What Does the Future Hold for Academic Associations?
March 19, 2014 2117
Competing associations. A funding drought. Smaller travel budgets. Royalty streams drying up. Surely the future for academic associations is grim. Steven Rathgeb Smith, the executive director of the American Political Science Association, certainly sees challenges all around. But the former president of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action and one-time editor of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly also knows a thing or two about how to snatch opportunity from adversity. Here, Smith outlines the peril and the promise facing associations in a presentation he adapted for Social Science Space from one he gave in January 2014 at the Southern Political Science Association meeting in New Orleans.
