ARNOVA Distinguished Achievement & Leadership Award
Melissa M. Stone
Professor Emerita
Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
【下面择要介绍Stone教授回顾过去展望未来提出的三个要点，我略过了前面几段，有兴趣的可以参阅后面的原文。】
第一，我们要继续推动拓展性思维，关注本领域的大问题。例如，在2020年代，我们将如何理解在某些领域、文化和历史背景下存在非营利组织（而不是企业或公共部门）的问题？或者，我们现在如何理解私人目的和公共目标之间的紧张关系。这种紧张关系长期以来一直是该部门的特点，但今天却与对持续存在的结构性不平等的高度认识同时存在？还有，非营利、非政府、民间社会组织在民主和非民主制度中的角色有何变化？为了探索这些问题和其他问题，我们仍然需要一种跨学科的方法，除了管理和公共政策之外，还需要哲学、历史、经济学、政治学、心理学、社会学。在学术界有许多压力，为了发表文章、被聘用、获得终身职位和晋升，我们必须探索更狭窄的研究问题。不过，我们仍有机会将更具体的研究问题置于更大的问题背景下，以促进对该领域的深入理解。广泛的知识好奇心必须继续成为我们工作的标志。
第二，我认为，非营利和慈善研究领域已经促进并必须继续强调发展的方法。我们需要不断阐明，"非营利和慈善研究领域"并不是到了与其他学术领域并驾齐驱的地步，而是像我们所研究和关注的现象一样，它在不断地发展。而我们每个人都要在培养研究生、支持新教师、吸引资深教师进入这个领域以及与从业者联系方面发挥作用。正如我前面提到的，ARNOVA似乎已经将这种方法地融入到了它的机构DNA中。然而，一种发展的方法，需要我们所有人不断地保持活力。我们如何让学者，特别是那些新进入该领域的学者，真正感到他们是一项非常重要的工作的一部分，是广泛的集体努力的一部分？
第三，与此相关的是，我们的教学和课程开发工作对这一领域仍然极为重要。也许因为我以前作为创始人和执行主任的经验，我一直致力于教学和课程开发。在ARNOVA，特别是NACC的工作，极大地促进了我（以及其他许多人）对这两个主题的学习。我认为关于非营利管理的教学不仅仅是介绍一套工具和技术。教学为学生提供了重要的机会，让他们在管理和领导力的背景下，努力解决我上面提到的一些大问题。教学还提供了机会，帮助学生成为多语种的人才，即精通商业管理世界和公共政策/政策倡导世界的相关概念和思想，以领导有效的组织，阐明和实施以价值观为基础的使命。我们的教学和研究任务齐头并进，以继续发展这一领域。
最后，让我提出一个可以追溯到我职业生涯中的观点——即使是在耶鲁的PONPO研究生时期，我也注意到这个领域的人很有趣，笑得很开心，很幽默。与我在ARNOVA之外参加的学术会议形成了鲜明的对比。在ARNOVA，我不仅觉得自己可以呼风唤雨，而且我发现自己在走廊里、喝咖啡或饮料时、坐在讨论桌旁，无论在哪里都会笑。(Dennis Young, Linda Serra, Dave Renz, Will Brown, Robert Ashcraft, Ruth McCambridge,还有很多人，你知道你是谁！）。那么，为什么会这样呢？是标准的解释吗？"我们非常认真地对待题材，但我们并没有太认真地对待自己？"也许吧，但我认为，作为学者、教师和导师，我们确实很认真。相反，可能是因为我们对工作的真正乐趣和对自己为什么从事这项工作的了解。也许是因为我们有一种归属感和意义，我们大家共同从事的工作才真正重要。我希望ARNOVA在未来的岁月里继续保持这种精神。
再次感谢大家给我这个荣誉，我期待着2021年能见到很多人的身影。
I am honored to receive the 2020 Distinguished Achievement and Leadership Award from ARNOVA, an association that has meant a lot to me over the past 35 years. Like many of you, I am sad to miss our Awards Luncheons and the din of voices from hundreds of conversations in a large, hotel ballroom. One of the things I most enjoy about our luncheons is both finding old friends and also sitting at a table with folks I don’t know, often new ARNOVA participants, often graduate students giving their first academic presentations, and often from places beyond US borders. ARNOVA has intentionally maintained an expansive and expanding view of itself as a scholarly association; so, while this year is different, my hope is that an ever-broadening and diverse group of participants will always feel welcome at our tables. I want thank the Awards Committee for their work and especially my nominators, Steven Rathgeb Smith and Carrie Oelberger. I first met Steve in the 1980s when we were both graduate students, and he and I have remained colleagues and friends ever since. We have been fortunate to see the field congeal, grow, create institutional anchors where his leadership, along with that of the co-nominators, has been critical. Carrie is a more recent colleague, and we met through ARNOVA’s Doctoral Fellows Workshop. Carrie, along with co-nominators Alnoor Ebrahim and David Suarez, are now helping provide new intellectual and institutional leadership as the field grows and develops. I also want to note that, while Carrie and her family dealt with the COVID-19 virus, Alnoor and David stepped in to move the nomination forward. I also want to thank my husband, Paul Stone, who has been with me since graduate school days. He has provided constant support and encouragement all along the way, and, as a historian, he has always reminded me to pay attention to the historical context surrounding the questions I explored. Thank you to all involved. As I thought about the remarks I wanted to share, two aspects of my personal experience kept surfacing. The first of these concerns nearly ten years of work in Alaska, during the 1970s, of founding nonprofits that worked with and for kids and families in crisis. We were flying by the seat of our pants but wanted to “change the world.” Those experiences fostered my fascination with organizations and governance and, hence, have always grounded both my research and teaching. The second was my graduate school experience in the 1980s at the Yale Program on Non-Profit Organizations, or PONPO, for short. It was here that I met my long-time collaborator and friend, Francie Ostrower. One of the hallmarks of our experience was feeling that, even as graduate students, we were contributing to something important. Alongside other graduate students, junior and senior faculty, new academic centers, and practitioners, from around the US and other countries, we were helping to build a field of study. What struck me most about my time at Yale was that the thinking was expansive, big questions were being asked by a joint collective of scholars from many diverse, academic disciplines as well as leading practitioners. From these experiences and certainly others, let me offer a few reflections that look ahead as well as back. First, we need to continue to promote expansive thinking and attention to big questions in our field. Big questions about and within the field remain salient and, while being explored by many of us, still need our attention. For example, how, in the 2020s, would we approach the question of why nonprofits exist in certain fields, cultures, and historical contexts, rather than corporate or public sector organizations? Or, how do we now understand tensions between private aims and public goals that have long characterized the sector but today exist alongside heightened awareness of persistent, structural inequities? And, what are the changing roles for nonprofit, nongovernmental, civil society organizations in democratic and non-democratic regimes? To explore these and other questions, we continue to need a cross-disciplinary approach that embraces philosophy, history, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, alongside management and public policy. There are many pressures in academia to explore more narrow research questions in order to be published, get hired, achieve tenure and promotion. Still, there are opportunities to situate more specific research questions in the context of larger questions that promote deeper understanding in the field. Wide-ranging, intellectual curiosity must remain a hallmark for our work.Second, I think the field of nonprofit and philanthropic studies has fostered and must continue to emphasize a developmental approach. We need to continually articulate that the “field of nonprofit and philanthropic studies” has not arrived to take its place alongside other academic fields but that it is continually evolving, much as the phenomena we study and care about. And we each have a role to play in nurturing graduate students, supporting junior faculty, enticing new senior faculty into the field, and connecting with practitioners. As I mentioned earlier, ARNOVA seems to have this approach hard-wired into its institutional DNA. A developmental approach, however, needs to be constantly rejuvenated by all of us. How do we give scholars, especially those new to the field, a genuine feeling that they are part of a very important endeavor and part of a broadly collective effort? Third, and related, our teaching and curriculum development work remain critically important to the field. Perhaps because of my prior experience as a founder and executive director who “flew by the seat of her pants,” I have always been committed to teaching as well as curriculum development. Efforts at ARNOVA, and especially NACC, greatly enhanced my learning (and that of many others) about both of these subjects. I view teaching about nonprofit management as more than presenting a set of tools and techniques. Teaching provides important opportunities for students to grapple with some of the big questions I mentioned above, situated in the context of management and leadership situations. Teaching also offers opportunities to help students become multilingual, that is, fluent in relevant concepts and ideas from both the world of business management and the world of public policy/policy advocacy in order to lead effective organizations that articulate and enact values-based missions. Our teaching and research missions go hand-in-hand to continue to develop the field.Finally, let me offer an observation that goes way back in my career – even as a graduate student at PONPO, I noticed that people in this field were funny, laughed a lot, had very good senses of humor. And, the contrast with academic conferences I attended outside of ARNOVA was stark. Not only did I feel like I could exhale at ARNOVA, I found myself laughing, in the hallways, over coffee or drinks, sitting around discussion tables, wherever. (Dennis Young, Linda Serra, Dave Renz, Will Brown, Robert Ashcraft, Ruth McCambridge, many more, you know who you are!) So, why might that be? Is it the standard explanation, “we take the subject matter very seriously but we don’t take ourselves too seriously?” Perhaps, but I think we do take ourselves seriously, as scholars, teachers, and mentors. Rather, it may be because of the genuine joy we have in the work and the knowledge of why we are engaged in it. Perhaps it is because we have a sense of belonging and meaningfulness that what we are all, collectively, engaged in really matters. I hope that ARNOVA continues to maintain that spirit for years to come. Thank you all, again, for this honor, and I look forward to seeing many of you in person in 2021.
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