Nonprofit research and resulting theory have evolved in a limited context of North American and West European historical experience, culture, and political economy. Recognizing this fact, Estelle James proposes, among other things, a widening of the research arena. This response to her proposals argues that existing studies of nonprofits involved in international development already provide significant comparative evidence that can enrich existing theory. This body of work suggests complementary and alternative research priorities.

Recent research has usefully documented the contribution that nonprofit organizations make to “social capital” and to the economic and political development it seems to foster. Because of a gross lack of basic comparative data, however, the question of what it is that allows such organizations to develop remains far from settled. This article seeks to remedy this by testing five existing theories of the nonprofit sector against data assembled on eight countries as part of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. The five theories are: (a) government failure/market failure theory; (b) supply-side theory; (c) trust theories; (d) welfare state theory; and (e) interdependence theory. The article finds none of these theories adequate to explain the variations among countries in either the size, the composition, or the financing of the nonprofit sector. On this basis it suggests a new theoretical approach to explaining patterns of nonprofit development among countries— the “social origins” approach—which focuses on broader social, political, and economic relationships. Using this theory, the article identifies four “routes” of third-sector development (the liberal, the social democratic, the corporatist, and the statist), each associated with a particular constellation of class relationships and pattern of state-society relations. The article then tests this theory against the eight-country data and finds that it helps make sense of anomalies left unexplained by the prevailing theories.

In this paper we examine Salamon and Anheier’s characterization and testing of alternative theories of the size and scope of the nonprofit sector in different countries. We identify various nuances and refinements of these theories, and we suggest ways in which their validation through statistical testing can be extended and improved. Finally, we offer additional avenues of research that could productively exploit the important cross-national data set assembled by the Johns Hopkins Project.

Lester Salamon and Helmut Anheier’s “Social Origins of Civil Society: Explaining the Nonprofit Sector Cross-Nationally” offers a thorough cross-national quantitative analysis of the correlates of nonprofit-sector size, composition, and sources of funding. The first study of its kind, it is remarkable in both its theoretical ambition and empirical scope. Still, this research is plagued by problems that affect almost all research of this type: small numbers, poor measures, vague theories, a preponderance of cross-sectional data, and so on. Suggestions for improving the research include: (1) disaggregating the definition of the nonprofit sector to address criticisms from both the right and the left; (2) adopting a multidimensional approach to assessment of the nonprofit sector, to deal with its great heterogeneity; (3) devoting more attention to possible nonlinear relationships; and (4) casting a wider theoretical net in the effort to build a convincing “social origins” perspective. In the end, Salamon and Anheier may be forced to devote more effort to qualitative analysis of specific sectors to demonstrate the explanatory power of the social origins perspective.

Responding to comments on “Social Origins of Civil Society, ” an article published in this issue of Voluntas, this article focuses on three critical issues that underlie cross-national theory building and theory testing in the field of nonprofit studies: the issue of definitions, the challenge of operationalizing key theoretical concepts, and the nature of the tests available to verify results. Regarding the first, the article defends the structural-operational definition used in The Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project against suggestions by the commentators that it either be expanded or narrowed, arguing that the alternative is either to broaden the focus beyond what is manageable or to make the basic yardstick vulnerable to changing political and policy shifts—a sure prescription for confusion. Regarding the question of operationalization, the article concedes that better measures of some key features of prevailing theories might be imaginable, but, since few of these are available, it cautions against letting the best become the enemy of the good in cross-national nonprofit theory testing. Finally, the article finds, in suggestions that multivariate techniques be used in testing various nonprofit theories, confirmation of its central argument that a contextual analysis of the sort embodied in the authors’ “social origins” approach is needed to come to terms with the reality of the nonprojit sector cross-nationally. Taken together these comments underline the need to continue the land of systematic data gathering and theory testing that the authors have undertaken, to utilize an interdisciplinary approach, and to link the study of the nonprofit sector to social analysis more generally.

This article explores developmental processes in community-based issue domains and the effects of such processes on the federated referent organizations (FROs) that emerge to address problematic issues. Such organizations mobilize resources and serve as focal points for collective strategies. FROs encounter developmental tensions as they oscillate between adaptation to their environments and construction of new contexts. The way these tensions are resolved suggests three possible response scenarios: reorientation, replacement, or demise. Likely conditions for each scenario are explored. A case study of a federation of over 200 nonprofit organizations in a metropolitan region in the United States is used to illustrate the argument, and implications for similar types of organizations are indicated.