Conflict and the construction of an organizational field: The transformation of American philanthropic foundations

Over the past three decades, private foundations have quietly undergone profound change and reinvention. This dissertation offers a new history of the evolution of American philanthropy that focuses on the construction of a unified organizational field, governed by an emerging set of norms and professional standards. Many of the changes in contemporary philanthropy can be traced to the early 1970s, just after foundations were investigated and regulated by Congress for the first time. As part of defensive strategy aimed at protecting private philanthropy from further government intrusion, foundations embraced new professional practices and redefined themselves as public institutions that were open and accountable to all.;In developing and testing a thesis about the institutionalization philanthropy, this research draws heavily on the literature of the new institutionalism in organizational analysis. While DiMaggio and Powell's classic formulation of institutional theory identified coercive, normative and mimetic isomorphism as the main forces leading organizations toward convergence, little work has been done to assess the interplay and sequential relationship of these three forces. In this dissertation, I argue for the priority of coercive isomorphism and its triggering role in field formation. In the evolution of private foundations, both normative isomorphism and mimetic processes emerge only after state coercion in the form of regulation acted as a trigger to field formation.;The dissertation draws on a wide array of source materials from the 1970s and includes two network datasets, one tracking professional staff movements between foundations from 1970 to 1994, the other focusing on patterns of board interlocks before and after the regulation of the field in 1969. In addition, based on a survey of 550 foundations, a model is developed to explain both acceptance and resistance to the institutional norms that emerged after the regulation of the field. The dissertation concludes by examining the implications of the transformation of private foundations for the vast legion of nonprofit service providers that depend on foundation grants.