After briefly explaining why social capital (civil society) is important to democracy, Putnam devotes the bulk of this chapter to demonstrating social capital’s decline in the United States across the last quarter century. (See Putnam 1995 for a similar but more detailed argument.) While he acknowledges that the significance of a few countertrends is difficult to assess without further study, Putnam concludes that crucial factors such as social trust are eroding rapidly in the United States. He offers some possible explanations for this erosion and concludes by outlining the work needed to consider these possibilities more fully.

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“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

The authors construct an integrated theory of formal and informal volunteer work based on the premises that volunteer work is (1) productive work that requires human capital, (2) collective behavior that requires social capital, and (3) ethically guided work that requires cultural capital. Using education, income and functional health to measure human capital, number of children in the household and informal social interaction to measure social capital, and religiosity to measure cultural capital, they estimate a model in which formal volunteering and informal helping are reciprocally related but connected in different ways to different forms of capital. Using two-wave data from the Americans' Changing Lives panel study, they find that formal volunteering is positively related to human capital, number of children in the household, informal social interaction and religiosity. Informal helping, such as helping a neighbor, is primarily determined by gender, age and health. Estimation of reciprocal effects reveals that formal volunteering has a positive effect on helping, but helping does not affect formal volunteering

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Who cares? Toward an integrated theory of volunteer work

The weak link between public spending in health and education, and health and education outcomes can be partially explained by the fact that the delivery of services that are critical to human development -- health, education, water and sanitation -- are widely failing poor people. The money is often spent on private goods or on the non-poor; it often fails to reach the frontline service provider; incentives for service delivery by providers are weak; and poor people sometimes fail to demand these services. This paper examines the experience with alternative mechanisms for service delivery -- contracting out to the private and NGO sectors, community participation, co-financing by service beneficiaries -- and shows that this, as well as the experience of more traditional public sector provision, can be interpreted by looking at three principal-agent relationships in the service-delivery chain: between policymakers and providers; between clients and providers; and between clients (as citizens) and policymakers. Weaknesses in one or more of these relationships can lead to service-delivery failure, while attempts to strengthen one may not always work because of deficiencies in other links in the chain. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Making Services Work for Poor People

Social enterprise has emerged as a businesslike contrast to the traditional nonprofit organization This article develops an explanatory direction for social enterprise based on institutional perspectives rather than more traditional rational economic concepts Through Suchman's typology of legitimacy (1995), the article argues that the origin and evolution of social enterprise is put into dramatically different focus, particularly through the concept of moral legitimacy Moral legitimacy not only connects the overall emergence of social enterprise with neoconservative, pro-business, and promarket political and ideological values that have become central in many nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development but also explains the observation that social enterprise is being more frequently understood and practiced in more narrow commercial and revenue-generation terms

The legitimacy of social enterprise

The authors present an overview of the academic literature on charitable giving based on a literature review of more than 500 articles. They structure their review around the central question of why people donate money to charitable organizations. They identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive charitable giving: (a) awareness of need; (b) solicitation; (c) costs and benefits; (d) altruism; (e) reputation; (f) psychological benefits; (g) values; (h) efficacy. These mechanisms can provide a basic theoretical framework for future research explaining charitable giving.

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A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms That Drive Charitable Giving

The second edition of The Nonprofit Sector provides a novel, comprehensive, cross-disciplinary perspective on nonprofit organizations and their role and function in society. This new, updated edition keeps pace with industry trends and advances as well as with the changing interests and needs of students, practitioners, and researchers. As before, every chapter has been written to stand on its own, providing sufficient background for the reader to follow the argument without referring to other chapters--allowing readers to selectively choose those chapters that are most relevant to a particular course, interest, or issue. The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook includes twenty-seven new or updated chapters. Relevant chapters from the previous edition have been refined, and new chapters have been added to fill in gaps, making this the authoritative reference for all who want an accessible, perceptive, and all-inclusive rendering of the nonprofit sector. The contributors--prominent scholars in their respective fields--carefully reflect upon the variety of changes in the rapidly growing world of nonprofits, examining a wide array of organizations, international issues, social science theories, and philanthropic traditions and covering a broad range of topics including the history and scope of nonprofit activities in the United States and abroad, the relation of nonprofits to the marketplace, government-nonprofit issues, key activities of nonprofits, aspects of giving to and joining nonprofits, and nonprofit mission and governance. For anyone who wishes to have a deeper understanding of the nonprofit sector, this remains the essential guide. From reviews of the first edition: "[This book] is the closest thing to a 'bible' of nonprofit sector research and state-of-the-art social science knowledge as currently exists."--Dennis R. Young, Public Administration Review "Invaluable to anyone currently engaged in research or policy decisions involving nonprofit organizations or, for that matter, considering becoming involved."--Jerald Schiff, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management "An exceptionally useful resource."--Mark D. Hughes, The Philanthropist

The nonprofit sector : a research handbook

What makes for a good theory in economics? Tastes and opinions differ on this important issue, with some admiring the mathematical elegance and logical completeness of analysis, some admiring the metaphoric insight provided by deep description, and others admiring the development of new analytic tools rather than the application of those tools to nonprofit issues. In this Chapter, I choose to evaluate economic theories of the nonprofit sector by their ability to answer what I regard as the central questions in (a) describing the sector; (b) formulating governmental policy towards the sector; and (c) managing nonprofit organizations. More specifically, I discuss theories’ ability to enlighten our understanding of the scope of inquiry, the determinants of the size and scope of the nonprofit sector, and the behavioral responses of donors, volunteers, paid staff, and nonprofit organizations to changes in their external environment. I then turn, more briefly and selectively, to theories’ ability to inform tax policy towards donations, taxation of nonprofit entities, competition among and between organizations in the various sectors, and fundraising regulation. Finally, I briefly discuss theories’ ability to improve the pricing, fundraising, and evaluation functions of nonprofit management.

Economic Theories of Nonprofit Organizations

Although assertions have often been made about the objectives underlying the behavior of nonprofit firms, there has been no empirical confirmation of these assertions. This article proposes a way to infer a nonprofit organization's objective function by estimating the marginal donative product of its fundraising. Panel data estimates derived by using Hildreth and Houck's (1968) random coefficients model, suggest that welfare, education, and arts firms are "service maximizers," that health firms are budget maximizers, and that the objective of research firms cannot be ascertained within the family of objective functions considered.

The Revealed Objective Functions of Nonprofit Firms

Reward structures in public good experiments

The economics literature on nonprofit utilization of employees and volunteers is reviewed and synthesized. Economic motivations for volunteering and accepting volunteers are explored along with inter actions between gifts of time and of money and the economic value of volunteer labor. Also examined are factors explaining wage differ ences between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors and the differential employment of women and minorities.

Richard Steinberg

Papers

The nonprofit sector : a research handbook

Economic Theories of Nonprofit Organizations

The Revealed Objective Functions of Nonprofit Firms

Reward structures in public good experiments

Labor Economics and the Nonprofit Sector: A Literature Review