Third Sector Research: The Construction of a Field of Study

More than 30 years ago, the ground-breaking work by Lester Salamon and Helmut Anheier launched global interest in research into the Third Sector. Their Voluntas articles from 1990 remain the most highly cited in that Journal, essential Third Sector reading. The Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP) studied the scope, structure, financing and role of the nonprofit sector in more than 45 countries in the world and involved a network of over 150 researchers, 90 funding organizations and several hundred nonprofit and philanthropic leaders in six continents. Nevertheless, the world is changing—Third Sector organizations and movements remain vitally relevant and yet, the changing environment and definitions of Third Sector organizations, availability of new data sets, gaps in the countries and topics studied, point to the need to take stock and ensure that future Third Sector research is relevant and impactful. Furthermore, the relevance of the Social Origins Theory developed from the CNP is now questioned.