This book has a dual focus: on how four countries use voluntary non-profit organizations to provide services to the physically, mentally, and sensorially handicapped; and on the changing role of the voluntary, or "third," sector in welfare states. At the same time, it is also a comparative study of privatization in the special sense of using nongovernmental organizations to implement public policy. Most comparative studies of the welfare state have neglected this form of "indirect public administration" because researchers have usually conceived of government as monolithic and consequently overlook the frequent separation of financing from the delivery of public services.