Suchergebnisse

Writing on weaponized volunteering in these perilous times, one risks the perils Auden described of 'lecturing on navigation as the ship goes down'. Aging and unarmed, this scholar proceeds to respond to the invitation of providing concluding remarks to the monograph issue. I address four aspects of weaponized volunteering, as introduced in the five articles presented in this issue: (1) the significance of the content of this phenomenon; (2) the scope and quality of initial presentations; (3) the refinement of criteria for the subject; and (4) the range of responses that are likely to greet initial efforts to develop this field. Researchers in this field, if they are to succeed, will need to be exceptionally introspective, reflective, and self-critical. It will not be difficult for their critics to attack them as apologists for one or another side in the conflicts they study, or even as advocates for violence or terrorism. Studies in this field will themselves require study, relating, for example, the depiction of groups targeted for study to the intellectual backgrounds and political orientations of the researchers themselves. And the field itself will expand in both time and space: the long history of weaponized volunteering will be discovered and explored as it unfolds in the many corners of the earth; alternative futures and their implications for social peace and justice will require charting. In short, this may become a lively and important field, one which opens a wide range of new issues and concerns to the researcher aiming to understand the broadened nature of voluntary and purposive social action.

Liberalism is that ideology, that worldview, which values, in an ever-evolving set of intelligently intermingled thoughts: democracy, freedom (liberty), equality (justice), fraternity (solidarity), the pursuit of happiness, pluralism (diversity), and human rights--and explores the ever-open ever-possible futures of their rediscovery and advance. The study of ways in which social movements relate to Third sector/nonprofit or voluntary organizations can be structured, if we choose, as a liberal endeavor. That is the message I receive from Antonin Wagner's (2012) telling of the emergence of a field that focuses its study and developmental energies on place of intermediate associational life in modern society, from Adalbert Evers' efforts to sustain the welfare state in an era of untrammeled capitalism (2013), and from Roger Lohmann's (1992) comprehensive vision of a social commons capable of assuring the values of liberal society.This paper sets the theory of liberal democracy in a contemporary cosmopolitan context, drawing on case material from Hungary, Northern Ireland, and the United States.

Liberalism is that ideology, that worldview, which values, in an ever-evolving set of intelligently intermingled thoughts: democracy, freedom (liberty), equality (justice), fraternity (solidarity), the pursuit of happiness, pluralism (diversity), and human rights--and explores the ever-open ever-possible futures of their rediscovery and advance. The study of ways in which social movements relate to Third sector/nonprofit or voluntary organizations can be structured, if we choose, as a liberal endeavor. That is the message I receive from Antonin Wagner's (2012) telling of the emergence of a field that focuses its study and developmental energies on place of intermediate associational life in modern society, from Adalbert Evers' efforts to sustain the welfare state in an era of untrammeled capitalism (2013), and from Roger Lohmann's (1992) comprehensive vision of a social commons capable of assuring the values of liberal society.This paper sets the theory of liberal democracy in a contemporary cosmopolitan context, drawing on case material from Hungary, Northern Ireland, and the United States.

For the past quarter-century, the field of voluntary action/nonprofit organization/third sector research has been dominated by a paradigm that focuses on organizations certified as tax exempt by the IRS and subject to an inability to distribute economic assets. This definition has facilitated large-scale empirical research but has dropped from visibility a wide range of important community-based voluntary and nonprofit organizations, including in the United States some 9 million grassroots organizations and a wide range of cooperative and mutual benefit organizations. In recent years, a critical literature has developed that challenges this dominant conception. This perspective has taken form under the leadership of the EMES European Research Network and employs a more expansive conception of the third sector than does the conventional American view. That conception is explored and refined in this article, the argument being that the value of the third sector far exceeds the contributions of tax-certified nonprofit organizations.

AbstractThe United Way: Dilemmas of Organized Charity, by Eleanor L. Brilliant, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 382 pp. $47.00.The United Way Scandal: An Insider's Account of What Went Wrong and Why, by John Glaser. New York: Wiley, 1994, 274 pp., $34.95.Free Ride: The Tax‐Exempt Economy, by Gilbert Gaul and Neill M. Borowski. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1993. 197 pp., $6.95 (paper).