Can Nonprofit Management Help Answer Public Management’s “Big Questions”? 259 Arthur C. Brooks Syracuse University Can Nonprofit Management Help Answer Public Management’s “Big Questions”? Are the fields of nonprofit management and public management naturally complementary, or are they substitutes? Briefly surveying the nonprofit literature on board governance, volunteer management, and performance measurement, the author shows that study of the third sector can help inform public management’s “big questions.” As such, nonprofit studies and scholar- ship should represent an improvement to public administration curricula and a fertile source of ideas for public managers. Arthur C. Brooks is an associate professor of public administration at Syra- cuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where he teaches courses on nonprofit management and economics for public admin- istrators. His research focuses on nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, and cultural policy. Email: acbrooks@maxwell.syr.edu. Introduction Defining moments in academic disciplines often occur when their principal unanswered questions are specified. Such was the case with Robert D. Behn’s frequently cited 1995 article in Public Administration Review, “The Big Questions of Public Management.” In this article, Behn laid out what he saw as the three areas of inquiry with the potential to make public management most useful to the field and “scientific” in its method of inquiry: 1. How can public managers break the cycle of micromanagement, which inhibits public agencies from producing results? 2. How can public managers motivate people to work to- ward achieving public purposes? 3. How can public managers measure performance? The relatively new field of nonprofit management saw similar contributions in 1993 and 1997 when Dennis R. Young, editor of Nonprofit Management and Leadership, defined the “key contemporary managerial and leadership issues facing nonprofit organizations.” In his estimation, these issues are board governance, executive leadership, human resources management, development of financial resources, strategic adaptation to change, organizational structure, and performance measurement (see figure 1). There is evidence that the nonprofit field journals have focused these issues well. For example, analysis of a sample of articles in the two most prominent nonprofit journals, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and Nonprofit Board governance 8% Executive leadership 8% Human resources management 12% Development of financial resources 7% Strategic adaptation to change 9% Organizational structure 14% Performance measurement 8% Other 34% Figure 1 Percentage of Articles in the Nonprofit Literature Focusing on Nonprofit Management’s Seven “Big Issues” Source: Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and Nonprofit Management and Leadership 1990–1998. Big Questions/Big Issues