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This article examines the determinants of social equality in the education and healthcare sectors in the 15 post-Soviet states. Focussing on regime type and civil society organisations (CSOs), it argues that countries where liberal principles of democracy are achieved or have a stronger civil society deliver a more equitable social policy.

The empirical analysis rests upon a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis from 1992 to 2019. Data are collected from the Quality of Government (QoG) Dataset 2020 and the Variates of Democracy (V-DEM) Dataset 2020.

The findings demonstrate that while regime type only partially accounts for social equality, as electoral autocracies do not have more equitable social policy than close regime types and democracy weakly explains equality levels, the strength of CSOs is associated with more equality.

The article challenges dominant approaches that consider electoral democracy to be related to more equal social policy and demonstrates that de-facto free and fair elections do not impinge on social equality, while the strength of liberal and civil liberties and CSOs correlate with more equitable social policy.

This study aims to enhance the understanding of the nature of collaboration between public and nonpublic actors in delivering social services and achieving social innovation in a fragile context, with an emphasis on the role of civil society organisations (CSOs). The paper focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Southeastern European country which has faced a turbulent post-conflict transition and experienced challenges in its social welfare policy and practice.

This study uses institutional theory, particularly new institutionalism and institutional networking, as a lens through which to understand public and nonpublic collaboration and social innovation within a fragile context. This study adopts a sequential mixed-method approach. Data were derived from 15 semi-structured interviews with representatives from local CSOs, international donors and public institutions, as well as a survey of 120 CSO representatives.

The collaboration and social innovation in a fragile welfare context have been initiated primarily by nonpublic actors and developed within the triple context of relations between public, civil and foreign donors’ organisations. In such a context, coercive, normative and mimetic isomorphisms act as leading drivers, but also as potential barriers of public–nonpublic collaboration and social innovation. They are triggered by influences from multiple actors, challenging power relations and external pressures on local CSOs.

The paper contributes to the growing research interest in the role of nonpublic actors in the provision of public services and public social innovation, but examines these issues from the perspective of a fragile context, which has thus far been overlooked in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to compare assessment practices for highly visible social initiatives implemented by civil society organizations (CSOs) and businesses in Latin America and Spain.

The paper presents a secondary analysis of field‐based case studies that focused on four dimensions of assessments carried out by companies and CSOs to determine the impact of their social initiatives. The four aspects studied were: definition of the initiative's mission and goals; creation of value for stakeholders; quality of managerial practices deployed in the social initiative; and degree of alignment of mission and strategy. Ad hoc scales were developed and two raters evaluated the cases based on these dimensions.

CSOs made a greater effort than businesses to assess their initiatives, as reflected in the four performance assessment scores.

The main limitations were the limited scope of information available for the analysis – a drawback when using secondary data – and the particular characteristics of the initiatives in this convenience sample.

Businesses implementing initiatives with expected social impacts as part of their CSR efforts should not rule out the possibility of outsourcing management and assessment of those initiatives to CSOs.

The paper sheds light on the relative strengths of CSOs compared with companies with regard to managing and assessing social initiatives. The finding is somewhat unexpected, given the culture of management effectiveness that permeates the business sector. The authors conclude that further study is required to identify the reasons for higher CSO performance and suggest some venues for such studies.

This paper seeks to focus on civil society organizations (CSOs) and their capacity to exercise power in the employment relationship. In particular, the paper is concerned with identifying the sources of power, how it is exercised and whether CSOs can exert pressure on other employment actors despite their apparent lack of resources possessed by more established representative structures.

Findings are based on 139 completed postal questionnaires and 47 interviews, primarily face‐to‐face, across 34 different CSOs.

Adopting a resource dependence framework suggests that CSOs have the capacity to exercise power and influence key employment actors. However, the power of CSOs is undermined by the absence of an internal organizational presence, making it difficult to mobilize workers.

The research highlights the role of an often‐ignored employment actor. To provide further insights further research is needed to garner the views of other employment participants.

In employee relations discussions of workplace power have typically focused on the power of the state, employers and trade unions. This paper adopts a novel angle by exploring the role of CSOs and their ability to exercise power.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) in Lebanon are among the most active groups supporting community welfare and advocating for human rights and policy reform. However, these organizations still lack the basic awareness and commitment needed to expand their role in earthquake disaster risk reduction. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the exposure of Lebanon to destructive earthquakes and to address the urgent need for CSOs to expand its contribution in earthquake disaster risk reduction supporting public awareness programs and strategic mitigation plans.

The paper sets out to alert CSOs about the seismic hazards of Lebanon and offers a discussion for an active engagement role of Lebanese CSOs in future earthquake disaster risk reduction. The focus is to outline a strategy that may facilitate the engagement of CSOs in building the resilience of Lebanese community against destructive earthquakes.

The proposed strategic plan suggests a leading role of Lebanese universities that call for the establishment of a disaster mitigation coalition leading to CSOs active involvement and effective contribution in collaborating with government and private sector to enhance the resilience capacity of the Lebanese community against future earthquake events.

The implication of the paper is beneficial to community leaders of Lebanon because it highlights the importance of direct engagement of CSOs in earthquake disaster risk reduction which has never been previously emphasized, evaluated or even discussed in the Lebanese studies.

Civil society organisations (CSOs) contribute essentially to welfare states and society. In Europe they play a key role in the provision of social services, but also fulfil a large variety of other functions, such as giving voice to unaddressed issues, offering alternative ways of occupational socialisation or facilitating social inclusion (cf. Kramer, 1981; Rose-Ackerman & James, 1986; Kendall, 2003). Current research suggests that the third sectors’ societal roles considerably vary between countries, depending on the welfare state they are embedded in: Starting with a revision of Esping-Andersen's welfare regime typology (1990) and also based on the earlier work of Moore (1966), Salamon and his colleagues developed a typology of four different ‘non-profit regimes’ (Salamon & Anheier, 1998; Salamon, Hems, & Chinnock, 2000a). As key dimensions for this classification, they applied the extent of governmental welfare spending and the size of the third sector (cf. Johnson, 1999). According to this typology of nonprofit regimes, in countries with a large third-sector CSOs mainly fulfil the service function. Countries with a relatively small third sector, so the implicit conclusion, would tend to engage in ‘the expression of political, social, or even recreational interests’ (Salamon & Anheier, 1998, p. 229).

The understanding of the term “civil society” has been given in many references. One reference is given by the London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society (2011), and its working definition is rather illustrative. Civil society, according to them, refers to the arena of collective action around shared interests, purposes, and values. The civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors, and institutional forms, and varies in the degree of formality, autonomy, and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), professional associations, and community groups, such as women, youth, and faith-based or religious organizations. Those groups are seen as the nearest to the grassroots level and therefore could best accommodate their aspirations and needs. These groups are referred hereafter as Civil Society Organizations (CSOs).

The objective of this paper is to compare the advocacy role of civil society organizations in the United States and Brazil. We conducted an exploratory case study of three peak organizations that engage in public policy advocacy as part of their strategies. We analyze how they advocate and the role this form of action plays within different democratic contexts that assume public discussion and deliberation, by citizens, about matters relevant to them, such as the formulation, execution, and monitoring of public policy. The study concludes that the policy advocacy role of civil society organizations strengthens internal and external democratic processes by bringing for the deliberation process in the public sphere organizations that represent different groups in society. However, this process also poses some risks and challenges that shall be taken into consideration.

This paper aims to focus on the unique goal of understanding how marketing spending, a proxy for firm visibility, moderates the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strengths and concerns on stock returns in the short and long terms. In contrast to the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, the visibility theory, based on stakeholder awareness and expectations, offers asymmetric predictions on the moderation effects of marketing spending.

The predictions are tested based on data from KLD, Compustat and Center for Research in Security Prices from 2001-2010 and panel data based regression models.

Two results support the predictions of the visibility theory over those of the RBV. First, strengths are associated with higher stock returns, for low marketing spending firms, and only in the long term. Second, concerns are associated with lower stock returns, for high marketing spending firms, also only in the long term. A profiling analysis indicates that high marketing spending firms have high R&D spending and are more likely to operate in business-to-customer than business-to-business industries.

The two findings highlight the importance of coordination among chief marketing, sustainability and finance officers investing in CSR and marketing for stock returns, contingent on the firm’s marketing and R&D spending and industry characteristics.

This paper identifies conditions under which CSR is and is not related to stock returns, by uniquely considering three variables omitted in most past studies: marketing spending, CSR strengths and concerns and short- and long-term stock returns, all in the same study.

This chapter will examine the interplay among actors who took part in the process of consensus building towards a post-2015 education agenda via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels.

Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs) and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this chapter will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues that arose during the analysis of post-2015 discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the ‘education community’. While most of the analysis to untangle the nature of discourse relies on qualitative analysis of texts and interviews, the end of this chapter will also demonstrate the trends of discourse in quantitative terms.

What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The keywords post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were shaped at the global scale.