The Hybrid Sphere: Voluntary and Community-Based Care in Three European Welfare States

European welfare states are increasingly relying on voluntary and community-based organisations to meet the expanding social and elderly care needs. Yet existing scholarship continues to model welfare provision primarily through the state-market-family triad. This paper reconceptualises the community sphere as an inherently hybrid institutional space and argues that community organisations occupy a structurally necessary “in-between” position, absorbing responsibilities that neither state, market, nor family fully assume. Building on historical institutionalism and organisational sociology, the analysis develops the welfare pyramid, a conceptual model that visualises how care organisations position themselves in relation to the state, market, family, and community. Through analytic induction, this paper traces three historical traditions of community care: faith-based, class-based, and identity-based, showing how each of them produced distinct hybrid organisational forms shaped by religious authority, worker mutualism, or pillarised civic structures. The article argues that even though institutional environments transform, these legacies continue to structure contemporary care organisations. The empirical analysis examines three cases: Bonifraterska Fundacja Dobroczynna in Poland, Vivium Zorggroep in the Netherlands, and Link Age Southwark in the UK. Drawing on organisational documents, financing structures, and governance arrangements, the study illustrates how each organisation reproduces a distinct variant of hybridity: a subsidiarity-driven religious hybrid in Poland, a professionalised public-market hybrid in the Netherlands, and a civic-philanthropic hybrid in the UK. These configurations reveal how contemporary voluntary care remains institutionally anchored, normatively grounded, and financially patterned.