Content area
Full text
Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations
Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2004 ( C[circlecopyrt] 2004)Alnoor Ebrahim, NGOs and Organizational Change: Discourse, Reporting, and
Learning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 181 pp., references,
index, $55.00 (cloth).Alnoor Ebrahims NGOs and Organizational Change is a welcome contribution to the literature on NGOs and international economic development to which
it is directed. It is also a welcome contribution to the literatures on the dynamics
of giving, on nonprofit organizations more generally, and on learning within organizations. Ebrahim shows that while money talks, as resource dependency theory
insists, perceptions and ideas are also the resources that count. Donors provide
not only money but also definitions of problems and preferred solutions. But recipients are never merely passive: in return for money, they offer local knowledge
and connections, stories of success, evidence of effectiveness, reputation. Donors
can help recipients achieve their goals: recipients can help donors gain influence
and prestige.Ebrahim grounds NGOs and Organizational Change in a thoughtful and
detailed sociological analysis (citing Foucault and Bourdieu as well as March and
Simon). Relations between donors and donees are shaped by the discourses
through which donors explain their gifts. Donors provide financial capital, but
donees reciprocate with symbolic capital in such forms as information, stories of
success, reputation. Yet the terms of exchange are by no means equal; donors can
and do impose definitions of success, notions of relevant information, systems
of measurement and reporting. Donors can also provide valuable information
about large-scale market, political, and intellectual change not otherwise available
to local development workers. Ebrahim carefully dissects the general notions of
donor and donee. He notes that the individual agents who approve grants
must negotiate with others who control funds, that donors seek to enhance their
financial capital with intellectual and reputational capital, that leaders of recipient
organizations can have motives very different not only from those of their donors,
but also from their subordinates or clients.NGOs and Organizational Change illustrates its (very careful and sometimes
technical) analytic argument through persuasively detailed case studies of two3050957-8765/04/0900-0305/1 C[circlecopyrt] 2004 International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins UniversityBook Reviews306 Book Reviewsimpressive NGOs that operate in rural areas of Gujurat and neighboring provinces
in western India. The Navinchandra Mafalal Sadguru Water...