The Global Historical and Contemporary Impacts of Voluntary Membership Associations on Human Societies

Abstract

Reviewed here is global research on how 13 types of Voluntary Membership Associations ( MA s) have significantly or substantially had global impacts on human history, societies, and life. Such outcomes have occurred especially in the past 200+ years since the Industrial Revolution circa 1800 CE , and its accompanying Organizational Revolution. Emphasized are longer-term, historical, and societal or multinational impacts of MA s, rather than more micro-level (individual) or meso-level (organizational) outcomes. MA s are distinctively structured, with power coming from the membership, not top-down. The author has characterized MA s as the dark matter of the nonprofit/third sector, using an astrophysical metaphor. Astrophysicists have shown that most physical matter in the universe is dark in the sense of being unseen, not stars or planets.