divided into three important junctures of change: 1971–1989, the founding period; 1990–2006, the golden era of philanthropic support; and 2007–2020, a maturing field and strategic directions. Through our analysis, we identify recurring themes and tensions and how ARNOVA navigated through a changing environment and growing field. We conclude the article with forward-looking questions.

NVSQ: The First Fifty Years, and Beyond

“…Nonprofit management became the buzzword for academics and universities on the make.” In the United States, increased professionalism and visibility of the sector was being advanced by infrastructure organizations, particularly the Independent Sector. Its leadership strongly encouraged AVAS to recruit more visible researchers from prestigious universities, professionalize journal publication by moving to a mainstream for-profit publishing firm (rather than the foundation-supported, university-affiliated Transaction Periodicals Consortium) and change the name of the journal to “something more suitable” that would encompass “nonprofit.” Given dwindling membership, the AVAS board—amid significant internal division (see Bushouse et al, this issue)—changed the name of the journal to Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly in 1989 and the name of the association to ARNOVA a few years later. As a scholarly outlet, NVSQ was becoming more formalized and it strategically sought to bridge the academic and disciplinary nodes, aligning with the creation of research centers and research associations that were being established in the field (Larson & Barnes, 2001; Smith, 2016; Weber & Brunt, 2022).…”

“…Just as ARNOVA expanded and professionalized its operations (Bushouse et al, this issue), NVSQ created a separate editorial office with a paid associate editor who brought “a measure of routine and order out of our office procedures that previously had always run out of the back of some professor’s university office” (Milofsky, 1996). At the same time, ARNOVA sought out—and was sought out by—a new (independent) publisher, Sage, which since 1996 has worked closely with the editorial teams to bring a high standard of professionalism and innovation to the operation, quality of publication and scholarly impact of the journal.…”