摘要: Nonprofit organizations in the USA and worldwide find themselves in an increasingly difficult environment. Governmental funding goes down, competition with for-profit firms and other nonprofits becomes more intensive, while the tasks to be performed by nonprofit organizations continue gaining Societal relevance. Nonprofit organizations thus experience a sustained need for organizational adaptation. This chapter argues that understanding the processes of organizational change in the nonprofit sector can be usefully informed by re-examining the relevant literature on the theory of the (for-profit) firm. Two inter-related strands of this literature are particularly relevant: those dealing with the delineation of organizational boundaries and the determination of cost-effective governance mechanisms. This chapter explores some of this literature's implications for the way organizational boundaries and governance mechanisms evolve in the nonprofit sector. Bringing the theory of the for-profit firm to bear on the economics of nonprofit organization is enabled by explicit consideration of nonprofit firms’ mission orientation. Nonprofit firms engage in activities that may be related or unrelated to their core missions; it is to be expected that decisions on both organizational boundaries and governance mechanisms are made differently for these two activity types. The chapter is organized as follows. The next section discusses the way nonprofit organizational boundaries are affected by transaction cost considerations, paying special attention to the difference between mission-related and mission-unrelated activities. The following sections explore the governance …