The Fate of the Third Sector

Ever since Tocqueville, Americans have prided themselves on their voluntary organizations. So important is the idea of voluntarism in America that it is often called "the third sector," sitting alongside the market and the state. The third sector includes charity, not-for-profit corporations, volunteer fire companies and ambulance services, museums and cultural institutions, hospitals, religious activities, public libraries, community organiza-

tions, blood donation centers, the Red Cross, the Peace Corps, and any other effort characterized by community spirit and altruism.^[34] The Filer Commission on Private Philanthropy has estimated that one out of every ten Americans is employed in the third sector.^[35]

The third sector is continually being rediscovered because it serves as a symbol of obligations to strangers. When we agree to donate time or to give to charity of our own free will, it is because we recognize that others whom we do not know are dependent on the choices we make. Although they are sometimes conflated, therefore, voluntarism and the market are quite different moral codes. One is based on sacrifice and puts the interest of the collective before that of the individual. The other is rooted in distrust and pleasure maximization and puts the interest of the individual before that of the collective.^[36] Today, greater reliance on the moral code of the market in families and communities raises the question of whether Americans are as committed to the third sector as they have been in the past.

If asked about their attitudes toward voluntarism in surveys, Americans say they believe as much as ever in the ethic of the third sector. For example, data collected and published by the Independent Sector (a merger of the National Council on Philanthropy and the Council of National Voluntary Organizations) indicate not only that a large number of Americans (more than half) volunteer in one effort or another but also that the rate of voluntarism increased by over 20 percent from 1984 to 1985.^[37] It is obvious that the idea of voluntarism is still powerful in American society, no matter how preoccupied Americans have become with their private selves.

Moreover, if positive feelings toward the voluntary sector increased, so have contributions to charity. A number of major empirical studies have measured the degree to which Americans give to charity, and most come to similar conclusions.^[38] (Table 3, containing data collected by economist Ralph Nelson for the American Association of Fund Raising Councils, presents the most reliable as well as most representative figures.) First, the highest rates of charitable giving in recent years took place in the years immediately after World War II, when, as I argued in Chapter 2, the pressures of the market were lower than before or since. From this peak, rates of charitable giving began to fall, reaching a low point sometime during the 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, government cutbacks in social programs sharply reduced the amount of funds available for the American version of the welfare state, and in consequence Americans began to increase the amounts they gave to charity.^[39] (A variety of volunteer organi-

zations, including Hadassah and the National Association of Women's Clubs, report increasing membership in the early 1980s as well, which reverses an earlier decline.)^[40] These latter developments in particular insure that the present period, characterized as it is by faith in the market, will not be characterized by greater private niggardliness—although, as Alan

Pifer of the Carnegie Foundation has written, the notion that private donations could make up for government programs "is, frankly, ridiculous to someone who is well informed about the entire field of philanthropy."^[41]

Despite the fact that reliance on the market as a moral code has not harmed the moral logic of the third sector overall, there is at least some reason to think that it might in the future. As is the case with intergenerational moral obligations, people are more likely to volunteer and to give to charity—thereby recognizing their obligations to distant strangers—when family and community relations in the intimate sector of society are strong. A survey undertaken by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan for the Filer Commission indicated that married people give more to charity than single people, small-town residents more than urbanites, and old people more than young.^[42] Thus, although gross data indicate that people give as much to charity as ever, closer analysis reveals that ties of help from kin and neighbors have declined in America, even as ties of help at the workplace have increased.^[43] Perhaps the most significant caveat in an otherwise optimistic picture about third-sector obligations is the fact that young people, who tend to give less to charity, also tend to volunteer less: the Independent Sector data showed an 11 percent drop in volunteer rates for Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four.^[44] This decline, moreover, can be directly traced to greater market intervention in families: the added burden of student loans has been cited by the director of the Independent Sector as one cause of a declining commitment to voluntarism.^[45]

Another obvious change in the intimate level of society that affects a willingness to express obligations to distant others is the entry of women into the labor market. In the United States, the giving of time rather than money has traditionally reflected a sexual division of labor, in which men worked for income and women devoted time to community and charitable concerns.^[46] As women begin to work, their ability to participate in voluntary organizations declines.^[47] At least one study found that between 1974 and 1980 women's participation in voluntary associations declined significantly, a trend that has also been noted in such areas as religious work.^[48] Moreover, when working women do volunteer, they tend to join associations that have instrumental rather than expressive purposes, that is, organizations with less of a direct service orientation.^[49] Although one side to the women's movement of the 1970s was to encourage voluntarism in the form of women's self-help groups, birth counseling centers, and other innovations very much in the Tocquevillean tradition of American life, it also seems inevitable that the drive for equality in wages and working conditions between women and men, however justifiable on its own terms, will

significantly crimp a long-standing tendency for American women to express moral difference by participating in charitable activities out of a sense of obligation to the community.^[50]

As these trends in family structure suggest, the problem is more one of time than of money. Because of greater family income resulting from two wage-earners, lower federal taxes, and an economic recovery, many families had more disposable income in the early 1980s. Yet giving time and attention to community is in many ways more important for strengthening the social bond between strangers than is giving money. As people work longer hours, they may be substituting higher monetary contributions for the time that is no longer at their disposal. Thus, if we consider the rates at which people offer something other than money, we find a decline as the market becomes a more important force in American life. Figures compiled by the Red Cross indicate that between 1972 and 1984, activities that require more than the giving of money, such as chapter formation, the joining of community volunteers, or student participation in school programs, have decreased (see figure 4).

Although corporate contributions to charity do not reflect the same tensions between intimate and distant obligations, greater reliance on the market ought to have consequences in this area as well. As with attitudes toward voluntarism and rates of private charitable giving, corporate contributions to charities increased in the first half of the 1980s. Data assembled by the American Association of Fund Raising Councils show that these increases in fact raised the level of corporate giving to the highest it has been since 1960 (see table 4). Such corporate generosity of course has its self-interested side, since firms, unlike individuals, give money not out of a feeling of personal obligation to strangers but instead to identify potential markets.^[51] Moreover, since corporations account for only about 5 percent of charitable giving in America, the increase that did take place in the early 1980s in no way matched the concurrent decline in public funding. Salamon and Abramson estimated that private giving would have had to increase by 30 to 40 percent a year between 1981 and 1985 to make up for the cutbacks proposed in Ronald Reagan's first budget,^[52] yet the largest one-year increase in corporate giving, between 1983 and 1984, was 16 percent.^[53] Still, no one was forcing corporations to give more, and in that sense higher profits in the private sector do not necessarily produce lower donations in the charitable sector.

Whether that pattern will continue in the future, however, is also problematic. Because corporate donations are dependent on profits, they can easily decrease as economic conditions change—a trend that has in fact

Figure 4.
American Red Cross, Chapters and Volunteers, 1965–84
Note: 1971 data not available.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau,  Statistical Abstracts of the United States:  
1970, 307; 1976, 322; 1980, 363; 1984, 399; 1986, 384.

already begun to happen. In 1986, the Conference Board in its annual survey noted a 2.5 percent decrease in corporate giving over the previous year. Even the figures of the American Association of Fund Raising Councils, which tend to portray higher rates of giving, indicated only a modest increase in 1986. According to William Woodside, executive chairman of Pri-

merica Corporation (once known as American Can), a new breed of manager has already taken over American industry, one that thinks "it becomes positively un-American to look at anything except their own bottom line." These people may not agree with T. Boone Pickens's observation that "company giving has to be related to the company's interests; not be a gift to the ballet because my wife likes ballet." Yet when leveraged buyouts, insider trading scandals, and hostile takeovers characterize the corporate world, business giving for charitable purposes will likely decline.^[54]

Much, although by no means all, of the evidence assembled here does not support my thesis that greater reliance on the market will harm one form by which we express obligations to distant others, that is, voluntarism and private charity. In the first half-decade of the 1980s at least, Americans, although preoccupied with material considerations, did not contribute less to charity or show less willingness to volunteer. Yet a nagging sense that this fact does not tell the whole story makes me reluctant to conclude that the matter is settled. In matters concerning private charity, a weakening of the boundary between the intimate realm and the market has already led to people's being less able to donate time to others and will likely, given present trends, produce problems for charitable contributions in the future. In matters concerning corporate charity, trends already indicate, because of increased economic competition and a more market-oriented sense of moral obligation, declines in the amounts that will be forthcoming.

We might therefore give the last word, not, of course, to Tocqueville, but to two contemporary French visitors, both of whom wanted to find the world of Tocqueville still in existence but, unhappily, did not. The anthropologist Hervé Varenne, who lived for a year in a small town in Wisconsin, was determined not to preach to Americans about their society as so many Europeans tend to do. Because one cannot live in a small town in America without becoming involved in the Farm Bureau Federation—or so Varenne thought—he began attending meetings. "The times I was present," he wrote, "no substantial issues arose and the meetings were poorly attended." Moreover, he found that this had been the pattern for some time. "The people who came were the original founders, now in their sixties to eighties. No young adults attended the meetings." Hence, "discussion was weak, superficial, uninvolved. The leader had to force and cajole people into taking positions, something that they did only after ensuring that unanimity would not be destroyed by their decision." The lessons taught at such meetings are far removed from Tocqueville's ideas about a virtuous citizenry.^[55]

Similarly Michel Crozier, despite his great respect for the United States, was frightened by the change that had taken place in the country between his first visit in 1946 and a subsequent one in 1980. America was, in his view, a long way from Tocqueville's hoped-for "free schools" of civic virtue:

The United States today is no longer the America Tocqueville described. Its voluntary associations have ceased to be the mainstay of a democracy constantly on the move but are now simply a means of self-defense for various interests (which, though perfectly ethical, are still parochial in nature). This breakdown of community structures is what has made America a country full of anxiety, and periodically shaken by reactionary crusades.^[56]

Voluntarism and charity, it seems fair to conclude, are still strongly encouraged virtues, and they still play an important role in American life. There are reasons, though, for worrying that future trends will not be so positive if the market continues to grow as a moral code for individual decision-making.