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Three trends since the 1960s underscore the need for different ways of conceptualizing the new mixed economy in the human services. First, there has been an enormous increase in the number and types of nonprofit organizations, and greater dependence on governmental revenue. Second, extensive growth in privatization and commercialization in the human services. Third, this culminated in the convergence...
This article seeks to establish whether the structural-operational definition of the sector, used by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (JHCNSP), is universal in its applicability. Historical case studies of primary health care and social housing provision in nineteenth-century England demonstrate that the definition cannot accommodate the institutional diversity of earlier periods...
This article reviews the role of third sector organizations in the field of “proximity services” from a francophone perspective. We analyze how the new wave of initiatives inside the third sector in France and francophone Belgium can be seen as providing institutional responses to state and market failures that arise from trust-dependent and quasi-collective attributes of these services. These initiatives...
Our aim is to enhance the knowledge regarding how the public assess and rate volunteerism. We begin by first developing the model for understanding the potential use of the net-cost concept in eliciting the public's subjective perceptions on the extent to which certain activities are perceived as volunteerism. Four hypotheses relevant to the use of the net-cost concept are developed. We developed...
This paper analyzes both the political discourse and the reality of Czech civil society. It describes how the concept of civil society has emerged in a difficult ideological context, and sets out how policy towards it has developed, also highlighting its economic role. Recent empirical evidence on the existing range of citizens' activities and their attitudes toward aspects of civic society and organizations...
This paper presents an analysis of nonprofit organizations—the organizational infrastructure of civil society—in East Central Europe, from one important respect: by placing them in the context of the comparative historical sociology of the region's widespread informality. This involves two steps: (1) summarizing an argument about the role of informality in East Central European capitalism today in...
This paper examines the role of social proximity (nonprofit) organizations in the process of professional innovation that involved a transfer of human service technologies from Western Europe and the United States to Poland during the 1989 political–economic reform. To explain that role, the paper introduces a theoretical model that posits the existence of elective affinity between the social proximity...
How do international nonprofit organizations influence political party formation in new democracies? Despite recent analyses of external influences on economic restructuring, less attention has been paid to international assistance to political parties. Contrary to the scholarly literature stressing preexisting socioeconomic cleavages, I argue that new parties may emerge around political cleavages...
This research note addresses issues, concerns, and opportunities for teachers and researchers of the third sector in Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on experiences in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, and Hungary. The paper briefly outlines the development of the third sector in the aforementioned countries, and describes the current state of third sector teaching and research there. It then frames...
The Republic of Kazakhstan is developing a nonprofit sector, albeit slowly. It still suffers from the experience of 70 years of Communism but is now moving forward with development. This survey reviews the history, evolution, scope, and currency with a focus on the legal underpinnings of the nonprofit sector in Kazakhstan. In addition to discussing the traditions and cultures affecting development,...
Think tanks in the former Soviet bloc face the stark challenge of sustainability. To survive and prosper, they have to be increasingly entrepreneurial and business-like and have to actively seek contracts from government and the international donor community. In this context, this paper discusses the diversification strategies of four think tanks identified to be particularly entrepreneurial in developing...
Egoism is a pervasive trait in modern market societies that encourages people to focus upon their own self-interest above all else. Third-sector organizations, by contrast, are frequently termed “altruistic.” This essay elucidates the meaning of “altruism” as it applies to these organizations. Moral altruism means direct concern for another's well being—whoever that person might be. This study rejects...
This paper investigates the repertoire of organizational forms in Western societies in order to assess the nonprofit sector's distinctiveness. A repertoire of six different ideal type constructs is presented adding to and reformulating existing theories, which have primarily focused on the “market” and the “firm.” This new extended theoretical platform builds both on theories discussing market, organization,...
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