Comparison of Volunteers in Public and Nonprofit

In recent years, there has been a blurring of the traditional boundaries between the public and the nonpublic (for-profit and voluntary nonprofit) sectors. Studies in volunteerism to date have not yet addressed the issue of differences and similarities of volunteers in public and nonpublic agencies. In this article, we report on the first empirical study conducted of volun-teers from the public and nonprofit sectors. Since World War II, modem welfare states in general have shared a distin-guishing characteristic: the government is the main provider of welfare and social services (Flora, 1986; Spiro and Youchtman-Yaar, 1983). Theo-retically, welfare states held out the promise that the government would assume the responsibility for developing human services formerly provided by private agencies, voluntary activity, and informal care (Hadley and Hatch, 1981). But by the late 1970s, it became evident that these govern-ments were unable to assume full responsibility and that cooperation with the profit and nonprofit sectors was essential (Salamon, Musselwhite, and Abramson, 1984), even though the three sectors viewed themselves as distinct in concept and practice. In recent years, the traditional division of the three sectors-govern-ment, for-profit, and nonprofit-has been challenged in theory and in practice (Van Til, 1988). The intersectoral theory calls for abandonment of the notion of the third sector as independent (Ostrander, Langton, an