Burton Weisbrod

Burton A. Weisbrod, John Evans Professor of Economics and former director of the Institute for Policy Research, has received two prestigious honors in the past six months. On December 6, he was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).

In April, Weisbrod was one of 13 prominent academics named Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars for 1998-99. The program is designed to enrich the intellectual environment of universities and colleges that house Phi Beta Kappa chapters. The visiting scholars pay a series of two-day visits to selected campuses to meet with undergraduates, participate in lectures and seminars, and give one major address.

In recognizing Weisbrod as its “most prominent economist,” ARNOVA cited his distinguished contributions to nonprofit and voluntarism research over more than two decades.

His work has had a major impact not only on economic research, but on interdisciplinary nonprofit research as well, the awards committee concluded. They noted that Weisbrod helped to legitimate research on nonprofits among economists and policy analysts and to attract more economists to the field.

“The field of nonprofit sector research didn’t exist 20 years ago,” Weisbrod observed, noting that four new journals and dozens of centers offering training in nonprofit management and related research activities show how the field has expanded.

Weisbrod’s international reputation in the field of economics helped build respect for this new field. His identification of problems in the nonprofit sector, such as the market for volunteer labor, his measurements of nonprofit sector outputs, and his analysis of nonprofit organization behavior have opened up new avenues for research.

Weisbrod has written 160 articles and a dozen books on subjects that include the economics of health care, education, human capital, and benefit-cost analysis. ARNOVA cited The Nonprofit Economy (Harvard University Press, 1988) as his most important book so far. It offered a comprehensive perspective on the behavior of nonprofit organizations, demonstrating how they do not exist in isolation from large segments of the economy but affect and are affected by both the government and private sectors. This intertwining of the three sectors is a major theme of Weisbrod’s work.

As a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, Weisbrod expects to travel to seven or eight institutions next year to talk about the effects of health care cost containment on medical research and development and the role of nonprofit organizations in the economy. One certain theme will be the growing commercialism of the nonprofit sector. Weisbrod’s new edited and co-authored book on this subject, To Profit or Not to Profit (see Faculty Books, p. 12), will be published this summer.

Economist and IPR Faculty Fellow Paul M. Hirsch has received two Distinguished Scholar Awards. The Academy of Management’s Organization and Management Theory Division has cited him for “fundamental contributions to organizational and management theory.” Hirsch, who is the James L. Allen Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Organization Behavior at Kellogg, will be the division’s Distinguished Speaker at the Academy’s annual meeting in August where he will be honored at a reception.

Hirsch was also selected as the keynote speaker for the Organization Theory Division of the Canadian Administrative Sciences Association. He addressed the division at its annual meeting in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in May. Hirsch is currently studying the language and cultures of business, in particular, how the framing of issues such as social responsibility, employee benefits, and downsizing has changed over time.

Dan A. Lewis (IPR-Education and Social Policy) is one of three Northwestern faculty to receive Excellence in Teaching awards for 1998 from the Northwestern Alumni Association. The honor carries with it a $3500 cash award. Lewis is currently working on a major proposal to study the impact of welfare reform in Illinois on former and current Illinois recipients and their families. He has also conducted studies of school reform in Chicago and community responses to the problem of homelessness in Evanston and Wheaton (see pp. 8 and 10).

Nicola K. Beisel (IPR-Sociology) has been named a 1998-99 Fellow by the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. She will spend a year’s leave continuing work on her latest book, which compares the use of racial rhetoric in 19th and 20th century discussions of abortion in the United States. Beisel will build on the research in her earlier book, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (1997).