This article examines the recent dissolution of H-Coop, South Korea’s first feminist-oriented consumer cooperative, founded in 1989 by a women’s organization. Initially established to promote gender equality and civic participation through daily practices such as consumption, H-Coop played a symbolic and pioneering role in the Korean cooperative movement. However, despite its ideological significance, the cooperative experienced long-standing business stagnation, mounting financial deficits, and management challenges, ultimately leading to its closure in 2025. Drawing on qualitative research methods, this study explores H-Coop’s collapse within the broader discourse on cooperative failure. This article critically engages with existing theoretical frameworks, mainly developed in the Western European context, while also considering the unique historical and socio-cultural context of the cooperative movement in South Korea. This study has two implications. First, through the case of H-Coop, the study assesses the applicability of existing theoretical explanations and considers new insights into the failure of cooperatives in the contemporary Korean context. Second, analyzing the challenges and eventual failure that H-Coop has experienced over the years offers valuable and meaningful insights not only for practitioners within Korea’s cooperative sector but also for cooperative stakeholders globally.

Street-level scholarship has increasingly turned to how organizations and frontline providers respond to crisis. Yet crises evolve, and street-level organizations may vary in how they relate to state entities that coordinate crisis response efforts. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the homelessness criminalization crisis in Austin, Texas, this article shows how the rise and rapid implementation of a punitive approach, focused on removing visible encampments, intensified crisis acuity, which increased provider ambiguity, fractured coordination, and exacerbated harm. Public providers, closely tied to the city, could at times mitigate harm for people in visible encampments but risked complicity as police enforcement rapidly escalated. In contrast, nonprofit providers were separate from city efforts and focused on the most vulnerable, yet their separation paradoxically limited their ability to influence outcomes or reduce harm. Drawing on nonprofit studies’ focus on public–nonprofit differences and social work’s critique of state-provider entanglements under conditions of criminalization, these findings show how intensifying crisis acuity and differential organizational-state relationships shape frontline adaptation and coordination. Criminalizing homelessness harms homeless individuals and the service systems designed to support them, underscoring tradeoffs in both public provision and government–nonprofit collaboration.

The importance of the third sector has been recognized by academia and policymakers. However, little is known about the geography of third sector associations. This issue is of central importance as the third sector is increasingly expected to play a role in solving local societal challenges. Here, the geography of the third sector is investigated at the municipal level in Finland using quantitative data and statistical analyses. The results show that socio-economically less advantageous and rural regions host the most third sector associations per capita. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, there are abundant numbers of third sector associations in rural regions that could step in to address local societal challenges. On the other hand, rural regions are among the most poorly locally resourced, casting doubt on the future of their operations.

There is limited research into the experiences and impact on wellbeing, of laypersons informally supporting people seeking asylum (PSA) within the United Kingdom. This study addresses this topic within the context of the Bibby Stockholm barge. An interpretivist philosophical paradigm and qualitative strategy were employed. A combination of purposive and snowball sampling was utilized in recruiting nine participants aged 50–80, six male and three female, and all of Caucasian ethnic origin. Data were collected using semi-structured one-to-one interviews and analyzed using Thematic Analysis. Three themes emerged. First, Participants situated their motivations to volunteer within the context of social justice, informed by previous life experiences, personal morals and a reaction to the sociopolitical context PSA are forced to navigate. Second, volunteers’ experiences reflected the interactions of community. To this end, community is considered as an ever-changing “machine” where processes such as welcoming, loss and belonging form the cogs, which drive its evolution. Finally, volunteers described the way their experience affected their wellbeing—the wellbeing equation. Overall, volunteers described an overwhelmingly positive experience and provide accounts of experiencing increased wellbeing. However, volunteers also faced challenges damaging to wellbeing, employing protective mechanisms to mitigate these. This relationship between volunteering with PSA and wellbeing is summarized in the development of a revised conceptual framework contextualizing the effects of volunteering on volunteer health and wellbeing. The future application of this framework across different voluntary fields may improve understanding of what it means to volunteer and thus universal volunteer retention and outcomes.

The civil society organizations (CSOs) in Bangladesh that came into the limelight for their activities during the COVID-19 pandemic are relatively new. Their formation, platform building, support expansion, fundraising, and coordination took place within the virtual network. Moreover, this new generation of civil society is engaged in digital advocacy. Under these new circumstances, it has become important to undergo a systematic study on this new generation of CSOs. The present article has conducted a content analysis of the websites (105) and Facebook pages (20) of sampled CSOs that have registered with the NGO Affairs Bureau of Bangladesh from 2011 to 2021. Their digital activities have been analyzed under four broad headings, namely, information and transparency, participation, networking, and mobilization. It has been found that although a few CSOs have come into the limelight for their digital performance, 81% of the CSOs are not using any official website. CSOs that are active on digital platforms are mostly concerned with providing information about themselves rather than engaging in online advocacy or mobilization. Among the different types of CSOs, youth groups have been found to be the most active users of Facebook, whereas service-providing NGOs and environmental CSOs have been observed to be disinterested in utilizing the digital facilities. Though digital culture has already taken root in the socio-political and economic life of Bangladesh, the CSOs seem to be in a transitional phase of digitalization, and their efforts to advocate for and deliver services through the digital space are at an initial stage.

Philanthropic organizations, as crucial intermediaries between the government and society, significantly contribute to public service delivery. This study examines how organizational features influence their effectiveness, especially exploring the impact of professional capacity and organizational resources. Based on the panel data of 259 philanthropic organizations in Shanghai from 2010 to 2022, we use two-way fixed effects models to examine the impact of professional capacity, financial scale, and annual income on public service delivery, as measured by the number of charitable projects, project expenditures, and the number of beneficiaries. The finding shows that professional capacity notably improves public service delivery. We also find that financial scale moderates the relationship, while annual income mediates it. The results advocate that policies should facilitate capacity building and resource support altogether to maximize philanthropic organizations’ contributions to public service delivery.

Family businesses play an important role in philanthropic responses to disasters due to their distinctive combination of business, family, and community logics. Drawing on an institutional logics perspective and based on interviews with family business owners, we assess how three key logic features—collective identities, resources, and governing practices—affect the philanthropic responses of family businesses following the Beirut port explosion in 2020. The findings demonstrate the importance of non-financial contributions and reveal the inventiveness of family businesses in mobilizing a variety of assets distinctive to their business. This creativity, coupled with their knowledge of and embeddedness in community, resolves the paradox of how family businesses can respond so effectively to disasters with seemingly limited financial resources. Socioemotional wealth serves as a building block in the creation of civic wealth and is a key factor in explaining the enduring engagement of family businesses in later stages of disaster response. While family businesses pay significant attention to integrating institutional logics in their governance of disaster philanthropy, they often struggle with striking an appropriate balance between a personal, family-held approach and a more professionalized one. Practical implications for family businesses in Lebanon point to the challenges of resilience of philanthropic efforts in the context of a weak state and recurring crises.

The article aims to provide an analytical and empirical reassessment of the transformation of post-socialist political activism, with implications for the general analysis of civil society. Based on a distinction between two types of political activism—transactional and participatory—we seek to illustrate how these help us understand the development of the key aspects of post-socialist civil society. First, we conceptualize a general mode of activism with three dimensions: mobilization, transactional capacity, and strategic capacity. Using a unique protest event dataset (1989–2022), we empirically examine this activist mode in two thematic areas of activism—economic and environmental ones—over the course of three decades. We show, first, how each dimension of the activist model is linked to different contextual or intra-organizational factors, and second, that these two fields of activism, which were considered dramatically different, are slowly converging in all three dimensions.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with climate activists who initiated, monitored, or engaged with citizens’ assemblies (CAs) across Poland, this article addresses a gap in the deliberative democracy literature on the bottom-up adoption of democratic innovations in Central and Eastern Europe. Our analysis shows that activists played a pivotal role in promoting CAs as a participatory tool for climate policymaking. Certain features of CAs, such as the random selection of participants, were strategically employed, while others, deliberation and expert input, were valued intrinsically. Their strategic use of assembly outcomes revealed both potential and transparency gaps, highlighting the need for institutional safeguards. As activists found their involvement exhausting, our findings suggest that the future of CAs will rely less on grassroots mobilization and more on institutional support and a robust implementation framework.

This article makes an original contribution to the study of philanthropy by applying an adaptation of Nancy Fraser’s theoretical framework of social justice to a case study. Fraser’s framework encompasses three dimensions: redistribution, representation and recognition. Drawing on an in-depth case study of a Quebec foundation active since 1990, we demonstrate how these dimensions are hierarchically structured and articulated differently across historical periods, actor profiles and social and political contexts. By identifying three successive configurations—each primarily focusing on redistribution (1990–2000), representation (2001–2021) and recognition (2022–2025)—the article highlights the internal tensions, blind spots and normative evolutions within the philanthropic sector. Our main theoretical contribution is to shed light on how philanthropic practices can integrate and support a vision of social justice, both internally, through the foundation’s operations and team composition, and externally, through its donations, financial investments and public statements. Rather than treating social justice as an abstract ideal, we show how it materializes in governance, funding, relationships and public discourse. This comprehensive framework offers valuable insights for analyzing and supporting foundations seeking to pursue critical emancipation and empowerment.

Changing civil society dynamics are often interpreted as the state’s encroachment upon an autonomous sphere of democratic activity, presumed to be respected by liberal democratic regimes but violated by illiberal ones. The paper argues that such a normative autonomy/encroachment framework overlooks how illiberal civil society configurations are actively shaped by conflicts and structures carried over from liberal regimes. Through a systematic comparison of organization–state relationships across liberal and illiberal periods, using the case of a Hungarian conservative civic organization, the National Association of Large Families, the study uncovers underlying patterns of illiberal civil society. Adopting a longitudinal and historically informed perspective that foregrounds the agency of actors aligned with the illiberal regime, this study develops a typology of changing state–civil society interactions. The analysis demonstrates how Central and Eastern Europe’s distinctive historical experience—marked by the transition from state socialism to liberal democracy, intertwined with neoliberal globalization—continues to shape the strategies of civic actors under illiberal rule, offering insights of global relevance for civil society studies and civic organizations seeking to counter illiberal regimes.

Although post-socialist civil society has been widely studied, scholars have rarely examined how political conflict reshapes its very meaning. This article addresses that gap by comparing the discursive constructions of civil society put forth by Poland’s liberal-left and conservative-right symbolic elites. Analyzing 53 opinion pieces published in Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita (2015–2023), I demonstrate that both camps instrumentalize the term as a tool for mobilization and legitimation. The liberal-left frames civil society as a pluralist watchdog that safeguards democracy and European norms, while the conservative-right associates it with national identity and cooperation with a strong state. Each narrative marginalizes civic actors that fall outside the partisan divide, thereby deepening polarization. These competing frames reflect a broader struggle between a pro-modernization project anchored in EU integration and a national-conservative alternative, which narrows public perceptions of Poland’s diverse civic landscape.

This article initiates a conversation on how contemporary Eastern European peripheralization and the hegemony of the energy transition impact social struggles, introducing the concept of “Periphery in Movement.” Through the examination of Serbia’s anti-extractivist movement against the mining corporation Rio Tinto, we ground this concept through three core specificities. The first is the power imbalance positioning the movement in opposition to corporate interests, the European Union, and national elites. The second is the conflictual convergence of civil actors, who have undergone significant ideological and practical transformations from the Yugoslav Wars to the present. The third specificity is the “how” of Periphery in Movement and its new political propositionalities and potentials. Periphery in Movement expands beyond traditional civil society and social movement studies by addressing struggles at the Eastern European periphery that build propositional and life-preserving resistance.

Based on an integrative review of research on European post-socialist civil societies over the past three decades, we critically examine: (1) how civil society is conceptualized and from whose position; (2) the methodologies employed in this knowledge production, including any reflections on the usefulness and conditions of such knowledge; and (3) existing knowledge gaps and areas where further development is needed within this body of literature. We distinguish between three theoretical approaches to European post-socialist civil societies, the Western-centric, critical, and triple-embedded approaches, based on their embeddedness in the field, closeness to the research subjects, and aspirations to include them in theory-building. We argue that a shift from a structural perspective on civil societies in the region has taken place into a perspective focusing on agency and developments on the ground in the past decade.