The Third Sector

Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits

Meghan Kallman, Terry Clark

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780252084294
  9780252040436
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252098857
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Civil society organizations, nonprofits, national and international nongovernmental organizations, and a variety of formal and informal associations have coalesced into a world political force. Though the components of this so-called third sector vary by country, their cumulative effects play an ever-greater role in global affairs. Looking at relief and welfare organizations, innovation organizations, social networks, and many other kinds of groups, Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark explore the functions, impacts, and composition of the nonprofit sector in six key countries. Chinese organizations, for example, follow the predominantly Asian model of government funding that links their mission to national political goals. Western groups, by contrast, often explicitly challenge government objectives, and even gain relevance and cache by doing so. In addition, Kallman and Clark examine groups in real-world contexts, providing a wealth of political-historical background, in-depth consideration of interactions with state institutions, region-by-region comparisons, and suggestions for how groups can borrow policy options across systems. Insightful and forward-seeing, The Third Sector provides a rare international view of organizations and agendas driving change in today's international affairs.

1.Civil Society, Social Capital, and the Growth of the Third Sector

Scholarly literature in North America and Western Europe commonly equates the third sector and associationalism with the concept of civil society. We find this concept useful for the purposes of thinking about citizen participation and, further, because civil society has shown itself to be deeply entwined with the formal development of the third sector worldwide. This section thus starts with a brief overview on civil society and social capital and then shows how it helps understand workings of the institutional logics from the introduction.

By Walzer’s (1998:9) definition, civil society is “an area where citizens and organizations are not restricted by the government and are able to form groups and networks without interference.” In this sense, it is by no means limited to voluntary or not-for-profit organizations but includes the entire universe of extra-statal organizations (including everything from business organizations to unions to book clubs to dance companies to congregations) that interface, cooperate, liaise, and compete with each other to supplement the political, economic, and cultural life of the state. This definition reflects conceptual roots in the work of Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Hegel, among others, and has been famously theorized by Habermas; all of these scholars employed it to refer to the broad and multifaceted realm outside the state (Frumkin 2005:13). The value of the third sector specifically, within civil society, is that it acts as a mechanism by which people are drawn out of individual concern for themselves and into concern for society as a whole; the third sector is thus a vehicle for community involvement.

Civil society in general, and the third sector in particular, varies widely in its relationship with the state throughout the world. The US third sector, for example, developed for many years without an explicit relationship to the government and was tasked with either filling in the “holes” in service provision that the government missed or with advocating specific social policies, at times positioning itself against prevailing state policy. China, on the other hand, has a third sector that developed almost exclusively in conjunction with the government, the third sector organizations therein acting largely as service providers.

There are tensions between both practitioners and scholars about the relationship of the third sector to the central government, a theme that this book examines in detail throughout, characterized under the institutional logics of both bureaucracy and professionalization. Government-nonprofit relationships are often typologized as either supplementary, complementary, or adversarial (Young 2000). A relationship is supplementary when nonprofits are seen as fulfilling the demand for public goods left unsatisfied by government; therefore, as government takes more responsibility for provision, less needs to be raised through voluntary collective means. This is the Tocquevillian discourse, which is often seen as linking citizens to government. Although the goals and activities of the citizens—and associations that they create and energize—are not independent of government, they nevertheless keep citizens engaged in part of a legitimating process within political life.

In the complementary view, nonprofits are seen as partners to government, helping to carry out the delivery of public goods largely financed by government itself. In this perspective, nonprofit and government expenditures have a direct relationship with one another: as government expenditures increase, they help finance increasing levels of activity by nonprofits. This perspective would understand the voluntary sector as a sort of “third-party” governance, supplementing the state’s initiatives and sometimes directly funded by them.

The adversarial view sees nonprofits as instigators, encouraging government to alter public policy and maintain accountability to the public, while the government attempts to influence the behavior of nonprofit organizations by regulating their services and responding to advocacy initiatives. This perspective considers organizations as quite explicitly opposed to the “establishment,” openly critical, seeking sometimes to consciously undermine the legitimacy and the stability of government.

These themes are larger than definitions; they bear heavily on how we understand the meanings and success of the third sector and civic participation. Scholars who value the adversarial component of the third sector see it as a sphere of action that is independent of the state and that is capable—precisely for this reason—of energizing resistance to a tyrannical regime (Foley and Edwards 1996). The supplementary and complimentary formulations of the third sector postulate the positive effects of association for governance (albeit democratic governance), while the latter emphasizes the importance of civil association as a counterweight to the state. A third view comes from some economists who interpret the “dense webs of association” praised by civil society scholars as “raising transaction costs” to markets reaching citizens and thus undermining the smooth and equitable functioning of modern states and markets (Olson 1982).

As the discussion below highlights, for us, the issue is not so much to ask if one interpretation is correct, but rather to include all three interpretations for insights into associative life and the third sector generally at different times and in different places. We consider how civil society works as a dynamic force within the entirety of a political and social experience; we variously invoke multiple analytical perspectives. Third sector organizations in the United States, for instance, can be supplementary, complimentary, and adversarial, sometimes simultaneously. (Planned Parenthood is a good example of such an organization. It provides healthcare services for low-income individuals, it fulfills state healthcare contracts, and it advocates healthcare policies.) Edward Shils writes, “Although autonomy vis-à-vis the state is one of the features of a civil society, the autonomy is far from complete. Civil society operates within the framework set by laws. … Laws require that rights within the civil society be respected and that duties be performed” (quoted in Chamberlain 1993: 208). Chamberlain expands: “Civil society, then, is a community in constant tension, its members pulled in several directions simultaneously: toward one another and apart, both toward their individual private worlds and the more public realm of state authority. Tension is a defining feature of civil society and a major source of both its strength and weakness” (208). For us, these tensions emerge in the broader conceptual format of institutional logics.

Tensions among institutional rules come most clearly into relief among states and civil societies without a history of democratic engagement. For example, Napoleon outlawed civic associations, and so dissenters found a creative outlet for their conversations in sometimes huge dinners throughout the nineteenth century (thus termed the ”banquet years” in Roger Shattuck’s [1958] book on the French avant-garde). Similarly, some attempts to frame Chinese institutions and practices in terms of Western notions of civil society appeared in the mid-1980s in histories of the late Qing Dynasty and engendered a discussion on if and how the idea is relevant to China’s concepts of state-society relations. The notion of civil society as such has enjoyed widespread intellectual currency in comparative communist studies and was used to analyze opposition groups in the Soviet bloc. By the end of the 1980s, the civil society concept was employed to think about pluralistic group formation and autonomy in the era of reform (Ma 2002b:314–16).

We begin with the first and most obvious—associations as integrative mechanisms in social life. Associational life and civil society has been positively linked in the literature with themes of social integration, social capital, and generalized trust, with correspondingly positive economic impacts. In this section we review these linkages briefly, to set the stage for countryspecific analyses of the third sector.

Organizations as Integrative Mechanisms: Social Capital, Trust, Development

In a description of Korean immigrants to the United States, Choi (2012) shows that Koreans who have worked in the United States for thirty to forty years often, even in retirement, continue to participate in book clubs and sing in church choirs. His point is simple: that such collective activities engender a persistent sense of community, linking people to each other and to places, and firmly integrating individuals into participatory society. Nonprofit and voluntary organizations worldwide understand this kind of linkage as valuable and regularly rely on this very sort of exchange.

The influence of this Putnam-Tocqueville model of participation in political sociology has been substantial: “participation,” “trust,” and “social capital” became buzzwords of early twenty-first-century social science and defined the approaches of many nonprofit and third sector organizations. In the late twentieth century, social scientists began to employ the term “social capital” to describe the tools and training that enhance productive human social life, and this notion has been increasingly linked with the idea of the third sector.

The basic theory of social capital is that social networks have value, and that healthy ones can affect the “social production” of individuals and groups; therefore, the existence of social capital has important consequences for the quality of civic engagement and politics. Trust built through civic associations and community projects extends into the political realm and creates enthusiasm for public life, which is in turn linked to more active political engagement and participation (Frumkin 2005:40). Social capital “calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital” (Putnam 2000:61). As Putnam demonstrates for the United States, a well-connected individual in a poorly connected society is not as productive as a well-connected individual in a well-connected society—you are better off if everyone around you is connected as well. Though debates rage about whether online platforms such as Facebook truly engender social capital (rather than simply weak ties—see Gladwell [2010]), social media do try to capitalize on and facilitate this type of reciprocal social exchange.

Nevertheless, social capital in every country develops against each country’s own backdrop of political, social, and cultural reality. For example, in France, the economie social came to prominence as part of the government’s strategy to decentralize public administration and social service delivery (Salamon and Anheier 1996:84); it evolved within a long French tradition of hostility toward voluntary organizations, rooted in the French Revolution’s prevailing concept of the “general will” and its suspicion of any institution that purported to mediate between the citizen and this general will. Between 1791 and 1901 nonprofit organizations were actually illegal in France. Thus a long tradition of state-provided services developed. As another example, in some Asian countries, interest groups are built through interpersonal and familial relationships (called guanxi in China and Taiwan), often related to market functions (T. Lin 2005:23), and are an equally important function in civil society, though we have not found a study of guanxi that includes sufficient detail and international comparisons to indicate how distinct guanxi are from various Western civic groups. The general impression most studies convey is that guanxi are more personalistic and familialist and are intended for private (often material) benefit of the participants—rather than seeking the ideal of “elevating” an individual’s conception of self-interest to incorporate “the public interest,” or “commonwealth,” in the manner philosophized in (part of) the Western tradition.

Framed positively, social capital can transform associations into mediating agents between individuals and deviant behavior. Associational relationships, rich in social capital, can bring trust into the minds of individuals and encourage socially responsive action toward others. Trust is an important social mediator, helping ensure accountability and decrease the cost of economic and social transactions. (You wouldn’t cheat your neighbor in the sale of a used car because you see her on a regular basis around your neighborhood; you are therefore spared the cost of hiring a lawyer to mediate the sale of the car, and in this case, your trust acts as a lubricant for a transaction.) Fukuyama (1996:29) characterizes such scenarios as having a “high degree of generalized social trust and, consequently, a strong propensity for spontaneous sociability.” Generalized trust and “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973) can facilitate innovation and adaptation through information exchange and networks. This idea, in Tocqueville and elsewhere, is most powerfully illustrated by looking at the edges of civility and civic activity to see where and how the lack of organizational and civic engagement can permit development of deviant subcultures and activities.

One such example is political life in southern Italy, the region’s history with the mafia, and the dramatic regional differences that Italy experienced with respect to it. The mafia dominated most aspects of political and social life in Sicily and other parts of southern Italy, beginning with the painful transition from feudalism to capitalism. The organized crime ring, whose initial racket was in “protections” and which subsequently expanded into the drug trade and other forms of trafficking in its two hundred years of operation (Chubb 1982; Gambetta 1996), dominated nearly every facet of social and political life, including representation, institutions, and access to material and social resources. It had strong claims to the public dominion (Paoli 2004) and often effectively shut the state out of administration; its own monopoly over the use of force precluded any such monopoly on the state’s part (a monopoly over the legitimate use of force is classically considered the definition of a state).

During the mafia crackdown in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, Italian television would regularly broadcast trials of mafia leaders, as the Italian state sought to publicize and document its punishment of deviance. This publicity presented a difficulty for the courts and judges involved in the trials; there were threats of violence against them from mafia members in the southern part of the country, and some judges and uncooperative public figures were killed in Palermo and elsewhere. The tensions, threats, and fears in the courtroom between the mafia and the prosecution were publicly palpable. This dynamic came to light as the trials were televised across Italy—citizens and national leaders were shocked at the retaliations and felt that something should be done to protect their judges. Meanwhile, no such retributions were taken against law enforcement in the north of the country.

Why were there such dramatic regional differences in political culture, even within one country? The leading book discussing this question and offering an interpretation is by Robert Putnam (1993), entitled Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Putnam begins by showing that such violence as was encountered during the mafia trials is part of a more general sense of strong individualism in southern Italy, wherein there is minimal trust for other persons. Putnam draws in turn on the monograph of Edward Banfield (1958), dramatically entitled The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Banfield spent a year in a village in southern Italy, his wife’s hometown, studying this so-called backward approach to politics: among others, he notes that there were no civic organizations that were active or engaging citizens in the town. There were a few business associations; though there were churches and some merchant organizations, they did not engage citizens actively. The peasants did not even trust God, and certainly not the Pope or Catholic priests. Neighbors did not trust neighbors. Husbands did not trust their wives, who did not trust their husbands.

In this context, wherein nobody trusted anyone else, the provider of order was the maf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Democratic Governance and Institutional Logics within the Third Sector (or, How Habermas Discovered the Coffee House)
• 1. Civil Society, Social Capital, and the Growth of the Third Sector
• 2. The United States
• 3. France
• 4. Japan
• 5. South Korea
• 6. Taiwan
• 7. China
• 8. Looking Forward: Understanding Associations and Trust Patterns
• Conclusion: Global Themes
• References
• Index