Connecting Nonprofit and Communication Scholarship: A Review of Key Issues and a Meta-Theoretical Framework for Future Research

The purpose of this review is to analyze the current relationship between communication and nonprofit studies, and to demonstrate how the field of communication can make a significant contribution to nonprofit scholarship by offering a unique way to analyze and explain nonprofit phenomena. To accomplish this we begin with a brief review of communication research in the nonprofit literature to see how scholars in this interdisciplinary field understand communication. Next we review key developments in the history of communication as an academic discipline in order to situate contemporary perspectives toward our field. We then explain how communication scholars have progressed from our intellectual origins. Our subsequent review of communication scholarship in and of the nonprofit sector highlights this evolution toward a more complex and nuanced approach to communication. From there we develop a distinct “communication perspective” toward the nonprofit sector based on a constitutive view of communication—a key meta-theoretical framework currently influencing the field of communication. Our primary contribution is thus to explain the implications of a constitutive approach to communication and how such an understanding can advance nonprofit—communication scholarship, as well as provide a meta-theoretical framework to further galvanize all scholars interested in this kind of work.