Society

Everyone says that after the horror, the people were beautiful. Shopkeepers bringing carts of food to workers at the World Trade Center. Young black men helping old Jewish men cross the street. Construction workers driving from Missouri to Manhattan with a truck full of equipment, just to see what they could do.

Over the past three decades, the study of nonprofit and voluntary organization has boomed. Research centers have been created at several dozen universities around the country and a growing body of research has been produced by scholars from the full range of social science disciplines. One of the most pronounced challenges in writing about the nonprofit sector has long been the difficulty in actually defining the boundaries of the subject matter under study.