Despite policy calling for compulsory education in China, many children with autism are not in school. This article examines the establishment of autism-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China to meet needs not being met by the state. We focus on the background and motivation in founding and running these NGOs, after first considering the broader context of state decentralization and NGOs roles in supplementing welfare needs in reforming societies, and the educational policy context of China. This study used mixed methods, including questionnaires with open-ended and limited choice questions, and follow-up discussion email. The goals of NGO leaders—more than 50% of whom are parents of children with autism—are to make up for where government implementation of educational policy is insufficient; help others and advocate for inclusion in society; and do meaningful work. Implications from these findings are discussed.

In this case study, we aimed to investigate residents’ agency through their participation in the development of their residential area in the city of Espoo, Finland. With the aid of seven themes, we identified by thematic analysis five types of residents in terms of agency: free floaters, home troops and helpers, representative information brokers, informed reviewers, and change agents. Relational agency, rooted from the cultural-historical activity theory, necessitated recognizing the available resources, understanding the motives of others, and collaborating in joint activities. The results of 30 interviews showed that residents are willing to participate, and they need space and structure to exploit their relational agency in order to build common interests in their neighbourhood. The findings are discussed with reference to the potential of residents’ agency while participating in neighbourhood governance and volunteering. Our study contributes to the understanding of residents’ relational agency in community development and in volunteering.

This paper examines legitimacy and political space for civil society in violent and divided contexts. It draws on qualitative fieldwork with civil society groups in Burundi, where government restrictions and political violence have increased in recent years. However, not all civil society groups experienced these pressures in the same way, and some were more vulnerable to restrictions than others. This paper asks why and considers whether civil society legitimacy can help to explain some of these differences. In doing so, it develops a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between legitimacy and political space, and processes of legitimation and delegitimation in violent and divided contexts. The paper finds that the experiences of civil society groups in Burundi prior to the 2015 elections not only related to their organisational legitimacy, but also the extent to which they were perceived to challenge the political legitimacy of government elites.

Volunteering is growing rapidly worldwide and has been recognized as a significant social force, contributing to social development. Motives for volunteering vary widely, ranging from collectivistic factors to individualistic ones. Collectivism is often identified as a main factor that contributes to volunteering, especially in collectivist societies. Our analysis shows that in Saudi Arabia—typically classified as a collectivist society—individualistic considerations such as learning skills, meeting friends, and releasing guilt mediate the effect that collectivistic motivations (e.g., prosocial personality and community identity) have on the decision of continuous volunteering. This finding is applicable to both males and females, to people in different forms of employment, across ages, and regardless of family members’ volunteering behavior, according to moderation analyses.

This study examines whether group heterogeneity and group structure and process predict the effectiveness of women’s self-help groups in terms of their financial performance, self-reliance of the group, members’ decision-making ability at the household level, and access to non-financial benefits. Data were collected using an interview schedule from 210 women’s self-help groups in six districts of Bihar and data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The findings suggest that the group heterogeneity directly predicts the effectiveness of women’s self-help groups and it is fully transmitted through group structure and process to positively predict the effectiveness of the women’s self-help groups. The group structure and process is found to be a full mediator between group heterogeneity and group effectiveness. The predictive accuracy of the model is found to be high. The findings have implications to bring in more diversity in members castes, education, and their reasons for joining women’s self-help groups at the formation stage and variations in members’ skills and expertise at the performing stage of the groups. The members’ awareness on group norms and trust in financial transactions, and leadership styles together with cooperation and cohesion among members, transparency in financial transactions, group attendance, and networking with the bank and the federation foster the effectiveness of women’s self-help groups.

This article deals with the social accountability activities of civil society organizations in Serbia and Cambodia. In both countries, they emerged with the conceptual and financial support of international development agencies; yet, the outputs were mediated by the social and political contexts. Still, these activities have some joint features: they (1) boost both understanding and awareness rather than solely mobilizing social interests; (2) target the interests of individual citizens rather than the interests of social-based groups or classes; (3) promote state cooperation instead of confrontation and (3) insist on the use of technical policy-related tools and mechanisms instead of political mobilization. The social accountability initiatives analyzed here have followed a policy-not-politics or depoliticized approach. As a consequence, they were ineffective in mobilizing citizens and social groups in a manner that would efficiently demand more accountability. On the other hand, governments contested civil society and appropriated its accountability discourses and strategies in an effort that can be read as an attempt to resist imposing government accountability and rule of law and pacifying present and future civic activism.

Civic participation among today’s youth is a topic of widespread concern for policy-makers, academics, and the publics of Western countries at large. Though scholars have increasingly become aware of deep-rooted social inequalities in access to volunteering in the adult population, differences in opportunity structures that facilitate participation among young people are rarely recognized. In this paper, I put forward a ‘life-track perspective’ on youth volunteerism that highlights crucial within-group differences among youths. I present empirical findings from a unique Danish national survey with multiple waves enriched with national register data. The study sheds light on the changing importance of longstanding dividing lines—gender, social class, and education—in volunteering trends among the young. While young people are seemingly more gender-equal in their volunteering behavior than older cohorts, higher education as a gateway to volunteering is of much greater importance among the young. This educational ‘elitism’ in volunteering has, furthermore, intensified among young people between 2004 and 2012.

Housing co-operatives host miniature versions of civil society. They vitalize a social system that is shaped by formal regulations, economic functions and a population of private housing units. The study examines factors that influence a person’s willingness to volunteer in civic society using a multilevel analysis based on survey data from 32 co-operatives and 1263 members. To do so, the social exchange theory is extended to include the member value approach, which connects social engagement with the fulfillment of a range of needs, thus going beyond a narrow economic cost–benefit analysis. Study results show that volunteer engagement largely depends on the degree to which members can expect to experience their own achievement. This finding provides an explanation for significant differences in the engagement levels beyond factors that have already been determined (age, level of education). On an organizational level, the study reveals that the age of an organization influences volunteer engagement, but that the size and the degree of professionalization do not have an effect on it.

Nonprofit education and management programs often recognize the efficacy of including experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad in their curricula. In addition, higher education institutions increasingly prioritize global citizenship as a learning outcome. However, challenges abound for educators who want to evaluate study abroad courses that expect students to acquire or deepen their levels of global citizenship. This study seeks to evaluate the impact of a short-course study abroad program on students’ global citizenship orientation. Our qualitative findings suggest that students indeed grapple with the notion of global citizenship in various ways while immersed in such a course. They can also express conflicting views, further confounding scholarly understanding of how to best measure global citizenship. We discuss implications for students expressing more of an observational role than an inclination to act on global issues.

This article examines how a social venture transitions from nascent to formal status and argues that the transformation of the organization set in motion by establishing formal boundaries is a deeply profound one. Drawing from the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship literature on what prompts and energizes individuals to initiate new not-for-profit ventures, and linking it to a notion of revolutionary crisis as organizations emerge and develop, we seek to illuminate and explore the tension, and its consequences, between nonprofit entrepreneurs and the organization they create as the new venture transitions from nascent to formal. We do this by presenting the results from an in-depth case study examining the gestation and boundary-forming phases of Robert’s Place Cooperative, a plucky start-up cooperative in a midsize Midwestern city.

Observers have noted that organizations in all sectors, whether business, nonprofit, or government, have been moving toward rationalized structures that presuppose and express empowered organizational actorhood. We draw upon neo-institutional theory in this paper to extend the argument: The arrival of organizational actorhood has precipitated a concomitant, cross-sectoral movement toward organizational social responsibility. Whereas existing research has tended to theorize the social responsibilities of businesses, we develop a pyramid conceptual schema to array the social responsibilities of nonprofits. We then document the coevolution of organizational actorhood and responsibility across both sectors with a metastudy of nearly 200 extant surveys. We chart the institutionalization of a slate of formal structures that express organizational actorhood (i.e., mission statements, vision statements, and strategic plans) and that profess and define organizational social responsibilities (i.e., core values, ethics codes, and responsibility communications). We close with implications and future directions for organizational studies and research on corporate social responsibility.

The goal of the present study was to examine differences in self-esteem between volunteers with physical disabilities and their counterparts who do not volunteer. Another goal was to examine the contribution of the characteristics of the volunteering experience (motives for volunteering, satisfaction with the rewards of volunteering, and the quality of relationships with beneficiaries) to explain self-esteem among volunteers with physical disabilities. The research sample included 160 Israeli participants with different physical disabilities. Of these, 95 volunteered and 65 did not volunteer. Participants who volunteered had higher self-esteem than those who did not. The findings highlight the compensatory role of volunteering for people with disabilities: The contribution of volunteering to enhancing self-esteem was mainly evident among participants with poor socioeconomic resources (low education, low economic status, and unemployed). Egoistic and altruistic motives for volunteering as well as satisfaction with the rewards of volunteering contributed to explaining self-esteem.

Inspired by the relational framework (Bassi, in: Franz, Hochgerner, Howaldt (eds) Challenge social innovation, Springer, Berlin, pp 325–350, 2012; Donati in Ital J Sociol Educ 5(1):19–35, 2013) and designed to integrate psychological and sociological aspects, a measure of social added value (SAV) was developed and validated. A study was conducted in the South of Italy on a sample of non-profit and voluntary organization members (N = 394) to examine the statistical validity and psychometric properties of the SAV scale. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that a third-order factor model, saturated by two second-order variables (internal and external relational goods) and eight first-order variables (sense of organizational community, quality of internal relations, influence, social responsibility towards members of the organization, users and stakeholders, organizational identification, and quality of external relations) obtained good satisfactory fit indexes. Additional analyses revealed that shared member values were positively associated with SAV and that there were differences among organizations according to their legal forms and the organizational roles available. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

The INGO Accountability Charter is the only global, cross-sectoral regulatory initiative for international NGOs. This is the first independent study of perceptions of its effectiveness, based upon 26 in-depth semi-structured interviews with key individuals from 11 leading international NGOs. Firstly, it analyzes interviewees’ beliefs about the motivations of NGOs in joining the Charter. The findings contribute to the scholarly debate about the key drivers for voluntary regulation between ‘club theorists’ and ‘constructivists’ by demonstrating that NGO behavior in this regard is both self-interested and norm-guided. Secondly, it investigates the extent to which the interviewees believe that the Charter has been effective in enhancing the accountability of its members. Their responses further underline the applicability of club theory and constructivist explanations of NGO behavior, and lead to several policy recommendations about the future direction of Charter.

This article examines foreign aid and government funding to NGOs as forms of patronage and explores the impact of such funding on the nature and role of civil society. Using qualitative research from Palestine and Morocco, we argue that patronage transforms NGOs into apparatuses of governing. NGOs become key sites for the exercise of productive power through the technologies of professionalization, bureaucratization, and upward accountability. The article explores how this transformation of NGOs depoliticizes their work while undermining their role as change agents within civil society. The findings have implications for understanding the transformation of NGOs, the relationship between patrons and their grantees, and, finally, for exploring the limitations of NGOs as vehicles for social change in sensitive political environments.

This article considers how civil society organizations (CSOs) may be understood in relation to the global refugee regime complex. It describes how several leading scholars have conceptualized refugee/internally displaced person (IDP) governance and explores how the neoliberal cognitive frame is impeding the possibility of democratic agency among IDPs/refugees. It argues that CSOs can play essential roles in encouraging democratization of the refugee regime complex by working to reshape their prevailing frame or orientation. Civil society organizations can also work to foster critical reflexivity among the parties that govern refugees and within that population as well. As an example of one such effort, the article employs Fraser’s (Scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010) democratization framework in a brief case analysis of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Deshodaya initiative in Sri Lanka that has sought to enable IDPs in that nation to embrace critical reflexivity to reimagine themselves as governing agents who can redefine state and international organization-based definitions of refugee protection. Overall, the analysis suggests that civil society organizations can act successfully and intentionally to open democratic spaces in which refugees/IDPs may find possibilities to exercise their innate agential possibility.

In recent decades, the Brazilian Movement Against Electoral Corruption (MCCE) has been promoting social innovation in the public sphere, which led to mobilization towards the creation of two popular initiatives in Brazil: the “Law Against Vote-Buying” (Law 9840/1999) and the “Clean Record Law” (Complementary Law 135/2010). This paper explores how the collectives of MCCE engage in social innovation in the public arena of electoral corruption in Brazil. The analysis shows social innovation as a driving force of social change promoted by the association of a multitude of actor networks both in the long term and at the interface of macro and microscales of social reality. Therefore, social innovation in the Brazilian electoral corruption arena occurs simultaneously as a process and an outcome produced by the collective actions of different public groups that can reflect, organize and reform a cause, manage trial situations and create new solutions for this public problem.