“Resilience and the Management of Nonprofit Organizations” is a book that explores the concept of resilience management for nonprofit organizations. The authors, Dennis Young and Elizabeth Searing, argue that the current paradigm of nonprofit management, which focuses on trustworthiness and efficiency, needs to be revised to adequately address the challenges facing nonprofit organizations. They propose a new paradigm based on resilience, which they define as the ability of organizations to adapt to changing circumstances and continue serving their missions effectively. The book provides strategies for anticipating and preparing for crises, explores the various dimensions of organizational resilience, and offers management strategies for achieving organizational resilience. It also discusses the need for “organizational slack” in order to be flexible and adaptable in the face of challenges.

This short article discusses how the COVID-19 crisis has affected solidarity. It starts by defining solidarity in such a way that it can be distinguished from other types of support and pro-social practice, and by arguing that solidarity can manifest itself at three different levels: at the inter-personal level, the group level, or at the level of legal and contractual norms. Drawing upon findings from two ongoing studies on personal and societal effects of the COVID-19 crisis, I then go on to argue that, while forms of inter-personal solidarity have been shifting even during the first weeks and months of the crisis, the importance of institutionalized solidarity is becoming increasingly apparent. The most resilient societies in times of COVID-19 have not been those with the best medical technology or the strictest pandemic containment measures, but those with good public infrastructures and other solidaristic institutions.

This history of charitable collections in the East German dictatorship (the Protestant organized Bread for the World and the student-led Initiative: Hope for Nicaragua) analyzes the relationship between philanthropy, civil society, and democratic action. These collections, widely unknown outside of the former German Democratic Republic, indicate that independent associations could form to organize philanthropic collections for international causes in this dictatorship. These groups provided the basis for actions outside of state control by engaging East Germans in support of human rights and individual need internationally. As such, my work shows that philanthropy can both exist within a dictatorship and encourage democratic action.

The article inquires into the role of the institutional context in explaining the governance of community co-operatives. These organizations do not solely focus on a member’s advantage but act on behalf of some collective identity. To enhance our understanding of the nature of co-operative governance on the neighborhood level, we draw on theoretical concepts that are context-sensitive, helping us to catch the institutional conditions in a specific place which are enabling individuals and groups to act and organize collectively. Thus, we enrich the abstract concept of governance put forward by New Institutional Economics. Based on a systematic analysis of case studies, the paper shows that the governance of community co-operatives is based on place-bound values. However, the encounter of divergent imaginations of the neighborhood results in different co-operative practices: e.g., either a government-directed practice to “discipline” the community or a community-initiated practice of self-organization.

Human service NGOs have become central actors in contemporary welfare states. The broadening of the role of NGOs in Australia as both providers of the human services that are an integral part of the welfare state and as lobbyists or advocates and agents of social change has been widely acknowledged; however, this paper focuses on a recent deepening of the role of human service NGOs in the Australian welfare state by exploring an additional dimension of their growth. Based on a recent study, it is evident that there has been increasing involvement by human service NGOs in the production of social policy knowledge through ‘policy research’ activities. The research mapped policy research activities, policy research infrastructure and policy research resources in human service NGOs, and also captured NGO policy researchers’ perceptions of the rationales and motivations driving NGOs in this direction. It was clear that this shift is based on strong beliefs that researchers located within human service agencies are best placed to produce the kind of knowledge that should form the basis of social policies responding to human need. Other drivers identified by policy researchers suggest, however, that the inclusion of third sector organizations in policy processes cannot simply be understood as the ‘opening up’ or ‘democratization’ of social policy processes to include Third Sector participants. The motivations for human service NGOs moving into social policy knowledge production in Australia are thus complex and diverse. Drawing on the findings of our study, Researching the Researchers, this paper reflects on the implications of this reconfiguration of welfare state politics. Who produces the knowledge that influences, moulds, and even determines the allocation of resources for the delivery of human services, and how this knowledge is produced have been ongoing concerns in social policy scholarship. We suggest, that in the case of human service NGOs in Australia, entry into the field of social policy research can be understood as a reconfiguring of the democratic system of policy determination. It may also be one in which the NGOs become ‘experts’ on citizens’ needs through research practices that are fundamentally less, rather than more inclusive, of the subjects of social policy. The implications of a possible shift in power to influence and in some cases determine who gets what in the welfare state is of deep concern in relation to future models of social protection and ultimately the redistributive and democratic processes of nation states. This paper seeks to question the often-unquestioned ascendancy of the third sector in welfare and asks whether this shift is in keeping with the democratic process and whether it is the best way to determine and satisfy human need.

If politics is the organised choice of alternatives, it arguably did not exist in Russia before the 1980s. There were certainly elections at which citizens periodically voted and returned a government. There was a political party, in which almost 10 percent of adults were enrolled; and there was a system of courts, a network of public associations, and a well developed mass media. Beyond this, there were regular struggles for influence within the leadership, and a wider ‘cryptopolitics’ with many similarities to bureaucratic politics in other systems (Rigby 1964).

Katzenstein's contribution to European political theory continues to resonate – even though the shift in scholarly work has moved in new directions, and the capacity for ‘flexible adaptation’ is under duress. When questions of power in the global system arise, the approach can account for issue-areas unanticipated by the author when the theoretical framework was introduced. Small States in World Markets still maintains a position on our reading lists, as a baseline for theory integrating comparative and international politics.

This article conducts a theoretical and empirical analysis of the allocation of the full set of jobs – both cabinet and junior ministers – in the Prodi Government that formed after the Italian election of 1996. We first discuss theoretical arguments linking forecasts of government policy to the policy positions of both cabinet and junior ministers. We then estimate the policy positions of cabinet and junior ministers appointed to the Prodi cabinet, applying a new technique for computerized content analysis to the collected legislative speeches of each minister during the 1996–1997 parliamentary session. Having considered the face validity of these results, we then use them to explore to observable implications of the various theoretical approaches. We conclude that, in this case, there does appear to be systematic evidence linking both the allocation of government jobs and the evolution of spending patterns between departments to the policy positions of senior politicians.

Many studies of European party systems have not taken into account fully the complexity and richness of party life on the continent. We need more multi-level, multi-dimensional analyses within a cross-national framework in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the relationships between parties, social structure and regimes. The discussion of some of the lacunae in the existing literature and of various ways of looking at political parties-emphasizes that because of the large number of alternative approaches available to the political sociologist, there is no single source of data, unit or level of analysis suitable for considering all facets of the subject. By crossing back and forth between levels or units of analysis, we may well gain in precision and detail what might be lost in methodological purity.

The French Communist Party pays particular attention to the writing and the recounting of its own history. Its militants consent often to an important training effort. The understanding of historical memory by the dimension which connects French Communism to ‘true socialism’, would prohibit reasoning which would have an objective of re-instating the memory of French Communists as an element of a partisan identity, rather than the falsification of which the nature of history might have been the object. Maurice Halbwach's notion of ‘collective memory’ fits this project. Consequently, some elements of the party's historical memory, especially autobiographies of communist party leaders, are compared to the opinions or life experiences collected from militants. In this comparison between published memories and oral life stories, models and constant themes appear. But one must also insist on the discrepancies between interviews, and on the differences between life stories and published autobiographies. If autobiographies provided life patterns founded on invariable elements and methods of historical interpretation, other factors were of influence, such as how long the subject has belonged to the party, the family continuity in the partisan group, school background.

Keeping volunteers committed and engaged is one of the toughest challenges for NPOs. The aim of the present study is to investigate the individual and organizational factors that promote volunteer satisfaction and, vice versa, foster intentions to quit. Two hundred forty-seven volunteers operating in four different NPOs were asked to fill in a self-report questionnaire that aimed to explore their motivations to volunteer, their degree of satisfaction and their perception of the organizational climate in the NPO they worked with, in addition to providing details of the activities which they were involved in. Results showed that the organizational climate mediates the relationship between autonomous motivation and satisfaction, as well as that between external motivation and intentions to leave an organization.