This study investigates which organizational capabilities (OC) enable Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) to pursue both social objectives and sustainable sources of revenue. It does so by focusing on the nature and use of OC that support both the social and the economic sustainability of this type of enterprise. The focus of the study is a consortium of 22 organizations that operate under the umbrella of Harmony, the fictional name of a WISE founded in Veneto, Italy. Case study analysis revealed three essential key prosocial capabilities supporting social innovation, namely the capability to engage and include stakeholders, the capability to learn from stakeholders and the capability to grow by diversification. We recommend that WISEs should establish a set of prosocial routines which enable solutions to complex neglected issues, such as the integration of the various categories of people facing specific challenges and which explicitly work towards the creation of social value.

In this study, we investigate why individuals in need of social support refrain from asking for help from social service providers in the third sector. This phenomenon of non-take-up of social support is still underexplored, and our theoretical understanding of it is highly fragmented. Based on psychological, socio-epidemiological, socio-cultural, and public administration research, we distil potential determinants of non-take-up of social support. Based on 55 narratives (individual interviews) and two focus groups (n = 16) in the Dutch municipality of The Hague, we examine empirical evidence for these determinants. Our results indicate that (perceived) bureaucratic obstacles and the desire to maintain one’s (feeling of) independence are critical barriers to help-seeking behaviour for social support from third sector social service providers. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and their implications for practice and propose new research avenues.

In the past three decades, Brazil’s state and civil society have undergone a transformation. Non-profit organizations have proliferated, revealing new opportunities for participation, while sustainability and corporate social responsibility have produced new agendas for corporations. Against this background, accountability has emerged within the debate, particularly with regard to governmental transparency and efficiency. This paper examines the Rede Nossa São Paulo movement, which pledges social justice and sustainability and promotes social accountability as its main strategy to achieve its mission. Thus, the main objective of this study is to understand social accountability; more broadly, the goal is to examine governmental accountability in the mobilization process developed by Rede Nossa São Paulo by referring to the framing perspective as a core aspect in the understanding of social movements. Social accountability is presented as a frame that is composed of the union between movements that are historically bonded by the motto of social justice and other groups that are related to urban development and social and environmental responsibility.

The editorial to the symposium briefly contextualises current debates on the European ‘public sphere’ and/or on absence thereof. In light of concern with the EU's so-called ‘democratic deficit’, the issue of how to create a polis without a demos has focused, in part, on the role of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) with respect, for example, to the mass media, law, and organisations within civil society. The editorial introduces the individual papers and seeks to identify their potential contributions to academic and policy debate within and beyond the EU.

Rapid population ageing and the digitalization of daily life have created a dual challenge: ensuring cognitive health while preventing digital exclusion among older adults. While the ‘use it or lose it’ hypothesis suggests that environmental stimulation protects against cognitive decline, international evidence regarding the causal impact of internet use on cognition remains mixed, particularly in developing contexts where digital adoption is uneven. This study addresses this gap by investigating the causal impact of internet use on cognitive abilities among middle-aged and older adults in China, while also exploring the heterogeneity of effects and potential underlying mechanisms. Utilizing three waves of panel data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) with 40,438 observations, we employ instrumental variable (IV) estimation to address endogeneity and generalized random forests (GRFs) to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. The results demonstrate that internet use significantly enhances cognitive abilities, with the IV estimates confirming a strong causal link. Notably, the GRF analysis reveals that these cognitive benefits are larger for rural residents, individuals with lower education levels and those who adopt the internet in middle age. Mechanism analyses indicate that these benefits are primarily driven by increased social interaction and reduced stress levels rather than changes in health behaviours. We conclude that digital inclusion serves as a critical non-medical intervention for healthy ageing, particularly in developing countries where it can help bridge cognitive disparities caused by socio-economic inequalities.

Effects of word frequency on spoken word duration are well documented and have long informed theories of the mental lexicon. In this study, we discuss the two theoretical constructs, ‘frequency’ and ‘word’, that are implicated by the notion of lexical frequency, in light of recent models of the lexicon that do not contain stable, discrete lexical representations, and in which lexical frequency therefore has no place. We compare two approaches (localist spreading-activation vs. discriminative learning (DL) models integrating distributional semantics) by assessing regression models of spoken word duration of English homophones grounded in each. We further show that the relationship between a homophone's form and its semantics is predictive of its duration, consistent with predictions of the DL-based model.

The Reform Theory and the Political Economy Theory postulate contradictory effects of government size on citizens' satisfaction with urban services. The former asserts that citizens' satisfaction increases with increasing size of urban governments because large units are more efficient and allows citizens to participate effectively in public policy-making. The latter postulates that citizens are more satisfied in the smaller jurisdictions because small units are more homogeneous, efficient and democratic. A series of tests performed in this study overwhelmingly supports the Political Economy Theory: citizens in small jurisdictions hold more favourable attitudes towards participation and democracy, and the smaller units are more homogeneous and more efficient in the provision of services. This in turn leads to more favourable evaluations of public services.

Tensions between regionalist claimants and state‐wide governments remain the primary source of violent conflicts. Existing theories cannot systematically explain why and when state‐wide governments accede to such claims. Building on the partisan approaches developed so far, a theory of ideological authority insulation is constructed in this article. It is argued that the willingness of state‐wide parties to transfer authority to specific territorial entities is predominantly informed by ideological proximity to those entities. In a nutshell, the dominant conflict dimension in a country superimposes partisan rationales on the territorial dimension. A new dataset has been compiled with roughly 4,300 region‐cabinet dyads between 1945 and 2015, including electoral data, party positions and regional ‘centres of gravity’. Using panel rare‐events regressions, it is found that ideological proximity systematically explains the accommodation of minority demand controlling for alternative explanations from the partisan and ethnic conflict literature. The empirical evidence therefore supports adding ideological insulation and superimposition to the toolbox of partisan and conflict researchers. Additionally, the findings encourage the application of arguments from the conflict literature in established democracies and the testing of insights from partisan researchers in less democratic environments.

Previous studies concluded that despite the parser's eagerness to resolve filler-gap dependencies, in island configurations it prefers to posit late grammatical gaps over early ungrammatical ones. This study investigates the possibility of resolving filler-gap dependencies inside Hebrew islands. We investigated the acceptability of resumptive pronouns (RPs) in two islands and the sensitivity of on-line dependency formation to the status of those RPs. Results revealed a filled-gap effect inside the island that allows RPs but not inside the one that prohibits them. This suggests that active dependency formation can proceed inside islands, and that when processing dependencies with islands, the Hebrew parser prefers an early RP over a later gap.

After the fall of state-socialism, efforts were made to build democracy by creating civil society organizations (CSOs) and forming independent nonprofit sectors across Central and Eastern Europe. However, most of these efforts ignored the mass organizations, state-sponsored interest groups, and quasi-independent associations in existence for many years. To understand how the transition affected existing associations and the forms of volunteerism they promoted, this paper investigates changes in the Czech Union for Nature Protection (CSOP), an organization that has endured since 1979. Here, it is found that rather than retaining its emphasis on classical modes of voluntary action and participant interaction, CSOP favors professionally managed activities designed to attract financial support. The case suggests that some of the participatory practices and collectivist norms advanced by associations in socialist times are being weakened as these groups attempt to secure the resources necessary to survive.

Nonprofit participation in the form of giving and volunteering has long been viewed as the building blocks of participatory democracy. Yet, prior research has rarely treated nonprofit participation as a distinctive form from the general construct of civic participation. Extending Communication Mediation Model, we examine nonprofit participation behaviors within community-based communication possesses. We use structural equation modeling to investigate the paths of influence among community attachment variables, nonprofit-specific media use and discussion, and individuals’ volunteering and giving behaviors. Results highlight the importance of nonprofit-specific discussion in (1) directly promoting giving and volunteering behaviors (2) mediating the influence of nonprofit-specific traditional media use, and (3) translating community attachment into greater giving and volunteering activities. Different community and communication mechanisms are identified to predict nonprofit giving versus volunteering.