Adalbert Evers and Jean-Louis Laville (eds.), The Third Sector in Europe, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK,
Adalbert Evers and Jean-Louis Laville (eds.), The Third Sector in Europe, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK,
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Adalbert Evers 和 Jean-Louis Laville(编辑),《欧洲第三部门》,Edward Elgar,英国切尔滕纳姆,
DOI:
10.1007/s11266-005-5699-z
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发表时间:
2005
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
D. Scott
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
D. Scott
This is an important book. The growth of scholarly interest in the third sector over the past thirty years has been largely driven by American researchers. Economists in the United States have shaped theory development, focusing on nonprofit organizations, particularly those listed in the US tax code as charities. In this process of theory development, they have worked within the neoclassical paradigm, privileging markets. Nonprofit organizations are explained as responses to various sorts of market failure. Although these theories claim universal application, for the most part they unconsciously reflect the cultural and institutional environment of the United States and assume that it applies everywhere. Empirical research provides only limited support, and other theories have begun to emerge. Drawing on European experience and the disciplines of sociology and political science, The Third Sector in Europe begins to elaborate an alternative theoretical framework for understanding the third sector and its likely future development. The book contains a series of chapters, organized into four parts. The first part, a single essay by the two editors assisted by others among their collaborators, sets out a European approach to theorizing the third sector and introduces a second part containing essays analyzing developments in six European countries. These essays explore both the history and likely future development of the sector in each country, using to varying degrees, the theoretical emphases elaborated in the first part. In different ways, all explore relations between governments and the third sector, emphasizing the closeness of this relationship. A third part contains three essays viewing the third sector within the wider governmental framework of the European Union. A final part with two chapters builds upon a number of the themes prefigured in earlier chapters. Perhaps because several of the authors have worked on other projects through the European EMES network, there is coherence to the volume not usually found in a book built around a series of country studies. Yet there is also a puzzling contradiction at its heart.