Different organizational forms may be developed at different points in time to meet societies’social welfare goals. This article considers how we can understand and explain change in the range of institutions chosen to address the problem of the London slums between 1840and1914.A number of theories, which posit some periodization or sequencing in the evolution of nonprofit, public, and for-profit provision, are examined and compared with this historical example. Theories that are implicitly periodized yet not properly historicized cannot account adequately for the process of change in the choice of organizational types to meet society’s social welfare goals. For the nonprofit field to learn from history, we must first understand the causal processes that lie behind that history and the factors that explain change as a process of continuity in particular contexts rather than as an abrupt transfer from one unspecified time period to the next.
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