Lecturer in Social Enterprise and Management

Kate Cooney's research interests include commercialization in the nonprofit sector, social enterprise, workforce development policy and programs, and social innovation. Her studies on work integration social enterprise approaches to workforce development have appeared in the Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Voluntas, and the Journal of Poverty. She has also written broadly about market based approaches to poverty alleviation in the Social Service Review. Her earliest work, published in Administration & Society, used institutional theory to examine social policy implementation in human service organizations contracting to provide welfare-to-work services. The theoretical work from this project on the micro foundations of institutional theory informs her current research on the negotiation of competing institutional logics in social enterprise organizations. Other projects underway include a stakeholder theory analysis of new legal forms for social business, and a study examining the organizational factors associated with financial risk and financial health in social enterprise models in selected subsectors of the U.S. nonprofit sector.

Prior to joining the faculty at Yale SOM, Dr. Cooney was on the faculty at Boston University teaching courses on nonprofit management, urban poverty and economic development, and community and organizational analysis. She has served as a research consultant for Abt Associates, Inc. and for Boston-based nonprofit organizations, including most recently, conducting a SROI analysis for Jewish Vocational Services (JVS) in Boston.

BA College of the Holy Cross
MSW University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Affairs
PhD University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Affairs

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Kate Cooney's CV