Organization termination in the nonprofit setting: the dissolution of children's rehabilitation services

Public and business sector organizations are the primary subjects of the existing literature on organization termination. This article considers the applicability of the termination literature to the nonprofit organization context. In particular, the literatures of public administration (public agency termination), organization theory (life cycles of organizations), and business administration (firm failure) are used to examine the termination experience of a specific nonprofit agency, Children's Rehabilitation Services (CRS). After more than thirty years of providing residential treatment services to boys with emotional problems, the agency merged with another nonprofit rather than face bankruptcy. To understand the causes of CRS's termination, financial factors, deleon's (1978) obstacles to termination, life cycle theory and the role of the agency's changing environment are studied. The case of CRS illustrates many of the findings of the organization termination literature and introduces a new point essential to consideration of termination in the nonprofit context: the importance of the selection of decision makers with competencies appropriate for the given life cycle stage of the organization.     

Reviews

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Palestine: the return of the one‐state solution

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Assessing nutritional status and functional ability of older adults in developing countries

This paper reports on the findings of a five-year collaborative research programme between the Public Health Nutrition Unit (PHNU) of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and HelpAge International (HAI) that was conducted in India, Tanzania, and Malawi with the broad objective of providing simple and easy tools for assessing nutritional vulnerability among older people.1 Under-nutrition was found to be a serious problem among such people in developing countries, with a positive association between nutritional status and functional ability. These results were presented at a Symposium held at the LSHTM with a view to encouraging development agencies to pay greater attention to the conditions of older people.