The Deeper Inquiry

The scholarship on institutional founding, particularly the biographical and organizational history literature, reveals consistent patterns in who successfully builds institutions of this kind and what distinguishes them from the majority who attempt it and do not succeed. James MacGregor Burns' analysis of transformational leadership, Howard Gardner's work on the minds of creative leaders, and the more recent scholarship on psychological characteristics associated with successful social entrepreneurship all contribute to a picture of founding capacity that is consistent with what this chapter describes: intellectual and relational sophistication in combination, sustained under conditions of uncertainty and public exposure, over timescales that most human beings find psychologically demanding.

The burnout literature is directly relevant to the economic support question. Christina Maslach's foundational research on organizational burnout identified workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values alignment as the six domains in which mismatch between individual and organization produces burnout. Providence's founding period design must address all six domains explicitly, because the founding period is structurally prone to burnout in each of them.

The feminist scholarship on care work and institutional development — particularly the work of Arlie Hochschild on emotional labor, Joan Tronto on the ethics of care, and the extensive literature on how care work is systematically undervalued and undersupported in institutional contexts — provides a critical framework for understanding why the support structures identified in this chapter are so consistently underbuilt in institutions with transformational missions. The institutions most committed to care and relationship in their external orientation are often the least attentive to care and relationship in their internal functioning.