ABSTRACT
Although the values of the nonprofit sector focus on fulfilling a social purpose, as the boundaries between the sectors have blurred, with nonprofits encouraged to “turn towards the market,” the values of the nonprofit sector have become muddied. This chapter pivots on the premise that the steady turn to rationalization and marketization in the nonprofit sector is not necessarily inevitable but are reflective of and aided by certain kinds of values that nonprofits either purposefully adopt or (more likely) simply assume. As a point of departure, we turn to an assessment of nonprofit ethics, focusing on the sector’s growing reliance on codes of conduct as the statement of values its presents to the community. Our aim is to indicate what reliance on such codes suggests about the kind of values that nonprofits embrace and whether nonprofits are well served by those values (or, put differently, whether they are serving well their various constituencies in light of those values). We argue that nonprofit values have moved away from their historic values of democracy and civic life, or values of the heart, substituting these once traditionally religious-based values with values of the head, based on quantitative concepts of efficiency and the primacy of individualism. As a way forward, we promote renewing the value of relationality, put into practice through the virtue of solidarity, which prioritizes communal, inclusive deliberation about the common good.
