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Building the Knowledge Base of Nonprofit Management:
A Searchable Database
And Lettuce Is Nonanimal: Toward a Positive Economics of Voluntary Action
Abstract
This paper sets out a positive conception of voluntary action as a unified type of economic activity, grounded in human group experience and based in autonomous, self-defining and self-regulating communities of nonmarket actors with shared mutual interests in identified common goods. Such common goods include many types of social services; community action; religious, scientific, and artistic endeavors; amateur athletics; and a broad range of other nonprofit activities. Key implications of the common goods approach, also known as endowment theory, include rejection of efficiency, maximization, Pareto-optimality, and other economic criteria as necessary and sufficient standards for evaluating rational choice and rational organization in the Commons, and substitution of more appropriate rational standards.
Journal
(December 1989)
vol18
no4
pages367-383
Categories
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Nonprofit Management
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Financial Planning and Management
