Nonprofit Organizations and Societal Approaches to Policy

Dear Colleagues,

We are seeking paper submissions for a Special Issue of the open source journal Societies that deal with NGOs and social policy.  The focus is broad and sociological, although papers from any discipline are welcomed.  These may be research papers, policy briefs, or applied papers.  By NGOs, we mean any of a number of equivalent terms: nonprofit organizations, third-sector organizations, voluntary organizations, social economy organizations, charities, civil society organizations, or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). By social policy, we mean initiatives for social action and change, undertaken by a governmental unit, an NGO, or a social movement intended to affect the local, regional, or societal levels of collective life. 

Social policies are often launched by governments, and analyses may involve demands for programs, decisions about what programs to offer, and processes of program delivery. They may also be undertaken by NGOs, churches, or social movements and may be focused internally (as with program implementation policies of large NGOs such as Catholic Relief) or externally. They may involve advocacy efforts meant to influence government or societal perspectives. They may also involve undertakings by civil society organizations to intervene on ethnic conflict, to advance values-based change efforts, or to allow for community-level actions that might not be effectively created or carried out by governmental agencies or large, institutional nonprofits (such as international disaster relief organizations). 

We encourage an international focus and examples from societies where social policy practices are quite different from those in Western industrial democracies (as is the case in some societies in the Middle East). NGOs may be seen as competitors with the state (as was the case in Northern Ireland in the 1980s) or as sources of threat to political stability, as in our research on Ethiopia. Social policies may transcend national borders, as is the case with international social justice or environmental movements. Social policy analysis may also focus on programs that give expression to political domination by large states or businesses over smaller, less powerful societies.  NGOs should have a central role in the analysis, and we welcome approaches that re-conceptualize the nature of the third sector.

Know more about MDPI at: https://www.mdpi.com/about

Prof. Dr. Carl Milofsky
Prof. Dr. Albert D. Hunter
Prof. Dr. Ram A. Cnaan
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as conceptual papers are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• nonprofit organizations
• NGOs
• civil society
• social policy
• nonprofits and states
• community organizations
• critical nonprofit organization theory
• sociology of policy