Reviewing the 20 years of research on social welfare and NPOs from the following four perspectives. The first is the global neoliberal policy trend and the "resonance" phenomenon with NPOs. This made possible the NPO law and the public long-term care insurance system, which were not only forward but also reverse. The second is evaluation of welfare NPO activities. Consider NPOs that are active in public long-term care insurance, using Salamon's four-function theory as a reference framework. The third is the issue of "managing the non-profit organizations". What is "management" of a non-profit organization under the long-term care insurance system? Is it possible to apply Drucker's theory to non-profit organizations in Japan? The fourth is "partnership between the government and NPOs". "Partnership" in Japan may be different from Salamon's "third-party government" theory. From this point of view, we examine theoretical issues between welfare and NPOs in Japan.

In order to explore trends in NPO/volunteer research in Japanese sociology, this study analyzed the trends of papers published and the contents of their discussion in academic journals of Japanese sociology. As a quantitative trend, articles containing "NPO", "volunteer", and related words in their titles have been published in the journals since the late 1990s. There was a period when the number of publications increased regularly, which was in response to the time when NPOs and volunteers gained social attention, such as the enforcement of important laws and the occurrence of serious disasters. Many papers have conducted empirical methods, especially qualitative analysis. This was a trend in line with a paradigm shift in Japanese sociology as "from theoretical studies to case studies". Furthermore, in this paper, KH Coder was used to analyze the frequent words that appear in the paper titles and how they are connected. This analysis extracted the major points of the discussion in NPO and volunteer research in sociology. The welfare community formation by social welfare NPO, social movement, instrumental and expressive significance of volunteers, and the power structure inside and outside volunteers were extracted as the major topics in those papers.

Management studies on NPOs in Japan began by introducing Western research. Today, it is evolving into research that meets the situation in Japan. However, while the object of Western NPO research that Japanese researchers have been referred to up to now was literally the entire private non-profit organization, in Japan, citizens' free and voluntary organizations are classified as "NPOs" in a different category from traditional non-profit organizations. It still has a major impact on the operation of the system for corporations. On the other hand, management studies on NPOs are also diversified due to the influence of the specialization of management studies. Research is influenced by the conceptual diversification of the organization itself and the diversification of behavior. This paper introduces management studies for the past 20 years in Japan, focusing on major research in the fields of human resources, accounting and finance, management strategy, and social enterprise.

This paper identifies an agenda for future research on nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in Japanese political science, based on a literature review of 115 articles on NPOs published from 1998 to the present. The review demonstrates that relevant research seeking to bridge political science and NPO studies is scarce. Both theoretically and empirically, existing research on the cooperatives, social enterprises, voluntary associations and volunteers is insufficient. Furthermore, there is a lack of comprehensive quantitative information on NPOs in Japan. Therefore, this paper recommends addressing these issues through collaboration between scholars in political science and NPO studies.

Who promotes public policies for nonprofits? Why is he or she willing to take such an action? Despite there being numerous studies of nonprofits and civil society, previous studies have not focused on these questions. This paper examines the characteristics of legislators committed to nonprofit policies using micro data of the Diet members of Japan, including data on membership to the parliamentary caucus for nonprofit organizations ("NPO giren" in Japanese) and explains the motivations of their behavior based on the rational choice theory. Findings from the multivariate analysis are as follows: First, the legislator's vote share of the previous election influences the probability of belonging to the parliamentary caucus for nonprofit organizations positively. That means that a legislator who has strong motives for "votes" does not commit to nonprofit policies, and vice versa. Second, the number of times of winning an election predicts the probability of membership to the caucus. This implies that a senior legislator who has strong motives for "posts" is willing to commit to nonprofit policies for the purpose of claiming credit. Third, a legislator who belongs to a liberal party, such as the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), tends to be a member of the caucus. This implies that partisanship explains legislators' commitment to nonprofit policies.

Most studies of NPOs by activity fields make use of twenty legal classifications. To better grasp the reality, however, the activity fields should be further divided. And so, this study has used more detailed classifications for the revenue structures analysis and also the activities of the small-scale NPOs. The business reports of more than 14,000 NPOs in Tokyo and six other prefectures in Japan have been used. As a result, the following three points have been clarified. First, one of the findings contrary to general impressions has been this: the major source of revenues in the health, medical and welfare fields is the benefit from the disability welfare system, of which the benefit of the long-term care insurance law accounts for only 41.5%. Second, many small-scale NPOs earn mediocre amounts of business revenues (quite a little, if any), and yet they are working hard to accomplish their missions. This fact indicates that, when discussing the NPO matters at large, due attention should be paid to not only large-scale corporations but also small-scale ones. Third, if all corporations are classified by percentage of business revenues over ordinary revenues, high business type earns over 80% and low business type less than 10%.

Prior study has fostered momentum in research on Work Integration Social Enterprise (WISE), but it has shed no light on WISE staff members' social relationships and mutual recognition. Therefore, this study employed participant observation to reveal that in social relationships, WISE staff use "two logics" and "two relationships" to recognize one another and to create social relationships. Sometimes, however, staff members experience conflicts in these relationships. Even so, WISE never crashes because its staff care about working well together and recognizing one another. Overall then, their social relationships do nothing less than build WISE's solidarity. Finally, this study contributes to the evolving understanding of WISE in the context of recognition.

The new public-interest corporation system in Japan began in 2013, and the institutional operation of general corporations and public-interest corporations was started. This paper used the results of the questionnaire survey for all general corporations and public-interest corporations in Iwate prefecture, Miyagi prefecture, Fukushima prefecture, and clarified the composition of general corporations and public-interest corporations from the viewpoint of scale, degree of nonprofit, relationship with old system and government agencies, response to social tasks by example of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Based on these results, this paper aims to obtain suggestions on future research and measures. The composition of current general corporations and public benefit corporations is a mixture of public-interest corporations based on large asset containing about 40% of organizations that experienced affiliated organizations and relatively small general corporations. The nonprofit type general corporation accounts for a large proportion of organizations newly established in response to social issues. The nonprofit type general corporation should be evaluated as a powerful instrument for groups of people who respond to future social issues and their property and this result raises the problem of incentive design to become a public interest corporation.

Although volunteers are becoming increasingly important for promoting social activities, many nonprofit and civil society organizations face a volunteer shortage, which limits their options of the activities. To identify an effective method for recruiting volunteers, we conducted a national survey in Japan using a web-based questionnaire, and analyzed the relationships between volunteering and leisure time, financial resources, and information sources that led to volunteering. There was no practical relationship found between the time spent volunteering and leisure time or financial resources, including the perceived net benefit of volunteering. Many individuals obtained information related to participating in volunteer activities from community sources or through personal contacts. Most information was obtained by coincidence rather than by active searching. These results indicated that individuals were more likely to initiate participation in volunteer activities by spontaneously responding to opportunities that arose rather than by making choices comparing the costs and benefits.

The concern of this research focused on what kind of role NPO engaged in diverse locally-based activities have as leaders of agricultural land management in order to eliminate abandoned arable land. The research examined the actual conditions and potential of agricultural land management through the activities of NPO and clarified what kind of activities engaged in by NPO are effective for agricultural management and the impact and future outlook of these activities. A qualitative study was conducted of the NPO that were the subject of this research, and they were classified into four groups based on the substance of their agricultural land management activities. The annual budget was increasing for agricultural land management that promoted urban and rural interaction and involved urban residents and initiatives that developed multiple agricultural land management activities and managed to secure sales channels for crops. Agricultural land management through allotment gardens and the planting of landscape crops which can save labor at NPO was also able to manage a large area of agricultural land. As for the local impact of agricultural land management by NPO, local trust and understanding was obtained due to socially significant agriculture-welfare collaboration and ongoing agricultural land management initiatives. While extensive agricultural land management has low productivity and poor economic efficiency, certain effects on the elimination of abandoned arable land through the efforts of NPO were demonstrated.

Equality in the collaboration between local governments(LGs)and citizen sectors is often referred as the fundamental principles both in Japan and foreign countries. On the other hand, many argues that equality is not always guaranteed in the actual situation of the collaboration. So, how we make LGs and citizen sectors close to equal. To quest empirically this research question, this paper conducted questionnaire survey toward citizen activities departments of 359 LGs selected by the random sampling. As the result, this paper clarified and implied that (1) LGs and citizen sectors are not still equal although difference in power between both sides becomes smaller than that in 2007; (2) LGs should (i) enact bylaws regarding collaboration and refer equality in it, (ii) communicate regularly with citizen sectors and recognize their trustworthiness for trust building, (iii) develop the history of collaboration with citizen sectors and (iv) conclude the partnership compacts, that define the roles of LGs and citizen sectors; (3) citizen sectors should make efforts to exert its advantageous abilities in the collaborative activities.

This essay focuses on the issues surrounding the regulation of political activity in the Ordinance related to Promotion of Civic Engagement established by local governments all over the country. Among 1,788 local governments, 304 of them, which occupies 17% out of the total governments, establish 394 ordinances related to promotion of civic engagement, and 394 ordinances, which occupies 45% out of the total ordinances, have some articles about the regulation of political activity. This essay introduces that some ordinances related to regulation of political activity, which could interfere with the Article 21-1 of the Constitution, have been established without enough discussion in the local assemblies. Also through establishing ordinances all over the country, it became 27 various patterns. This essay will also provide some data that there are ordinances related to promotion of civic engagement which are stricter in regulation of political activity among juridical personalities at NPO sectors.