ABSTRACT

This chapter reconsiders the key issues raised in author's argument. It starts out by discussing the problems of third sector theories in light of my findings, outlining an alternative take on nonprofits. Prevailing scholarly views on nonprofits understand them either as virtually automatic responses to needs unmet by states or markets or as a means of state action. Individual organizers tend to fall out of the theoretical picture. Evolving discourses and shifting emotional climates may engender opportunities for nonprofit organizing and specifically modulate relations with the state and its different agencies. In this way, discursive-emotional regimes impact on the internal organizational dynamics of nonprofits. This is evident from how the professional transformation of AIDS organizations was found to be premised on dominant, medicalizing AIDS discourse and was precipitated by emerging state-nonprofit relations. National patterns of state-nonprofit relations are thus to be seen as another formative condition for the evolution of nonprofit organizations.