Dr. S. Wojciech Sokolowski is Senior Research Associate on the JHU research team. His research interests focus on comparative research of organizations and civil society institutions, measurement of non-market social action and behavior, macroeconomics and economic sociology, organizational behavior, and social determinants of cognitive processes. He has researched the legitimating role of civil society organizations in Eastern Europe and Russia during the period of transition to market economy, social movements, organizations, work, occupations and professions. He served as a visiting researcher at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where he designed and implemented a system of assembling data on tax exempt organizations from the administrative data systems maintained by US government agencies, the principal investigator of the research project on environmental NGOs in Russia funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and a consultant to sevaral nonprofit organizations, where he designed and implemented program evaluation strategies.

Relevant Publications

• S. Wojciech Sokolowski (2001) Civil Society and the Professions in Eastern Europe: Social Change and Organization in Poland. Plenum/Kluwer

This book examines the process of creation new nonprofit organizations during transition to democracy in Eastern Europe.  It finds that many such organizations were established by professional social and health service providers as the means of introducing novel forms of these services to the market.  The nonprofit organizational form proved effective in legitimating unknown and controversial services to both the public and regulatory authorities.

• S. Wojciech Sokolowski ( 2000), The Discreet Charm of the Nonprofit Form: Service Professionals and the Nonprofit Organizations in Poland 1989-1993. In: International Journal of Voluntary and Non-Profit Organizations VOLUNTAS, June.

This paper examines the role of nonprofit organizations in the process of professional innovation that involved a transfer of human service technologies from Western Europe and the United States to Poland during the transition to democracy. The paper discoveres elective affinity between the nonprofit organizational form and occupational interests of service providers. As the existing system of professions is no longer sufficient to legitimate expert services and curb competition among different types of providers, the nonprofit organizational form legitimizes novel or controversial types of services, and is thus instrumental in marketing those services.

• S. Wojcieich Sokolowski (2011). Philanthropic Leadership in Totalitarian and Communist Societies. In: Agard, Kathryn Ann (ed.) Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations, Washington, DC: Sage Publications, pp. 138-145.

This book chapter examines the effect of non-democratic government on the development of civil society.  It compares the dimensions of civil society sectors observed in countries with histories of authoritarian or communist rule and contrasts these developments with the countries without authoritarian or communist interludes.  It finds that non-democratic governance stymied the growth of organziational capacity of the civil society sector and its cooperation with government.  In addition, communist rule had a negative effect on volunteer engagement in civil society organizations.

• S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Lester M. Salamon and Megan A. Haddock (2011) Measuring the Economic Value of Volunteer Work Globally: Concepts, Estimates, and a Roadmap to the Future. In: Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 82(3): 217-252

This article explores alternative approaches for measuring the economic value of volunteer work, develops a methodology for producing global estimates of this value using existing data sources, and identifies a new data source that promises to yield significantly improved data on which to base such estimates in the future at both the global and national levels. Both volunteering through organizations and directly for individuals are considered. Different approaches to evaluation, including the replacement cost, opportunity cost, and social benefits approaches and both observed and reported market proxies, are examined. Based on a number of criteria, the replacement cost method using observed market wages is recommended. Using this method, the article estimates that ‘volunteerland,’ if it were its own country, would have the second largest adult population of any country in the world, and would be the world’s seventh largest economy.

• S. Wojciech Sokolowski (2012) Effects of Government Support of Nonprofit Institutions on Aggregate Private Philanthropy: Evidence from 40 countries. In: International Journal of Voluntary and Non-Profit Organizations VOLUNTAS, February.

This paper examines the effects of aggregate government payments to nonprofit organizations on aggregate private philanthropy. Four behavioral models of private philanthropic giving are proposed to formulate four hypotheses about those effects: no net effect (null hypothesis), crowding in (positive effect), crowding out (negative effect), and ‘‘philanthropic flight’’ or displacement (negative effect across different subsectors). The paper finds that, on the balance, government payments to nonprofit institutions (NPIs) have a positive effect on aggregate philanthropic donations to nonprofits, as stipulated by the crowding in hypothesis, but a field level analysis revealed evidence of ‘‘philanthropic flight’’ or displacement from ‘‘service’’ to ‘‘expressive’’ activities by government payments to ‘‘service’’ NPIs.