Despite the fact that gouernment in the United States relies more heavily on nonprofit organizations than on its own instrumentalities to deliver government- funded human services, and that nonprofits receive more of their income from government than from any other single source, the phenomenon of government- nonprofit partnership has been largely overlooked both in analyses of the welfare state and in research on the voluntary sector. This article argues that this neglect of government-nonprofit ties is less the product of a lack of research than of important weaknesses in theory. Both the theory of the welfare state and the theory of the voluntary sector, moreover, are deficient. To overcome these weaknesses, the article advances an alternative theoretical formulation that replaces the prevailing con ception of the welfare state with the concept of "third-party government," and replaces the current "market failure-government failure" theory of the voluntary sector with a theory built around the concept of "voluntary failure" instead. Viewed through these alternative conceptual lenses, the phenomenon of government-non profit partnership comes into far better view and becomes far more understandable. Against the backdrop of this alternative theory, the article then identifies a number of principles that should guide government-nonprofit relations in the years ahead.
In this paper we argue that the lack of attention to the third sector historically is primarily a result of the weakness and limitations of the concepts that are used to define and describe it. The purpose of this article is to remedy this situation by developing a general definition of the sector that can be used in comparative research. To do so, the article first identifies four alternative types of definitions that are potentially available and evaluates each in terms of three basic criteria. On this basis it concludes that the most useful definition is the 'structural/operational' one, which includes in the non-profit sector organisations that share five basic characteristics. These are: formal, private, non-profit-distributing, self-governing and voluntary. The basic definition is then tested against the realities of three disparate countries and found to perform quite well. On this basis we recommend the structural/operational definition, particularly for comparative, crossnational research. A glance across the institutional landscape of the world reveals often striking differences in the way human beings organise themselves for social, economic and political action.
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