Davies’ review explores the history of transnational voluntary associations in multiple sectors, including humanitarianism, science, education, environment, feminism, race, health, human rights, labour, business, standards, professions, culture, peace, religion, and youth. It argues that the historical evolution of transnational voluntary associations is longer, less Western in origin and more cyclical than traditionally assumed.
"Reviewed here is global research on how 13 types of Voluntary Membership Associations (MAs) have significantly or substantially had global impacts on human history, societies, and life. Such outcomes have occurred especially in the past 200+ years since the Industrial Revolution circa 1800 CE, and its accompanying Organizational Revolution. Emphasized are longer-term, historical, and societal or multinational impacts of MAs, rather than more micro-level (individual) or meso-level (organizational) outcomes. MAs are distinctively structured, with power coming from the membership, not top-down. The author has characterized MAs as the dark matter of the nonprofit/third sector, using an astrophysical metaphor. Astrophysicists have shown that most physical matter in the universe is dark in the sense of being unseen, not stars or planets."--Page 4 of cover
Providing guidance to students, scholars, genealogists, museum docents, and historical society volunteers who seek to investigate the multiplicity of voluntary organisations in America's history, this book includes steps to locate club records, ask appropriate questions of them, and more.
Migration has changed the social, cultural, political, and economic landscape of many countries. Mutual aid organizations, ethic-oriented religious organizations, hometown associations, and various other types of ethnic and immigrant organizations emerged to respond to the particular needs of immigrant communities. For countries with a tradition of civic participation, integrating immigrants into civic life becomes an important issue. This article reviews the literature on ethnic/immigrant associations and minorities’ or immigrants’ voluntary participation in major developed countries that have experienced a significant increase of immigrants, particularly after the 1990s. In terms of ethnic/immigrant associations, the author reviews the historical background of research in this area, the size and scope, the formation and development, the memberships, and the financial well-being of these associations, the roles they play in helping immigrants acculturate into the host countries, and the classification of ethnic/immigrant associations. Particular attention is given to immigrants’ mutual aid organizations, ethnic cultural organizations, ethnic-oriented religious organizations, and hometown associations. The author also reviews the literature that examines the factors influencing minorities’ and immigrants’ voluntary participation, their formal and informal volunteering, as well we immigrant youth’s voluntary participation.
This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period. It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: • How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. • How associations employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. • And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.
Examines gift exchanges as a foundational notion both in anthropology and in debates about international economic governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
"This volume, which grows out of a research project on women and philanthropy sponsored by the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the City University of New York, expands our understanding of female beneficence in shaping diverse political cultures ... As in the United States, this activity often enabled women to create parallel power structures that resembled, but rarely replicated, the commercial and political arenas of men. From nuns who managed charitable and educational institutions to political activists demanding an end ot discriminatory practices against women and children, many of the women whose lives are documented in these pages claimed distinctive public roles through the nonprofit sphere. The authors are from Europe, the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, Egypt, India, and Asia. Their essays cover nations on every continent, representing a variety of political and religious systems ... The essays in this book illustrate the extent to which government, the market, and religion have shaped the role of female philanthropy and philanthropists in different national settings. By shifting the focus from organizations to donors and volunteers, they begin to assess the relative importance of each of these factors in creating opportunities for citizen participation, as well as the role of female philanthropy in opening a space for women in the public sphere"--From publisher's description.
