This article contributes to and develops the previous literature on excess resources (“slack”) in nonprofit organizations through a conceptual analysis of the implications that the organizational distinctiveness of nonprofits carries for our understanding of slack in these organizations. We argue that this distinctiveness has important implications for (i) the threshold level at which resources become slack in nonprofit organizations; (ii) the type of resources that can be considered to constitute slack in nonprofits; and (iii) the different categories of slack to which nonprofit researchers should pay special attention. In particular, we propose an additional slack category to expand the classical typology: tappable slack. Importantly, we also suggest that in order to be relevant and useful also in the nonprofit context, the concept of organizational slack needs to be analytically linked to the mission of the organization. As an empirical illustration of these theoretical points, we discuss the resource use of the Church of Sweden and its parishes during the European refugee reception effort in 2015–2016.

Policy institutes, or think tanks, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our societies. In this article, we conceptualize think tanks explicitly as a civil society phenomenon, linking the proliferation of this relatively new type of actor to the transformation of civil society structures and of systems of interest representation. Using the case of Sweden as an illustration, we argue that the recent decades' rise of think tanks in institutional settings outside of the USA can only be understood if we take into account the particular features and institutional policy access opportunities of the domestic civil society in each national case, and that think tanks should be analytically understood as the allies of, rather than competitors to, the older, established forces in civil society.

Think tanks, defined as organizations that produce policy research for political purposes (McGann, 2007; Medvetz, 2008), are an increasingly ubiquitous type of policy actor world-wide. In Sweden, the last 20 years’ sharp increase in think tank numbers (Åberg, Einarsson, & Reuter, 2019) has coincided with the decline of the traditional Swedish corporatist model based on the intimate involvement of the so-called ‘popular movements’ in policy-making (Lundberg, 2014; Micheletti, 1995). Contrary to the large, mass-membership based and democratically organized movement organizations, think tanks are small, professionalized, expert-based, and seldom represent any larger membership base. Their increasingly important role as the ideological greenhouses in Swedish civil society might, therefore, be interpreted as an indication of an increasingly elitist and professionalized character of the latter. But what is a think tank? The article explores how a shared understanding of what constitutes a think tank is constructed by think-tankers themselves. In the study, interviewed think tank executives and top-level staff reflect upon their own organizations’ missions and place in the Swedish policy system.

Ibland ses det civila samhället som en alltigenom svensk historia. I denna nya bok uppmärksammas istället civilsamhällets plats i ett transnationellt rum av ständigt tilltagande aktiviteter och växande flöden av människor, resurser, information och idéer. De idéer som bär organisationslivets frågor och former har rest in från andra delar av världen. De översätts och vävs ihop med tidigare generationer samhälle, ibland vandrar de vidare. Så gick det till igår och så går det till idag. Med den transnationella blicken får vi syn på den pågående radikala omförhandlingen av systemet och på nationalstatens förändrade roll. I tolv aktuella kapitel möter läsaren forskare från olika discipliner och lärosäten med detaljerade analyser av civilsamhällets utveckling, men också motstånd och resistens.

I bokens första kapitel sätts scenen för övriga kapitel. Vi möter Pride och undersöker kvinnorörelsens organisering i Europa. Vi får lära oss mer om både sparbankernas och konsumentkooperationens europeiska resor. Konturerna för ett nytt rum för importerad frivillighet och filantropi mejslas fram och arbetarrörelsens problem att hantera globaliseringen analyseras. Vi får veta vilka som är nationalstatens sista väktare, hur det går till när pappaskolor går på export, men också vad som kan hända med en transnationell gåva och varför en invandrarorganisation inte når hela vägen i sin europeiska strävan. Antologin är en fristående uppföljning på Civilsamhället i samhällskontraktet.

An increasing number of people work in organizations that 'trade in trust'. Institutions such as banks, accounting firms, schools, and hospitals require customers, students, and patients to have confidence in the experience and professional expertise of the staff, as well as in the effectiveness of the regulations, rules, and systems in place for quality control. What mechanisms have developed in modern society to create, manage, maintain, and convey trust in companies, public administrations, and civil society organizations? What takes place in the encounter between different cultures of confidence and what happens when confidence in or between organizations is shattered? Trust and Organizations gathers an interdisciplinary group of academics to contextualize the dilemmas resulting from the institutionalization of trust and confidence in a wide selection of organizational settings. The importance of trust is highlighted in relation to different types of borders or boundaries - institutional, organizational, and geographical - as the overlapping and blurring of such boundaries is becoming one of the main characteristics of an increasingly transnational and re-regulated world.

What is the role of social trust in society and in organizational life? Does trust, as many imagine, function as a sort of a web that holds together the entire machinery of society, as a lubricant that oils the wheels of exchange and transactions? Or is it, in reality, a loose but sticky glue that produces inertia and slowness of reaction, hampering mobility and change? What mechanisms have developed in modern society to create, manage, maintain, and convey trust, not only in such different organizational settings as corporations, agencies of public administration, and civil society organizations, but also across these boundaries and other settings? What happens in the transition zone between different societal contexts, when trust is being recontextualized in diverse institutions and cultures? And—perhaps of particular importance today—what can we learn from the logic of de- and recontextualization of trust, in situations where public confidence is shattered?

Government-voluntary sector “compacts” have emerged in the recent years as an innovative nonprofit policy practice in many industrialized countries around the world. Originating in England in the late 1990s, the compact phenomenon has today spread to societies with relatively different tracks of inter-sectorial relations and different civil society regimes. This introductory article seeks to chart out the diverse functions that the compact solution seems to perform in different institutional surroundings, and it also opens up for a comparative discussion of the broader socio-political contexts in which this policy instrument has developed.