Local nonprofit organizations are often small, loosely structured, and democratically governed, and therefore do not fit conveniently into traditional theories of organizational behavior that are rooted in administrative science and bureaucratic structure. Treating community organizations as parts of larger systems--organizational fields or ecologies and communities--this collection of papers presents various perspectives on local nonprofit organizations from the standpoint of organizational theory. The essays draw on an array of methods and theoretical approaches taken from population ecology theories of organizations, laying the foundation for the structural analysis of community organizations.