Voluntary Sector Organizing in International Contexts

This essay introduces questions and critiques about the contemporary study of voluntary organizations in the world’s industrialized nations. In doing so it acknowledges contending models and labels, competing empirical approaches, and conflicting representations and definitions of the voluntary action at the heart of existing studies. The essay provides a brief critique of the dominant American model that stresses the demography and management of nonprofit organizations. We note the model’s potential limitations for studying voluntary organizing in developing countries and provide a cautious introduction to the civil society implications of “third way” models of governance, an approach introduced primarily from Europe. The essay concludes by introducing the four empirical studies that comprise the exploration of “third ways” from a variety of international contexts.