Over the past 15 years, organizational theory and nonprofit scholarship have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance, yet both perspectives still lack a clear understanding of organizational forms. This article suggests ways of tracing the development and differentiation of organizational forms through empirical analyses of the built environment and argues that this approach offers valuable insight into the history of nonprofit charitable organizations, public-private partnerships, and citizen participation in a developing democracy. The mainfocus is on how charitable practices operated within buildings and how different buildings used by charitable organizations in the 19th century limited and defined social service provision. Investigating the ways in which early organizational struggles over space influenced, constrained, and/or enabled organizational institutionalization can lead to greater understandings of American civil society.
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