TY - JOUR A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. A1 - Salamon, Lester M. T1 - Social Origins of Civil Society: Explaining the Nonprofit Sector Cross-Nationally JF - Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations N2 - 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. KW - Nonprofit theory KW - Social origins theory KW - Comparative methodology KW - Cross-national comparisons Y1 - 1998 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022058200985 SN - 0957-8765 VL - 9 IS - 3 SP - 213 EP - 248 PB - Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. A1 - Salamon, Lester M. T1 - On Developing Comparative Nonprofit-Sector Theory: A Reply to Steinberg and Young, and Ragin JF - Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations N2 - Responding to comments on “Social Origins of Civil Society,” an article published in this issue of Voluntas, this article focuses on three critical issues that underlie cross-national theory building and theory testing in the field of nonprofit studies: the issue of definitions, the challenge of operationalizing key theoretical concepts, and the nature of the tests available to verify results. Regarding the first, the article defends the structural-operational definition used in The Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project against suggestions by the commentators that it either be expanded or narrowed, arguing that the alternative is either to broaden the focus beyond what is manageable or to make the basic yardstick vulnerable to changing political and policy shifts—a sure prescription for confusion. Regarding the question of operationalization, the article concedes that better measures of some key features of prevailing theories might be imaginable, but, since few of these are available, it cautions against letting the best become the enemy of the good in cross-national nonprofit theory testing. Finally, the article finds, in suggestions that multivariate techniques be used in testing various nonprofit theories, confirmation of its central argument that a contextual analysis of the sort embodied in the authors' “social origins” approach is needed to come to terms with the reality of the nonprofit sector cross-nationally. Taken together these comments underline the need to continue the kind of systematic data gathering and theory testing that the authors have undertaken, to utilize an interdisciplinary approach, and to link the study of the nonprofit sector to social analysis more generally. KW - Nonprofit theory KW - Comparative history KW - Social origins theory KW - Democratic theory KW - Cross-national comparative analysis KW - Comparative methodology KW - Civil society Y1 - 1998 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022014418732 SN - 0957-8765 VL - 9 IS - 3 SP - 271 EP - 281 PB - Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. T1 - Comparative Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Sectors: Looking Back and Looking Forward JF - Voluntas N2 - While comparative research on nonprofit organizations has made much progress since the launch of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project in 1990, there now seems to be a loss of momentum. Some of the reasons for this have to do with aspects of definition, classification, and aggregation that can be corrected. The main issue, however, is the lack of progress in advancing comparative nonprofit sector theories beyond the social origins theory. To remedy this, the essay proposes four ways forward as part of a new research agenda. KW - Comparative nonprofit sector research KW - Structural-operational definition KW - Classification KW - Satellite accounts KW - Social origins theory Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-023-00608-5 ER -