This book is about the many organizations in Britain and the United States which are neither legally attached to the state nor permitted to distribute any profits they earn. These "intermediate organizations" include charities, churches, famine relief agencies, nonstate universities, credit unions, and social clubs. In a unique study of this area of the British and American economies, Alan Ware provides a rigorously analytical and historical account of the relationship of intermediate organizations to both the state and the "for-profit sector." Among other issues, he considers the disappearance of nineteenth-century working-class "mutual" organizations, the growth of profit-making activities by nonprofit distributing bodies, and the growth and change in voluntarism. He argues that the boundaries between intermediate organizations and the other two "sectors" are becoming more blurred in a variety of ways and that intermediate organizations do not constitute a separate "sector" of society.

The book also examines the problems of regulating such organizations and explains the consequences of the British and American practice of having relatively little state intervention in the affairs of such organizations. Finally, the author discusses the activities of these organizations in relation to pluralist accounts of the working of liberal democratic states.