Relief efforts resulting from the $5 billion Priority Reconstruction Program, launched as part of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, attracted nearly 500 nonprofit organizations to the small, newly independent nation of Bosnia. Donor resources and recipient needs changed over time forcing constant adjustment in this environment, at times resulting in service overlap, inefficiency, and waste. However, the inter-relatedness of tasks in this war-torn country continually reminded players of the need for cooperative, coordinated action. Within a short time, intricate webs of interorganizational relationships emerged among donors, NGO implementers, and host nation players, at both ground and global levels. The research reported here is based on extensive interview material with a diverse range of informants.

This paper presents a theory-guided examination of the (changing) nature of volunteering through the lens of sociological modernization theories. Existing accounts of qualitative changes in motivational bases and patterns of volunteering are interpreted against the background of broader, modernization-driven social-structural transformations. It is argued that volunteer involvement should be qualified as a biographically embedded reality, and a new analytical framework of collective and reflexive styles of volunteering is constructed along the lines of the ideal- typical biographical models that are delineated by modernization theorists. Styles of volunteering are understood as essentially multidimensional, multiform, and multilevel in nature. Both structural-behavioral and motivational-attitudinal volunteering features are explored along the lines of six different dimensions: the biographical frame of reference, the motivational structure, the course and intenity of commitment, the organizational environment, the choice of (field of) activity, and the relation to paid work.

Given the significant role attributed to community organizations by many social capital scholars, it is appropriate to investigate the dynamics of that process. In particular, Woolcock and Narayan (World Bank Res. Obs. 15(2): 225-249, 2000) have suggested that bridging and bonding are two different types of connections, whereby bridging is associated with loose ties across communities and bonding is associated with strong ties within a limited group. This qualitative study explores the loose and strong ties of 39 participants connected through community organizations in rural and urban New South Wales. The results suggest that loose and strong ties are not synonymous with bridging and bonding. In general loose and strong ties differ in degree rather than in kind and people prefer to bridge through their strong ties. The interesting exceptions were ties to professionals, which were highly trusted but defined as loose ties. It is suggested that a model for a high social capital society might be a chain of well-bonded groups each with strong links to some other groups.

Case study research from France and Germany reveals that Catholic welfare is revising its mission and its methods. Central points are a different approach to voluntary participation, new public relations, and a rearrangement of public-private partnerships. As a result, Catholic welfare has become activated in both countries. While the shrinking of the overall influence of Catholic charity seems inevitable, there is more creative agency, and less “programming” by the old stakeholders. The national paths of change, however, differ in that Caritas, defending its service approach, is confronted with a process of de-institutionalization while Secours catholique, though giving particular emphasis to voluntary action is entering into further institutionalization.

This paper applies the contrast between idealist and non-idealist modes of thought to an examination and categorization of ideas and practices of voluntary action in Britain in the period from the1880s to the 1990s. In particular, the paper explores: (1) idealism and non-idealism as properties of social theories about voluntary action; (2) idealist and non-idealist social thought in voluntary organizations; (3) pro-state idealist social thought in “official” or governmental circles on relationships with voluntary action, and changes in such thought and in government relationships with voluntary action in the 1970s; (4) innovations in the ways of classifying voluntary organizations; and (5) new approaches to the study of voluntary action. The paper also comments on voluntary action and the “third way.”