Fifteen years have passed since the Centre for Voluntary Organisation was founded in London. In reviewing the history of research on the voluntary sector in the United Kingdom, the author asks whether the progressive blurring of boundaries between the governmental, proprietary, and voluntary sectors means that in the long run the third sector will disappear. He argues that it will not, proposing that the core of the voluntary sector is the associational base out of which organizations grow. In turn, that base has connections to the personal, nonorganizational sector of life. Sector blurring occurs at the boundaries between the sectors, but mixed form organizations generally do not have associational bases.
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