On philanthropic foundation work, or what is wrong with Pasadena?

Using a microhistorical approach to address the application and evolution of power in administrative processes as a persistent gap in philanthropy research, we investigate how work is done in private multi-purpose foundations, especially in their early and expansion phases when new routines and structures are established. Examining the Rockefeller Foundation’s small-grant projects for UK university administrators and library specialists in 1934–1937 and linking archival data to social and historical theory, we detect persuasion as a special form of social power routinely applied in ‘rational’ grant administration. By further identifying co-production of persuasive power and bureaucratic rule at the center of a social economy through which elite benevolence is administered, and beneficiaries are controlled, Strauss’s ‘negotiated order’ emerges as a useful theoretical framing for microhistory and organizational analysis. Providing a counterweight to the biographical study of foundations’ richest benefactors and their hand-picked senior managers, our study illuminates how distinctly cultivated persuasion enables lower-ranking foundation elites with no formal jurisdiction to gain power through administrative discretion and network brokerage. This research direction may reflect early perception of, and reaction to, special problems in managing knowledge workers and imposing order on their research aims in past and present private philanthropy.