Partners in Public Service: Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State

Lester Salamon pioneered the study of nonprofit organizations and of their cooperation with government in the development and delivery of important social and economic services. His unique research in the early and mid-1980s was the first to document the pervasive interrelationships between government and the nonprofit sector in the United States, identifying some of crucial characteristics of nonprofit human service agencies and examining the impact of the budget and tax policies of tire Reagan and Bush administrations. Partners in Public Service brings together some of Lester Salamon's most important work on the changing relationship between government and the voluntary sector in the American version of the modern welfare state. Approaching issues from a variety of perspectives -- theoretical, empirical, retrospective, prospective, and comparative -- Salamon illuminates the theoretical basis of government-nonprofit cooperation, shows why government came to rely on nonprofit groups to administer public programs, documents the scope of the resulting partnership, reviews the consequences for this partnership of recent attempts to cut federal spending, and explores the expanding scope of government-nonprofit collaboration at the international level.