Nonprofit organizations face a significant and distinctive challenge to maintain an organizational mission of achieving individual and societal benefits in the face of constant and often stringent financial imperatives. This creates a potential contradiction between being “business-like” and “charitable” within nonprofit organizations. Drawing on Trethewey and Ashcraft’s (2004) notion of the irrationality of organization, this study examined (a) how the phenomena of being business-like and being charitable were individually defined by organizational members and (b) how the relationship between those phenomena were configured through organizational communication practices. This study explored this potential contradiction through an ethnographic study of the National Sports Center for the Disabled (NSCD). Findings illustrated that being business-like and charitable at the NSCD were indeed salient, distinctive, connected, and simultaneous organizational concerns. This resulted, in large part, from material conditions (Cheney & Cloud, 2006) that contributed to differentiated experiences of being business-like and charitable and to the definition of their relationship by staff members as contradictory. Findings also illustrated that staff members in both offices defined business-like in a way that eschewed profit motive and put money second to charitable service. Consequently, the relationship between being business-like and charitable was configured with the NSCD as a dialectic—a mutually implicative contradictory relationship that views both elements of a contradiction as generative and coproductive (Mumby, 2005). This configuration enabled staff members to frame their work as compatible with either business-like or charitable goals and outcomes. Thus, the findings of this study demonstrate that two significant dynamics were associated with the meanings and practices of being business-like and charitable at the NSCD: differentiation and integration (J. Martin, 2002). Indeed, being business-like and charitable existed as both contradictory and interconnected concerns in the communication of organizational members.

Keywords. nonprofit organization, business-like, dialectic, irrationality of organization, contradiction, material conditions, differentiation, integration