Abstract
As Kallman and Clark note in the first paragraph of their book, the “third sector” varies from country to country, consisting of different flavors of nonprofit organizations (NPOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSO), and voluntary associations, as well as the laws and practices that govern them. The Third Sector offers a theoretical framework for comparing third sectors in different countries, and applies that framework to six nations: the United States, France, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Given that the third sector is either highly influential or becoming influential in many nations around the globe, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of politics, citizenship, and democracy.
The theoretical framework consists of two arguments:
First, institutional logics: Kallman and Clark maintained that “socially constructed, historical patterns of practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules” shape the structures of organizations in a society” (p. 11). Or, in other words, culture has an effect on what third sector organizations look like, but not in a simplistic or direct way. For each country, then, the authors examine the history, the political and legal conditions, and the current funding situation of its third sector to make sense of where it is in the current day.
Kallman and Clark identify five basic institutional logics that operate in the third sector, often in combination (p. 12). They are as follows:
Clientelism
Paternalism
Bureaucracy
Activism
Professionalism
In the case studies, they argue that the institutional logic of professionalism is becoming increasingly important in the third sector in many countries. By contrast, the institutional logics of clientelism and paternalism are rarely mentioned in the rest of the book. The reader gets the impression that although these two institutional logics may have been important in the past, they are now irrelevant for today’s third sector. Because they drop out of the story, it is not clear why they were listed as two of the five institutional logics of the framework. Despite this, I find this framework persuasive and useful. Indeed, my only serious frustration with this framework was that I wanted a more thorough discussion of institutional logics (in Chapter 1) and a deeper analysis with institutional logics in the country studies.
The second component of Kallman and Clark’s theoretical framework is that since the 1980s, there has been a “veritable explosion of nonprofit organizations and activities” worldwide, and this is due to the rise of the New Political Culture (p. 45). According to the authors,
As higher levels of income, education, media exposure, Internet penetration, and the like are reached, citizens and consumers grow more sophisticated in their demand for products and services . . . Suddenly the citizen is more than his or her work; participation, lifestyle, and consumption practices take on increasing importance and merge with identity. This in turn leads to the development of what we have termed “issue specificity.” (p. 46)
Unfortunately, this discussion of the New Political Culture, although intriguing, never quite coheres into a convincing argument. In general, I feel that Kallman and Clark are correct that the rise of what many scholars term “neoliberalism” has had an important transformative effect on the third sector around the world, although in different local iterations. Yet their description of what the New Political Culture is and the way it shapes these organizations felt rushed and incomplete. This is a complex argument which combines economic, political, cultural, and social factors. Clarifying how those factors interact, and how that interaction shapes the third sector, requires more space than the authors gave themselves in this book. In addition, the New Political Culture theory was used rather sparingly and unsatisfactorily in the country studies. For those who want to understand this theory and its application, I would suggest they look up Clark’s 1998 book with Hoffmann-Martinot and Gromala, The New Political Culture (Clark, Hoffmann-Martinot, & Gromala, 1998). The Third Sector either should have been a longer book, or should have left out the New Political Culture argument completely and focused more time on institutional logics. I found the book’s discussions of legitimacy and trust similarly underdeveloped.
Although the theoretical framework is useful, the real contribution of this book comes in the country studies. As the authors accurately note, very few scholars of the third sector have the luxury of cross-national comparison, especially across global regions. For Western scholars who study Asia, like myself, there is a temptation to hold up the NGO sector in our country against an imaginary, idealized version of “Western civil society,” albeit subconsciously. We focus on the supposedly pathological aspects of the third sector in whatever nation we study, reinforcing an unspoken assumption that these Asian countries are inherently flawed. Although we should all be quite aware that every nation’s third sector is grounded in its own complex history, culture, and politico-legal system, it is helpful to read about this in concrete detail. For me, it was immensely useful to learn about the differences between the Anglo-American culture of civil society in the United States versus the statist tradition in France. I assume that for scholars of civil society in the West, it will be equally illuminating to realize that there are significant differences between the third sector in, for example, Japan versus South Korea. Anything that breaks down the pernicious essentialism of “the West” or “Asia” as persuasively as The Third Sector does is a valuable work. The country chapters are all quite readable, and constructed with some level of consistency (examining the history, legal system, and funding institutions of each nation’s third sector), so that they are quite accessible to scholars from a wide variety of social science fields.
Despite the strengths, Kallman and Clark do make some curious choices in this book. The selection of national cases is odd—why only one country each from North America and Europe, but four from East Asia? Why no cases from South Asia or Africa, where NGOs have been so influential? Part of the answer is revealed on page 2: The study emerged from an invitation from the Chinese government in 2009 and was initially published in Chinese in 2011. This brings up more questions. What did the government of the PRC want from this research? How did its desires shape the design of the project, besides the selection of cases? As the chapter on China indicates, the third sector in the PRC emerged in the last few decades and has become extremely robust quite recently. This boom in NGOs took the Chinese government by surprise, and it has been scrambling to deal with this new sector. What the chapter does not mention is that in 2012, the year after the study was published in Chinese, Xi Jinping became the PRC’s new president. Under his regime, a host of new regulations have been promulgated for the third sector (Shieh, 2016). Many Westerners interpret the last few years as a crackdown on civil society in China (Wan, 2015; Wong, 2016). Others argue that the Chinese state is attempting to tame the third sector by supporting segments that it finds helpful and controlling areas that are potentially dangerous to the regime (Hsu & Teets, 2016). What is not in doubt is that the Chinese state’s relationship with the third sector changed after 2012.
Because this is my area of expertise, I see more problems in the chapter on China than any of the other country studies. I will discuss some of the issues here because the other chapters may suffer from similar weaknesses. The authors relied on the fairly limited number of sources although they generally are from respected scholars in the subfield. The works they chose tend to be somewhat out of date, with a great reliance on research from the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is a problem because Chinese third sector has grown and changed significantly in the past two decades, with important shifts after the 1989 Tiananmen Protests, the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, and the accession of Xi Jinping (Hsu, 2017). Kallman and Clark flattens all of that history, often treating information from 1998 or 2002 like it is perfectly relevant in 2016. Not surprisingly, this leads to inaccuracies. Chinese laws and regulations for the third sector have changed quite a bit since 2013 (Shieh, 2016), but none of that is mentioned in this chapter. Prior to these changes, Chinese NGO had a very high rate of legal non-compliance, but this is never discussed (Hildebrandt, 2011). The authors are correct that guanxi relationships matter a great deal in the Chinese third sector, but they do not seem to realize that guanxi works very differently in the PRC than in Taiwan (Lo & Otis, 2003).
These may be nitpicky concerns, irrelevant for a general reader who simply wants some general background on the third sector in the PRC. However, these small errors of information have led the authors to a larger error of interpretation. Kallman and Clark argue that, like most of the other countries they study, the third sector in China is shifting from the institutional logic of bureaucracy to one of professionalization. To come to this conclusion, they had to take Chinese NGO’s claims of professionalization at face value, ignoring studies that show that they are often just window dressing (Spires, 2012) and that professionalization has been erratic (Hasmath & Hsu, 2014). They also fail to acknowledge research that has revealed a powerful culture of state paternalism and the importance of clientelistic relationships between Chinese NGOs and party-state officials (Hsu, 2015; Kang & Han, 2008; Lu, 2009).
Although I am not in a position to assess the analysis in the other country case studies, I do want to note that the chapter on China is longer and more thorough than the chapters on South Korea or Taiwan, both of which felt cursory to me. These may be weaknesses built into any book that attempts to cover such a wide geographic range at this level of depth. If Kallman and Clark had chosen to invite specialists to contribute to an edited volume instead, they would have avoided these problems. However, such a book would not have had the coherence or accessibility of The Third Sector. In its current form, it is not quite appropriate for most undergraduates, but is quite readable. The Third Sector is a relevant and useful book for political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and anthropologists interested in the relationship between states and citizen, regardless of what country/region they study.