David Billis was Emeritus Reader in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was an organizational theorist whose work engaged with the public, private and voluntary sectors.
Influenced by Weber, he developed a distinctive approach to organizational analysis across three main dimensions: category (the type of work), level (the vertical dimension within the organizational hierarchy), and authority (the management role) to which he also added a conceptualization of individual capacities.
He began his career at Brunel University, where he wrote Welfare Bureaucracies (1984) and Organisational Design (1987), where he undertook collaborative action research with a range of social welfare agencies. He then went on to develop a theory of ‘work levels’, an approach which was adopted by multinational companies and implemented in over a hundred countries. However, it was his work on voluntary organizations for which he became best known. He joined the School in 1987, bringing an innovative voluntary/nonprofit sector management research and teaching agenda that he had started developing at Brunel.
As founder-director of the LSE’s Centre for Voluntary Organization (later the Centre for Civil Society) in the Department of Social Policy, he established a new MSc in Voluntary Sector Organization, which was the first specialised postgraduate course of its kind. His next book Organising Public and Voluntary Agencies (1993) set out a voluntary sector theory of change, which was influential in assisting organizations with navigating changing policy environments and dealing with the management challenges.
He co-founded the journal Nonprofit Management and Leadership in 1990, and in 1995 was awarded the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). His 2010 book Hybrid Organisations and the Third Sector reflected further evolution of his ideas, and his chapter ‘Towards a theory of hybrid organizations’ was published in Shafritz, Ott and Jang’s Classics of Organisation Theory (2015). David Billis will be remembered by colleagues and students as a kind and approachable teacher, a dedicated scholar, and a passionate advocate for the voluntary sector.
Written by David Lewis
It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that we inform you of the death of our colleague and friend, Stéphanie Beltrando. She had been bravely fighting cancer for 8 years.
