Dunn (law, U. of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK) presents 16 chapters survey the legal questions of activities of the British voluntary sector (non-profit and non-governmental organizations). Specific topics include legal structure and governance, accountability to government and service-users, regulation and privatization, partnerships with central and local governments, taxation of trading activities, volunteer behavior and regulation, political independence and control, and conflicts of interest. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Provides a multi-disciplinary survey of nonprofit organizations and their role and function in society. This book also examines the nature of philanthropic behaviours and an array of organizations, international issues, social science theories, and insight.

The growth of the non-profit, voluntary or third sector has been widely recognized throughout the world. This text seeks to provide a definition and a common classification of the non-profit sector, while recognizing the great diversity of voluntarism internationally.

A critical introduction to and analysis of the legal relationships between the state and voluntary sector, this volume provides the first available comparative analysis of state responses to voluntary sector activity in the wake of September 11th.

State regulation of civil society is expanding yet widely contested, often portrayed as illegitimate intrusion. Despite ongoing debates about the nature of state-voluntary relations in various disciplines, we know surprisingly little about why long-lived democracies adopt more or less constraining legal approaches in this sphere, in which state intervention is generally considered contentious. Drawing on insights from political science, sociology, comparative law as well as public administration research, this book addresses this important question, conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. It addresses the conceptual and methodological challenges related to developing systematic, comparative insights into the nature of complex legal environments affecting voluntary membership organizations, when simultaneously covering a wide range of democracies and the regulation applicable to different types of voluntary organizations. Proposing the analytical tools to tackle those challenges, it studies in-depth the intertwining and overlapping legal environments of political parties, interest groups, and public benefit organizations across 19 long-lived democracies. After presenting an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical framework theorizing democratic states' legal disposition towards, or their disinclination against, regulating voluntary membership organizations in a constraining or permissive fashion, this framework is empirically tested. Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the comparative analysis identifies three main 'paths' accounting for the relative constraints in the legal environments democracies have created for organized civil society, defined by different configurations of political systems' democratic history, their legal family, and voluntary sector traditions. Providing the foundation for a mixed-methods design, three ideal-typical representatives of each path - Sweden, the UK, and France - are selected for the in-depth study of these legal environments' long-term evolution, to capture reform dynamics and their drivers that have shaped group and party regulation over many decades.

The rise of the welfare state threatens the autonomy and survival of nonprofit voluntary agencies as providers of social services. Or does it? In this cross-national, empirical study of the workings of voluntary agencies, Ralph M. Kramer cuts through the conceptual confusion surrounding voluntarism and the boundaries between the public and private sectors. He draws on a survey of voluntary agencies helping disabled people in four welfare democracies (the United States, England, Israel, and the Netherlands) to explain the virtues and flaws of different patterns of government-voluntary relationships in coping with the growing demand for human services. Kramer concludes that many of the most cherished beliefs about the voluntary sector have little basis in fact. The most innovative agencies, for example, are not the smallest, but rather among the largest, most bureaucratized, and most professionalized. Government funding does not necessarily constrain agency autonomy. And giving voluntary agencies the primary responsibility for social services can reduce, not increase, citizen participation. This comparative analysis of the distinctive competence, vulnerability, and potential of the voluntary agency should replace some of the myths that guide public policy and the day-to-day activities of social service agencies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

Analysis the nonprofit sector in Italy and shows that such organizations operate in more diverse fields than those of the traditional welfare sectors.