S. Wojciech Sokolowski

Show me the way to the next worthy deed: Towards a microstructural theory of volunteering and giving

Using the data from a survey undertaken in the United States in 1992, this article examines the effects of altruism, self-interest and social ties on motivations to give and volunteer, as well as the effects of volunteering on definitions of life goals. Social ties with non-profit organisations were good predictors of both the value of charitable contributions and the time volunteered for charitable causes. The level of prior philanthropic activism and social connections with philanthropic institutions had an effect on life goals. Altruism and the desire for self-improvement had effects on volunteering, but not on giving. Utilitarian motives (expected career advancement) had no observable effects on volunteering or giving. Based on those findings, a general microstructural model of philanthropic behaviour is proposed.

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.

The implications of government funding for non‐profit organizations: three propositions

While the state dependency thesis seems widely accepted among students of the German non‐profit sector, there is surprisingly little research that has systematically explored its empirical base and conceptual validity. Attempts to remedy this situation and offers an initial empirical examination of this thesis. Examines the extent and pattern of state funding of the German non‐profit sector and develops three propositions, each adopting a different explanatory focus, which are then analysed with the help of data taken from a sample survey of West German non‐profit organizations.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall? Commentary on Heinrich

Volkhart Finn Heinrich’s “Studying Civil Society Across the World” offers an interesting discussion of the challenges involved in conceptualizing and measuring the increasingly important concept of civil society. The paper starts with a fourfold classification of concepts of civil society by the type of inquiry (normative v. empirical) and the ontological status of its object (attribute of social activity v. set of social institutions). However, it quickly turns into a comparison of essentially two research Projects assigned to one category of that classification: the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project and its Global Civil Society Index and the Civicus Civil Society Index that the author of this piece manages. Although the article claims to offer an objective assessment of these two Projects, in fact it quickly turns into a critique of the Hopkins Project, and a rather unfair one at that, and a defense of the Civicus approach. In this brief note, therefore, we seek to accomplish two purposes: first, to set the record straight about the CNP Project and its associated Global Civil Society Index (GCSI); and second, to suggest a better way to understand the relationship between these two efforts, one that clarifies their differences but also points up their potential complementarities and hence their potentials for fruitful interaction. Although, as principals in the CNP effort, we have obvious stakes in presenting that effort in favorable light, we also hope that readers will be in a better position as a consequence of this note to judge for themselves the relative merits and demerits of these two bodies of work. Journal of Civil Society Vol. 1, No. 3, 235–240, December 2005

Second commentary on Heinrich: “Studying civil society across the world”

We would like to thank the editors of JCS for their invitation to this conversation on the conceptualization and measurement of civil society. While it is a truism that science is a cumulative process of multiple research efforts, the reality is often far more compartmentalized and fragmented. The JCS editors therefore deserve credit for their efforts to transcend this compartmentalization and start a broader dialogue on the state of civil society research. As they rightly appreciated, however, such dialogue must begin with a clear understanding of what various scholars have done rather than caricatured portrayals tinged with suggestions of cultural bias. While Heinrich expresses disappointment that we focused our previous remarks on setting the record straight with regard to his portrayal of our own work in this field, we hope he will agree that such clarification is a necessary precursor to the kind of substantive exchange that he calls for, and that we certainly endorse. With this clarification of respective approaches as a backdrop, it may be possible now to address some of the substantive issues that have surfaced in the comparative civil society research arena. Three of these deserve mention here.

The Discreet Charm of the Nonprofit Form: Service Professionals and Nonprofit Organizations (Poland 1989-1993)

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 form and occupational interests of service providers. As the existing system of professions is no longer sufficient to legitimate expert services and curb competition among different types of providers, the social proximity form bestows social legitimacy on novel or controversial types of services, and is thus instrumental in marketing those services. The proposed model is supported by quantitative data and in-depth interviews. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Closing the Gap? New Perspectives on Volunteering North and South

This chapter brings new data to bear on the long-standing question of whether apparent North–South disparities in rates of volunteering result from the widespread failure to take account of direct, as opposed to organization-based, volunteering in most official volunteering surveys. To do so, it first outlines some of the misconceptions, definitional obstacles, and methodological glitches that have afflicted efforts to measure volunteering cross-nationally in the past. It then outlines the considerable progress that has been made by international statistical authorities to remedy these problems. Finally, it brings new data to bear on the question of whether apparent North–South disparities in volunteer effort disappear once direct volunteering is brought into the picture. Ultimately, the conclusion that emerges is that when both organization-based and direct volunteering are taken into account, the total amount of volunteer work that becomes visible is massively increased and the absolute disparities in the amount of volunteer work between better-off and less-well-off countries narrows. But the relative disparities in volunteering rates remain stubbornly unmoved. The article suggests that this may have more to do with volunteering overperformance on the part of well-off country residents than any volunteering underperformance on the part of less-well-offcountry residents.