Reflections on the Concept and Measurement of Global Civil Society

This paper argues that the current academic debate about global civil society has reached a point where some assessment or reflection could be useful for informing the course of future research in the field. Behind this call for an assessment is the very nature of the debate and emerging gaps and weaknesses that together produce a potential slow-down in generating new knowledge and understanding of global civil society. There are several shortcomings to the current research approach: the failure to take account of other civil society traditions; the failure to address the relationship between global civil society, conflict, and violence; and, most critically, the neglect of the notion of civility, both conceptually and empirically. The balance of the paper then explores the implications of this new assessment of global civil society research.     

Book reviews

As we have seen, there are great differences between the three books, both in the way demography is treated and in the way the issues are raised: the thematic outline is different, as are the methods used to tackle the many topics covered and the attitudes to the problems triggered by development trends.However, despite these differences, there is a stress throughout on the need to closely follow demographical behaviour and its importance for society as a whole. Thus, while certain trends are common to each of the three countries, future prospects are not quite the same, and there is a call for policy directions which reflect these differences. The underlying motive is not to condition trends (which past experience has shown to be little open to change) but rather to tackle promptly and effectively the problems which these give rise to.     

Meet the Parents? Family Size and the Geographic Proximity Between Adult Children and Older Mothers in Sweden

The aim of this study is to estimate the causal effect of family size on the proximity between older mothers and adult children by using a large administrative data set from Sweden. Our main results show that adult children in Sweden are not constrained by sibship size in choosing where to live: for families with more than one child, sibship size does not affect child-mother proximity. For aging parents, however, having fewer children reduces the probability of having at least one child living nearby, which is likely to have consequences for the intensity of intergenerational contact and eldercare.     

Abstracts in French,German, and Spanish

Abstract List

Abstracts in French, German, and Spanish     

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.