A Legal Scholar's Perspective: reviewing Henry Hansman, The Ownership of Enterprise

Whether or not one agrees with his ideas, no one can doubt that Yale legal scholar/economist Henry B. Hansmann has had more of an influence on our understanding of nonprofits than any other living scholar. Hansmann’s significance stems not merely from his thinking about nonprofits but from the way his work locates them in larger understandings of organizational life; by providing explanations for their existence and rationales for their treatment by regulatory, tax, legislative, and judicial bodies, he bridges important bodies of theory and links the domains of theory and practice. Most readers of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly are familiar—directly or indirectly—with Hansmann’s work on nonprofits. But few—unless they have followed the range of his writings as they have appeared in law reviews, economic journals, and working papers from over the past two decades—have had the opportunity to appreciate the full scope of his intellectual enterprise. This volume, encompassing in a single volume Hansmann’s wide-ranging and provocative explorations of the organizational universe, presents an analytical paradigm that requires the attention of all serious students of nonprofits and voluntary action. Because Hansmann’s work draws from so many disciplinary domains (law, management, economics, organization theory and organizational behavior, sociology, history), a set of critical perspectives on the book are presented.