Throughout the past three decades, changing governments in Denmark have been cultivating a more proactive role for civil society organizations by emphasizing the legitimacy of voluntary social work as part of the social service provision in a hard-pressed welfare state. At the same time, political and public actors praise the civic virtues and democratic skills that volunteers obtain when participating in any kind of voluntary organization. This notion of voluntary organizations as “schools for democracy” already lacks empirical grounding. Given the increased instrumentalization of voluntary social work, it becomes even more important to ask what the modes of participation look like among volunteers within the new organizational forms. In this article, we review key trends and changes at the institutional level and present data from a long-term ethnographic study that explores the mode of participation of volunteers within an organizational form that responds to the demands of the current civic landscape. We demonstrate that while the organizational form in question aptly and strategically navigates the competitive, welfare-oriented, institutional environment, the space for civic action among the volunteers is limited.

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). It is argued here that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. The article tackles longstanding stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for, and highlights how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. The potential pay‐off is demonstrated with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies suggest a reorientation of how one understands the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. The article concludes by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection, and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment.

Ethnography is a rich research tradition originating from sociocultural anthropology that aims to vividly represent cultural meaning through fieldwork and thick description. Ethnographic fieldwork is known for unearthing surprises, and ethnographers are often convinced that, had they used another approach, they would have been unable to explain fully what was going on in the research setting. Ethnography in nonprofit studies is increasing, but sparse. This article argues that introducing more tales of the nonprofit field could deepen the analysis of how nonprofit organizing works, bridge the nonprofit research–practice divide, challenge the Western ethnocentricity of nonprofit studies, bring the sector’s periphery to the forefront and enhance nonprofit management education. However, to benefit from ethnographic work, the nonprofit field must embrace alternative norms of composition and rigor. The starting point is conversation and community among nonprofit ethnographers to foster such work.

The article examines the recent emergence of ‘volunteering’ as a publicly significant notion and practice. Based on an extensive fieldwork in a prominent intermediary NGO in Israel, the article follows the efforts to promote and expand ‘volunteering’ pursued by the organization’s board and staff members. Affiliated with the privileged social strata of Ashkenazi (European) Jews, whose hegemonic position has been eroded during the neoliberal transformations in Israel, the NGO staff seek to retain their privileged status through a managerial activity in the field of ‘volunteering’. They promote a particular, liberally inspired construction of ‘volunteering’, while universalizing it as a professional, a-political and consensual realm. Inspired by critical studies of ‘whiteness’, the article describes how the privileged character of this managerial activity is being successfully obscured through the representation of ‘volunteering’ as an all-inclusive aspiration.

Ethical issues of ethnographic research are long-debated, but the context of volunteering and voluntary organisations emphasises challenges and opportunities associated with this method. In this paper, we explore these rarely examined concerns with focus on participant-observation, in terms of ‘voluntariness’ of participants, responsibilities of researchers in maintaining boundaries and self-care of researchers themselves in such contexts. Reflecting on implications in ethnographic enquiry from research design to conclusions, we argue volunteering should be viewed as an important context highlighting ethical issues often seen as ‘tick-box’ exercises or generally accepted research limitations. The increased risks to participants through access, sampling and questioning processes, to ethnographers through emotional involvement and to volunteer-involving organisations are discussed through reflection on three distinct pieces of research conducted between 2009 and 2019. These issues are ethical as well as methodological, as data yielded may be rich, demonstrating immersion in the ‘community’, but also limited in credibility.

During the year 2005 many organizations took part in Poverty Zero, a campaign that aims to reach the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015. Based on participant observation and open ended interviews, this paper describes the origins, development, and evaluation of Poverty Zero in Andalusia (Spain). It examines, by means of ethnography, how DNGOs (Development Nongovernmental Organizations) create social movement networks, and explores the limits and possibilities of their advocacy activities. The paper concludes that DNGOs tend to generate centralized social movements with reduced questioning of the global system. Nevertheless, as shown in the case of the Andalusian Alliance against Poverty, the more decentralized a movement, the deeper its transformational potential.

Anthropology meets democratic theory in this conversation that explores indigeneity, diversity, and the potentialities of democratic practices as exist in the non-Western world. Wade Davis draws readers into the ethnosphere—the sum total of human knowledge and experience—to highlight the extinction events that are wiping out some half of human ethnic diversity. Gagnon worries over what is lost to how we can understand and practice democracy in this unprecedented, globally occurring, ethnocide.

This article considers the relationship of civil society to the domain of the political from the actors’ perspectives. It explores the attempt by a citizens’ movement (CMDP) in Nepal to construct new political realities in the context of the autocratic regime of king Gyanendra and then during the democratic transition. This was, paradoxically, to be achieved through the construction of an apolitical space. Theoretically, this production of apoliticality by civil society actors shows that civil society is not only implicated in the expansion of what is understood as ‘political’ but also in setting its boundaries. The broader aims of the article are to contribute to the ethnography of civil society and to add to current understandings of the relationship of actually existing civil societies to the political domain. Practically, it argues that debates over whether civil society is or is not political in the Nepal case and normative positions within development circles that it should not be political are misconceived since civil society is a site for the production of both politicality and apoliticality.

This article presents an ethnographic study of the case of Ende Gelände (EG), a German civil disobedience network undertaking action for climate justice. We reveal how a politics of legitimacy in civil society organizations such as EG are structured and constructed through different styles of civic action. Specifically, in our case study, a dominant pattern of “civil anarchizing” (CA) emerged, in which legitimacy was continuously negotiated in relation to both external and internal stakeholders. This CA style was also accompanied by a more individual-centered style that we call personalized politics. We compare both styles and describe the tensions that result from their co-occurrence. In addition, we argue that the CA style might be more viable for politicization due to its emphasis on a collective strategy. Finally, we describe how this CA style shaped the participants’ politics of legitimacy by functioning as a negotiated hybrid of civil and uncivil expectations.

Previous researchers who applied cognitive dissonance theory to charitable giving found that giving is for many donors a means of acting consistently with their self-concepts as rational and moral beings. The present study extends this inquiry by investigating how “rationality” and “morality” are culturally constructed norms. Donor communications are effective insofar as their use of language reproduces the expectations of the stakeholder community’s shared culture. This finding is indicated by the author’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Baptist denomination in the United States. The capacity of professional leaders to arouse, preempt, or reduce members’ cognitive dissonances over giving derived from language use that activated (as it simultaneously reified) concepts and associations approved by their Baptist subculture. Building on this and previous studies, the present author proposes a process model for pre- and post-decision cognitive dissonance over charitable giving.

This paper explores how ethnographic approaches to third sector and nonprofit studies allow for context-based understandings of the links between volunteering and development. Drawing from our ethnographies of volunteering in Sierra Leone, Burundi and the Philippines, we argue that ethnographic methods could tease out local ideologies and practices of volunteer work that can challenge knowledge monopolies over how volunteering is understood and, later, transcribed into development policy and practice at various levels. The contribution of ethnography as a methodology to third sector research lies not only in the in-depth data it generates but also in the kind of ethos and disposition it requires of scholars—providing attention to issues of power and voice and leaning into the unpredictability of the research process.