Every question concerning U.S. nonprofit organizations and its nonprofit sector as a whole has a historical dimension. Changing state and federal laws have always determined both what nonprofit corporations and associations can do and who can join and lead them. Conflicts over individual freedom, the nature of government, the role of various religions, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other matters have always shaped these laws. Learning about the nonprofit sector has just begun, but large numbers of books and data sources—many noted in this article—are relevant. Numbers of nonprofit employees grew from near zero to 1% of the U.S. labor force in 1900, to 3% in 1960, and 9% in 2000. Consumer wealth, steadily increasing government subsidies, and expanded individual rights explain the growth. The sector limits religious and other cultural conflicts and promotes diversity, while increasing inequality.
The United States offers a challenging case for the comparative study of philanthropic foundations. Depending on definition, foundation numbers total 80,000 or 130,000. They hold comparatively large assets per capita, though they vary enormously in assets; most are quite small, and compared with government and profit-seeking business, their wealth and their influence are very limited. Public controversies shape and confuse much of the discussion about them: the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth, the continuing subordination of people of color and women, the impact of money on elections and on public policies and international relations, the prominence of the largest endowed, nonprofit universities and hospitals. Seeking to evaluate the critiques as well as the foundations’ positive contributions, the U.S. researcher encounters all “the combined complexities” that bedevil comparative international studies of foundations. Deriving their corporate charters from the states, they operate under diverse legal environments and vary in self-understanding and operations. American foundations prize their autonomy, though regulation denies them the privacies and choices available to business firms and the superrich. Historically close affiliations with religion brings many funds under constitutional provisions that restrict public access to information. Although the data are incomplete and superficial, high-quality nonprofit websites and archives do provide much federally mandated and other data. Focusing more on change and the protection of values than on relief of basic need, they underwrite highly diverse and competing purposes; many of them promote the leading universities, hospitals, and arts organizations in their home regions. Recent donors, determined to achieve defined outcomes, have increasingly used community foundation or commercial advised funds rather than independent foundations. Finding that their resources are too limited to advance favored policy or social changes, a number of celebrated funds have recently sought to increase their influence through expertise, collaboration with communities and other organizations including businesses, supplementing grants with loans, and other initiatives.
In planning this symposium, we began with four observations:• Formal nonprofit, nongovernment organizations in the United States and other nations have been shaped by national development over a long period of time, beginning not later than the early 19th century; • relations between church and state have powerfully shaped nonprofit activity; • nonprofit, voluntary, and mutual benefit activities of many kinds have waxed and waned over the years; and • nonprofit activity, as a whole, grew slowly from the beginning of the 19th century to about 1960, but amid considerable controversy, has grown much more rapidly in recent years.These broad outlines of the development of nonprofit and voluntary activity have come into focus only in the past 10 years or so, and we still have much to learn. Fortunately, increasing numbers of scholars, based in several disciplines and many countries, are studying these questions. Knowledge of the development of nonprofit activity over the long term is vital to students of current nonprofit trends, to analysts of nonprofit policy, and to campaigners for increased civic participation. It is valuable to efforts to improve the operations and performance of nonprofit organizations. Knowledge of what has hap- The call for papers for this symposium requested contributions that explored and sought to explain the remarkable expansion of the nonprofit sector in the United States over the past 40 or 50 years. Three of the articles that follow responded to this request. The other three responded to another part of the call for "papers that place the recent United States experience in an international or comparative perspective." These articles define the nonprofit sector as including organizations that are separate from the state, not profit distributing, self-governing, and voluntary (Fisher, 1998;; for a very complete analysis, see Hansmann, 1996). They confirm the view that this sector has deep roots in the histories of several western European nations as well as the United States. These articles demonstrate that the nonprofit sector has expanded quite dramatically, and at nearly the same time on both sides of the Atlantic, since 1960. As a group, these articles also support the view that the size of a nation's nonprofit sector depends very largely on fundamental notions about the nature of the nation and the state, and about citizenship and political obligation-and on the institutional arrangements and policies that put these notions into practice. Especially important, it seems clear, are individual rights, the rights and powers of associations and nonprofit corporations, and relations between state and religion. A nation's commitments in these areas influence the number, activities, and diversity of its associations and nonprofit organizations. The size of a nation's nonprofit sector has also depended, in the four nations considered in these articles, on the size and character of government funding, and on the market for health, education, and welfare services (c.f. .In the United States, Fr...
American nonprofit organizations first developed in the nineteenth century as the organizational instruments through which Americans put their First Amendment freedoms of religion and political belief into practice. For one hundred years American nonprofits were held accountable by relatively small, compact communities of people who shared religious or other highly defined beliefs and values. In the twentieth century, many nonprofit organizations have grown very large and have adopted a scientific, general‐service‐to‐the‐community ethos. The legal, institutional, and cultural ideas and practices through which traditional nonprofits were, and are still, held accountable no longer seem to work equally well for the larger, more universal nonprofits of the late twentieth century.
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