Bromley and Santos make a cultural argument that situates nonprofit organizations within the broader context of organization itself. Due to the ascendancy of organization as an emergent category of social structure, the authors suggest that all types of organizations (government, business, nonprofit) are becoming increasingly similar. As the divisions between them (e.g., for-profit organization vs. nonprofit organization, etc.) become less prominent, the sector in need of explanation is the organizational one, writ large. Thus, rather than explaining the nonprofit sector, per se, the authors argue that the nonprofit sector is just one manifestation of organization and that it is organization that deserves our attention. In this sense, sector theory as traditionally understood (as narrow attention to the nonprofit sector in comparison to other sectors) diverts attention from more fundamental sociocultural developments. The authors argue that one can only understand nonprofit organizations vis-à-vis government and for-profit organizations by first understanding this broader context.

Does arbitration permit a self-sufficient contract? To what extent can relevance be disregarded without affecting the validity and enforceability of an award? What power does the arbitral tribunal have?

Contract practice andthe reasons for its standardised style. A discussion ofboilerplate clauses. A presentation of the theories of the relational contract and of the autonomous contract.

How is the governing law of a contract determined? What are the effects of the parties' choice of law? How is the governing law chosen in arbitration?

This chapter discloses the functions of the nonprofit sector in non-Western democratic national contexts and argues that a state’s political regime is related to the hierarchy of functions performed by the nonprofit sector in that state. The authors focus on the function of legitimacy and the ways the nonprofit sector performs it in a non-democratic context, with Russia as an example. They construct a theoretical model that explains why nonprofits instead of other organizations fulfill certain functions in nondemocratic regimes. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the model’s relevance to other nondemocratic contexts.

The theory of the nonprofit institutional form introduced by Henry Hansmann more than 40 years ago proposed that informational problems, specifically information asymmetry, explains the essential defining feature of the nonprofit organization – the so-called nondistribution constraint. While the conventional argument holds that an asymmetry of information arises due to intrinsic, hard-to-measure attributes of nonprofit outputs, this chapter argues instead that informational problems arise because private purchasers fail to sufficiently value the positive externalities of information. In short, information is a social good, rather than a private good, and neither purchasers (donors) nor producers (nonprofits) have sufficiently strong incentives to systematically incur the costs and risks associated with generating information. The undervaluing of information by private parties results in a symmetry of ignorance that may lead to “benefit failure” in the form of foregone social impact. This type of failure is induced by transaction, allocative, and production inefficiencies resulting from the symmetry of ignorance.

Castillo argues that one reason for the standstill in sector theorizing may be that theory-building has been too focused on anthropocentric constructs, for example, economic, organizational, and symbolic aspects of firms and societies. Instead, the author suggests moving from an egocentric to an ecocentric conceptualization of organizing by drawing from principles from biology and ecology to develop a framework to explain prosocial organizing. By shifting the analytical focus from economizing to ecologizing, the chapter offers a conceptual foundation for how a relational approach to exchange can reconcile sustainability tensions between now and later, individual and collective, and social and financial returns. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for research, policy, and practice, suggesting relational biology as a plausible theoretical framework to move nonprofit theory beyond description toward concrete mathematical models.

The excursus made in this book was meant to determine the relationship between an international contract and the sources that regulate it. Even if the parties have not thought of any governing law when drafting the contract; even if they have intended expressly to avoid a certain governing law; even if they have chosen a certain set of transnational rules to govern their transaction; even if they have made use of model contracts that are meant to be used in a variety of jurisdictions – the contract may nevertheless be subject to the mandatory rules, the overriding mandatory rules or the ordre public of state laws that the parties had not taken into consideration or had intended to avoid. Moreover, the contract will be interpreted and construed on the basis of the legal tradition of the applicable law, thus attaching different legal effects to the same wording, depending on the applicable law.

To what extent are contemporary scholars using the ten explanations of the nonprofit sector described in Chapter 2? The authors use scholarship, or published academic articles, as data to answer this question. They find that the ten nonprofit-sector theories continue to be an important foundation for nonprofit studies research. The most commonly used sector theories are associationalism, contract failure, nonprofit/government interdependence, and social origins. However, their analysis suggests that use of the nonprofit-sector theories is merely ceremonial. Nonprofit scholars could do much more to question, develop, and refine the existing sector theories – or to develop new ones. This research highlights the importance of a book like this one to encourage scholars to discuss and question existing sector theories and pose new sector-theory contributions to better understand the nonprofit sector.

This chapter explores the nature of nonprofit-sector theory. To do this, we first examine what we theory, and what we mean by nonprofit-sector theory. We also propose a framework for evaluating what makes good nonprofit-sector theory, based on the function of theory (define, describe, explain, prescribe, predict, and evaluate) and the theory's depth, breadth, and relevance. For this volume, we have taken a broad and inclusive approach to nonprofit-sector theory, defining it as answering the questions, “What is the nonprofit sector?” and “Why does the nonprofit sector exist?”