Lester M. Salamon Memorial Issue, Part II

This issue of Nonprofit Policy Forum presents the second part of the Lester Salamon Memorial Issue. Whereas the first part (NPF 14:3) was mostly US-focused, this second part commemorates Lester’s work from international perspectives.

In an explicitly comparative article on “Social Origins Theory: Untapped Potential and the Test by the Pandemic Crisis,” Vladimir Benevolenski, Natalya Ivanova and Lev Jakobson—associates of Salamon at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow--explore similarities and differences between social origins theory (an institutional-historical explanation of different patterns of nonprofit development) and other prevailing approaches, namely welfare regime theory (describing differences between liberal, conservative and social-democratic welfare states) and varieties of capitalism (specifying country-specific institutional conditions that shape competitive advantages of companies and countries). On that basis they examine the explanatory power of social origins in the responses to the Covid pandemic in Germany, Austria, UK and USA, and find evidence of a convergence towards the welfare partnership regime pattern.

Taking a deeper look at one of these countries in “Germany – Still a Welfare Partnership Country?,” Annette Zimmer and Eckhard Priller, former local associates of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, chronicle the slow erosion of the partnership due to neoliberal policies that weaken the position of nonprofits by removing protections from commercial competition and strengthen the hand of government by reducing its interdependence with the sector.

In “Nonprofit–Government Partnership during a Crisis: Lessons from a Critical Historical Junction,” Paula Kabalo (Johns Hopkins Philanthropy Fellow ‘01) and Michal Almog-Bar explore the part of Salamon’s voluntary failure theory that suggests that nonprofits historically predate government agencies and discuss the advantages that various womens’ organizations brought to the table during the war preceding Israel’s founding that supported the fledgling state institutions.

Andrea Bassi (Johns Hopkins Philanthropy Fellow ‘90/91) evaluates the continuing contributions of voluntary failure theory against other current conceptualizations in “The Relationship Between Public Administration and Third Sector Organizations: Voluntary Failure Theory and Beyond.” Current approaches in public affairs and welfare policy, such as the new governance, co-creation and co-production are compatible with voluntary failure theory and are keeping it relevant. Salamon’s four voluntary failures however may have lost salience over the past three decades, as nonprofits have increasingly become commercial and professionalized.

The issue concludes with Toepler’s commentary which reviews the core tenets of voluntary failure/interdependence theory and questions the relative importance of the voluntary failures within the overall argument; and Megan Haddock’s review of Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering, a book detailing the implementation of official statistics standards for capturing volunteering, which was among the issues that she had worked on at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies.