The chapter introduces readers to the major theories of the sector. Those covered include: market-failure theory, government-failure theory, contract-failure theory, voluntary-failure theory, supply-side (or entrepreneurship) theory, social-origins theory, interdependence theory, the commons, mediating structures, and associationalism.

To what extent are contemporary scholars using the ten explanations of the nonprofit sector described in Chapter 2? The authors use scholarship, or published academic articles, as data to answer this question. They find that the ten nonprofit-sector theories continue to be an important foundation for nonprofit studies research. The most commonly used sector theories are associationalism, contract failure, nonprofit/government interdependence, and social origins. However, their analysis suggests that use of the nonprofit-sector theories is merely ceremonial. Nonprofit scholars could do much more to question, develop, and refine the existing sector theories – or to develop new ones. This research highlights the importance of a book like this one to encourage scholars to discuss and question existing sector theories and pose new sector-theory contributions to better understand the nonprofit sector.

The colonial state’s institutionalized secrecy had produced an anomaly that reformers were keen to resolve. Britons – even those who prided themselves on their humanitarian dispositions – were seemingly unconcerned about the fates of millions of their fellow subjects on the subcontinent. To address this apathy and provide Indians with a greater role in policymaking, reformers attempted to construct an entirely new social formation that is the focus of Chapter 4: an imperial civil society based on inter-associational linkages. Early reformers in the metropole endorsed the establishment of societies in the Indian presidency towns that could provide reliable information on local conditions. Webs of contact also developed on an individual level, as veteran reformers in Britain advised members of the incipient Bombay Association on constitutionalist techniques. Intent on improving deteriorating race-relations in the 1870s, the East India Association continued to identify strategies to increase Britons’ awareness of Indian issues and facilitate the expression of native public opinion.

This chapter explores the borders of education in relation to contemporary refugee issues in Europe, specifically addressing the informal ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, Northern France, where University of East London (UEL) colleagues taught an accredited Life Stories short course between September 2015 and October 2016. It suggests that this pedagogy apparently beyond the borders of the conventional university is in some ways precisely the terrain of the university and education more generally. It disassembles ‘education’ itself, in a context where it was at the same time a humanitarian response, a human right and a political field of reciprocity, traversed by processes of coalition, commoning and association. Within this field, the outside of the camp, more than the camp itself, might appear as a jungle, irrational and denying humanity, while the ‘Jungle’ space itself contested neoliberal education and counterposed its own ‘university’.

In the 1990s, the idea that culture had a role to play in political sociology was relatively novel. Identifying sociologists who fit this emerging interdisciplinary subfield posed a challenge. Today, it is difficult to imagine a sociologist, or even a political scientist, who would argue against the importance of culture to politics. It has become de rigueur to acknowledge culture in political analysis. If anything, the field of politics and culture borders on oversubscription. Methodological issues that dominated early syntheses (Berezin 1994, 1997b) remain salient. These include epistemological discussions of culture as an explanatory factor in social analysis (e.g., Berezin 2014a; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methodology (Goertz and Mahoney 2012).

RJ demonstrates how the IRI instrumentalized rural development to consolidate power at home and project influence abroad. This book serves as a corrective and supplement to scholarly works that focus on the IRI’s consolidation and resilience mostly, if not entirely, in terms of repression, particularly in urban areas. Strategically and ideationally, RJ served as a soft-power mechanism that helped the IRI further bring provinces and villages into the political, economic, and sociocultural fold, and expand the state’s footprint in other parts of the Muslim and developing world. RJ’s organizational trajectory mirrored the IRI’s broader evolution during the last four decades. RJ sheds light on four important aspects of the IRI: first, the political and social changes and continuities that have transpired in Iran before the revolution until today; second, the ambiguity and reciprocity of the IRI’s state-society relations, and the agency or ability of its revolutionary activists to not simply follow and support leaders and officials, but also to influence and challenge them; third, the processes and outcomes behind the IRI’s centralization, consolidation, and state-building; and fourth and finally, the merits and shortcomings of the IRI’s bureaucratic institutionalization, and the opportunities and constraints of its associational life.