Book Review: Suzanne Horne and Avril Maddrell, Charity Shops: Retailing, Consumption and Society, Routledge, London, 2002, 152 pp., bibliography, index, $50.00 (hbk)

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Voluntas [voluntas] pp974-volu-471437 August 22, 2003 17:40 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit OrganizationsVol. 14, No. 3, September 2003 (C© 2003)

Book Reviews

Helmut K. Anheier and Diana Leat,From Charity to Creativity: PhilanthropicFoundations in the 21st Century, Comedia in association with the Joseph RoundtreeReform Trust, Near Stroud, UK, 2002, 235 pp., bibliography, appendices,£12.95.

A vast assortment of literature currently exists analyzing the implications ofrecent transformations, loosely referred to as globalization, upon the nation–state,corporations, the family, and other institutions. Mapping this emergent terrainhighlights both constraints and opportunities for institutional renewal. More im-portantly, alternative development strategies and new imaginaries for politics aresuggested and debated. Helmut K. Anheier and Diana Leat provide an invaluablecontribution to this literature by extending the discussion to philanthropic founda-tions in Britain and other advanced democracies. The authors’ aim is to initiate amuch-needed debate on the role and function of philanthropic foundations. Con-sequently, the book does not present conclusions as such but instead provides aprovocative initial mapping of the implications of globalization on philanthropicfoundations. As the authors indicate throughout their text, their discussion raisesmore questions than answers and is done deliberately so.

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of charitable foundations; thetwentieth century saw their transformation into philanthropic organizations. How-ever, as the authors point out, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, philan-thropy has remained essentially stagnant while social and political circumstanceshave been radically altered. They cite transformations in the welfare state cou-pled with the increased reliance on the market economy and voluntary sector asevidence of these changes. They also allude to uneven capitalist development,increasing multiculturalism and individuation in advanced democracies as furtherexamples. Foundations, they argue, must modify themselves to fit the times.

Rather than viewing these transformations as constraints on the activities offoundations, the authors correctly point to the potential for a renewed politics ofsocial change. They contend that foundations are well suited to the era of smallgovernment combined with increasing social diversity. The critical issue, there-fore, becomes: How is it possible for foundations to not only meet the challenges

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of these changed circumstances but to be actively engaged in the creation ofnewcircumstances? To this end, Anheier and Leat make a case for the refinement andadaptation of a mandate that is central to philanthropic foundations: the promo-tion of pluralism. However, the vagueness of pluralism, they argue, should betransformed to that of promoting social innovation.

Innovation, according to the authors, is the basis for renewing and maintainingthe legitimacy of foundations not as charitable organizations but as incubators ofsocial creativity. Pluralism, therefore, is recast in its more focused form as socialinnovation. The shift in emphasis is significant and requires a radical rethink ofhow foundations operate in terms of process and goals. Fulfillment of this rethink,they contend, is made possible by foundations concentrating on their strengths—namely their independence from market, state, and disciplinary elite capture. Thisindependence enables foundations to take a longer-term view and to take risksnot possible by state, market, or voluntary organizations. Additionally, the lack ofsingular disciplinary control renders foundations more suitable to interdisciplinaryand hybrid potentials, which they suggest are the cornerstones of innovation.

The argument for a shift from charity to creativity is both consistent and con-vincing. A key strength of the book is the guidelines the authors offer to immediatechallenges faced by foundations. These provide stakeholders with a set of basictools to rethink the manner in which ideas and decisions are constructed. Moreimportantly, they provide room for innovation and creativity to be generated in theinterstitial spaces of knowledge and experience provided both inside and outsideof the foundation. For example, information is resident in all foundation workers.By encouraging information sharing amongst all members, the potential is broughtout of the boardroom and into the space of innovation. With such guidelines theauthors provide a basic platform for vision to potentially become reality.

Hasmet UluortaPolitical Science, York UniversityToronto, Canada

Mokhbul Morshed Ahmad,Understanding the South: How Northern Donor Agen-cies and NGOs Understand the Needs and Problems of Southern NGO Clients,Social Sciences Research Council, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2001,244 pp., bibliography, $20.00.

First, the good news: this is a published contribution to the discourse oninternational aid and North–South relations by an informed spokesperson fromthe global South. This is an event to be celebrated in a field dominated by Northernexperts, a fact poignantly underlined by the author’s own literature review (Chapter2) and his comprehensive bibliography—if, indeed, such reminders were needed.The author, a citizen of Bangladesh, is a former public servant and now an AssociateProfessor of Geography and the Environment at Dhaka University. The book arises

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from a year of postdoctoral studies at the National University of Ireland. The bookalso offers a welcome contribution for what it has to say on Ireland Aid (theofficial Irish Government aid program) and the Irish international developmentNGOs. Since Ireland is, relative to other “donor” countries, not a big player, thestudy is both timely and welcome.

Unfortunately, the study is not without its shortcomings, starting with itstitle, a formulation that would seem to suggest two somewhat different possiblemeanings. The first might be the means or the process by which “Northerners”come to know “the South.” The other might be the nature of the understandingthat they have of that “South.” The book is more about the latter than the former,though, in that, it is less than wholly successful. Indeed, the title might be said tobe somewhat exaggerated in the light of the ground the book actually covers.

The book primarily addresses the development policies, strategies, and man-agement of the Irish and Bangladeshi governments and NGOs and the relationshipamongst these actors. A more accurate description might have been a “case study.”Such a case study, though much more modest, still has a good deal of value inopening up areas hitherto not well or widely known.

This book would have benefited from a demanding editorial advisor, or per-haps a coauthor, someone who would have insisted on knowing: “What is thepoint?” “What is this paragraph or this chapter trying to say?” There are problemsof clarity and coherence that, if corrected, would have resulted in a more read-able and satisfying volume. For instance, in Chapter 8, one wonders why the fourIrish NGOs singled out for examination, presumably because they are relativelylarge and significant in terms of their public support and scope of their work inBangladesh and elsewhere, are not listed in the summary table (p. 132) whichprecedes the discussion.

Chapter 9 summarizes the views of NGO managers on a variety of issues(the differences between Bangladesh and Africa, donors, cooperation betweenacademics and practitioners, partnership, religious fundamentalism, sustainability,micro credit, and so on). The author presents their views but, arguably, does notsubstantially challenge them or suggest why the reader should regard them assignificant. Some elements appear contrived and not entirely useful to the study,for example, the comparisons between Bangladesh and Ireland as countries (p. 18)and between Irish and Bangladeshi NGOs (pp. 125–127). Confusion also resultsfrom the occasional introduction of questions that are not developed—for instance,comparisons of Bangladesh and Africa, as though the latter were a country, or theintroduction of other donor country experiences from Norway or Finland to thediscussion but abruptly dropping them.

“What is the point?” the rigorous editorial advisor or coauthor might havedemanded. In fact, there are important points, though they are not always welldeveloped. The author offers important insights on sustainability, legitimacy, ac-countability, and partnership versus donorship. He also raises serious questionsabout the sustainability of democracy-building programs, so much in vogue atpresent (p. 29). He offers insights into a “new phase of surveillance”

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(pp. 39–41); he accepts the uncomfortable view that many southern NGOs shouldbe considered as a subsector of the business sector rather than as belonging to civilsociety (Chapter 4); and calls attention to a certain blurring of profit and nonprofitboundaries as well as to the dangers of the substantial credit preoccupation exhib-ited by Bangladesh NGOs. He also claims that Bangladesh NGOs are generallynot reaching the poorest of the poor and suggests reasons why this might be thecase. These are, to be sure, important and critical issues with which developmentpractitioners daily wrestle. There is much of substance to recommend this study,even if it does not answer the question posed by its title. In sum, this book is awelcome contribution, even if not a wholly satisfying read.

Lawrence S. CummingConsultant in International Development and VoluntarismOntario, Canada

Kathy L. Brock (ed.),Improving Connections Between Governments and Nonprofitand Voluntary Organizations: Public Policy and the Third Sector, McGill–Queen’sUniversity Press, Montreal, 2002, 264 pp., preface, appendix, $26.95.

This book contains papers presented at a conference by the same name, heldat Queen’s University in the fall of 2000. It also includes key questions and answersfor each session of the conference, adding an important dimension to the book.

The timing of the conference was impeccable, coinciding as it did with thegrowing recognition by “third sector” organizations across Canada that they con-stituted a voluntary sector in Canada, and a community movement within Quebec.This self-awareness had emerged most clearly in Quebec and Newfoundland inthe previous 5 years, and had been facilitated by developments in at least twoother provinces (Manitoba and British Columbia), with initiatives to build on therelationship between the sector and government. It also coincided with the ear-liest stages of a 5-year initiative (the Voluntary Sector Initiative) by the federalgovernment to build the capacity of the voluntary sector, to improve the regula-tory framework at the federal level that governs—and sometimes constrains—thevoluntary sector, and finally to improve the relationship between the federal gov-ernment and the voluntary sector. Panel discussions provided expert and detaileddescriptions and occasional insights into these developments. The questions fromconference participants are often those a reader would want to ask, so the inclusionof questions and answers improves the reader’s experience. These factors combineto make this book a valuable addition to any library about the voluntary sector andits relations with governments.

As is often the case, the book’s strengths are also manifest as its weakness. Abook based on conference papers is only as good as the papers. While the content

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of most of the papers is very strong, and the writing is also mostly strong, there area few papers with important content that could not be saved by editing, while othersare superbly written but do not provide much description or insight. These failingsare not within an editor’s control, or even a conference organizer’s control (as theeditor and organizer were one and the same), but make it an imperfect publication.

The content of the papers also does not exactly match the subtitle of the book:public policy and the third sector. It is clear from the content of the book that muchof the activity relating the sector and the various levels of government has focusedmore on governance, funding, and relationship than on the involvement of thesector in actual policy development. Again, this is not a failing of the editor, butrather reflects the detour that efforts to develop, improve, and even examine therelationship between the sector and government can take. The inevitable tensionbetween a nonrepresentative voluntary sector and an electorally representativelegislature in the policy development terrain is left unexamined in this book, butmay be the explanation for the failure of most papers to address the role of thesector in policy development.

Havi EchenbergConsultant in Social Policy and Public AffairsOntario, Canada

Chris Cornforth (ed.),The Governance of Public and Non-Profit Organizations—What Do Boards Do? Routledge, London, 2003, 253 pp., bibliography, appendix,$95.00 (hbk).

The Routledge series, edited by Stephen Osborne, has provided another usefultext in managing nonprofit and voluntary organizations. Anyone studying andworking with boards knows the importance of responsible governance by trustees.It is timely that Cornforth has presented a well-crafted array of chapters sharplyfocused on how boards govern public and nonprofit organizations to make us pauseand reflect on this essential responsibility. The introductory chapter gives a ratherdetailed glimpse into the major tensions confronting boards as well as some of theparadoxes that confront executive directors working with their boards.

Cornforth segments his edited book into four key parts. Part I moves swiftlyinto issues surrounding effectiveness, representativeness, accountability, and themyriad of partnerships that serve also as governance structures. Stakeholder rep-resentativeness is a major theme. There is some concern that those who serve onboards are not the right people to be governing. Even so, many organizations arepleased just to have people who want to serve on a board. This text discusses thelong-term ramifications of this issue and mentions the need for service users to beon boards themselves.

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One of the highlights in Part II is the methodology employed by the authors.They go well beyond the self-completed survey, into structured observations ofboard meetings, analyzing the content/level of agenda items and the interactionbetween board members and chief executives, to interviews with managers andboard members. They also reviewed all papers that board members received beforeand during board meetings. These methods drill deeper into the contextual andprocess factors of board activity and decision-making. It points to the need toexamine the behavior of individuals on boards as both leaders and followers,especially during organizational crises.

While Part III focuses on the relationships between board chairs and ex-ecutive directors, it includes some interesting insights into the role ambiguitythat frequently occurs in these organizations. In one instance, it suggests thatboard members and their executive directors preferred roles that were not welldefined, so as to be flexible in matters such as priority determinations. In an-other case, it stresses the overlap between the executive director and the board—each trying to safeguard everything. This begs the question over who shoulddo what and when. One author focuses on the limited amount of governanceexperience that museum trustees have and the power relationships that result.The text shows that shared leadership must occur, while objectivity is neededto monitor the executive director and still maintain this supportive relationship.There is no one model for all boards, as each requires differenttransactions.

In the last part, the book builds upon how boards have changed over timeand examines some contextual variables influencing this change. One of the moreinteresting discussions in Part IV deals with organization size as a key to gov-ernance. Organizational size seems to affect: the number of board members,written job descriptions for board members, and training and ease of recruit-ing members. As a result, “one size does not fit all.” Governance of the Na-tional Health Service and of women’s organizations also takes center stage in thissection.

Cornforth ends the book nicely by emphasizing external and internal vari-ables that affect board characteristics, roles, and effectiveness. He targets the issueof the relationship between boards and management staff as a critical point ingovernance and stresses the tensions that exist between boards that are profes-sional versus representative, between performance and conformance, and betweencontrolling and partnering management. Cornforth closes by stating that boardsneed a dynamic balance as they face new challenges and search for new conceptualtools to help them become more what he terms “reflexive” (p. 251). Boards need tobetter understand their roles, behavior, and management relations in this balancingeffort. However, they seem too busy to focus on their own development, and oftenlose balance as they try to cope with operational detail.

In summary, this book is a gem that goes behind the scenes of board gover-nance. As a result, it is a definite must for those serving on boards, and seekinginsight into boards and how to improve them. It adds substantially to the literature

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on the governance of public and nonprofit organizations; both academics andpractitioners would gain much by reading this well-edited text.

Dean F. EitelPublic Services Graduate Program, DePaul UniversityIllinois, United States

Peter Dobkin Hall,Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philan-thropy, Voluntarism and Nonprofit Organizations, The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, Baltimore and London, 2002, 349 pp., endnotes, $16.95.

Peter Dobkin Hall’s book is a mixture of anthology and monograph. All thechapters have been previously published elsewhere. However, Hall notes that onlyChapter 2 is as it has originally been published; others have been more or lessrewritten. As a whole, I do not see this as a good approach. Rewriting shouldhave been more profound and there should have been a clear main thread runningthrough the work. Historical overviews in Chapters 1–4 (Hall’s characterization,p. 10) occupy almost three-quarters of the book. The rest seems to be more orless filling material. Hall himself notes (p. xi) that the work is “incomplete andfragmentary.” This raises the question as to why then publish it?

There are three technical difficulties in evaluating Hall’s anthology. First, thepractice of putting bibliographical information only in notes without a distinctbibliography makes source analysis quite difficult. Second, the index is not com-prehensive (for example, although Chapter 3 is largely based on the influence of“Social Gospel,” it is not listed as such). Third, the practice of using endnotes isa second worst of all possibilities (the worst being endnotes after each chapter)since it makes reading awkward. In this sense, Hall’s anthology could be used asan example of how not to edit a book.

Hall defines the aim of this book to be threefold (p. 1):

First it chronicles the intense and practical political drama over private nonprofit institutionsand their role in American democracy. Second and almost unavoidably, it explores theprocess through which the public in a democracy defines itself and its collective purposes.Third, it examines scholarship and its crucial roles in these dramas of self-definition.

Each of these tasks is so vast that it would have been worthy of its own publication.Combining these three, leads to the inevitable problem that the book cannot delvedeeply into any of them.

Since I am “not an intellectual historian” (as Hall characterizes Salamon, p.101), I may not be competent to argue that my comments are valid on Hall’s treat-ment of all his themes. However, as a sociologist of religion, I was surprised as tothe light basis of argumentation and evidence that Hall offers on religious nonprofitorganizations. While he notes the importance of the Social Gospel movement andthe YMCA (“most of us, the boys anyway, belonged to the YMCA,” p. 262), he

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does not delve deeply in analyzing the impact of these movements. He does notquote YMCA research at all but traces his information of the “Y” on F. EmersonAndrews’ “Corporation Giving” from 1950. He does not include a single noteto Hopkins, Pence, Zald, or to other YMCA scholars. A similar lack of litera-ture can be seen in the case of Social Gospel. Although there is a reference toRauschenbusch, I expected references to Niebuhr, Hopkins, Visser’t Hooft, andothers who have analyzed the movement. YMCA literature would have revealedthe role of John R. Mott as one of the most important figures in the American (aswell as the worldwide) nonprofit sector. Hall does not even mention him. This lackof knowledge of previous literature can also be seen in that Hall does not recognizeRichard Ely’s (p. 38) connection to Social Gospel (p. 39). In general, Hall’s weakargumentation in this area raises doubts as to the argumentation in other fields aswell.

As a European, I also feel uncomfortable with Hall’s treatment of the Amer-ican nonprofit sector as an isolated phenomenon. Associations and foundationswere not invented in the United States although Americans adopted them andgreatly developed them. Missionary societies and modern education just“pop up” in America. There are no references to the preceding European mod-els that gave rise to them, nor does he analyze the impact of European mi-gration on the development of nonprofit institutions or on attitudes towardsthem.

Although Hall points to the importance of the academic world in the construc-tion of the nonprofit sector, he does not recognize the importance of the curriculumwithin lower education. Carnegie’s “scientific” philanthropy with its concepts of“worthy” and “unworthy” (p. 118) is nothing but an application of ideas presentedin Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The concept of “deserving poor” has been alivethrough Western history, because education was based on reading Greek classics.Hall does not deal with this aspect at all.

In Hall’s book other kinds of international interactions are also missing. Inthe case of the YMCA, many emphases on policy have emerged in America afterthey were presented at international conferences. In dealing with the welfare state,Hall notes (p. 51) that welfare capitalism was an alternative to socialism. However,these kinds of alternatives had already been created in Prussia and Denmark in thenineteenth century. The Catholic labor movement in southern Europe utilized thepapal encyclia Rerum Novarum of 1891 in trying to create alternatives to socialism.Hall only briefly notices these kinds of linkages (p. 42).

Unfortunately, this book was a disappointment. Readers have the right toexpect more from a scholar like Hall.

Martti MuukkonenFaculty of Social Sciences, University of Jyvaskyla,Finland

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Suzanne Horne and Avril Maddrell,Charity Shops: Retailing, Consumption andSociety,Routledge, London, 2002, 152 pp., bibliography, index, $50.00 (hbk).

At first, this book might seem to have a narrow appeal. Charity shops (thriftstores) that raise money from second-hand goods comprise a niche even withinthe United Kingdom voluntary sector. Despite this fact, the book merits widerinspection. It deals well with some issues that should be widely recognized bynonprofit academics and practitioners, and it explores two issues that are rarelydealt with in the literature but apply to a wide range of human serviceactivities.

In the United Kingdom, over 6,000 charity shops sell mainly second-handclothing but also some new goods in High Street retail outlets. Many of the largecharities have a national chain of such stores and some local charities (such as hos-pices and animal sanctuaries) will have one or two stores supporting their work.Some shops are professionally managed and have a high standard of presentationand goods, making them scarcely distinguishable from for-profit businesses. Oth-ers have an air of scruffy informality and offer real bargains to people on lowerincomes.

The chapters offer a thematic discussion of the literature and empirical datadrawn from the authors’ own research. In common with many nonprofits, a charityshop has to deal with competing goals. Is it there primarily to raise money, to raiseawareness of the charity’s work, to provide a service to customers, to provide mean-ingful work for its volunteers, or to recycle goods that would otherwise go into land-fill? Clearly, all these goals need to be met simultaneously but the balance betweenthem sends signals concerning the ethos of the charity. There is data about whouses charity shops and why—clearly the low prices are important but so is the highlevel of personal service offered by the volunteer staff who take a personal interestin regular customers. Those who donate the goods that are sold also make up animportant group to consider. A final well-known theme is the relationship betweenpaid staff and volunteers and the tensions that arise from their different motivations.

I turn now to the two issues that this book theorizes well and which are un-derexplored in the broader literature. First, the relationship between identity andconsumption is addressed: What statement are people making when using a charityshop? It could be that they are on a low income, that they wish to recycle goods, orthat they are opting out of a consumer lifestyle. All these constructions are avail-able, but the way in which the shop operates can emphasize one over the other. It isprobably worthwhile for all nonprofits to ask how the consumption of their servicesaffects the identify of their users. Second, there is an interesting chapter on pricing,drawing upon the for-profit retail literature. Because their cost base is lower thanfor-profit retailers, charity shops can be seen as undermining competition. How-ever, they do have their own rationales for the prices they charge—combining upto six factors in assessing the value of an item blending contextual and intrinsicfactors.

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This book has strengths in its use of empirical data and the wide range ofliterature it draws upon. It treats its subject comprehensively and would makestimulating reading for both practitioners and students. Its main weakness is thatit fails to draw connections between the issues it raises and wider debates in thesector; two of those debates, about the pricing of nonprofit services and the linkbetween consuming nonprofit services and identity, merit further development.

Helen CameronVisiting Fellow, Centre for Civil SocietyLondon School of EconomicsUnited Kingdom

Jason Kaufman,For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the GoldenAge of Fraternity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, 198 pp., notes andbibliography, $35.00 (hbk).

In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the strength of associational lifein the newborn United States served as the backbone of a newly democratic society.Voluntary associations moderated excessive individualism and made democratictyranny unlikely, as people would rely on their own group efforts rather thanon the State. In modern times, although United States’ democracy persists as aformal set of procedures, a growing number of social scientists have begun toquestion its Tocquevillean cultural, social, and economic underpinnings. Frommoney-stoked professionalized political campaigns to low voter turnout, fromsupposed family breakup to the decline of organized bowling leagues and parent–teacher associations (PTAs), there has been a chorus of concern that the kind ofstrong associations that once produced “social capital” are on the decline, and withthem the habits of democratic participation and association that accompany them.Catalyzed by Harvard’s Robert Putnam, the “great civil society debate” has thusfar centered on the chief culprits for civil society’s decline. Conservatives blameda “nanny state” that replaced voluntarism with a government bureaucracy. Liberalsand leftists blame a new breed of frenetic capitalism that transforms active citizensinto consumers, and communities into markets. Putnam himself blames the riseof TV and Internet for isolating individuals in passive entertainment instead ofinvigorating conversation and activities.

Jason Kaufman’s ambitious book seeks to explode the terms and assump-tions of this now prolonged debate. America’s dominant associational tradition,he argues, is hardly democratic at all. As it emerged after the Civil War and in themidst of massive immigration and industrialization, associational life was morelikely to retard democratic conversation rather than promote it, more likely tosegregate individuals by race, gender, ethnicity, and religion rather than broaden

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people’s links to others, more likely to turn people away from the common goodthan enhance it. Kaufman’s bold claims are rooted almost entirely in his inves-tigation of fraternal associations and their growth from 1880 to 1900. From theElks to the Masons, through the Knights of Columbus and hundreds of othernow forgotten associations, American men (mostly) joined the “lodge movement”in droves during this period. The stunning diversity and numbers of these fra-ternal lodges spanned every ethnicity, race, and religion—the formation of onelodge built by would-be nativists served as the catalyst for the formation of otherlodges by those excluded. Why did people join them, and what happened af-ter they did? Kaufman argues that far from furthering a sense of fraternity andbrotherhood, lodges created and flourished in what Madonna might call a mate-rial world. Successful lodges enticed and kept members by offering a package ofburial, life, and health insurance policies. To sustain themselves against competi-tors, they fostered a thin gruel of tentative loyalties by accentuating ethnic, racial,and religious identities and underplaying identities built on social class, politicalideology, and citizenship. The result? Fraternal associations were decimated bythe rise of corporate insurance policies in the twentieth century. Broad baseddemands for universal, government-supplied health insurance were refracted intoself-interested ethnic and religious struggles, and the European struggles of classesagainst capitalism led to a politics of fragmented interest groups and divided racesand groups.

Kaufman’s strongest argument is his story of the rapid rise and just as speedydemise of the Knights of Labor in the l880s and 1890s. The Knights sought tofound one great lodge of labor, linking people across region, ethnicity, and re-ligion in political and workplace action. The Knights did so by trying to buildforms of solidarity that resembled the local lodge and its intimacy. Yet Kaufmanargues that they failed because they did not offer the precise material benefits ofethnic and religiously based associations. The Knights’ failure was momentous,for it deflected and depoliticized working class grievances into competition be-tween ethnicities, religions, and races. Until the New Deal, workers saw unions asnonpolitical organizations dedicated to increased pay for its members rather thanorganizations making broad democratic claims upon capitalist institutions.

Kaufman’s case is both novel and strong when it comes to the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries. Yet a central question is whether or not the kinds of self-segregation and hierarchy he finds in the fraternal lodges can be used to criticizemodern proponents and their call for a revival of democratic voluntarism. Becausethe book does not pretend to examine new forms of association forged duringthe New Deal, World War II, and the 1960s, Kaufman overreaches slightly in hiseagerness to score points against newer proponents of associationalism (peoplesuch as Putnam, Amitai Etzioni, and Benjamin Barber). Essentially, his case isthat the dominant tradition of American associations is at best nondemocratic, andat worst frankly undemocratic, and that we should be skeptical of “touchy-feely”

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accounts that romanticize the bowling league, the PTA, and the local Lions Club.While this point is well taken, might it not also be just as important to examinethe labor movement of the l930s, the civil rights, feminist, and environmentalmovements of the l960s, or even the Christian Right of the l990s—all movementsthat made some attempts to raise issues of social justice and morality? Does notthe American tradition also supply strong examples of democratic movements andstrong citizenship, which need to be recalled? Perhaps in the future, Kaufmancould turn his formidable intellect and sophisticated methods to an examinationof these questions. For now, he has written an important and readable book thatraises essential questions about democracy in the United States and its past andfuture.

Raymond SeidelmanPolitical Science, Sarah Lawrence CollegeNew York, United States

Zhao LiQing and Carolyn Iyoya Irving (eds.),The Non-Profit Sector and Devel-opment, Hong Kong Press for Social Sciences, Hong Kong, 2001, 368 pp.

LiQing and Irving’s edited work,The Non-Profit Sector and Development, isa compilation of the proceedings of the first International Conference on the Non-Profit Sector and Development held in Beijing in 1999. The volume consists of56 short conference essays that alternate between describing current conditions ofthe nonprofit sector in China and offering prescriptions for building and strength-ening the sector. A number of the book’s essays merely offer a recitation of whathas become conventional wisdom in the literature with regard to the institutionalprerequisites of a healthy and robust nonprofit sector, namely: the importance ofan enabling legal–regulatory environment; the need for sector autonomy (but withfunctional ties to government and the market sector); and the comparative advan-tages that NPOs can offer development operations. Such ideas have been coveredextensively in other works, and therefore provide little that is new to those wellversed in the literature. In other ways as well,The Non-Profit Sectorlacks much ofwhat is expected in an edited volume. The editors fail to adequately synthesize thediverse content of the book and a good deal of redundancy exists between manyof the essays.

Despite these shortcomings,The Non-Profit Sectoris not without merit. In-deed, there are a number of intriguing themes and insights sprinkled throughout thevolume. Among the more interesting aspects of the book are substantive essays thatcontribute to a picture of the nonprofit sector in China. It is a picture of a sector inits infancy, emerging from a history of pervasive government planning and control.A number of contributors document the lingering hand of government and openlyquestion how much devolution of state control of the nonprofit sector has taken

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place. Indeed, after nearly two decades of reform and an expressed goal of “smallgovernment and big society,” the nonprofit sector remains largely dominated bygovernment-organized NGOs (GONGOs). As one contributor states, “Most civicorganizations still depend to some extent upon the government. Their managementand behavior have a high color of governmental administration” (p. 43). Anothernotes that nonprofit organizations in China are not only financially dependent onthe government, but often receive excess personnel from government agencies andregularly take on government functions. Moreover, government agencies continueto exercise a form of organizational paternalism, overseeing and “sponsoring”nonprofit organizations under their purview.

Despite the inertia of its organizational legacy, China is on the verge of fun-damental institutional change. The precise direction of that change, however, par-ticularly with regard to the nonprofit sector, is not fixed—hence the prescriptivenature of many of the conference papers comprising this book. As a number ofcontributors point out, there are signs of an emerging autonomous nonprofit sectorin China. This is especially true in the areas of environmental protection, women’sinterests, and socioeconomic development, all of which are represented in the bookby a handful of short case studies. The autonomous portion of the sector remainsrelatively small, however, and is stifled by a government that, while allowing thespread of markets, appears less willing to relinquish control over civil society.

In sum, select essays ofThe Non-Profit Sectorwill serve as a useful referencefor those seeking an introduction to the status of civil society and NPOs in China.Collectively, the book’s substantive contributions offer an ideal case of a countrygrappling with a receding state, expanding markets, and an undetermined role forthe nonprofit sector. As such,The Non-Profit Sectorreads like the first installmentof a story yet to be written.

Wade T. RobertsDepartment of Sociology, University of ArizonaArizona, United States

Documents

Book Review: Suzanne Horne and Avril Maddrell, Charity Shops: Retailing, Consumption and Society, Routledge, London, 2002, 152 pp., bibliography, index, $50.00 (hbk)