This article examines democracy-related attitudes of German sports club members. It employs a framework derived from the neo-Tocquevillian theoretical works about democracy to argue that the depth of individual involvement in a club, in conjunction with the club’s political and democratic culture, is crucial for determining attitudes conveyed by members. A representative sample of the population (N = 3,049) indicates that there is only a slight difference in the levels of political interest, political efficacy beliefs, cosmopolitan orientations, or satisfaction with democracy between sports club members and non-members. However, more nuanced models for sports club members indicate that active participation, as well as a club culture that encourages initiative, open political debate, and diversity, is predictive of pro-democratic attitudes. Based on these findings, we propose a perspective that no longer treats sports clubs as a homogeneous group, but acknowledges the existence of a range of club cultures.

There are long-standing concerns about unevenness in the distribution of voluntary organizations across local areas, reemphasized by the sector’s role in responding to the pandemic. Using longitudinal data on a subset of voluntary organizations across six census periods (1971–2021), we estimate growth trajectories in the number of charities per capita for local authorities across England and Wales. We assess whether the shape of these trajectories is associated with an area’s demographic and geographic characteristics, including its level of material deprivation, ethnic composition, and regional location. We reveal sizeable and enduring differences between local authorities over time, driven by a homogenous growth trajectory for all areas. Our findings suggest that national efforts are needed to address inequalities in the distribution of charitable organizations, as well as reverse recent declines in the per capita density of these organizations.

Is it possible to build a global organization based on the model of a social movement? We analyze Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), an entity with over 4 million participants in 193 countries, which claims to have operated with a social movement-like structure for over two decades. In so doing, it has achieved significant scale in addressing an entrenched social problem: the lack of specialized healthcare and social services in underserved communities. Utilizing interviews and other qualitative data sources to develop an analytic case study, we identify four features in Project ECHO’s model that collectively appear to enable it to balance mission, legitimacy, permanency, and scale, to a greater degree than either a social movement or a traditional third-sector organizational model might. Its organizing structure may enable operation with a permanence social movements lack, while reducing some challenges organizations often face in simultaneously maintaining mission and stakeholder legitimacy at lasting global scale.

Cooperatives are built on principles of democracy and equity, yet women continue to be underrepresented in their governance structures. This Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) scoping review synthesizes 25 peer-reviewed empirical studies on factors enabling or hindering women’s participation in cooperative boards. Across studies, individual enablers include qualifications, prior performance, and collaborative leadership, whereas stereotypes, heightened expectations to overperform, and internalized bias constrain access and legitimacy. Organizational enablers include inclusive recruitment, mentoring, and flexible arrangements; barriers include male-dominated cultures, restrictive bylaws, and informal networks. At the environmental level, quota legislation, training initiatives, and support networks can foster change, but weak enforcement and entrenched social norms often limit impact. Anchored in a Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) lens, the review argues that advancing gender diversity requires structural and cultural reforms beyond “fix-the-women” approaches, and offers implications for cooperative leaders and policymakers. These insights support efforts to align cooperative governance with SDGs 5, 10, and 16.

This study examines how intersectional identity congruence between leaders and members of associations shapes volunteering behaviors and outcomes. Drawing on the American Society of Association Executives’ Decision to Volunteer survey and using the intersection of gender and race identities, we find that board–member congruence is associated with more time volunteered, whereas executive director–member congruence shows limited association. Strikingly, intersectional congruence with boards is associated with lower volunteer satisfaction. Applying an intersectional framework to leadership–member representation reveals the complex implications of the multiplicity of identities across and within individuals.

In social entrepreneurship research, social businesses have increasingly been cited as a proper conduit to solutions for pressing social problems to transform societies into better places. As a result, the ethics of social entrepreneurship is often assumed but not explicitly explained. In this article, we reflect on this view and offer an alternative to enrich the comprehension of ethics in this area. We draw on Ricoeur’s notion of the economy of the gift, which stresses the generosity that we put in our relationships with others to evaluate the ethicality of our actions. This approach brings fresh insights to judge the ethics in the social entrepreneurship field with an integrative approach that goes beyond what is considered to serve a social mission or adopting a social governance but considering the ethics of actions in the immediacy and singularity of each relationship and situation.

This article investigates how volunteers in rural Australia are managing their volunteer portfolios to avoid burnout. Rural areas are heavily dependent on volunteers to deliver essential services and create vibrant, livable communities. Rural volunteers often undertake multiple volunteering roles to support their communities, meaning they may be at greater risk of burnout. Our article uses in-depth interviews with volunteers from three case study towns to examine how they manage their volunteer portfolios to avoid burnout. Findings indicated that feelings of burnout among volunteers were common, due to the high workload and time demands on them. This issue was accentuated by inadequate volunteer supply, increased bureaucracy, and a lack of funding for organizations. Approaches volunteers used to counterbalance burnout included reduction and/or distribution of their volunteer workload, withdrawal of services, refusal of additional volunteer duties, and leisure activities to balance their volunteering commitments. The research and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

As large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly engage with human society, how well do we understand their prosocial behaviors? We (1) investigate how LLM agents’ prosocial behaviors can be induced by different personas and benchmarked against human behaviors and (2) introduce a social science approach to evaluate LLM agents’ decision-making. We explored how different personas and experimental framings affect these AI agents’ altruistic behavior in dictator games and compared their behaviors within the same LLM family, across various families, and with human behaviors. The findings reveal that merely assigning a human-like identity to LLMs does not produce human-like behaviors. They suggest that LLM agents’ reasoning does not consistently exhibit textual markers of human decision-making in dictator games and that their alignment with human behavior varies substantially across model architectures and prompt formulations; even worse, such dependence does not follow a clear pattern. As society increasingly integrates machine intelligence, “prosocial AI” emerges as a promising and urgent research direction in philanthropic studies.