Civil society has been lauded for its ability to act as a social glue that is critical to healthy and functioning democracies. Despite their centrality to US society, nonprofits have lacked legitimacy commensurate with the criticality of their civic purposes. Drawing upon the publicness debate in which government functions under a political authority and business operates within a market authority, Robichau and Fernandez propose a normative “Nonprofitness Framework” that accounts for the moral authority by which nonprofits operate, which is necessary for contributing to a vibrant democracy. A Nonprofitness Framework considers charitable and voluntary organizations in terms of degrees of moral authority and their expression of nonprofit ethos and missions in which some organizations move closer to public or private orientations. Understanding how nonprofits and their agents are conditioned by history and values in turn preserves and cultivates a thriving sector, generating the flexibility to enhance society and provide balance among a dominant private sector and an influential public sector.

In this concluding chapter, the editors take stock of the contributions, summarize overarching themes, and suggest new directions for research.

That a commercial contract is international may seem intuitive to some observers, yet it is difficult to find an accepted definition for the term. What is even more difficult is identifying the legal rules to which international commercial contracts are subject. Are international contracts subject to some sort of international law? What are the sources of this law and what is its scope of application? To the extent that international contracts are subject to national rules, which law’s rules are applicable? These questions become even more pressing when the practice of international contracting is taken into consideration: contracts are often written as if their terms were the only source with which to regulate the parties’ relationship and as if any sources of law were irrelevant.

Ressler introduces a sociological theory of transformative symbolic reality to illuminate a specific, but often overlooked, impact of the nonprofit sector that is directly tied to improving the quality of life for individuals and groups within society. Grounded in the sociology of communities and nonprofit theory, transformative symbolic reality states that society reproduces itself or changes through social reality, and that social reality can be purposefully manipulated to challenge the forces of inequity. Specifically, individuals or organizations can create both the physical and metaphysical spaces in which people manifest and manipulate social norms, expectations, and behaviors in an inter-relational way that generates transformative social capital. Through the lens of transformative symbolic reality, the chapter conceptualizes the nonprofit sector as a wellspring of this overlooked public good and argues that it is this transformative aspect of the nonprofit sector that undergirds connections between nonprofit organizations and any long-term social impact.

This chapter critically considers the historic and contemporary entanglements of the nonprofit sector with the state and the market, and the implications of such entanglements on nonprofits, marginalized communities, and the possibility of social change. Interrogating what happens to the structural institutional form of the nonprofit when intertwined with the state and the economy in what some call the nonprofit industrial complex, Rojas assesses the fallout that leads to exacerbated policing and incarceration of women and communities of color, among other deleterious impacts. The work of naming these concerns and critiques is necessary for nonprofits to potentially become avenues for social transformation. The chapter concludes with practical interventions toward building organizations capable of creating more just futures.

This chapter critiques Western and scientific philanthropy scholarly understanding of the nonprofit sector. It argues that this narrow analysis of nonprofits limits our understanding of Muslim prosocial behaviors that are less dominant in the academic literature. By examining the tenets and roots of Muslim prosocial action, we see how this specific view of social good has been limited in the broader conversation, which in turn has limited our understanding of the nonprofit sector across the world. The chapter also explores Muslim prosocial action by examining its theological and cultural sources to create a broader conception of giving behavior within an Islamic context, and discusses the challenges associated with strict adherence to the Western definition of the nonprofit sector for scholars who want to include Muslim perspectives and charitable acts. Ultimately, it suggests a framework that nonprofit-sector scholars can use to move beyond Western-centric definitions of prosocial action to include other cultural and faith perspectives. This approach treats Muslim prosocial action as a practice-oriented religious tradition.

To what extent does soft law ensure harmonisation? Does it replace the governing law or does it complement it?

Lamothe and colleagues view the nonprofit sector as being intentionally engineered or designed by government to create specific behaviors in the economy. This chapter examines the ways in which government and legal structures envision desirable outcomes in the broad economy and develop laws and policies intended to yield specific institutional state-sanctioned outcomes in the private market. Drawing on the Korean context as an example, the authors explore what government design of the social sector says about not only the strong-state context present in the global East, but also how this lens helps us to reinterpret our understanding of the legal underpinnings of the nonprofit sector elsewhere.

The chapter introduces readers to the major theories of the sector. Those covered include: market-failure theory, government-failure theory, contract-failure theory, voluntary-failure theory, supply-side (or entrepreneurship) theory, social-origins theory, interdependence theory, the commons, mediating structures, and associationalism.

In this chapter, Mook and Whitman provide a critique of the dominant three-sector paradigm, which categorizes organizations into distinct public, private, and social sectors based on their legal status. The critique is inspired by the social economy perspective that focuses attention on the dynamic intersection of the sectors as part of a mixed economy. The social-economy model acknowledges the blending of sectoral elements and the evolution of different types of organizations in the political economy. The authors explain this perspective, contrast it with the three-sector paradigm, and provide an example of how it allows us to reexamine societies and better conceptualize the work of organizations with social objectives. The closing calls for a movement to balance the political economy in favor of humanity and the world.

This chapter introduces a self-development theory of the nonprofit sector, informed by alternative development and basic-needs theory. The theory presented in this chapter suggests that nonprofit law plays a role in creating a legal framework that allows people to participate in the improvement of their own lives and communities through self-development. With a nonprofit-friendly legal environment in place, individuals have greater economic incentive to work within their own communities to create organizations that help individuals, families, and communities to meet their own needs. This paradigm stands in contrast to views of nonprofit organizations as facilitators of rescuing behavior, in which one group of people seeks to uplift another. Based on cases in Nigeria and South Africa, this paper describes the role and importance of nonprofits in facilitating the development of individuals, institutions, and communities from within.

This introductory chapter makes a case for the value of considering the role and purpose of nonprofits in society. It defines “theory” in accessible terms and describes the scope of nonprofit-sector theory. It also previews the subsequent chapters.