The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, Third Edition

By Walter W. Powell and Patricia Bromley

The nonprofit sector has changed in fundamental ways in recent decades. As the sector has grown in scope and size, both domestically and internationally, the boundaries between for-profit, governmental, and charitable organizations have become intertwined. Nonprofits are increasingly challenged on their roles in mitigating or exacerbating inequality. And debates flare over the role of voluntary organizations in democratic and autocratic societies alike. The Nonprofit Sector takes up these concerns and offers a cutting-edge empirical and theoretical assessment of the state of the field.

This book, now in its third edition, brings together leading researchers—economists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists along with scholars from communication, education, law, management, and policy schools—to investigate the impact of associational life. Chapters consider the history of the nonprofit sector and of philanthropy; the politics of the public sphere; governance, mission, and engagement; access and inclusion; and global perspectives on nonprofit organizations. Across this comprehensive range of topics, The Nonprofit Sector makes an essential contribution to the study of civil society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781503611085

Book preview

1

WHAT IS THE NONPROFIT SECTOR?

Walter W. Powell

SCHOLARS AND PRACTITIONERS ROUTINELY REFER to the wide array of activities pursued by voluntary and social purpose organizations in the United States as the nonprofit sector. In different contexts and at different points in history, this domain has gone by a host of names: charitable organizations, civil society, the third sector, the independent sector, the social sector, and, more recently, social purpose organizations. My intention in this introductory chapter is to problematize the terms and concepts used to capture such activities and to preview how the chapters in this volume assess the current landscape and chart future directions. Each section of the book also contains an introduction presenting the unifying theme of those chapters and describing how the analyses within that section collectively elucidate current knowledge and research gaps within a specific area of nonprofit scholarship.

Our goal with this book is to advance research on a number of protean questions: What is a nonprofit organization? What is the relationship between formal nonprofit organizations and the wider sphere of civil society? Why do nonprofits exist in market economies? What roles do voluntary organizations play in democratic and autocratic societies? How do we explain variation in the contributions of nonprofits in fields such as health care, education, and the arts? When do voluntary organizations erode rather than encourage civic capacity? Why does the nonprofit realm have different social and economic footprints in different countries? The authors of this volume take up these and other important questions.

The first question concerns the conceptual framing of nonprofits. What does it mean to describe an entity in terms of the actions it does not take? Were we chemists, this would be a terrible way to go about research. In contrast, physicists often theorize about things with respect to the absence of particular features. The study of nonprofits has more in common with physics than chemistry in this regard, examining underlying principles and dynamics rather than discrete and predictable interactions. What are the common limiting elements associated with nonprofit organizations? Perhaps the most central idea is that of the nondistribution constraint (Hansmann 1987). Nonprofit organizations operate without distributing profits to their stakeholders. Simply put, if there are funds left over at the end of the year, nonprofit executives cannot pocket them. Nonprofit leaders do not focus their energy on enriching shareholders, as do managers of firms, nor do they feel the need to spend every penny of their budgets as if they were state agencies.¹ Accordingly, some scholars have argued that nonprofits are, in principle, more trustworthy than firms or government bureaus (Nelson and Krashinsky 1973; Hansmann 1987). The nondistribution constraint is centrally tied to the tax exemption given to nonprofits, which comes with an obligation to respond to society’s needs at a particular time.² Of course, this temporal feature means that nonprofit organizations turn to the legal tools of organizing available resources in particular countries at specific moments in history. As several chapters of this volume discuss, this legal protection varies markedly across place and time.

What are other negative elements that characterize nonprofit organizations? Nonprofits are voluntary; that is, they do not coerce participation. In many countries, young people are required to perform either military or social service. Both are for public benefit, but they are demanded, and length of service is not negotiable. In contrast, people may move readily between nonprofits; participation is fluid and consensual. Nonprofits also exist without clear lines of ownership and accountability, precisely because they serve multiple masters (Frumkin 2002): nonprofits must be responsive not only to their constituents and clients but also to staff, members, volunteers, and donors.

Although these negative features describe what nonprofits lack or are not allowed to do, civil society organizations can also be framed through positive concepts. Whether referred to as civil society (Cohen and Arato 1992) or the public sphere (Habermas 1989), the space for voluntary activity is characterized by debate, contention, and engagement. These expressions reflect the interests of diverse members of society, whether a political regime is democratic or autocratic. In places where the tools of formal representation are available, nonprofits exist because ideas and resources are mobilized and formalized by activists, volunteers, donors, and social entrepreneurs. These diverse elements are the forces that supply energy and ideas. In this sense, nonprofits exist as the medium for the expression of values and commitment.³ Put differently, nonprofits serve as the organizational infrastructure for civil society (Anheier 2014). They result from the legal incorporation of activities that represent the varied interests and identities that members of civil society hold. As Nancy Rosenblum and Robert Post (2002:4) nicely put it, civil society affords individuals the experience of pluralism.

Political scientist Lester Salamon (2012:6–15) stresses this organizational nature. He emphasizes that nonprofits are formal entities distinct from their officers, capable of holding property, making contracts, and persisting over time. The right of people to come together to build community is distinct from the right of organizations to access the legal tools that enable them to grow larger and exist longer. Although this crucial distinction has become taken for granted in the United States, the ability to ensure organizational persistence is lacking in many countries.

Salamon also points out that nonprofits are self-governing and must provide a public benefit. This expressive view suggests that moral energy for a cause can exist independent of large-scale societal demand for its objectives. Civil society organizations can keep the home fires burning, so to speak, until the political winds blow in the right direction (Taylor 1989). Consider the abolitionist movement, the movement against child labor, advocacy for consumer safety, the fair trade movement, and, today, environmental conservation. Each of these activities was first championed and protected inside a small set of nonprofit organizations and social movements that worked to keep the issues alive until support came from a broad swath of society.

Such commitment or moral energy has enabled the nonprofit sector in the United States to garner political support from both conservatives and progressives. Both ends of the political spectrum use nonprofit organizations to achieve their aspirations and advance their divergent understandings of the public good, although their forms of organization can vary by political beliefs. Theda Skocpol (2011) argues that among contemporary U.S. civic organizations, those on the left create public interest groups that are staff-centered, whereas those on the right, such as the Tea Party and the National Rifle Association, create chapter-based membership federations. In some periods in U.S. history, nonprofits have acted as laboratories for experimentation, and successes were subsequently passed on to the government (Hall 1987). At other times, such as the era in which we now find ourselves, nonprofits may provide the space to raise opposition to the government. Civic engagement is also moving into more temporary and experimental vehicles that quickly spring up and disappear. Such minimalist organizations may have distinctly circumscribed goals; when these are met, the organization dissolves (Tufekci 2017; also see Walker and Oszkay, Chapter 21, The Changing Face of Nonprofit Advocacy).

A sharp, clean image of a nonprofit sector, however, is problematic in several respects. First, the term has a geometric connotation that implies clear and firm boundaries. The sector imagery draws attention to formal entities rather than charitable activities or altruistic efforts. Acts of compassion and charity are as old as humankind, whereas the tax code is a modern legal entanglement. Although the U.S. tax code acts like a border patrol, policing which organizations qualify for tax exemption (Simon 1987; Barman 2013), basing the concept of a sector primarily on a single nation’s tax code inhibits comparative analyses. In other countries, comparable organizations can be defined differently, as either nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), voluntary associations, a social economy, or part of a larger civil society. Recently, observers have noted that in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region, nonprofit organizations have attained increasing importance as providers of health, social, educational, and cultural services (Anheier 2009). In Chapter 4, The Organizational Transformation of Civil Society, Patricia Bromley chronicles the increasingly formal organization of associational life around the globe. Similarly, there has been international growth in the number of foundations and trusts, most notably in Asia but to a lesser extent in other regions as well (Johnson 2018).⁴ Evan Schofer and Wesley Longhofer also explore the global growth of NGOs in Chapter 27, The Global Rise of Nongovernmental Organizations.

Second, the concept of a sector leads scholars to try to classify and catalog types of organizations, often failing to capture what these entities actually do or promote. In the United States, nonprofit organizations are assigned subsector codes intended to categorize what they do, but such codes may mask an underlying commonality. For example, a variety of organizations in different subsectors, such as housing or the arts, may work with the elderly or children, but the codes assigned to these organizations do not reflect the recipients of their services. Beyond these internal classification challenges lies a bigger question: What purpose does an organization serve? The general public or constituents of different types of organizations are much more concerned with the quality and care of the service provided than with organizations’ tax status. From this vantage point, depicting altruistic or charitable activity requires a broad canvas rather than a divided triptych of commercial, governmental, and nonprofit work.

How, then, did we come to think of the wide array of voluntary activities and donative organizations as belonging to a single common category? The boundaries between the market, the state, the family, and civil society are fluid and varied, depending on both the historical moment and the societal context. Consider, for example, health care in the United States. Jill R. Horwitz offers a fresh view in Chapter 17, Charitable Nonprofits and the Business of Health Care. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, medical care in the United States was primarily private, delivered by solo practitioners, with some modest contribution from almshouses, where charitable care was given to the poor (Starr 1982). Over time, health care evolved to a much larger organizational scale and became primarily nonprofit and publicly provided. An unexpected consequence of the Medicare Act of 1964, which extended health care to many more citizens in the United States, was to turn health care into an activity that could be priced. This change drew new for-profit entrants into the field (Scott et al. 2000). Today, health care in the United States is a vast industry, populated by large chains that are primarily nonprofit and private. However, in other advanced industrial nations health care is provided to a greater extent by governments, with a small for-profit presence and a relatively limited nonprofit component.

Similarly, if we consider higher education, the current mix of public and private nonprofit universities in the United States (with a small for-profit component) looks very different from the arrangements in other nations, where higher education is largely public. Nevertheless, some of the most prestigious universities and research centers are nonprofits (e.g., McGill in Canada; Cambridge, Oxford, and the London School of Economics in Britain; Bocconi in Italy; Keio in Japan; and the Max Planck Institutes in Germany). In the United States, the costs of attending college are converging across private nonprofit and public state schools and becoming vastly more expensive. Chapter 18, Education and the Nonprofit Sector, by Richard Arum and Jacob L. Kepins reviews the many factors that have reshaped the boundaries of educational institutions.

An Independent Sector?

To a certain extent, the porous boundaries in the United States between the market, the state, and nonprofits are policed by the tax code. However, the tax code is not an abstract entity that exists separately from the organizational realm, as Daniel J. Hemel emphasizes in Chapter 5, Tangled Up in Tax. Tax policy is also deeply political, as Aaron Horvath and I detail in Chapter 3, Seeing Like a Philanthropist, discussing the power struggles associated with various eras of elite philanthropy. The current IRS tax code that regulates 501(c)(3) organizations was the outcome of a two-decade political battle fought in the U.S. Congress. Indeed, the genesis of the concept of an independent sector was a response to contentious debates over the unchecked power of philanthropy. In May 1961, Texas congressman Wright Patman took to the floor of the House of Representatives to deliver a series of speeches inveighing against foundations and other tax-exempt organizations that had become a vehicle for institutionalized, deliberate evasion of fiscal and moral responsibility (Hall 1992:72). Distressed at the disproportionately rapid growth of foundations, Patman worried about the economic consequences of granting tax exemptions to these privately controlled entities. Over the next decade, through the efforts of the House Select Committee on Small Business, Patman focused on the favorable treatment that philanthropy gave to the very wealthy. Patman’s efforts helped foster a growing belief that foundations were tax dodges and that those that existed in perpetuity were costs to the government (Brilliant 2000). Patman’s eight-year campaign led to hearings by the House Ways and Means Committee in 1969, with the expectation that Congress would curb the activities of foundations (see detailed discussion of this debate in Hall 1992:66–80). The resulting 1969 Tax Reform Act, however, proved to be less stringent than the heated rhetoric might have suggested.

The foundation world and other tax-exempt entities did not sit idly by as these congressional debates ensued. John D. Rockefeller III and other elite foundation officials and academics sought to alter public opinion about the contributions of foundations to American life. Rockefeller understood that damping down further outbreaks of regulatory zeal would require foundations and tax-exempt entities to come up with a coherent and compelling rationale for the existence of nonprofits and the privileges they enjoyed. The Tax Reform Act set limits on charitable contributions to foundations and increased requirements of accountability and transparency. Penalties for violations were set on foundations, their managers, and their contributors. However, the proposed harsher limitation on the life of a foundation to just twenty-five to forty years was not passed.

In May 1973, John D. Rockefeller created a working group called the Advisory Group on Private Philanthropy. By the end of the summer, he had formed a prestigious and diverse commission, exquisitely balanced by geography, party, gender, race, occupation, and religious denomination (Hall 1992:77) and brought together under the leadership of John Filer, a corporate lawyer and the chief executive officer of Aetna Life & Casualty. The commission would come to be a joint effort of Congress, the Treasury Department, and the private sector, aided by a distinguished panel of experts. In 1977 the Department of the Treasury published the results of the Filer Commission’s work in six large volumes as The Report of the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs. The work gave substance to a new idea: that charitable tax-exempt organizations composed a coherent sector of American political, economic, and social life.

This unified conception of nonprofits and foundations as together forming an independent sector laid the groundwork for establishing that these disparate organizations shared common interests. Before the work of the Filer Commission, there is little evidence in either tax records or scholarly research that the broad analytic category of the nonprofit sector existed at all (Hall 1987, 1992). The first two editions of this book had chapters that reflected herculean efforts to map the size and scope of the U.S. nonprofit sector (Rudney 1987; Boris and Steuerle 2006; also see Weisbrod and Long 1977). Today, however, this pioneering work has been supplanted by The Nonprofit Almanac, regularly compiled and published by the Urban Institute. Moreover, data on foundation giving is now available from Candid, the new entity formed through the merger of the Foundation Center and GuideStar, and various nonprofit rating services that assess nonprofits’ efficacy.

The Filer Commission’s vision of the sector brought donors and recipients together as actors with a common purpose. This unification of fund-raising bodies, foundations, and such diverse organizations as soup kitchens and symphony orchestras was a remarkable political and social achievement, cast in economic terms. Rather than seeing grant givers, advocacy organizations, and service providers as distinctive entities, this new view carried an organizational conception modeled on business enterprise (Karl 1987:985). The Filer Commission made the case that the independent sector should be viewed for its economic contributions rather than only its moral or social benefits.

But what does independent mean? Does it imply free of government? Surely not, as the effort to create this new sector was in direct response to the activities of Congress and the Treasury Department. Does it refer to independence from corporate influence? Again, the defense of the new sector was led by elite business and civic leaders who, although concerned with efforts to correct abuses by some foundations, nevertheless wanted to maintain a space for the power and influence of elite private philanthropy. Clearly, the claim of independence is misleading, politically constructed to suggest a separation from business and government interests that never existed in practice.

How Do the State and Civil Society Interact?

Perhaps a different way to think about independence is to consider open-access organizations (Lamoreaux and Wallis 2017). Open access implies that groups in society have the ability to associate with one another and create special-purpose organizations. The freedom to establish organizations that are designed to pursue purposes independent of government is relatively recent. Moreover, there is an important complementarity between government-granted freedoms allowing citizens to (1) assemble as a public right and (2) establish private organizations. The assumption that these two freedoms inherently arise together is, in many respects, naïve, both historically and in the contemporary global context. Two striking illustrations highlight this point. The French Revolution led to the influential Loi Le Chapelier (1791), which expressly stated that no intermediary associations were allowed to exist between the individual and the state as an expression of the public will (Anheier 2014:41). Citizens could assemble but not create associations. Prussians lacked the freedom to associate without government permission for most of the nineteenth century. Full freedom of association and the capacity to form organizations did not come about in either country until the twentieth century. In Germany, such freedom was not permitted until the Weimar Republic after World War I (Brooks and Guinnane 2017).

Britain and the United States were the first countries to undergo the dramatic transformation to open access, permitting citizens the power to form organizations without constraints or control by the government (see Lamoreaux and Wallis 2017). By the middle of the nineteenth century, both countries had shifted toward open access, although the process occurred very differently in the two settings. In Britain, a century and a half after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the change occurred suddenly and with apparently little conflict. Joint stock companies were formed, and a shift toward greater tolerance for all kinds of organizations occurred. To be sure, both men and women had formed a growing number of clubs and voluntary associations since at least the mid-seventeenth century, but organizations that posed questions about the established political or religious order had led a shadowy existence on the margins, protecting themselves from repression by touting their charitable activities. Over the course of the nineteenth century, clubs and voluntary associations proliferated in Britain. These organizations served charitable, educational, recreational, political, and even whimsical goals.

By contrast, the transformation to open access in the United States was more halting, uneven, and organizationally and regionally variegated (Hilt 2017). Peter Hall (2006) has emphasized the profound ramifications of the religious differences between the New England, mid-Atlantic, and Southern states. The plantation South imposed the most restrictions on what types of organizations could be created and what kinds of people could participate. In the North, sharp differences between the states could be seen in rules of incorporation and charter as well as levels of political, religious, and ethnic tolerance. The Tocquevillian image of nineteenth-century America as a nation of joiners is far too rosy; Ruth Bloch and Naomi Lamoreaux (2017) convincingly argue that although white (male, and to a lesser extent female) U.S. citizens could form all manner of associations, they depended on state government approval for the tools to make their organizations long-lasting. Benjamin Soskis chronicles these developments in Chapter 2, A History of Associational Life and the Nonprofit Sector in the United States.

More recently, scholars of American political development have argued that civic life in the United States has been reorganized from member-based associations to civic organizers and donors (Putnam 2000; Skocpol 2003, 2011). This transformation has two components. (1) It represents a movement from fellowship associations, with citizens joined in fraternal, religious, or veterans’ groups, to more specialized organizations that advocate for causes on behalf of constituents. The staffs of these organizations do not directly interact with these constituents except when asking them for donations or specific actions such as signing petitions or contacting political representatives. (2) These new, professionally managed organizations operate as public-interest groups with considerable political clout (Berry 1999). Arguably, however, they do not create civic capacity, as they do not teach constituents the skills of interacting with one another to resolve differences and enhance sociability. Thus the paradox of contemporary civic life: more voices, but less participation; more causes, but less consensus. Additionally, in comparison to earlier eras, more time is now spent raising money, particularly chasing the wealthy for funds to support advocacy for less advantaged individuals (Skocpol 2011).

Another important question for contemporary scholars of nonprofits is how the private formation of organizations operates differently in legal settings that permit the creation of associations, in contrast to legal regimes that force associational activity outside the law and into the shadows. As we think about comparative differences in the shape and scale of the nonprofit sector across countries, it is critical to understand the ways in which some societies developed to achieve open access while others evolved in directions that keep such access restricted. This dynamic between societal development and associational freedoms is important because, as sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe (1965) argued many years ago, the spread of organizations becomes a self-reinforcing process, creating the groundwork for more organizations to be formed. Anheier and Salamon (2006) have made this argument most clearly, suggesting that the nonprofit sector has different historical moorings and reveals different social and economic shapes across countries. In a related vein, in Chapter 29, Social Movements in a Global Context, sociologists Breno Bringel and Elizabeth McKenna argue that transnational activism takes on distinctly different shapes in specific historical eras.

Private organizations may rein in governments by providing focal points for resistance against abuses of power (Rosenblum and Post 2001: chap. 1). For much of the twentieth century, civil society was seen as a formidable force in sustaining democracy. In this view, private, nonprofit organizations serve as training wheels for democracy, teaching individuals how to function as citizens through both participation in organizations and commitment to associational life (Clemens 2006). As such organizations spread and become common, they enhance wider civic capacity. The organizations become separate from their founders; they can live on even as membership changes. This feature offers a different understanding of the independence of the sector. Civil society allows people to see themselves as agentic citizens, independent of their participation as employees, consumers, or voters at a ballot box. Furthermore, in our current illiberal era, with democracy challenged around the globe by elected autocrats in many countries, independence may take on a new meaning. Civil society may be the last defense against leaders who run roughshod over the rule of law and a free press (Acemoglu 2017).

Such tensions and counteracting dynamics have long characterized the historical relationship between civil society and the state. Indeed, many scholars consider the sequence and timing of associational and state development to be important in explaining the size and composition of the nonprofit sector (Esping-Anderson 1990). On the one hand, if a modern state developed before associational activity became widespread among its citizens, then the government is likely to carry out most social service activities. On the other hand, in nations where associational life either predated large-scale government or developed in tandem with it—such as the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia—these same social service activities are conducted by voluntary organizations. Not surprisingly, in the latter circumstance the extent of associational life and nonprofit organization tends to be larger.

This developmental trajectory argument, or social origins theory, also helps us understand the differing composition of nonprofit sectors (Anheier and Salamon 2006). For example, social democratic countries such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland have a considerable array of nonprofit organizations, but they are concentrated among membership organizations, such as football and hockey clubs, rather than social service organizations. In contrast, many more social services are either performed directly by nonprofits or contracted to nonprofits by governments in the liberal market democracies of Anglo-American origin. The central argument in the social origins theory is that there is (1) an inverse relationship between the extent of government social welfare spending and the size of the nonprofit sector and (2) a difference across societies in the predominant types of nonprofits that is shaped by historical development and class relations. Helmut K. Anheier, Markus Lang, and Stefan Toepler revisit and amend this line of argument in Chapter 30, Comparative Nonprofit Sector Research.

Despite this overarching framework, broad generalizations about international differences in civil society are nevertheless difficult to make. It is not only the size of the nonprofit arena across nations that is challenging to explain but also its composition. The economist Burton Weisbrod (1975, 1988) attempted to develop such an argument, with important contributions added by the economist Estelle James (1987). Their general explanation of the presence of nonprofit organizations is based on two ideas: the heterogeneity of the population and the concept of a median voter. With heterogeneity, Weisbrod (1989) referred to the degree of consensus among citizens for collective services, such as medical services and famine relief, and trust services, such as day care and nursing homes. If members of a society have disparate interests, in, say, medical research or environmental conservation, governments will have difficulty catering to these diverse tastes. In a heterogeneous society, with differences also marked by religion, race, or ethnicity, one would expect to see more nonprofit organizations than in a homogeneous society. This argument rests on the belief that politicians cater to a median voter who represents the largest segment of the demand for public goods. Government spending is aimed at the median voter and leaves other members of society unsatisfied. Nonprofit organizations, in this view, step in to satisfy those who have an interest in public goods not provided by government.

Other factors may loom large alongside heterogeneous demands, however. By and large, more-developed countries have a larger nonprofit sector than less-developed countries. Some observers argue that democratic societies have larger nonprofit sectors than autocratic societies, but associational life in such settings can occur in the shadows and appear in unanticipated ways. Contemporary China, with its massive new middle class of more than 350 million people, has considerable (albeit not necessarily formalized) support for environmental goals and progress. Despite the extensive reach of a powerful state, there is an unruly, contentious online space where millions of Chinese citizens raise questions about their society (Lei 2018). Grassroots organizations spring up in the shadow of the state (Spires 2011). Furthermore, as more middle-class Chinese residents become homeowners, housing associations are becoming more active in expressing the views of neighbors and citizens (Lin 2020). Part of the challenge of studying civil society across nations is that organizing models are deeply conditioned by political struggles, media access, and legal tools.

Ideological movements also influence the contours of the nonprofit sector. In the 1990s, many advanced industrial nations saw a general move toward shrinking government (Hood 1995; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). This trend—whether referred to as retrenchment, decentralization, new public management, or neoliberalism—resulted in a sharp reorganization of the public sector. Much more emphasis was placed on accountability and contracting with both private for-profit organizations and private nonprofit entities. As the scale and activities of government shifted, an array of public–private partnerships appeared in many fields, as discussed in Chapter 9, Toward a Governance Framework for Government–Nonprofit Relations, by Nicole P. Marwell and Maoz Brown.

General secular trends also shape the size of the nonprofit sector. As two-income families become more common, demand grows for professional child care. Increases in life expectancy raise the demand for elder care. Rising levels of educational attainment produce more heterogeneous tastes, creating a wider variety of artistic, athletic, and cultural interests. The kinds of associations created by the well-to-do are quite different, however, from mass participatory organizations; they are more likely to involve doing for others rather than with them (Skocpol 2003). Meanwhile, increased rates of immigration and forced migration put pressure on governments, and nonprofits have stepped in to provide relief in many countries, as described by Irene Bloemraad, Shannon Gleeson, and Els de Graauw in Chapter 12, Immigrant Organizations. Greater awareness of the effects of climate change increases the role of environmental nonprofits (see Chapter 15, Nonprofits and the Environment, by Magali Delmas, Thomas P. Lyon, and Sean Jackson), and when greater severity of events caused by climate change combines with increased frequency, pressures develop that governments cannot meet. These secular trends can to a large extent be understood as increasing the heterogeneity of demands discussed earlier, leading to greater nonprofit activity as predicted by Weisbrod (1988).

If explaining the size and scope of the nonprofit sector across countries is difficult, it is perhaps still harder to gain a purchase on how volunteering varies. There are competing definitions of what constitutes a volunteer in different nations, making it challenging to assess the amount of such activity. Even in the United States (as Nina Eliasoph shows in Chapter 25, What Do Volunteers Do?), volunteering carries a wide variety of meanings. Sorting out the relationship between formal employment and volunteering is not easy. Research by Salamon and his colleagues in the Johns Hopkins University comparative nonprofit sector project found a general trend: the larger the paid employment in the nonprofit field, the higher the volunteer workforce (Salamon et al. 2012). Paid work does not, therefore, displace volunteers. Countries with the largest nonprofit sectors, such as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, and Israel, also have the highest rates of volunteering. Volunteering roles differ notably, however. In Europe, volunteers are often involved in sports activities, whereas in the United States religious congregations attract the most volunteers (see Brad Fulton’s analysis in Chapter 26, Religious Organizations).

Nonprofits and the Market

A complex relationship of interdependence has long existed between governments and nonprofits. Salamon (1987) was one of the first analysts to stress the idea of third-party government, in which governmental monies go to nonprofit organizations to deliver public services. This characterization raises the following question: Why don’t governments contract with firms instead of nonprofits? And, relatedly, why don’t we see more for-profit day care centers, art museums, or elder care facilities? To answer these questions, we need to examine the spaces nonprofits occupy in the market and how the value of these organizations is calculated, a topic Jennifer E. Mosley explores in Chapter 10, Social Service Nonprofits.

Scholars have developed several arguments to account for which industries have the largest nonprofit presence and what kinds of evaluative criteria are typically used for nonprofit enterprises. Economist and legal scholar Henry Hansmann (1987) argued that nonprofits most commonly arise in situations where consumers feel unable to assess a good or service accurately. In this model, nonprofit organizations have less incentive to take advantage of consumers’ informational disadvantages. Put differently, when it is difficult to monitor an activity or when the recipient of an activity is not the person paying for it (as in the case of professional child care), the informational asymmetry between the consumer and the provider could be exploited by commercial entities. The nondistribution constraint means that, as Weisbrod (1989:543) puts neatly, the incentive to chisel is weakened. Consider, for example, the informational challenges faced in trying to find quality care for a developmentally disadvantaged family member or state-of-the-art medical interventions for older loved ones. These situations pose a moral hazard problem—that is, a circumstance in which someone other than the purchaser of the service bears the risk of misbehavior by the service provider.⁵

In a mixed economy, nonprofits should have some performance benefits over for-profits. And indeed they do. For example, nonprofit hospitals provide more uncompensated care to the indigent; nonprofit nursing homes and psychiatric care facilities are more likely to use waiting lists than raise prices; nonprofits provide higher-quality day care. In contrast, for-profits in these domains tend to pursue profitable niche markets (Krashinsky 1998; Mauer 1998; Schlesinger and Gray 2006; Horwitz, Chapter 17, Charitable Nonprofits and the Business of Health Care). Nobel laureate economist Oliver Hart and his colleagues take this incentive design argument further, demonstrating that in the case of prisons, for-profits are even more extreme in their revenue-oriented behaviors than chiseling on conditions or failing to focus on recidivism. They also use excessive force and have lower-quality personnel (Hart, Shleifer, and Vishny 1997).

The stylized theory assumes that nonprofits have less incentive to take advantage of people with fewer resources, but the companion implication is that they also have weaker motivations to be efficient or to innovate. Such trade-offs in incentives began to change in the 1990s. Despite the broad view that nonprofit organizations are more concerned with mission than maximizing output, a movement began at that time to promote the use of evaluative criteria to document nonprofits’ impact. Paul Brest examines the motivations to measure outcomes and traces the emergence of such methods in Chapter 16, The Outcomes Movement in Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector. This trend was driven by a host of factors. A turn toward more professional and professionalized employees, alongside demands for performance metrics by government funders, spurred efforts to develop new ways to measure nonprofit activity (Hwang and Powell 2009). A new generation of philanthropists, flush with money made in tech sectors, drew on metrics from the for-profit sector to guide their donations. As Aaron Horvath and I discuss in Chapter 3, Seeing Like a Philanthropist, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was pivotal in this transformation; it launched initiatives in hopes that it would obtain measurable and verifiable results. Some funders extended this idea to conclude that if program results don’t have a number attached to them, they are not valuable. The cultural climate in the United States thus shifted markedly in the 1990s and early 2000s, altering the criteria by which nonprofits are valued.

A change in the relations between nonprofits and the market has gone hand-in-hand with the shrinking of government. People with altruistic motives increasingly looked to work in civil society organizations rather than government service. As both evaluative criteria and public support shifted, there was widespread public enthusiasm for social enterprises of varied forms (see Chapter 14, Social Entrepreneurship, by Johanna Mair). Many nonprofits have long relied on fees for their services and competed in a limited way with for-profit alternatives. The newer social enterprises reflect a stronger embrace of market forces, however, as Maitreesh Ghatak discusses in Chapter 13, Economic Theories of the Social Sector. Whether in a nonprofit or hybrid form, these new models often share the view that social problems can be ameliorated with market-based, technical solutions. Examples abound, including digital platforms for informal labor markets and novel health care programs.

This entrepreneurial spirit has spread not only to nonprofits but also to philanthropy. As private giving for public purposes becomes more professional and businesslike, it changes from patronage to a more hands-on style (Skocpol 2016). This shift has many ramifications. Stephen Teles (2016) argues that foundations are turning to shorter-term projects that will show quick results, whereas Horvath and Powell (2016) suggest that patronage has moved away from projects that are contributions to the public sphere toward disruptive agendas that offer alternatives to existing governmental institutions. Other scholars speculate that philanthropy is highest when social inequality is greatest (Gilens 2012; Berry 2016; Levy 2016), leading us to ask why the superwealthy have the right to speak for others through philanthropic initiatives. This question of the imposition of tastes or values is taken up by Francie Ostrower in Chapter 19, Nonprofit Arts Organizations, in her discussion of tensions between inclusion and exclusivity in the world of cultural organizations.

Philanthropic donations have also become a potent tool for policy advocacy, as Sarah Reckhow discusses in Chapter 8, Politics, Philanthropy, and Inequality. One focus has been on changing the conversation, that is, altering the policy formulation and implementation process. In the domain of political advocacy, we find a surprising twist. Progressive donors have tended to follow the entrepreneurial mind-set: project-based, incentive-laden, short-time-horizon donations. Many of the activities supported by these donations also entail some form of service provision. By contrast, conservative donors have played a long game (Hertel-Fernandez 2016; Hertel-Fernandez, Skocpol, and Sclar 2018). They have focused on building an institutional infrastructure, at the state level and in think tanks, with large gifts to a small number of entities. This contrasting focus raises questions about the meaning of voice in civil society.

Nonprofits and Voice

Despite wealthy donors’ outsized influence on political affairs in relation to that of other citizens, the political activity of donors needs to be viewed in context to accurately gauge its impact. Funds from large donors, and philanthropic gifts in general, constitute but a small portion of the overall budget of most operating charities. In Chapter 23, What Influences Charitable Giving?, Pamela Paxton surveys the scope of individual charitable giving in the United States, and Laura K. Gee and Jonathan Meer explore the motivations for giving in Chapter 24, The Altruism Budget. Notwithstanding the media attention given to signers of the Giving Pledge,⁶ the considerable philanthropic contributions of these donors make up only a small fraction of overall charitable gifts. Further, although the contemporary activities of the wealthy have garnered much public and scholarly attention, their current influence is not unrivaled. The more striking contrast is between the present celebration of philanthropists and the vilification of such individuals in the late nineteenth century (Horvath and Powell 2016; Levy 2016). Further, the remarkable political capacity-building of conservatively oriented philanthropists over the past thirty years was undertaken in response to the perception that large U.S. foundations had historically supported, in the main, liberal causes of integration and inclusion (Useem 1984:80–85; Teles 2008). Philanthropy has thus been altered both in reputation and orientation.

In addition to considering the role of donors and foundations in advocacy, the chapters in this volume analyze voice inside nonprofit and civil society organizations and discuss their external influence. Who speaks inside nonprofit organizations? Do nonprofits have a seat at the table when important decisions are made in their communities and cities? Chapter 6, Political Theory and the Nonprofit Sector, by Ted Lechterman and Rob Reich, and Chapter 7, Nonprofits as Boundary Markers, by Elisabeth S. Clemens, consider the effects of membership in nonprofit organizations on political socialization and attitudes. The classic writings of Alexis de Tocqueville spawned a line of work, perhaps most vividly expressed by Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Nanetti (1993), that emphasized participation and associational life as means of fostering civic engagement. This training ground view has been buttressed by a good deal of empirical work. For example, Daniel McFarland and Reuben Thomas (2006) show that participation in student clubs and student government in high school leads to much stronger civic engagement in adulthood. Putnam and his colleagues (1993) argued that civic engagement is central to the subsequent success of political institutions because civic participation creates norms of trust and reciprocity that enable citizens from different backgrounds to work together.⁷

These arguments go right to the heart of what makes associational life distinctive. In Chapter 7, Nonprofits as Boundary Markers, Elisabeth S. Clemens focuses on the processes that connect associational life and civic engagement. Does participation create a habit of involvement that is translated from nonprofits to the realm of the polity? Or do civic norms and practices depend on the character and functioning of specific organizations? Do nonprofit organizations provide a voice for their employees and volunteers through participation in strategic planning or other critical decisions? How much is the wider community drawn in, via meetings, focus groups, or social media? Powell, Horvath, and Brandtner (2016) have shown that nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area have become much more porous with regard to their external publics, inviting constituents in via their websites, blogs, chat rooms, and focus groups. Do internal and external participation go hand in hand, or are they subject to different influences?

Some participatory organizations, however, have values that are inconsistent with democracy (Fiorina 1999). The socialization role of such organizations can also work against democratic institutions. Sheri Berman’s (1997) research on Weimar Germany is a vivid example, showing that associational life was rampant during this heady period. But absent a stable democratic government, many civil society groups worked to undermine democracy. In societies where cleavages among groups are significant, associational life may further aggravate tensions. Dylan Riley (2010), for example, argues that fascist regimes in Italy, Spain, and Romania arose, somewhat paradoxically, out of strong, pre-fascist civil societies. Some may ask whether we are at such a moment today in the United States—do nonprofits evince more bonding of like-minded people rather than bridging across different groups of people?

In the United States, members of churches, synagogues, and mosques are among the most generous citizens with regard to donations of both money and time (see Chapter 26, Religious Organizations, by Brad Fulton). But do religious communities teach values of participation or toleration, especially toward others who are not members of their specific community? Recent research by Wesley Longhofer, Giacomo Negro, and Peter Roberts (2018) suggests that schools can unite diverse communities, whereas churches tend to divide them. In Chapter 11, Nonprofits as Urban Infrastructure, Christof Brandtner and Claire Dunning explore how civic organizations function as either inclusive or exclusive communities. Their focus on the reciprocal relationships between civic associations and the wider society sheds light on the values of associational life for the vitality of cities.

Most research on civic participation has been carried out in countries that are broadly democratic. With democracy in retreat in many nations, it becomes imperative to study and theorize how associations operate under autocratic governments. In recent years, both autocratic and even ostensibly democratic regimes, such as Austria and Canada, have moved to limit the involvement of international NGOs in their local polities. These restrictions make it difficult or impossible for domestic NGOs to receive funding from international sources and restrict travel on both sides. Kendra Dupuy and Aseem Prakash argue in Chapter 28, Global Backlash Against Foreign Funding to Domestic Nongovernmental Organizations, that such restrictions can be viewed as a form of border control, in which states seek to regulate foreign donors’ influence on domestic politics.

Counterbalancing these limiting forces are a number of trends that expand civil society. As countries become more developed and larger middle classes arise, a number of features spark associational life. Environmental pollution prompts citizens to take action, independent of government, as discussed in Chapter 15, Nonprofits and the Environment, by Magali Delmas, Thomas P. Lyon, and Sean Jackson. Homeownership fosters attachment to place and a sense of community. Addressing these local concerns requires some degree of organizational skill. Accordingly, the neo-Tocquevillian argument developed by Putnam and others may prove applicable in contemporary nondemocratic settings.

The internal organizational dynamics that develop in these new contexts will be as critical to determining outcomes as the external situations that nonprofits seek to rectify. The relationship between internal voice within organizations and external political advocacy is a central topic in this volume. Nonprofit organizations frequently advocate on behalf of their members, and the manner in which they do so both reflects and influences the way that citizens exercise their rights. As Ted Lechterman and Rob Reich discuss in Chapter 6, Political Theory and the Nonprofit Sector, many of the most fundamental rights of liberty are expressed in the context of nonprofit organizations. It is to be expected, therefore, that voluntary associations function as sources of countervailing power challenging existing structures. How this countervailing force is exercised will be critical to its outcomes. Is voice exercised through influential mass membership associations, as was common at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century (Skocpol, Ganz, and Munson 2000), or is advocacy championed by organizations run by skilled managers with few members (Walker, McCarthy, and Baumgartner 2011)? If large national membership organizations have declined in size and influence, is civic voice reduced even as policy advocacy is more actively pursued by a growing number of special-interest nonprofits? The relationship between different types of nonprofits and their effects on public policy is a focus throughout Part VI of this volume.

Any argument that suggests strong swings of the pendulum from mass movements to special-purpose entities is, of course, subject to exceptions. It may well be that new forms of civic and social action are emerging that have largely escaped our view because of a scholarly focus on formal organizations. In a study of urban Chicago, Robert Sampson and his colleagues (2005) found a rich, blended associational life in which cookouts, bake sales, and barbecues, often sponsored by churches and neighborhood associations, were combined with efforts to influence local policy decisions. A picnic to save a local park and a cookout in support of a library are examples of community activism and policy advocacy going hand in hand (Han 2016). One question that remains to be answered is whether such activity channels advocacy and protest to the local level, away from large-scale social change, or is a wellspring for nationwide movements. The complex web of relationships among local, national, and international movements for political and human rights, and the attending backlash against these efforts, is explored in Chapter 28, Global Backlash Against Foreign Funding to Domestic Nongovernmental Organizations, by Kendra Dupuy and Aseem Prakash.

Conclusion

In an earlier era, scholars sought to develop a body of theory to explain why and where nonprofit organizations existed (Hansmann 1987; Weisbrod 1988). Interestingly, this effort dovetailed with a period in American political development when nonprofits were perhaps most distinctive as an institutional form, separate from both government and business in their motivations. This tripartite scheme was an ingenious model; however, it proved challenging to apply to other nations with different political economies and at different stages of institutional development. Today, clear boundaries are harder to find even in the U.S. context. Social movements create markets, as discussed in Chapter 15, Nonprofits and the Environment, by Magali Delmas, Thomas P. Lyon, and Sean Jackson, and markets create movements, too—consider, for example, the invention of the birth control pill (Eig 2016). Nonprofits rely on funding not only from earned income and individual donors but from governments, businesses, foundations and other nonprofits, tying all three sectors together.

In my own work on public and private science in the biomedical field, I have used the distinction between organizations that were in science to do business and in business to do science. We found this contrast much more analytically crisp than a distinction based on legal form in explaining divergent behaviors (such as following norms of open as opposed to private science and developing new medicines rather than copycat drugs) (Powell and Sandholtz 2012). Nonetheless, some of the most pathbreaking work in biomedical research has come out of private nonprofit research centers such as the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California; the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco; the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, also in La Jolla; the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle; and the Cleveland Clinic (Powell and Owen-Smith 2012). These entities combine the freedom of discovery associated with university science with the sense of urgency for tackling big questions associated with commercial firms. Yet not all nonprofit research centers have such sterling reputations; some fall victim to greed and malfeasance. In short, our analytical lens should be directed at behavior rather than legal form, and we cannot assume that behaviors and form march in lockstep.

There is little doubt that civil society is found in many places. The coffeehouses celebrated by Jürgen Habermas (1989) have been joined by brewpubs, public and nonprofit parks, libraries, museums, incubators, and, for all their vitriol, online discussion platforms. Nonprofits now give microloans to small businesses, and limited liability corporations are gaining prominence as an alternative to foundations because they allow donors to fund businesses and engage in political advocacy (see Chapter 4, The Organizational Transformation of Civil Society, by Patricia Bromley). More businesses have moved beyond viewing corporate social responsibility as a publicity matter and are thinking seriously about their social purpose. In the overall scheme of the economy, the number of such businesses is small, but it may be growing as some firms think about adding to the economy rather than extracting from it. Furthermore, cities around the world have pursued challenges such as climate change by engaging with local civic actors and collaborating to develop bottom-up solutions rather than top-down imposed policies that seldom work (Brandtner 2019). Clearly, social purpose occurs across organizational forms rather than only in neatly segregated spaces.

Thus, our goal with this volume is to chart the current research terrain, identify gaps in our understanding of the shape and impact of associational life, and prioritize questions for future study. We have assembled an interdisciplinary cast of contributors, bringing economists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists together with researchers from schools of communication, education, governance, law, management, and public policy. We aim to move beyond familiar tropes that nonprofit organizations are more trustworthy, that they are fountains of civic engagement, that the boundaries between sectors are blurring, or that the sector is expanding rapidly across the globe. The chapters in this book ask the hard questions: Under what conditions do we see such effects or changes, and in what domains? Do arguments made in the U.S. context apply across nations, or are they limited to specific political systems? How do we conceptualize the different meanings of participation, and in what kinds of organizations? What insights are gained from well-crafted comparative and historical perspectives? Perhaps most crucially, what role can nonprofits play in the future, particularly as democracy appears to be receding? In tackling these thorny questions, this volume aims to make fundamental contributions to the study of civil society in ways that can inform many fields throughout the social sciences.

PART I

EMERGENCE, TRANSFORMATION, AND REGULATION

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS OPENING PART PAINT the nonprofit world on a broad canvas, capturing its history, financing, global proliferation, and tax treatment. There is a deep and lasting influence of founding beliefs and models from Britain and the U.S. colonies on the field’s development over the first century of the young republic and up to the present day. These liberal origins underpin the development of civil society into a more formally organized sector over time, certainly in the United States but also in countries around the world with the globalization of liberal and neoliberal models. The nonprofit sector’s trajectory is linked not only to its cultural and political origins, but also to the growth of capitalism and economic imperatives. In the United States, elite philanthropists used the tools and models by which they made their fortunes and applied those to their charitable strategies and organizations. In so doing, they shaped the recipients of their patronage and influenced public debates in the process. Relatedly, the federal tax system is interwoven with the U.S. nonprofit sector. Tax policy intervenes in the functioning of nonprofits, conditions their involvement in the political arena, and shapes how nonprofits engage in income-generating activities. The accounts of emergence and development of the sector spelled out here bring us up to the present day, where historical legacies interact with contemporary pressures to change the sector in novel and unprecedented ways.

In Chapter 2, A History of Associational Life and the Nonprofit Sector in the United States, Benjamin Soskis describes the development of associational life in the United States over the span of four centuries. Many have described the United States as a special case of benevolent exceptionalism, but Soskis is skeptical of such a claim. He notes that in colonial times there was an active transatlantic network that connected Britain and the main port cities of the United States—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. As reform movements developed and matured in Britain, they crossed the Atlantic, spurred on by trade, print media, and the ties of church and family. The densest associational ecology was found in Philadelphia, with its charity schools, ethnic aid societies, and the first public hospital. The American Revolution changed associational life in the former colonies, in both the nature of voluntary activity and its governance. The connection of voluntary organizations with democratic practice meant that how associations were organized and who was allowed to participate in them became subjects of debate. Formal charitable organizations did not emerge in any great number until well into the nineteenth century, and their regional distribution was highly uneven.

Soskis charts numerous moments of crisis that have characterized the sector through its history; he argues that these crises mark changes in the relations of power in the larger society. The nonprofit sector has been a crucible for political contestation over most of the defining issues in US history, from slavery to immigration. But nonprofits are not just sites for deliberation and advocacy. Soskis shows how the activities of nonprofits have reflected the changing distribution of power and service in America, with voluntary action deeply implicated in the practice of democracy, for all its faults and strengths.

Philanthropy represents an attempt at transferring economic wealth into social influence. In Chapter 3 Seeing Like a Philanthropist, Aaron Horvath and Walter W. Powell seek to understand how the influence of the wealthy has changed over time. The business successes of elite philanthropists become a kind of idée fixe—how you earn conditions how you give away, as does one’s stage of life. They trace five different eras of philanthropy, distinguishing the visions of elite philanthropists, the organizations they built, and the controversies their attempts at intervening in American society provoked. The aim of their chapter is to both reveal how philanthropists see the world and show how the philanthropic field of vision has changed from the time of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller to today’s era of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. They view philanthropy not as mere acts of generosity but as reflective signposts that mark collective understandings of democracy, wealth, and the kind of society we have become.

Wealthy donors from the past are not the peers of those in the present, but the philanthropic practices they adopted leave their imprint on successive generations. Yet even as organizational models persist, new forms of wealth create new philanthropic endeavors alongside the old. The visions of new generations interweave with the organizational models of past generations. This braiding is reflected in the myriad ways that established foundations are influenced by new entrants, with their novel approaches. Charitable donations are more than a mere medium of exchange, however; they are imbued with different meanings. Alms, contributions, gifts, grants, and investments mark not only distinctive monetary forms, but also very different relations between benefactor and beneficiary. Different conceptions of recipients (such as the contrast between the donee and the grantee) imply divergent relationships and obligations. For example, twenty-first century, ultra-rich philanthropists impose on recipients a new set of requirements and routines; nonprofits today have to act like start-ups or incubators, produce metrics, and talk about scaling in order to attract attention.

Horvath and Powell begin their chapter by observing that during the first Gilded Age there was keen awareness of the contradiction between Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic vision of how to improve the general condition of the people and the ruthless manner in which he ran his railroads and steel mills. Both Carnegie and Rockefeller faced strong headwinds, as the marriage of monopoly corporate power and elite philanthropy did not sit well with a vision of democracy. Today in our new Gilded Age, powered by an interconnected global economy, the relationship between corporate wealth, elite philanthropy, and political legitimacy has changed. The new vision is to bring benevolence to business, in the hope that corporate enterprises may be less extractive and can be harnessed to solve public problems. Philanthropy has undergone a profound shift from something once contested to now venerated, carrying hopes that its legitimacy can rub off on the private sector.

In Chapter 4, The Organizational Transformation of Civil Society, Patricia Bromley argues that the nonprofit form has expanded massively worldwide in countries that differ politically, economically, and institutionally. Moreover, she asserts, within countries large nonprofits are increasingly formal, complex organizations that can look like their counterparts in the business and government sectors. Consequently, she states, all types of organizations work to demonstrate their accountability and responsiveness to the members of a pluralist society.

Bromley develops a cultural argument for the rise of formal nonprofit organization that accounts for why this form has proliferated and expanded so markedly. Her argument has both historical and cultural components. Seen through the lens of long-term historical change, the growth of formal organization is tied to broad political changes related to the evolution of a feudal religious polity with medieval governance structures into the secular, administrative, and legal structures of most modern nation-states. In tandem, she chronicles a profound social transformation in which the individual has become the locus of both rights and action. The twentieth century witnessed an explosion of human rights treaties, organizations, and doctrines that spread liberal principles worldwide. More rights were constructed, and for more types of people, expanding agency to more members of the general population. In addition, diverse realms such as education, art, and music have become matters of interest to the general public, rather than restricted to an elite few.

Of course, there has been a backlash in many countries to the expansion of scientific principles, accompanied by a loss of respect for the rights of individuals. The core foundations of the liberal world order are under assault; hence we might expect a decline in the growth of formal nonprofit organizations, or a movement where they are more purveyors of special interests than the public good. Her chapter concludes with a rich discussion of possible research directions to explore these arguments.

Daniel J. Hemel argues in Chapter 5, Tangled Up in Tax, that nonprofit organizations in the United States are caught in a complex web of nonprofit-specific tax provisions, and that even seemingly unrelated tax statutes often tie back to the sector in complicated ways. He distinguishes among three types of entanglements—administrative, political, and market—and explains how society’s decisions to support the sector through tax exemptions and deductions both respond to and result in entanglements. The two main ways in which the federal tax system supports the nonprofit sector are exemption and deduction. Exemption allows nonprofit organizations to earn income without paying any entity-level tax; deduction allows donors to a subset of nonprofit organizations to reduce their taxable income by the amount of a gift. But such support comes with strings attached. He reminds us that the familiar term tax exemption is a misnomer of sorts, as exemption comes with a heavy load of compliance burdens, disclosure obligations, and other behavioral restrictions that dictate the day-to-day lives of nonprofits.

Administrative entanglement involves the tax authorities in the lives of nonprofit organizations, whereas political entanglement refers to the participation of nonprofit organizations in the political sphere. Administrative entanglement and political entanglement both involve the nonprofit sector with the organs of government; a different type occurs when