ABSTRACT
The decade of the 1980s may well be regarded in retrospect as the beginning of a new era for voluntary nonprofit organizations (VNPOs) in England. More likely, however, it will be remembered as the period during which Margaret Thatcher served as prime minister of a Conservative government that promised to “roll back the frontiers of the state” by reducing statutory responsibility, promoting privatization, and expanding the role of the market, voluntarism, and the informal sector. The new conservative paradigm of the British welfare state implied a considerably expanded role for VNPOs, which, however, was viewed by many of their leaders with considerable anxiety. As part of one of the early efforts to develop a more empirical basis for social policy decisions regarding voluntary agencies as public service providers, a group of twenty large national agencies in Britain serving the physically, mentally, and sensorially handicapped were included in a four-country study completed in the mid-1970s.
