Development Status And Function Of The Volunteer Organizations

From the 1970s, voluntary organizations have been springing up all over the world, which gradually become an active power in social development and stir up the attention of international academic world. Voluntary organizations are burgeoning not only in other countries, but also in China. The reform and opening-up of China sped up the arising of Chinese local voluntary organizations, whose quantities and scales have been enlarging greatly in recent years. And they perform a series of unique while important functions in the fields of economy, politics, society, culture and so on. This thesis aims at studying on the current situation and functions of the Chinese local voluntary organizations, expecting to orientate them towards a more sound and standardizing development.Apart from the foreword and the conclusion, this thesis is divided into four parts.The first part: understanding voluntary organizations. This part, for the convenience of the following study, is to set forth the concept of voluntary organization, its features and its theoretical principles.The second part: rise and development of the Chinese voluntary organizations. The Chinese voluntary organizations are the offspring of China's reform and opening-up. They are rising and developing in Chinese specific economic, political and social environments. On the basis of Chinese practical situations, this part divides the main voluntary organizations existing in China currently into three types:①the voluntary organizations originated and popularized by the government, including community voluntary organizations and civil servants voluntary organizations;②the voluntary organizations originated and popularized by the quasi-government, including youth volunteers associations and media-originated voluntary organizations;③the voluntary organizations rising and developing spontaneously from the non-governmental sector, including voluntary organizations originated by enterprises and public institutions and grass-root voluntary organizations. After classifying, this part comes to the conclusion that the current situation of the Chinese voluntary organizations is"giving priority to the government, making the non-government supplementary, and they existing pluralisticly".The third part: functional analysis of the Chinese voluntary organizations. Based on the second part, this part analyzes the functions of the Chinese voluntary organizations. The Chinese voluntary organizations, as the undertakers of a noble social behaviour and the participants of an important public welfare undertaking, have the following five functions: providing economic value——creating a great amount of economic value and saving public expenditure; providing material achievements——helping disadvantaged groups and improving environment; providing human capital——building up knowledge, skills and gratification of an individual labour, and collecting elites for the whole society; providing social capital——establishing good relation net among people and between the masses and the government; providing cultural capital——protecting local culture, forming public welfare culture and accumulating administrative culture.The fourth part: the main problems of the Chinese voluntary organizations and the countermeasures to them. In the last part, the thesis puts forward that the main problems of the Chinese voluntary organizations are the lack of independence and being short of governmental support and supervision. Those government-run voluntary organizations should strengthen independence by playing down executive ladder, carrying out council system, and changing management system; while those non-governmental voluntary organizations should be supported by the government in finance-providing, talents-inputting, incentive-giving, example-setting, and cooperation-establishing; and both the government-run and the non-governmental organizations need the supervision of the government in the field of finance and cadre.