Suchergebnisse

This paper describes and analyses the response of UK civil society in the early months of the Covid-19 crisis, roughly the period March to July 2020. While focussing primarily on civil society actors, the paper includes an exploration of how civil society and the national government interacted with each other. It considers the extent to which responses to the Covid-19 crisis reflect familiar patterns of behaviour by civil society in the UK, and in the relationship between the government and 'third sector'. The paper concludes by pointing to emergent issues for civil society as the UK looked towards recovery from the initial wave of crisis.

This article considers how the field of voluntary sector studies (VSS) in the UK emerged. Drawing on published and unpublished documents as well as on semi-structured interviews with people involved in the early development of VSS, a timeline of key events is suggested. The analysis reveals both social and cognitive elements in the field's development and considers the broader policy and institutional context within which key events of the VSS field occurred.

Although the field of nonprofit studies now encompasses a substantial body of literature on the relationship between governmental and nonprofit organizations, the relationship between the business and nonprofit sectors has been less addressed by specialist nonprofit scholars. This Research Note aims to encourage further studies by nonprofit scholars of the business-nonprofit sector relationship. It looks at descriptive evidence to date, proposes a tentative resource-based framework for understanding how nonprofits and business relate to each other in practice and suggests some initial directions for developing a subfield within nonprofit studies.

Wichita, incorporated in 1870 as a village, is the largest city in Kansas. It is the county seat of Sedgwick County, located at the junction of the Arkansas Rivers in south central Kansas. Westward expansion and financial rewards attracted the first White settlers to the area in the 1850s and 1860s looking to profit from hunting and trapping wildlife and to trade with the native American population, the Wichita Indians, who had moved north from Oklahoma and built a permanent settlement in 1863.

This article draws attention to two significant strands in the development of contemporary social science scholarship: the recognition of the importance of self in research processes and the recognition of the reflexive nature of knowledge construction. It argues that these two strands should be taken more seriously by nonprofit and voluntary sector scholars. A family history case study is presented: the outcome of the author's own research into the ways in which the lives of her parents and grandparents, as well as her own life, have been affected by nonprofit and voluntary organizations. The author considers how this has affected her own academic work in the nonprofit and voluntary sector field. The article concludes with a discussion of what, in the light of the case study, social science thinking on reflexivity and on the place of self in research might contribute to third sector scholarship in the future.

AbstractIn her inaugural lecture at the Aston Business School in Birmingham, England, presented here in an edited version, Margaret Harris looks at the contributions of the voluntary and charity sector to individual lives and to our society. She examines the distinctive features of voluntary organizations and outlines the threats currently facing them. She argues that universities have an important role to play in ensuring the survival of the voluntary sector, the accumulation of "social capital," and the maintenance of "civil society."

Nonprofit scholars have generally paid little attention to the organizational features of voluntary associations. This article starts to fill this gap in nonprofit scholarship. It proposes five key challenges of associational organization: meeting long-term goals and individual member's needs, balancing member-benefit and public-benefit goals, setting priorities in the face of competing interests, controlling member volunteers, and integrating paid staff. The article suggests that voluntary associations are conceptually and organizationally distinguish able from the bureaucratic service-delivering agencies of the broader nonprofit sector and merit specific research attention to build descriptive data and specialist theory.