This article reviews the general characteristics of the ‘crisis’ faced by the EU when confronted by the George W. Bush administration in the US, and considers it in relation to the EU's capacity for collective international action. On the basis of a range of examples, it appears that the EU's foreign policy ‘crisis’ was limited to one end of an extensive spectrum, and that in other areas there is considerable evidence of success in maintaining solidarity and proposing alternative policies. The article concludes by proposing an approach to EU collective international action that can account for and accommodate this unevenness, and which might be applied to EU–US relations more generally.

One puzzle that the crises of the past three years have thrown up is why the financial crisis of the period 2008–09 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2010 had such a different political-institutional fall-out on the Euro area. In both, governments were essentially trying to avert a banking collapse. The Euro area passed the stress test of the financial crisis in the period 2008–09 surprisingly well, especially when compared with the US. By contrast, the turmoil in peripheral countries’ bond markets since late 2009 required the suspension of constitutive principles of economic governance and was a disaster for European political integration. This paper tries to offer an explanation.

In stark contrast to the robust social safety nets found in many developed nations around the world, the modern American welfare state is increasingly operated by a variety of non-governmental actors and voluntary organizations. The operation of this welfare regime depends on the discretionary decisions of street-level bureaucrats. As street-level bureaucrats confront new circumstances, their discretionary decisions change. Normative institutionalism and the concept of bricolage are used to explore how discretionary decisions change within an organizational role in the context of a voluntary organization. Understanding this process of bricolage sheds light on the decision-making processes of street-level bureaucrats, explains how behavior in an organizational role shifts over time, and points to the dynamic nature of institutions. We present an in-depth qualitative study of the emergency food network in Oregon as a critical case to illustrate this argument.

This paper explores the impact of social capital—measured by social trust and social networks—on individual charitable giving to religious and secular organizations. Using United States data from the national sample of the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, we find that social trust, bridging social network, and civic engagement increase the amount of giving to both religious and secular causes. In contrast, organizational activism only affects secular giving. Volunteering activity, and human and financial capital indicators positively affect both religious and secular giving. Finally, those who are happy about their lives and those who are religious give more to religious causes, but these factors do not affect secular giving. We find evidence of important differences in the determinants of religious and secular giving, suggesting the need to distinguish these two types of charitable giving in future work.

This paper examines the organizational structures of nonprofit organizations in Australia and the United States. Using random samples of nonprofits drawn from the two organizational populations, the analysis compares the extent of structural resemblance or isomorphism in each. It detects similar levels of isomorphism for several structural characteristics. The paper interprets this finding as reflecting expectations for nonprofit organizations that stretch worldwide.

According to the relevant literature, the relationship between government and the private foundation sector in Germany is marked by a “paradigm of conflict” very similar to the one that has often dominated the U.S. discussion of government/ nonprofit relationships in the past. More specifically, scholars often hold that the development of foundations in Germany is largely hampered by an administrative and regulatory climate that weakens rather than strengthens the foundation community. Two main arguments are brought forth in this context: First, the expansion of the state bureaucracy into traditional activity fields of foundations “crowds out” the foundation sector, second, the structure of tax regulations is detrimental to a “sound” development of foundations. However, while these arguments figure prominently in the policy debate, they have neither empirically nor analytically been substantiated as of yet. Borrowing from organizational theory, this article critically evaluates the arguments in the light of available evidence in an effort to contribute to a better understanding of foundations in an international context.

We provide improved evidence on effects that fund-raising, government support, and program revenue of U.S. higher education, hospital, and scientific research nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have on donations to those NPOs and provide improved estimates of price elasticities of donations to, and donor demand for output of, those NPOs. Applying econometric tests, we find the best-specified model is two-way fixed effects, which controls for organization-specific and time- specific factors. Results suggest that U.S. higher education, hospital, and scientific research NPOs fund-raise to the point where the marginal fund-raising dollar brings in zero dollars of donations, donor demand for output of hospitals and scientific research NPOs is price inelastic and price elastic, respectively, and results are not sensitive to specification of price.

The financial crisis has generated contrasting policy responses to the financial crisis in the EU and US, the significance of which is discussed by the contributors to this Debate. In the US, the regulatory response involves a partial reversal (although too limited for its critics) of deregulation in the 1980s–1990s. In the EU, the transformation of a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis has led to a major shift in political and economic management, including a reinforcement of regulatory capacity and a potentially substantial shift towards ‘economic government’ in the eurozone.

Social entrepreneurship is an increasingly important concept in the study of voluntary and nonprofit organizations. In spite of the growing recognition of this concept, little is known about what individual characteristics might describe or explain who in society is likely to be (or become) a social entrepreneur. This preliminary study empirically addresses this question using data from a United States online panel. Our results suggest that social entrepreneurs are likely to be female, non-white, younger, and college-educated individuals with some business experience and who live in big cities. Social entrepreneurs also tend to have more social capital, as measured by their activity in clubs and organizations other than work, and they are more likely to be happy, interested in politics, extroverted, giving (to charity), and liberal ideologically. Although exploratory, these findings help describe the social entrepreneur and suggest ways in which this important actor in civil society can be better identified, understood, and perhaps cultivated.

This paper engages the concept of the organizational field to explore the status of a growing set of organizations referred to as social enterprises, nonprofit ventures, and social purpose businesses. The argument is developed through an ethnographic case study of a nonprofit hybrid organization (in the United States) that is training welfare recipients in their own in-house businesses. First, this paper provides an overview of the commercial trends in the nonprofit sector and the rise of social purpose enterprises. Then, employing key concepts from neo-institutional theory, the author proposes framing nonprofit-business hybrids as organizations positioned in two different organizational fields—each necessitating different internal organizational technologies—to elucidate the structural tensions that can emerge inside these new hybrid models. Internal organizational tensions identified in the case study are highlighted. Finally, the proposed use of organizational field theory developed from the case analysis is discussed in terms of social enterprise more generally.

Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the New Orleans, Louisiana metropolitan area in August 2005, made many United States citizens more aware of how their national government undertakes its humanitarian relief responsibilities. Many learned for the first time, for example, that the federal government is a secondary responder and attends to natural disasters only when states and localities request such support and assistance. That U.S. framework and the international relief implementation structure are remarkably similar. This paper compares and contrasts these two aid implementation approaches with an eye to clarifying their similarities and differences and to identifying how each might better be understood for the future to secure improved coordination and more effective outcomes.

This article examines the charity financial reporting regimes of three common law jurisdictions: Ireland, the UK and the US. It assesses whether these respective disclosure models improve either nonprofit behaviour or enforcement odds. Three core aspects of the regimes are reviewed: the reliability of the disclosed information, the consistency of such information and its ability to facilitate comparison between charities, and the level of enforcement arising from disclosure. Particular attention is paid to oversight mechanisms, including audits, and their rates of effectiveness in the regulation of charities. The article examines ongoing efforts to reform broader international accounting standards and considers the impact such moves are likely to have at both regional and national level for charity accountability. It concludes that given the markedly different spheres in which for-profits and nonprofits operate, care should be taken in modelling charity disclosure regimes on those developed for for-profit entities.

Open Access in the humanities and social sciences in the United States faces challenges in developing sustainable funding models. Begun in part to disseminate scholarship more widely and in part to solve an immediate budget problem faced by academic librarians, Open Access has evolved to include several ‘flavours’ that involve different funding schemes. Because the humanities and social sciences emphasize books more than STEM disciplines and because publication funding in humanities and social sciences is problematic, it will be necessary for publishers, librarians, faculty, and university administrators to cooperate to find sustainable solutions. This includes consideration of whether open access is always the model that best serves the audiences sought.

International studies theorists have sought to characterize the role of transnational NGOs in world affairs from a variety of bottom-up, top-down, and critical perspectives. Since transnational NGOs employ such a wide range of strategies in the pursuit of their missions, scholars often find it necessary to differentiate between different types of organizations and to predicate theoretical analyses on informal typologies. However, when these typologies are implicit or speculative scholarship risks mischaracterization and invalid generalization. This article contributes to NGO theory by deriving a formal typology of the strategies that US-based transnational NGOs employ in the pursuit of their missions. This typology provides an empirical basis for future theorization specifically accounting for heterogeneity in the strategic orientations of NGOs. Findings are based on a mixed-method analysis of in-depth interviews with more than 150 leaders of US-based transnational NGOs spanning all major sectors of NGO activity.

Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which participants and researchers alike often called “volunteer” or “civic” groups, operate very differently from traditional civic groups. The ethnography systematically details prevalent tensions that actors face when they try to cultivate the civic spirit in these increasingly typical organizations.

In the United States, neoliberal strategies for social, economic, and state organization have been accompanied by frequent calls for volunteers to solve serious social problems. A case study of a community mobilization of middle-class volunteers to provide one-on-one support to families in poverty shows both possibilities and limitations. Volunteers provide social support to families in poverty, thus alleviating social isolation. Volunteers learn about systemic forces that cause poverty, its effects on families and communities, and about themselves and their capacities to engage in poverty work. However, social isolation is but one of many problems associated with poverty, and even a more knowledgeable amateur volunteer corps cannot take the place of substantial social, economic, and political change.