The disability movement and disabled persons’ self-help organizations (DPOs) are emerging in China, some of which succeeded in promoting policy and social changes with special strategies. Based on an original survey and interview, this article explains the development and survival strategies of China’s DPOs, and especially interprets some successful cases of social advocacy and policy advocacy in the emerging disability movement. It is hoped that scholars will pay more attention to the advocacy and public engagement of the disability community in non-western settings in the future.

China’s disability policies are changing, some of which are gradually closer to the requirements of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Based on the social model of disability, this article explains the driving forces of disability policy reform, and especially adopts the critical policy analysis approach to evaluate the revised education policy along with the rehabilitation policy of disabled people. The inclusive education policy is improving disability policy issues the most compared with others because of the disability advocacy by disabled persons’ self-help organizations. Meanwhile, the nascent rehabilitation policy is typically top-down oriented by the government. Public participation may be the main way forward, especially with the growth of the disability movement in China. It is hoped that scholars pay more attention to the transformational disability policy in non-western settings.

Given its ubiquitous nature, sport events are one of the most popular venues for episodic volunteering around the world. This article explores the rare dataset of volunteering in sport events in seven countries—Finland, Ghana, India, Japan, Switzerland, Tanzania, United States—to overview the differences and similarities identified in demography, volunteers’ reactions to hosts’ management strategies, satisfaction, and intention to volunteer again. Key findings include differences in the level of satisfaction, where responses among American volunteers were the highest. We also find that although well-organized management strategies such as quality training, communication, and proper appreciation led to higher satisfaction, these factors did not contribute to volunteers’ intent to volunteer again. Such management style might be too impersonal with less autonomy on the part of volunteers that they may not feel needed in future events. Somewhat messy management might motivate volunteers to participate again.

Confronting the uncertain environment, this article adopts a case research approach to resonate with the studies of hybridity. It aims to explain how the perception of uncertainty in the institutional environment affects the adaptation of organizational structure in pursuing legitimacy for hybrid organizations. Based on the empirical data collected from a two-staged fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the case analysis concentrates on the correlation between the evolution of institutional logics and organizational structure change from a diachronic perspective. The findings indicate that in the face of competing and changing institutional logics, Chinese mass media organizations have gradually shifted from a dominated blending strategy in the exploration stage to a deeply compartmentalizing strategy in the stable stage. The hybrids can deal with the uncertainty of the institutional environment by enhancing the uncertainty of the organizational structure. Consequently, the case evolves an organizational integration through internal legitimacy. It manifests a possibility for hybrids of combining the two major response mechanisms in one process.

As scholarship on episodic volunteering expands, researchers question if episodic volunteering is similar to, and/or different from, long-term, membership-based volunteering. This article examines the motivations of Ghanaians, South Africans, and Tanzanians to engage in event-based, episodic volunteering. Based on surveys collected from over 1000 participants in 2018, we use logistic regression models to distinguish differences in motivations between novice, occasional, and regular episodic volunteers. The results show that age and student status are influential in distinguishing novice volunteers from regular volunteers, but more importantly that novices are motivated for primarily social reasons, while regular volunteers are motivated by more altruistic reasons. Our study reinforces established knowledge that people are motivated to volunteer for many reasons that may overlap or occur simultaneously, and that these motivations differ by stage of life.

Rationale: Children’s health is conventionally studied as an ultimate consequence resulting from various social and biological processes that jointly channel the risk factors and pathogens toward an individual health outcome. What is currently neglected is the rich tradition of a functionalist analysis of children’s health as a necessary function in the family institution. Children’s health may be associated with how children are integrated into the family’s core functioning and how parents regulate children’s behaviors. Methods: The current study used a cross-sectional sample of 891 parents from 2018 southern Jiangsu and surveyed information about children’s health and family activities. Employing a latent class analysis, we established four types of families based on children’s integration and parental regulation: loose, free, pressed, and concerted. Results: The regression results showed that a child’s health is associated with the concerted family type (OR = 3.6, p < 0.05), indicating the necessary functionality of health in heavily regulated and mobilized families. Conclusion: This study broadens the perspective on children’s health by ushering back functionalism and placing health in its social implications.