Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present (review)

Politics and Partnerships is an exceptional edited volume. It brings together an introduction and ten chapters about the interaction between American voluntary or civic associations and markets and political institutions. The chapters report findings that span more than 200 years of American history and a broad range of different kinds of voluntary associations and their interactions with varied social sectors. The most general claim of the volume, as stated in the introduction, is that the boundaries separating the “third sector” of voluntary associations from political and market institutions are porous. The associations of civil society have always been influenced by their interaction with, and interpenetration of, market and institutional political processes but in highly contingent ways that have varied across time and social space with unpredictable outcomes.

The book’s excellent introduction reframes the scholarly debates about civil society by arguing that “[o]nce the relations among government agencies, voluntary or civic associations, and even private firms are placed front and center, their history is transfigured from the development of three distinctive domains to a process of contestation over the legitimacy of organizational forms, their respective jurisdiction, and their interdependencies” (3). The chapters that follow transfigure the history of these three domains.

The chapters are ordered chronologically and divided into three thematic parts—“Of, by, and instead of Politics”; “Nonprofits in a World of Markets”; and “Boundary Crossing: Contemporary Recombinations of Markets, States, and Nonprofit Organizations”—every one of which is excellent. In the first part of the volume, the articles concentrate on the porosity of the political boundary of the voluntary “sector.” For example, Johann N. Neem’s excellent chapter about civil society and nationalism in the nineteenth century shows how alternating attempts by political leaders to prevent and then to encourage voluntary associations provided the members of these organizations “with concrete settings in which national identification could be constructed and maintained” (36). The American national identity emerged in this antebellum civil society, and this civil society then played a role in fragmenting the Union.

Clemens’ historical sociology of the American Red Cross establishes how under the New Deal a “bright line” was drawn between public funding of social relief and private organizations like the Red Cross and then made blurry again. The chapter explains how voluntary relief in the face of drought and economic collapse in the early 1930s failed, only to rebound during the late 1930s and grow increasingly intertwined with government aid in the preparation for war.

The second part of the volume explores the relationship between the market and voluntary associations. Alice O’Connor’s excellent chapter chronicles the way in which conservatives reacted to the progressive trajectory of institutions like the Ford Foundation, attempting through a host of new organizations of their own to make the market and market logic the dominant force in civic life and the world of nonprofits.

Doug Guthrie’s chapter provides a needed statistical description of corporate philanthropy, detailing how much corporations give, what they give to, and how they vary in their giving. The third and last part of the book consists of three fine-grained analyses of contemporary nonprofit work within particular communities and by specific voluntary associations. The rich micro-focus of these chapters brings much detail and complexity to the overarching themes of the book.

The breadth and depth of the analyses in this volume are rare. Politics and Partnerships is indispensible for all scholars interested in the empirical and theoretical dimensions of voluntary societies across U.S. history, as well as in relationships between civic engagement and political institutions and market forces.