Lester M. Salamon

Partners in public service : government-nonprofit relations in the modern welfare state

Lester Salamon pioneered the study of nonprofit organizations and of their cooperation with government in the development and delivery of important social and economic services. His unique research in the early and mid-1980s was the first to document the pervasive interrelationships between government and the nonprofit sector in the United States, identifying some of crucial characteristics of nonprofit human service agencies and examining the impact of the budget and tax policies of tire Reagan and Bush administrations. Partners in Public Service brings together some of Lester Salamons most important work on the changing relationship between government and the voluntary sector in the American version of the modern welfare state. Approaching issues from a variety of perspectives -- theoretical, empirical, retrospective, prospective, and comparative -- Salamon illuminates the theoretical basis of government-nonprofit cooperation, shows why government came to rely on nonprofit groups to administer public programs, documents the scope of the resulting partnership, reviews the consequences for this partnership of recent attempts to cut federal spending, and explores the expanding scope of government-nonprofit collaboration at the international level.

Social Origins of Civil Society: Explaining the Nonprofit Sector Cross-Nationally

Recent research has usefully documented the contribution that nonprofit organizations make to “social capital” and to the economic and political development it seems to foster. Because of a gross lack of basic comparative data, however, the question of what it is that allows such organizations to develop remains far from settled. This article seeks to remedy this by testing five existing theories of the nonprofit sector against data assembled on eight countries as part of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. The five theories are: (a) government failure/market failure theory; (b) supply-side theory; (c) trust theories; (d) welfare state theory; and (e) interdependence theory. The article finds none of these theories adequate to explain the variations among countries in either the size, the composition, or the financing of the nonprofit sector. On this basis it suggests a new theoretical approach to explaining patterns of nonprofit development among countries—the “social origins” approach—which focuses on broader social, political, and economic relationships. Using this theory, the article identifies four “routes” of third-sector development (the liberal, the social democratic, the corporatist, and the statist), each associated with a particular constellation of class relationships and pattern of state-society relations. The article then tests this theory against the eight-country data and finds that it helps make sense of anomalies left unexplained by the prevailing theories.

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.

Volunteering in Cross-National Perspective: Initial Comparisons

Despite a growing interest in volunteering at national and international levels, few studies have explored comparative aspects of voluntary activities. To remedy this situation, this paper looks at the cultural differences in defining volunteering in relation to paid work on the one hand, and compulsory work on the other. Against this background, the paper explores cross-national patterns in the frequency of volunteering, the social characteristics of volunteers, and the motivations that lie behind them. The paper finds a close relationship between the type of non-profit regime (liberal, social democratic, corporatist, and statist) and the role and importance of volunteering. In closing , the paper addresses policy issues and open research questions.

The emerging nonprofit sector : an overview

Nonprofit organizations, which collectively make up the emerging sector, have an increasingly influential role in the economies and societies of countries throughout the world. This book, the product of comprehensive international research into the sector, offers an international overview of its scope, structure, financing and role. The authors provide a comparative summary of the findings of individual empirical analyses into the nonprofit sectors in 12 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Japan, Brazil, Ghana, Egypt, Thailand and India. They explore the global scale of the sector, its sources of revenue, and differences between the countries analyzed. They assess how well-equipped nonprofit organizations are to respond to the shift towards voluntarism and away from government in many societies, and they identify the key issues such organizations need to address in the future, such as coming to terms with globalization.

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.

The nonprofit sector at a crossroads: the case of America

Despite some encouraging trends, Americas nonprofit sector stands at a crossroads because of an interrelated series of challenges. Government budget cuts beginning in the early 1980s have eliminated a significant source of nonprofit revenues and created a serious fiscal squeeze for many organizations. Although the sector as a whole managed to replace this lost revenue, it has done so largely through fees and charges that have attracted for-profit businesses into traditional fields of nonprofit action, creating a serious economic challenge to the sector. Simultaneously, important questions have been raised about the effectiveness and accountability of nonprofit organizations, and about what some see as the overprofessionalization and bureaucratization of the sector. All of this has undermined public confidence in the sector and prompted questions about the basic legitimacy of the special tax and legal benefits it enjoys. To cope with these challenges, American nonprofits could usefully undergo a process of renewal that revives the sectors basic values, reconnects it to its citizen base, and creates a better public understanding of its functions and role.

Institutional Roots of Volunteering

The “legitimation crisis” (Habermas, 1975) that has enveloped the state and large-scale corporate enterprise in recent years has prompted a search for alternatives among political leaders and community activists in many parts of the world. A useful byproduct of this search has been the discovery, or rediscovery, of an alternative social force (Touraine, 1988), the spontaneous self-organization of individuals in pursuit of collective goals, epitomized by the growth of nonprofit organizations and by the popular social movements that have characterized the 20th century, including the suffragists, Gandhism, Liberation Theology, the Civil Rights movement, the antiapartheid, antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements, “Solidarnnosc,” and recently the protest movement against the negative aspects of globalization.

In Search of the Nonprofit Sector: Improving the State of the Art

The purpose of this article is to assess the data resources currently available to measure the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector and to describe an effort underway to fill some of the existing knowledge gaps. This article discusses a rich but so far underutilized source of data on nonprofit employment: the ES-202 data program managed by State Employment Security Agencies under the supervision of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This article first identifies a set of criteria for evaluating existing data on nonprofit institutions, then applies these criteria to the existing sources of empirical data on these institutions, and finally describes the effort now underway through the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Employment Data Project to produce employment data from the ES-202 system to close some of the gaps that currently exist in our ability to measure the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector.

The Voluntary Sector and the Future of the Welfare State

Several critical factors, including demographic trends and shifts in public policy, promise to alter the balance between public, nonprofit, and proprietary provision of human services in the years ahead.