From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market by Paul-Brian McInerney (review)

It feels odd, when I can simultaneously stream a European soccer game to my laptop while reading news headlines from around the world and answering emails, and at a time when many of our students know nothing other than the ubiquity of digital connectedness, to think of the turn of the century as a time when an entire sector of the economy was technologically unsophisticated—especially when the turn in question is from the twentieth to the twenty-first. Yes, before the year 2000 the nonprofit sector was surprisingly low-tech, and perhaps more surprising only because of our collective forgetfulness regarding how quickly things have changed, practitioners in the sector were not all that concerned about their embryonic state of affairs. After all, they had the work of social and environmental justice to pursue, and their supporting foundations could be forgiven for not feeling inclined to support administrative costs such as those associated with connecting to a newish technology called the World Wide Web.

There were some seers, however, who had a vision of what connectivity could do for nonprofits, and McInerney tells us a story about the work they engaged in to help managers of nonprofits and foundation leaders rethink the role of technology in their organizations. Lest they be confused with the stereotyped IT professional of today, these "Circuit Riders," as they came to be called, were not just interested in networking an office or troubleshooting a frozen computer screen. More than tech geeks, they were for the most part activists who used their tech savvy to pursue (and to help others pursue) a progressive political agenda.

At least that is how it was in the beginning, anyway. As is so often the case, as the movement grew it would face the choice of remaining small and holding firm to its idealist (if sometimes exclusionary) roots or opening up and bringing outsiders into the fold while letting go of its progressive bent. Of course, the reality of the situation was more complicated than that, and McInerney introduces us to the cast of characters and series of events that shaped how the field would evolve—the evangelists like Rob Stuart, who in his zeal to grow the movement may have inadvertently planted the seeds of its undoing, or the entrepreneurs like Joan Fanning, who seized upon a crisis moment to offer an alternative vision for the future of the field.

And evolve it did. What was initially a network of politically active techies became, in only a few years, the field of professional technology assistance to nonprofits. The movement became a market. That is, the passions and practices that defined the field went from looking like those typical of a social movement (actors motivated by idealism, operating outside of exchange relationships, toward a political end) to those typical of a marketplace (professionalized actors, operating through exchange relationships, to increase efficiency).

One organization in particular, NPower, a nonprofit with close ties to Microsoft, emerged as the dominant player in this nascent industry. Although it incorporated some of the movement's original preoccupations, it carved a new path by operating in a more market-friendly style—emphasizing fees for services, relying on quantitative metrics, toning down its political ambitions, and the like. The innovation was successful, which attracted funding and clients, so other players in the field were left to either capitulate or to resist. Many chose the former, and those who did not—some tried, for example, to persuade nonprofits away from proprietary software and toward free and open source solutions—were unsuccessful.

McInerney thus tells an interesting story about the nonprofit sector, the rise and fall of a movement meant to aid its practitioners, and the genesis of a tech services industry. More than that, though, he weaves theoretical insights into the narrative. These come in...