Commonly, voluntary organisations are formally accountable to their memberships, but the rights of members to influence organisational policies are often minimal. Members may be recruited by organisations to provide funding, legitimacy and voluntary help; members may join in order to obtain material benefits, to express support for organisations’ goals and, in some cases, to influence policy. The disjunction between these two sets of expectations can lead to disputes in large voluntary bodies, especially those whose members hold a wide range of ideological positions. This creates problems for those running the organisations, who both have to account to a variety of other groups and also maintain their public legitimacy. Illustrations of some of these issues are drawn from environmental organisations, particularly the National Trust.

Although scholarship on the ‘third sector’ has successfully integrated Jewish history and the contemporary Jewish scene (including the State of Israel) into its overall agenda, the Zionist movement in Western Europe and the United States, before 1933, is largely absent. This is mainly because, almost until the present, spokespersons for the movement have denied that Zionism is a charity. It may seem obvious that Zionism relied on the tradition of Jews giving to charity, yet this fact is barely reflected in the movement's historiography. Zionism's appeals to Western-acculturated Jews show that many characteristics of Jewish philanthropic societies were essential to the life of the movement. This article explores the institutional strategies which drew on the charitable instincts of Zionism's constituents, especially the creation of the Jewish National Fund (1901) and the Palestine Foundation Fund (1921). The prominence of these bodies led to much of the success, as well as the frustrations of the movement, before the Nazi rise to power.

Using the data from a survey undertaken in the United States in 1992, this article examines the effects of altruism, self-interest and social ties on motivations to give and volunteer, as well as the effects of volunteering on definitions of life goals. Social ties with non-profit organisations were good predictors of both the value of charitable contributions and the time volunteered for charitable causes. The level of prior philanthropic activism and social connections with philanthropic institutions had an effect on life goals. Altruism and the desire for self-improvement had effects on volunteering, but not on giving. Utilitarian motives (expected career advancement) had no observable effects on volunteering or giving. Based on those findings, a general microstructural model of philanthropic behaviour is proposed.

This article presents the results of a survey of grant monitoring in 170 UK charities. The monitoring and evaluation process is modelled and the extent to which donors follow this is explored. Although over 70 per cent of donors monitored grants, a much smaller percentage proceeded to evaluate results. Reasons for this and an indication of how the processes are carried out are presented.

The way in which kibbutz members define voluntarism, their attitudes toward it, the volunteering they do, their reasons for doing it, and the helping mechanisms and obstacles that the kibbutz offers were explored in a sample of four Israeli kibbutzim. This is a preliminary study of the way a unique society deals with a well-known field. Between-kibbutz differences were found mainly between the religious kibbutz and the others. No satisfactory explanations for between-person differences with regard to volunteering could be found, and it is hypothesised that the difference may lie in orientation to traditional kibbutz ideology.