The hallmark of the welfare state is the extension of social rights to the most vulnerable, a cause historically championed by nonprofit human-service organizations. With the rise of neoliberalism, these rights are threatened. This article attempts to show how the institutional, economic, and political environment of the nonprofit human-service sector is reshaped by a neoliberal ideology that celebrates market fundamentalism. The ideology institutionalizes such rules and practices as new public management, devolution, and privatization of services. Those elements shift the political discourse about the rights of the most vulnerable from the national to the local level. By turning vulnerable citizens into consumers, the ideology also reduces the national visibility of their needs. Most importantly, neoliberalism dampens the sector’s motivation to challenge the state and greatly curtails its historical mission to advocate and mobilize for social rights.

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Nonprofit Human-Service Organizations, Social Rights, and Advocacy in a Neoliberal Welfare State

In this article, the author examines a slow but profound revolution in U.S. human services over the past 50 years. The author provides a general overview of the human service field, its current size and composition, and the role of nonprofit organizations; examines broad trends in these dimensions and the role of government policies; and reviews why and how these developments constitute significant changes in human services and how they compare with those in other fields. The article concludes with a look at the future role of nonprofit organizations in human services and at major developments in the funding and management of nonprofit human service organizations.

The U.S. Nonprofit Human Service Sector: A Creeping Revolution

Welfare reform discussions in the 1990s included proposals for government to support religious organizations that provide social services. This fostered a debate about the proper relationship betwe...

Defining Faith-Based Organizations and Understanding Them Through Research:

Among traditionally educated scholars in the Islamic world there is much disagreement on the crises that afflict modern Muslim societies and how best to deal with them, and the debates have grown more urgent since 9/11. Through an analysis of the work of Muhammad Rashid Rida and Yusuf al-Qaradawi in the Arab Middle East and a number of scholars belonging to the Deobandi orientation in colonial and contemporary South Asia, this book examines some of the most important issues facing the Muslim world since the late nineteenth century. These include the challenges to the binding claims of a long-established scholarly consensus, evolving conceptions of the common good, and discourses on religious education, the legal rights of women, social and economic justice and violence and terrorism. This wide-ranging study by a leading scholar provides the depth and the comparative perspective necessary for an understanding of the ferment that characterizes contemporary Islam.

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism

Every question concerning U.S. nonprofit organizations and its nonprofit sector as a whole has a historical dimension. Changing state and federal laws have always determined both what nonprofit corporations and associations can do and who can join and lead them. Conflicts over individual freedom, the nature of government, the role of various religions, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other matters have always shaped these laws. Learning about the nonprofit sector has just begun, but large numbers of books and data sources—many noted in this article—are relevant. Numbers of nonprofit employees grew from near zero to 1% of the U.S. labor force in 1900, to 3% in 1960, and 9% in 2000. Consumer wealth, steadily increasing government subsidies, and expanded individual rights explain the growth. The sector limits religious and other cultural conflicts and promotes diversity, while increasing inequality.

Nonprofit Organizations in American History Research Opportunities and Sources

Between the Civil War and World War II, Catholic charities evolved from volunteer and local origins into a centralized and professionally trained workforce that played a prominent role in the development of American welfare. Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown document the extraordinary efforts of Catholic volunteers to care for Catholic families and resist Protestant and state intrusions at the local level, and they show how these initiatives provided the foundation for the development of the largest private system of social provision in the United States. It is a story tightly interwoven with local, national, and religious politics that began with the steady influx of poor Catholic immigrants into urban centres. Supported by lay organizations and by sympathetic supporters in city and state politics, religious women operated foundling homes, orphanages, protectories, reformatories, and foster care programmes for the children of the Catholic poor in New York City and in urban centres around the country. When pressure from reform campaigns challenged Catholic child care practices in the first decades of the 20th century, Catholic charities underwent a significant transformation, coming under central diocesan control and growing increasingly reliant on the services of professional social workers. And as the Depression brought nationwide poverty and an overwhelming need for public solutions, Catholic charities faced a staggering challenge to their traditional claim to stewardship of the poor. In their account, Brown and McKeown add an important dimension to our understanding of the transition from private to state social welfare.

The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare

The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare. By Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown. Cambridge: Harvard University Press and Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America. By Timothy A. Hasci. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Elizabeth McKeown

Papers

The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare

The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare. By Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown. Cambridge: Harvard University Press and Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America. By Timothy A. Hasci. Cambridge: Harvard University Press