Toward a Participation-Based Typology of Voluntary Organizations

Classification is a first step in theory construction, and social scientists concerned with voluntary action have devoted considerable effort toward the classification of formal voluntary organizations. Internal political structure (Sills, 1957), organizational incentives (Clark and Wilson, 1961), types of beneficiaries (Bell and Force, 1956; Blau and Scott, 1962) and stage in the formalization process (Chapin and Tsouderos, 1956) are among the proposed bases for classification. Typologies involving organizations ’ functions for members and/or society are more commonly used. Gordon and Babchuk (1959) classified organizations according to whether they served instrumental, expressive, or instrumental-expressive functions. Similarly, Warriner and Prather (1965) classified organizations on the basis of the value functions of their central activities: pleasure in performance, sociability, ideological symbolism, or production. Palisi and Jacobson (1977) have used a study of student participation to show that the Gordon-Babchuk and Warriner-Prather typologies can fruitfully be combined. Work along such lines will doubtlessly continue. Gordon and Babchuk’s (1959) typology, in particular, has been shown on the basis of members ’ perceptions to be a unidimensional, valid framework for describing voluntary associations (Jacoby and Babchuk, 1963), and it has proven useful in predicting members ’ activities (Jacoby, 1965), recruitment processes (Jacoby, 1966), and organizational problems (Warner and Miller, 1964). However, such typologies have been criticized for resulting in categories which are too broad to allow many important distinctions to be made (Warner and Miller, 1964; Smith and Freedman, 1972:9). Moreover, any classificatory scheme which is not strictly based on empirically observed differences may reflect the values of the analyst to an unintended and undesirable