The Global Historical and Contemporary Impacts of Voluntary Membership Associations on Human Societies

Download or read book The Global Historical and Contemporary Impacts of Voluntary Membership Associations on Human Societies written by David Horton Smith and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reviewed here is global research on how 13 types of Voluntary Membership Associations (MAs) have significantly or substantially had global impacts on human history, societies, and life. Such outcomes have occurred especially in the past 200+ years since the Industrial Revolution circa 1800 CE, and its accompanying Organizational Revolution. Emphasized are longer-term, historical, and societal or multinational impacts of MAs, rather than more micro-level (individual) or meso-level (organizational) outcomes. MAs are distinctively structured, with power coming from the membership, not top-down. The author has characterized MAs as the dark matter of the nonprofit/third sector, using an astrophysical metaphor. Astrophysicists have shown that most physical matter in the universe is dark in the sense of being unseen, not stars or planets."--Page 4 of cover