The Nonprofit Sector in Economic Theory: Beyond Mainstream Explanations
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
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| Description | Having gone through a turbulent history, the nonprofit sector in the Czech Republic and the neighboring European countries has tremendous socio-economic and political potential. The achievement of this potential, however, depends on the sector’s ability to deal with the socio-economic and political challenges that are no less tremendous. Much of the work that needs to be done toward this goal involves the scientific analysis and reconstruction of the sector’s conceptual foundations. This habilitation thesis reviews the international definitional and theoretical approaches to the nonprofit sector originating in the Anglo-Saxon environment with a view to assessing their applicability in the (post-) transitional context and identifying the elements of their integrative conceptual core. The emerging argument is that the societal determinants of the nonprofit sector in Central and Eastern Europe, at least in the short and middle term, are mainly related to supply-side rather than demand-side determinants, with the supplyside factors including public funding, public regulation, and the legal environment of the nonprofit sector. This argument is supported with empirical evidence assessing the plausibility of alternative nonprofit theories in Slovakia and with investigations of the commercialization and sustainability of nonprofit organizations in the Czech Republic. The concluding section of the habilitation thesis draws attention to the ongoing conceptual, organizational, and political redefinition of the Czech and Slovak nonprofit sectors with possible implications for other (post-) transitive countries. The key drivers of this ongoing definition process include the proliferation of new semantics, such as social entrepreneurship and social innovations, and the emergence of novel socio-economic and political challenges. |