Researching Asia's Third Sector

Most Asian countries have a strong third sector and a rich tradition of philanthropy. The varied array of social, economic, political, and third sector variables across the many countries of the region make Asia an ideal site for testing and developing third sector theory. The research infrastructure needed to sustain such a venture is beginning to form. The five papers published in this issue of Voluntas indicate some of the product, and the variety, of this growing body of research.     

The third sector in welfare policies in Italy: the contradictions of a protected market

The paper describes how the involvement of non-profit organisations (NPOs) in welfare politics in Italy has historically developed in a mutual accommodation with the state, which has prevented the growth and the public recognition of an independent third sector. Using data from official statistics and recent research on non-profits, three analytical dimensions of the relationship between State and the third sector are considered: the resource exchange; the division of responsibility for delivering public services; and the dynamics of social policy making. The study indicates that distinctive features of the ‘welfare mix’ in Italy have been: the attribution of public status to many NPOs as a consequence of an arrangement between Church and state; the weakness of state guidance, in spite of the generous economic assistance provided to NPOs by the state; the substitutive role of NPOs in providing basic public services; and the emergence of informal arrangements between public authorities and NPOs mediated by political patronage. I thank Ralph Kramer, Ugo Ascoli, Perri 6, and three anonymous referees ofVoluntas for helpful comments they provided on an earlier draft of this paper. My research was supported by a grant from the National Council of Research of Italy, and through facilities provided by the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. An earlier version of this paper is published in P. 6 and I. Vidal (eds)Delivering Welfare: Re-positioning Non-profit and Co-operative Action in Western European Welfare States, CIES, Barcelona, 1994.     

In search of the non-profit sector. I: The question of definitions

In this paper we argue that the lack of attention to the third sector historically is primarily a result of the weakness and limitations of the concepts that are used to define and describe it. The purpose of this article is to remedy this situation by developing a general definition of the sector that can be used in comparative research. To do so, the article first identifies four alternative types of definitions that are potentially available and evaluates each in terms of three basic criteria. On this basis it concludes that the most useful definition is the structural/operational one, which includes in the non-profit sector organisations that share five basic characteristics. These are: formal, private, non-profit-distributing, self-governing and voluntary. The basic definition is then tested against the realities of three disparate countries and found to perform quite well. On this basis we recommend the structural/operational definition, particularly for comparative, crossnational research.Lester Salamon is Professor at the Johns Hopkins University,Baltimore, Maryland 21218 and Director of the Institute for Policy Studies there.Helmut Anheier is Research Scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08903. He is co-editor ofVoluntas.     

In search of the non-profit sector II: The problem of classification

Building on a previousVoluntas article (Salamon and Anheier, 1992b), which formulated a systematic approach to defining the non-profit sector for purposes of comparative research, this article takes on the complementary task of formulating a classification system that can be used to differentiate systematically the types of non-profit organisations that exist at the global level. To do so, the article first assesses a number of existing classification systems, such as the International Standard Industrial Classification and the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities. Finding these systems inadequate, the article then introduces an alternative system, which we term the International Classification of Nonprofit Organizations (ICNPO). The ICNPO classifies non-profit establishments into 12 major groups based on their primary economic activity, and then further sub-divides these into 24 sub-groups. The result is a system that scores high in terms of five key evaluation criteria: economy, significance, rigour, organising power, and richness. What is more, initial tests of the ICNPO in a set of countries show that it performs well in coming to terms with the diverse types of non-profit institutions that exist around the world.Lester Salamon is Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 and Director of the Institute for Policy Studies there.Helmut Anheier is Research Scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08903. He is co-editor ofVoluntas.The authors are grateful to Kusuma Cunningham for her assistance in developing the ICNPO and for compiling Appendix C of this paper.     

Entrepreneurship theories of the non-profit sector

This article summarises the main results of entrepreneurship theories of the non-profit sector and discusses the impact they may have on theory development and on the real world non-profit sector. It is pointed out that the entrepreneurship approach advances our knowledge of the non-profit sector, especially by stressing the supply-side aspect and by focusing on the preferences individuals must have in order to engage in non-profit activities. There is empirical evidence consistent with entrepreneurship theories. Yet most observations do not exclusively support entrepreneurship theories but also provide evidence consistent with other economic theories of the non-profit sector. This illustrates that the various economic theories of the non-profit sector are more complements than substitutes. Furthermore, entrepreneurship theories indirectly help to improve the image non-profit organisations have in the real world; therefore they play a prominent role in teaching programmes which have been established to train non-profit managers. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments of the participants of theVoluntas Symposium at Yale University, especially the comments made by Estelle James, James Ferris and Dennis Young.     

A European perspective: The Nonprofit Almanac and the development of European profiles

Conclusion The Independent Sector approach to measuring the US non-profit sector, as summarised inThe Almanac, provides a valuable and instructive model for European and other attempts to describe and measure the sector. The aim of mappers in those other countries should not be to replicateThe Almanac, but to imitate its broad approach, using it to stimulate and encourage statistical efforts elsewhere. Although the time for whole-Europe mappings has not yet come — in fact, it is very many years away — individual European countries could and should make substantial progress. As I have argued, progress will generally be greatest when an imaginative blend of five main approaches is employed. This is exemplified by the Independent Sector's work, and would-be mimics should endeavour to match both this blending and the energy and zest with which the task has been tackled.Professor of the Economics of Social Care and Deputy Director of the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent at Canterbury and Co-editor,Voluntas.I would like to acknowledge a number of European colleagues whose comments assisted my preparation of this paper, in particular Edith Archambault, Paulo Barbetta, Andrea Bassi, Rudolph Bauer, Andrew Crook, Jim Jackson, Jeremy Kendall, Éva Kuti, Susan Saxon-Harrold, Wolfgang Seibel, Justin Davis Smith and Tymen van den Ploeg. This paper is lodged in the Personal Social Services Research Unit as Discussion Paper 873.     

Governing the voluntary sector response to AIDS: a comparative study of the UK and Germany

The impact of AIDS on Western polities serves as a useful indicator both of social values and of political and organisational relationships. At the same time, community-based nonprofit organisations have been at the forefront of AIDS policy-making and service development. Taking Britain and Germany as case studies, this paper discusses similarities and differences in the functions accorded to the voluntary sector in the pattern of responses to HIV and AIDS. Typical problems confronted by emergent voluntary sector welfare agencies are noted and particular features of AIDS service organisations described. Separate accounts are then given of the development of a federated network of AIDS service organisations (ASOs) in Germany and of contrasting experience in the UK. While governments have shared a concern to confine the activity of ASOs to serving the needs of those groups directly affected by AIDS, other significant differences in policy development may be attributed to differences in the organisational structure of the health sector.Some of the material used in this paper is due to be published in Freeman (forthcoming). The paper is a product of doctoral research carried out in 1990, which was funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council. That research included case studies of policy responses to AIDS in Britain and Germany. I am indebted to all those who, despite the demands made on both their agencies and themselves, took time to discuss aspects of their work with me. The paper was first presented at the ECPR workshop on Non-governmental welfare provision in a long term perspective held at the University of Essex in March 1991. My thanks for their advice and comment are due to participants in the workshop and to three unnamedVoluntas referees.     

Measuring the non-profit sector cross-nationally: a comparative methodology

As a result in part of the way non-profit institutions are defined and treated in the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), little is known about the size, scope, financial base and role of this set of institutions at the international level, even though their importance is increasingly being recognised throughout the world. To remedy this significant lack of systematic information on non-profit institutions cross-nationally, the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project has undertaken a major analysis of the economic role of this sector in twelve countries throughout the world, utilising a more meaningful definition of the sector and an approach that is otherwise consistent with the overall thrust of the SNA system. This paper outlines the basis of the more inclusive definition of the non-profit sector embodied in this project, the classification system formulated to structure data-gathering on this more broadly-defined sector and the data assembly strategy developed to build up key estimates of the scale, structure and revenue sources of the non-profit sector in the project countries. The article concludes with a recommendation to incorporate a similar approach to the assembly of data on the non-profit sector into the ongoing SNA system on a regular basis.Professor Lester Salamon is Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and Director of the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218.Helmut Anheier is Research Scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08903. He is co-editor ofVoluntas.     

Value added taxation and the third sector

During the last decades, value added taxation (VAT) has become widely used. Introducing or widening VAT may have important consequences for third sector organisations. There is no consistent, widely-accepted theory regarding the treatment of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) under VAT. International comparisons are difficult to make. The general scope of VAT, what goods and especially what services are included in the tax base, may be more important to NGOs than the direct concessions granted them. To comprehend how VAT may affect NGOs, it is necessary to understand the general mechanism and some of the technical details of VAT, such as registration thresholds and accounting requirements. There is a tendency for the legislature to widen the tax base and make VAT as general as possible. Tax administrative considerations may acquire the character of absolute principles. When VAT is introduced or widened, it may be important for NGOs to demonstrate how their tax bill has been changed as a possible unintended side-effect due to the administrative need to make VAT as comprehensive as possible.I have received valuable comments from Myles McGregor-Lowndes and two anonymous reviewers ofVoluntas.     

What About Who is Mapping and Its Implications? Comments on Brent Never’s “The Case for Better Maps of Social Service Provision”

The term “mapping” has garnered a lot of attention in civil society research and nonprofit studies. Important contributions to mapping discussions have often focused on definitional issues, what to include and not include, what the data is intended for, and measurement challenges. However, the who is undertaking the mapping is often neglected in these discussions. This short article comments on Brent Never’s recent piece in Voluntas and the mapping of civil society and nonprofit organizations in general. Never’s analysis pushes the conversation forward by recommending better maps with both supply and demand of services for funders and policymakers at the local level. However, it neglects the question of who should conduct the mapping and the implications resulting from who these mappers are.     

Women and philanthropy

Although women often played a central role in the creation of non-profit organisations through their donations of time, money and material possessions, their efforts have received little systematic attention from students of the non-profit sector, particularly outside the United States. This special issue ofVoluntas traces the ties between philanthropy and women's social, economic and political roles in Argentina, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, India and Australia. Written as part of an international collaborative study co-ordinated by the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, these essays test a variety of theoretical models for assessing the significance of philanthropic activities in empowering disadvantaged groups and fostering the growth of civil society.     

Conceptualizing the Third Sector in Ireland,North and South

While there is a long established and deeply embedded tradition of voluntary action and nonprofit organizing in Ireland, there has been very limited debate on a philosophy of voluntary action or on the place of the third sector in a modern democratic state. It is against this background that practitioners and academics are beginning to articulate their individual understandings of the role of the third sector in Irish society. This paper presents a framework developed from three questions to consider the place of the third sector in a modern democratic state. The questions are: What are the roles of the third sector in a society? What relationships exist between the third and other sectors? How are third sector organizations resourced within that societal context? Answering these questions contributes to a conceptualization of the third sector in Ireland, North and South.

     

Towards a sociology of risk work: A narrative review and synthesis

In this article, we define the concept of “risk work,” which aims to make visible working practices to assess or manage risk, in order to subject these practices to sociological critique. This article reviews and synthesizes existing published literature to identify components of risk work: (a) translating risk into different contexts, (b) minimizing risks in practice, and (c) caring in the context of risk. We argue that these three components of risk work raise important tensions for workers that have been inadequately explored in the literature to date. We propose that future research should additionally focus on practitioner subjectivity and identity in risk work. In addition, we argue that comparative research—across type of risk and different contexts—and methodological and theoretical diversity would enhance this emerging field of research.     

Family Studies and Intergenerational Studies

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews key sources in the field of family studies in order to identify, in research and program development, intersections of theoretical, methodological, or programmatic interests. The purpose of the paper is to begin a dialogue between researchers and practitioners in the fields of family studies and intergenerational studies to foster collaborative projects in research and programming. The authors have chosen to limit the literature reviewed to sources that contain landmark reviews of research on intergenerational relationships from the perspective of the family studies field: Decade reviews that appeared in the primary journal of the National Council on Family Relations, the Journal of Marriage and the Family(Broderick, 1971a; Berardo, 1980; Booth, 1990; Milardo, 2000); the Handbook of Marriage and the Family(Sussman & Steinmetz, 1987; Sussman, Steinmetz, & Peterson, 1999); Families: Intergenerational and Generational Connections(Pfeifer & Sussman, 1991).     

Piloting external peer review as a model for performance improvement in third‐sector organizations

Peer review is used widely in the United Kingdom as a means of engendering performance improvement in the statutory sector and is being used increasingly to address the needs of specific networks of third‐sector organizations. The project on which this article is based sought to develop a peer review model that could be applied by any third‐sector organization to improve performance. The article reviews existing initiatives and details elements of models that the research sought to replicate. It describes the approach taken to develop the model, including details of three pilots, and summarizes the associated guidance. Finally, it incorporates a commentary on some of the opportunities and challenges presented by the model as a means of securing continued performance improvement by third‐sector organizations.     

Social participation and charitable giving: A multivariate analysis

Despite an abundance of survey data on charitable giving, researchers have not analysed these data asking the kinds of theoretical questions and employing the kinds of multivariate statistical techniques that would advance our understanding of the social processes leading to charitable behaviour. This article reports the authors' first findings from their continuing efforts to develop and test such a multivariate causal model of the social, demographic, economic and motivational determinants of individual charitable giving. The first section outlines ouridentification theory of charitable giving. In the second section we discuss the data and how we operationalise our variables. The third section examines whether there is broad quantitative support for major tenets of the model developed if applied at the household level. In the fourth section we enquire about which factors are most strongly related to giving behaviour. We conclude with a discussion about the centrality of communities of participation for inducing charitable giving and about the practical implications for fundraising. An earlier version of this article was prepared for presentation at the annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, Berkeley, October 1994. The authors are grateful to the T. B. Murphy Charitable Trust, the Lilly Endowment and the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy for their support of this research. We are also grateful to Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Stephen M. Noga for providing data from theSurvey of Giving and Volunteering and for sharing their expertise. Finally, we wish to thank the Editor ofVoluntas and three anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive suggestions.     

Legitimacy and the Role of UK Third Sector Organizations in the Policy Process

This paper explores the legitimacy of third sector organizations in the policy process in the United Kingdom. It draws on empirical research to examine how legitimacy is defined, both by third sector organizations and by those they target within government. The paper argues that while many third sector organizations give high priority to political forms of legitimacy—in the sense of participatory structures and accountability to members and beneficiaries—government is generally more likely to give priority to technical forms of legitimacy, e.g., the quality of research and the ability to implement policy. Nonetheless, political legitimacy is still important, first because this is the form of legitimacy that third sector organizations claim for themselves and second because, as government gives way to governance with an increase in partnerships and collaboration, the dilemmas faced by third sector organizations in achieving political legitimacy are being faced on a broader canvas.     

The voluntary sector and agency approval: A case study

The article describes and reviews the experiences of the voluntary sector in Oxfordshire in developing a consortium approach to gaining agency approval and the conflicts which were generated with CCETSW over attempts to open up placements and practice learning opportunities with the black voluntary sector in the county.     

Knowing and Governing: The Mapping of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector as Statecraft

Recent debate in Voluntas and elsewhere has paid a great deal of attention to the subject of mapping the nonprofit sector. However, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice of mapping is a political mode of knowing and the ways in which knowing is governing. In this essay, we turn to critical theory and political anthropology in order to demonstrate how mapping as it is currently practiced is a mode of knowledge inquiry that facilitates statecraft. In light of these interdisciplinary perspectives, we wrestle with the implications of knowing—and thereby governing—voluntary collective organization in this manner. We conclude that this approach potentially disciplines the qualitative dimensions of democratic associational life and misrepresents the possibilities of social change.     

Unpacking the State: The Implications for the Third Sector of Changing Relationships Between National and Local Government

The drive to welfare reform has revolutionalized the relationship between the state and the third sector in many countries. But this article argues that, if we are to understand the impact of the changing role of the state on the third sector, then we must first understand the dynamics of the relationship between national and local government. It compares two countries—the U.K. and Italy—where national-local government relations have developed in different directions, and suggests a number of avenues for further analysis of this three-way relationship.