ABSTRACT
The new term voluntaristics has been suggested as a single-word label for the nearly 50-year-old interdisciplinary field and emergent academic disciple that involves studying NGOs (or non-profit organizations, NPOs) and all other phenomena of the voluntary non-profit sector (VNPS) in all human societies, past and present (Smith, 2013, 2016). The term is similar in form to the term linguistics, referring to the study of all human languages, past and present. This chapter will discuss the origins of voluntaristics as a field of study, its current global structure and growth trends, and the key substantive contents of the field beyond the transnational/international aspects reviewed in the present volume.
