Breaking Good? Managerial Practices in Nonprofits

Abstract Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are often torn between calls to remain “distinctive” and pressures to adopt managerial, professional, and market-oriented practices. Early scholarship emphasized the risks of such practices, warning of mission drift, bureaucratization, and the erosion of civic and democratic functions. This article reviews and synthesizes three decades of research, tracing how concerns about business-like logics evolved into a more differentiated understanding of organizational practices. Integrating concepts of managerialism, professionalism, marketization, and organizational democracy, it examines their effects on nonprofits’ performance and societal contributions. Recent large-scale and comparative studies suggest that professional management can strengthen resilience, service delivery, advocacy, and community building – contrary to longstanding fears – while democratic practices remain crucial for inclusiveness and civic engagement. Rather than a simple trade-off, the evidence points to complementarities between managerial and participatory logics. The article concludes that what matters is not whether nonprofits professionalize, but how they do so: aligning managerial tools with participatory structures and contextual demands enables nonprofits to combine efficiency with democracy, structure with openness, and resilience with societal value.