Review by Anthony S. Keller of the book Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint (New York. Oxford University Press. 1986. 370 pages).

It is with his characteristic scholarly consientiousness and delight in the ironic that Paul DiMaggio has titled this book of fifteen essays. Some readers may bridle at the use of the word enterprise, wanting the noble subject of art to be held at a respectable distance from the profane mechanisms of getting and spending, but the editor deliberately announces his intention to keep our focus on reality.

Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint loses no time in describing two conditions underlying the dynamics of the universe with which many of this journal's readers are professionally engaged:

1. in recent decades, nonprofit institutions have been encouraged by economic realities and the Weltanschauung of their sponsors to assume business-like standards, to think of themselves as managed enterprises marketing products for consumption;
   
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2. there is, in this competitive entrepreneurial environment, a significant relationship - often uneasy, sometimes creative - between mission and the systemic elements that constrain the institutions' leaders in their pursuit of that mission. There is also, as most of the book's authors describe it, a lurking danger that, implicit or explicit in this Mephistophelean deal, the constraints are such as to compromise, alter, or erode the original mission.

This may not be the book DiMaggio would have produced had he been able to commission its chapters to his preestablished specifications. As a collection of papers and articles written independently since 1979 for other occasions and publications, the essays, taken together, lack a common point of departure and, taken separately, vary in degree of relevance to the central rubric. Given the range of provenance, however, the essays work well enough as a unit to justify their second generation bonding and many of the pieces are outstanding in their own right, skillfully researched and provocatively presented. (p. 78, 79)