Nonprofit Organizations and Societal Approaches to Policy

A special issue of Societies (ISSN 2075-4698).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 February 2023) | Viewed by 2361

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA
Interests: nonprofit organizations; community studies; sociology of community
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Guest Editor
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60601, USA
Interests: urban sociology; sociology of communities; nonprofit organizations; rhetoric of social research; urban planning
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Guest Editor
School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
Interests: social work; religion; philanthropy; nonprofit management; voluntarism; Israel; social innovation
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Special Issue Information

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

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Keywords

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

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

27 pages, 1027 KiB  
Article
Examining How Equalities Nonprofit Organizations Approach Policy Influencing to Achieve Substantive Representation in Sub-State Government Policymaking
by Amy Sanders
Societies 2023, 13(2), 49; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13020049 - 20 Feb 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1865
Abstract
This article is concerned with equalities nonprofit organizations’ activities to achieve substantive representation in policy-making through a sub-state government. It draws on three strands of the interest representation literature from equalities theory, nonprofit sector studies, and social movements theory. The analytical framework synthesizes [...] Read more.
This article is concerned with equalities nonprofit organizations’ activities to achieve substantive representation in policy-making through a sub-state government. It draws on three strands of the interest representation literature from equalities theory, nonprofit sector studies, and social movements theory. The analytical framework synthesizes these to provide a new approach for examining equalities nonprofit organizations’ policy influencing. Drawing on equalities theorists’ accounts of mainstreaming, and understandings of campaigns from social movement literature, it explores nonprofit organizations’ positioning in relation to government in order to advance equality. This analysis engages with questions raised by nonprofit scholars about nonprofit organizations’ independence from government and their capacity to retain a critical voice. An overarching institutionalist lens enables an examination of the formal and informal facets that shape policy influencing approaches. The research question is: How have equalities organizations engaged with the institution of a nonprofit-government partnership to promote substantive representation in policy? This research uses semi-structured elite interviews to explore key policy actors’ accounts. The case study is the statutory Welsh nonprofit sector–government partnership. Findings suggest the equalities nonprofit organizations involved in this partnership deploy a sophisticated array of action repertoires as part of an interrelated web of nuanced, multi-positioned influencing activities. This agility enables the sector to maintain some capacity to be critical of the state whilst sustaining informal relations with state policy actors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nonprofit Organizations and Societal Approaches to Policy)
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