Greg Wilson

Greg Wilson is a Provost’s Fellow and an assistant professor of management and public affairs and (by courtesy) sociology. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. 

His research agenda examines how and why the nonprofit sector, itself, is racialized and how this system impacts the work of nonprofits led by people of color, particularly those led by African Americans. His research has appeared in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. He is currently working on a major theoretical article that proposes the existence of a Racialized Nonprofit Industrial Complex (RNIC) - a racialized social system created and maintained by an interconnected relationship between the State and Philanthropy where Black-led and white-led nonprofit organizations differ schematically in their approach to, acquisition and understanding of key areas (e.g. leadership, funding, data, collaboration and volunteering) thought to be race-neutral but whose differences constitute the racial structure of the sector. He is deeply committed to a pluralistic approach to inquiry which prompts him to draw upon multidisciplinary theories and is guided by the axiom that questions determine methodological choices which leads him to employ diverse methodologies to answer questions. 

Beyond his scholarly agenda, Wilson’s teaching interests are in nonprofit organizations, management and leadership, race and inequality, mixed and qualitative methods, and technical communication. In addition to research and teaching, outside of the Glenn College Wilson is a Faculty Fellow in the Justice Labs of America at Brown University. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Fellow at the New York University Stern School of Business. Previously, he has been affiliated with and funded by the Institute for Research on Poverty. He also consults nonprofits on leadership and philanthropic strategy. 

Wilson earned a PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also holds a Master of Arts degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago as well as a Master of Education degree in higher education administration and Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and English — both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.