Human Service Organizations and the Question of Impact

This volume offers empirically based insights and findings on the question of how human service organizations are reacting to the increasing need for greater impact, effectiveness, and performance. As demand for increased impact outstrips our knowledge of how best to achieve these goals, the book's contributors discuss the innovative strategies being used to ensure that multiplex goals are being met and the degree to which client and staff concerns are being sacrificed for the organizational bottom line. Taken together, these discussions demonstrate that specific management strategies and collaboration based on trust and consideration of mission may help improve the quality of some services; however, many of the pressures which organizations and managers experience are resulting in lower staff morale, compromised missions, and inefficiencies. This book will be of interest to those researching human service agencies, as well as those with a broader concern for how organizations react to doing more with less. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Human Service Organizations journal.

Jennifer E. Mosley is Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, USA. She researches the role of nonprofit organizations as political actors, specifically the role human service organizations, community-based nonprofits, and philanthropic foundations play in advocating for underrepresented populations. Steven Rathgeb Smith is the Executive Director of the American Political Science Association and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, USA. His research interests include nonprofit organizations, nonprofit and public management, philanthropy, and social services.

1. Human service agencies and the question of impact: Lessons for theory, policy, and practice 2. Remaking "Community" Mental Health: Contested Institutional Logics and Organizational Change 3. Marketization strategies and the influence of business on the management of child welfare agencies 4. Frontline managers' contribution to mission achievement: A study of how people management affects thoughtful care 5. Policy fields, data systems, and the performance of nonprofit human service organizations 6. What counts? Quantification, worker judgment, and divergence in child welfare decision making 7. Levels and consequences of embeddedness among private human service organizations: National survey evidence from child welfare