Contesting parallel worlds: time to abandon the distinction between the ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ contexts of third sector scholarship?

David Lewis

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Since third sector research emerged as a fully fledged inter-disciplinary academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained—in common with many other social science disciplines—between communities of researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich Western countries and those who work on the third sector in the so-called ‘developing world’. While internationally focused researchers tend to use the language of ‘non-governmental organizations’, those in domestic settings usually prefer the terms ‘non-profit organization’ or ‘voluntary organization’, even though both sub-sectors share common principles and are equally internally diverse in terms of organizations and activities. While there has long been common-sense logic to distinguishing between wealthier and poorer regions of the world based on differences in the scale of human need, the ‘developed’ versus ‘developing’ category can also be criticized as being rather simplistic and unhelpfully ideological. As the categories of ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries become less clear-cut, and global inter-connectedness between third sectors and their ideas grows, this paper argues that we need to reconsider the value of maintaining these parallel worlds of research, and instead develop a more unified approach.

Keywords: third sector research; NGOs; developing countries; globalization; knowledge communities; postgraduate teaching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Voluntas, October, 2015, 26(5), pp. 2084-2103. ISSN: 0957-8765

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59636/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:59636

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().