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NONPROFIT SECTOR AND CIVIL SOCIETY:
ARE THEY COMPETING PARADIGMS?
MARK LYONS
CACOM WORKING PAPER NO 35
NOVEMBER 1996
This paper was presented to the “Social Cohesion, Justice, Citizenship. The Role of the
Voluntary Sector” Biennial Conference of Australian and New Zealand Third Sector
Research Limited, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, 3-5 July 1996
Mark Lyons is an Associate Professor in the School of Management at the University of
Technology, Sydney and Director of the Centre for Australian Community Organisations
and Management (CACOM)
ISSN: 1036 823X
ISBN: 1 86365 341 4
CENTRE FOR AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITY ORGANISATIONS
AND MANAGEMENT (CACOM)
Community organisations are the product of group or community initiatives. They are formed to provide
services to their members or to a wider public. Community organisations are particularly active in providing
community services, health, housing, culture and recreation, education and training, finance, religion and in
the organised representation of interests.
Community organisations are not run to make a profit for owners or shareholders and are not under the formal
control of government. As a class they differ in important ways from both for-profit and government
organisations. They differ in the ways they are governed, in the variety of their sources of income and in their
frequent reliance on volunteers.
It is the mission of the Centre for Australian Community Organisations and Management (CACOM) to
strengthen the Australian community sector and its management through research, management training and
publication.
Among CACOM’s objectives are:
•
to promote a better understanding of the Australian community sector by undertaking and publicising
basic research on its size, its resources, its management practices, its history and its relations with
government and other sectors of the economy; and,
•
to provide an information resource by collecting and disseminating research and other information
vital to the community sector.
To this end CACOM sponsors a Working Paper Series.
Generally, CACOM Working Papers will publish research undertaken by CACOM members or encouraged
by CACOM. The aim is to make the results of research widely available as quickly as possible to encourage
discussion. In some cases, the research reported in a working paper will be further refined for refereed
publication.
Working papers are available to academics, researchers, community sector managers, public servants and
others who are interested in better understanding the Australian community sector.
If you wish to comment on this paper or seek further details of CACOM’s activities and publications, write to:
The Director
Centre for Australian Community
Organisations and Management (CACOM),
University of Technology, Sydney,
Kuring-gai Campus, P O Box 222,
LINDFIELD NSW 2070, AUSTRALIA
Phone: (02) 9514 5311
Fax: (02) 9514 5583
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
i
Introduction
1
Nonprofit Sector
3
Civil Society
6
Comparing Civil Society and Nonprofit Research
11
Conclusion
14
References
14
ABSTRACT
The growth of research into and writing about the third sector over the last decade has been
remarkable. It began in the United States but quickly spread to other countries. There is, however,
a bifurcation in this research. Some identifies itself as being interested in nonprofit organisation,
other research describes its interest as civil society. Nonprofit research is strongly influenced by
economics, whilst political science and sociology are the formative disciplines for civil society
research. This paper explores these two traditions and asks whether they are fundamentally
incompatible.
i
Introduction
The growth of research into and writing about what I shall call the third sector over the past 20 years
has been remarkable. It began in the United States but has spread to many countries as the
membership directory of the International Society of Third Sector Research (ISTR) can testify.
In part this growing interest would appear to be a response to the growth of the third sector world
wide. In an important paper in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, Lester Salamon, has argued
that this growth is the product of several factors: a loss of confidence in the welfare state in
developed countries; a crisis in government led models of development in most of the third world in
response to the oil price shocks of the 1970s; the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe
and their replacement by political systems that allow the articulation of various interests; the huge
growth in the size of the educated middle class in many Asian and other countries; the growth of
social movements such as the women’s movement, the environment movement, and the human
rights movements, which manifest themselves in thousands of third sector organisations (Salamon,
1994). Interest in the third sector has been provoked not only by its international growth, but also by
the collapse of Marxism as an intellectual movement. This in turn has led to the partial dissolving of
the old left/right distinctions and has generated a quest for new social theory and a critical
reassessment of the role of the state.
But while this fruitful intellectual climate and the apparent growth of the third sector world wide
may have helped fuel the growth of research into it, they are not a sufficient condition.
It is perfectly possible for the third sector, its growth or decline, to go unnoticed,as the record in
Australia shows. In part, this is because the third sector is fragmented into various fields of activity:
education, health, sport, community services, recreation, interest groups and the like, so that the
common features of organisations that constitute the sector are not easily recognised (Lyons, 1993).
To paraphrase Peter Dobkin Hall’s provocative but accurate observation, in a country such as
Australia the third sector (for Hall, the nonprofit sector) needs to be “invented” (Hall, 1992).
1
I have used the term third sector in an attempt to find as neutral and as generic a term as possible for
all those organised efforts that are neither part of government nor designed to return a profit for
owners, plus volunteering and philanthropy. The growing interest in the third sector by researchers,
intellectuals and activists that was referred to above does not share a common terminology. Rather,
it has emerged in different parts of the world, among researchers from different disciplines with
different concerns and different forms of discourse for expressing them.
Within these many different strands, it is possible to identify two forms of discourse, two intellectual
movements. These are best captured by the terms ‘nonprofit sector’ and ‘civil society’. The first
began in the United States in the 1970s but has a world wide salience; the second was revivified in
Eastern Europe at about the same time, but acquired a strong articulation in the 1980s, not only there
but in Asia and Latin America and finally attracted usage in the United States where it has drawn on
and become entangled with some older intellectual projects of political scientists and sociologists
which are focused on what has been called variously civic culture (Almond and Verba, 1963)
communitarism (Etzioni, 1987); civic voluntarism, (Verba, 1996) and social capital (Coleman, 1990;
Putnam, 1993, 1995). Generally speaking, as scholars in these two traditions become aware of the
other tradition, they welcome it, though tentatively. Thus Amati Etzioni, the founding father of the
new ‘communitarian’ movement gave the keynote address to first ISTR conference in Budapest in
1994, and Robert Putnam has become an active participant in ARNOVA, the Association of
Research on Nonprofit Organisations and Voluntary Action. Yet there has been to this point little
cross fertilisation in ideas.
That raises the question that this paper seeks to explore. Are the two traditions of discourse, of
scholarship and research simply illuminating different parts of the third sector, so that their insights
can simply be added to give a fuller picture of the third sector, or are they at heart, different and thus
competing paradigms that lead to quite different conclusions about how to evaluate and theorise
about the third sector and individual third sector organisations.
The paper will sketch salient aspects of the two traditions, that of the nonprofit sector and civil
society, and will draw out some of their similarities and differences especially how they go about
evaluating the object of their study.
2
Nonprofit sector
Despite the oft quoted remarks of the French commentator de Tocqueville in the 1830s about the
American passion for forming associations, the growth of extensive scholarly interest in the
nonprofit sector began in the United States in the late 1960s. The events that triggered it were a
series of poplar attacks on foundations. These attacks came from both left and right and led to
Congressional enquiries which culminated in the 1969 Tax Reform Act. These criticisms and
official enquiries spurred a response by sections of the nonprofit sector which culminated in the
early- to mid-1970s with the Filer Commission, established by a few foundation leaders,
congressional leaders and the United States Treasury (Hall, 1994: 72-80). It was the extensive
research agenda developed and pursued by the Filer Commission that marked the first extensive
acknowledgment by the research community of the nonprofit sector. Given its origins, much of the
research which the Filer Commission sponsored focused on the impact of taxation on private giving,
on foundations and on the large public-serving nonprofits, such as hospitals, universities, art
museums and social service organisations.
Responding to the same events that led to the Filer Commission after a long gestation, Yale
University began its Program on Non Profit Organisations (PONPO), with one of its fundamental
tasks being that of defining what might be meant by ‘nonprofit sector’ (Hall, 1994: 249). In the end,
the definition that was adopted and is now generally used refers to organisations given tax exempt
status by the US Tax Code, or alternatively, organisations that are prevented by their constitution
from distributing any surplus funds, which is, basically, what the Internal Revenue Service requires
to award tax exemption.
For some, this definition and associated terminology was too broad in scope and too negative in
connotation. In 1979, a loose grouping of peak bodies representing various groups of charitable
nonprofits (or the 501C3s), in the terminology of the US Tax Code) formed the Independent Sector
which has since then played a crucial role through its annual research forums, its own research,
especially on the dimensions of the nonprofit sector, giving and volunteering and through its various
publications. The concept of an independent sector has been criticised as being both false and bad
3
politics: false, because few of these organisations are truly independent (most of them receive large
amounts of government funding in particular); bad politics, because such an assertion of
independence encourages government to reduce its support. Nonetheless, the Independent Sector
has done much to advance research into and to create a wider public awareness of the concept of a
nonprofit sector.
But probably it was PONPO at Yale which, building on the Filer Commissions research, did most to
establish a clear and strong research tradition for the nonprofit sector. Many of the prominent names
in US nonprofit studies have had an association with Yale: Simon, Hansmann, James, Rose
Ackerman, Young, Steinberg, Ben Ner, DiMaggio, Powell, Hall, Milofsky, Anheier. There are
certainly important exceptions:
Horton Smith, Van Til, Salamon, Weisbrod, Clotfelter, Dale,
O’Neill, Lohmann, Gronbjerg – to name but a few. And, over the past decade, other centres have
grown. Nonetheless, nonprofit scholarship was given its formative shape by the work of the Filer
Commission’s research and PONPO. The definition of the sector and the priority in deciding
matters requiring research have been determined primarily by lawyers and economists, such as the
first seven of the Yale group named above and three of the other group.
The strength of this legal/economic paradigm can be seen in the history of ARNOVA, the scholarly
association that now draws 400 scholars to its annual conference.
At the time as the Filer
Commission researchers were beginning work, but emerging from a different tradition and set of
interests, academic sociologists, David Horton-Smith and John Van Til, began the Association of
Voluntary Action Scholars focusing research attention on voluntary action and (primarily) voluntary
associations, phenomena of little interest to those in the Filer group. During the 1970s and 1980s it
was the nonprofit research group around PONPO and the Independent Sector which grew in scope
and prominence. They gradually became entangled with AVAS and in the early 1990s, AVAS
underwent a name change to the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organisations and
Voluntary Action, or ARNOVA, a marriage of the two traditions, one emerging largely (but not
exclusively) from economics and law, and the other from sociology (and, to a lesser extent, political
science). But it is the former tradition which has dominated. Some work on voluntary associations,
small neighbourhood-based self help membership bodies has been done by Smith (eg Smith, 1991,
4
1992, 1993, 1995), but by and large the major emphasis within ARNOVA over the past 6 years has
been on public serving, employment generating nonprofit organisations.
What then is the scope of the nonprofit research project and the theory that underpins it. Essentially,
nonprofit theory is interwoven with economic theory.
At the heart of any theory is an explanation of why the phenomenon that is the object of study exists.
The explanation for the existence of nonprofit organisations is framed in terms familiar to
economists who assume that the profit maximising firm operating in a free market is the natural form
of economic organisation and who seek to explain deviations from this, such as governments and
private nonprofit organisations, in terms of market failure.
The two most commonly cited
explanations for nonprofit organisations are those of Hansmann (1986), which argues that nonprofit
organisations exist because of market failure caused by information a-symmetry, and Weisbrod
(1986), who argues that the existence of public benefit providing nonprofits needs to be explained
not directly by reference to market failure, but by reference to government failure. To elaborate,
Hansmann, and many who follow him, propose that because people sometimes need to access
services where they cannot judge the quality of the service, then they will choose a nonprofit
organisation because it is less likely to try and cheat them than is a for-profit firm. Weisbrod notes
that nonprofit organisations often provide public goods which are more generally provided by
governments (because of a different type of market failure). He proposes that this is because
governments, which rely on taxation revenue to fund the provision of public goods, will provide
only that type and level of goods which just over half of the electorate (or the median voter) prefers
and is prepared to pay for. Any further provision, or any specialised provision catering to minority
groups will be provided by nonprofit organisations. Using this theory, James (1987) predicted that
nonprofit organisations would be more likely to be found in heterogenous society than homogenous
ones. Her study of schooling in several countries seemed to demonstrate this. The proportion of
schools that were private schools correlated in particular with the degree of religious heterogeneity
of the society.
Since then a great deal more theoretical work has been done without overturning these theories.
This is despite Lester Salamon’s theory of voluntary failure, which noted that historically, voluntary
5
organisations preceded governments as the providers of many services and were replaced by
government provision in many cases for reasons to do with the insufficiency, the particularism, the
paternalism and the amateurism of voluntary or nonprofit endeavour (Salamon: 1987: 111-113).
Nonprofit scholarship has subsequently broadened its coverage, probing the interrelationship
between giving and levels of taxation and giving and government expenditure, describing the
prerequisites of effective management and governance and explaining relations between nonprofit
organisations and government. But in almost all these cases, it has been the charitable nonprofits:
the art museums, hospitals, social services and mental health providers which have been the objects
for study.
The relative narrowness of this focus has been remarked by several commentators. It has been
criticised for omitting mutual aid organisations, such as co-operatives and self-help groups (O’Neill,
1994).
It has been criticised for paying scant attention to purely voluntary, member benefit
associations that vastly outnumber employing nonprofits (Smith, 1992, 1993). The French term
“economie sociale” or social economy, tries to encompass all of these. But the original definition of
nonprofit sector remains strong. For example, even though Lester Salamon has proposed an
alternative version to relations between nonprofits and government and has been critical of the use of
the term “independent sector”, his interest focuses on the public serving nonprofits (Salamon, 1992).
The Johns Hopkins comparative nonprofit sector project which he and Helmut Anheier co-ordinate
only recently agreed to accommodate the views of researchers from a number of other countries to
include unions, mutuals and political parties within its scope (though with certain conditions). Its
primary measures for evaluating the nonprofit sector is employment size and turnover or expenditure
(Salamon and Anheier, 1994).
Civil Society
While the tradition of nonprofit scholarship may be criticised for its omissions, it is nonetheless an
impressive cross-disciplinary and cross-national endeavour; one that possesses an important degree
of coherence.
6
That cannot be said of the set of organised activities, research interests and intellectual traditions that
provide a very different focus and might eventually emerge as an alternative paradigm. The term
civil society will be used to identify these loosely coalesced traditions but other terms such as social
capital, civic voluntarism, civic community are often used.
The term civil society has a far older usage than nonprofit sector. This is both a strength but also a
weakness.
Along with related terms such as civitas and commonwealth, it made a frequent
appearance in the writings of 18th and 19th century philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Smith,
Ferguson, Kant, Hegel and Marx It received continuing attention in the works of many Marxist
writers, particularly Gramsci, but also Poulentzas, Urry and others. The civil society was seen as a
sphere of action that was in some way distinct from family, state and economy or market, but for the
most part, the philosophers proceeded to conflate it with one or the other of its more readily grasped
partners of state or market. For some, it was a sphere which was separate from the state where
economic relationships of the market could flourish; for others it was the synonymous with the state
(Frankel, 1983, 25-33).
Because civil society was used, ambiguously, by Marx, it was a Marxist writings that the term
entered the 20th century. Gramsci, for example, saw civil society as constituting the institutions of
hegemony, the institutions whereby intellectuals who carried the interests of capita …
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