This chapter explores the nature of nonprofit-sector theory. To do this, we first examine what we theory, and what we mean by nonprofit-sector theory. We also propose a framework for evaluating what makes good nonprofit-sector theory, based on the function of theory (define, describe, explain, prescribe, predict, and evaluate) and the theory's depth, breadth, and relevance. For this volume, we have taken a broad and inclusive approach to nonprofit-sector theory, defining it as answering the questions, “What is the nonprofit sector?” and “Why does the nonprofit sector exist?”

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a public health challenge that grows in urgency every year. As the world’s largest dedicated voluntary health organization to AD and related dementia (ADRD), the Alzheimer’s Association has a vision of a world without AD and ADRD. In addition to providing care and support in communities across the United States and actively pursuing advocacy for federal research support and community needs,it is committed to advancing vital research toward methods of treatment, prevention, and a cure. In addition to financial support to researchers worldwide, it promotes the sharing of knowledge and data, gathering key stakeholders form the field, including academia, federal, non-profit and industry to advance research (such as through the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference) and accelerating clinical trial research though Alzheimer’s Association TrialMatc. The Association’s funding expands the full spectrum of research, with focused funding on drug development and early-phase human trials.

In 2006, the Japanese law of nonprofits underwent a major reform. Notably, the reform involved a shift in the governance mechanism from external governmental oversight to a structure that emphasizes internal fiduciary governance. As the Japanese law in this area has historically been marked by various strands of fiduciary rules derived from different sources, the event presents a valuable case study on how the shift to a fiduciary governance approach can impact the operation of those entities that are subject to the reform. This chapter will begin with a historical account of the evolution of Japanese nonprofit law that involves complex interactions among the indigenous nonprofit tradition, the civil law influence, American fiduciary principles, and the English-style charity commission. After discussing the major components of the 2006 reform against the backdrop of major events that created the reform momentum, this chapter will use available empirical evidence to critically examine the reform’s achievements and consider any remaining issues that pose ongoing challenges.

This chapter argues that market metafiction has emerged as the vanguard fictional style of the post-financial crisis period. It begins by discussing the work of Tao Lin and Chris Kraus. The remainder of the chapter analyses two recent works of market metafiction that exemplify the paradigm, even as they register and contest differing financial and literary market logics. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), attempts to deal with risk and uncertainty central to derivatives trading provide models for “hedging” between different forms of literary value, so that underperformance in market terms may be offset against critical approbation. In Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), meanwhile, the depredations of what David Harvey calls “the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex” are seen to be of a piece with the global publishing industry’s exploitation of images of African suffering. In his novel, Cole deliberately sidesteps these stereotyped and voyeuristic images, while at the same time acknowledging the privilege that permits him (now a relatively affluent and highly educated New Yorker) to perform precisely such a resistance to market-dictated convention.

This concluding Coda juxtaposes the market logics traced throughout the book with a form of exchange that is often identified as their antithesis: that of the gift. Focusing on Barbara Browning’s 2017 novel The Gift, it shows how this exemplary work of twenty-first-century market metafiction tries to imagine itself into an alternate economy of gift-giving. The Coda explores the tension, however, whereby the publication of this experimental text, with its Occupy Wall Street affiliations, is made possible by the “gifts” of the corporate and financial donors who support its small, nonprofit press. Rather than viewing this situation as a mere contradiction, however, the Coda suggests that it helps us to recognize that the creation of formally ambitious, “autonomous” works of literary art will always be incompatible with the purity of the gift, since such creation demands material and other resources accessible only via some form of financial backing or remuneration. The Coda suggests that a key challenge for cultural practitioners and critics in the twenty-first century is to imagine a less ends-focused, more democratic structure of support for the arts.