ABSTRACT
This chapter has two main aims. First, to offer a broad overview of the overall consequences that have been associated with the voluntary sector in general in the UK, guided by the framework provided by stage 1 of the comparative nonprofit sector project ‘impact study’. Here, the theoretical frame of reference is nonprofit or third sector theory as developed in the international literature that has emerged over the past 30 or so years (as referred to initially in Chapter 1, and whose relevance to impacts was highlighted in the introduction to this part of the book). The project’s emphasis has been on enabling a static comparison between countries at one moment in time, the second half of the 1990s. Sections 6.2 and 6.3 therefore diagnose how the UK situation ‘fitted’ in terms of the comparative international framework applied in that study at that time, implicitly focusing on continuities and abstracting from political context.
