International Encyclopedia of Civil Society
Helmut K. Anheier, Stefan Toepler, Regina List (Eds).
International Encyclopedia of Civil Society
With 40 Figures and 44 Tables
HELMUT K. ANHEIER University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany Hertie School of Governance Berlin Germany STEFAN TOEPLER George Mason University Arlington, VA USA
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009937022
ISBN: 978-0-387-93994-0 This publication is available also as: Electronic publication under ISBN: 978-0-387-93996-4 and Print and electronic bundle under ISBN: 978-0-387-93997-1 ß Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 (USA) All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC., 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. springer.com Printed on acid free paper
SPIN: 12609567 2109SPi– 5 4 3 2 1 0
Preface The purpose of the International Encyclopedia of Civil Society is twofold. First, it is to take intellectual stock and offer an authoritative assessment of knowledge of and for a field of study that has expanded greatly in recent decades. This field, however, does not present itself as a settled or unified body of theories and facts; nor is it easily accessible to experts, students and practitioners. Instead, the field consists of several overlapping substantive areas such as civil society, social capital, philanthropy, voluntarism, civic engagement, etc., and cuts across a range of social science disciplines that include economics, sociology, political science, history, the law, and psychology. The second purpose of the Encyclopedia is to introduce greater conceptual clarity to an increasingly perplexing terminology that has been developing in the field of civil society, philanthropy, nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, voluntarism, etc. over time. Confusion about the meaning of volunteering, association, civil society, nonprofit organizations, foundations, and charity has handicapped communication and understanding, particularly in inter-disciplinary and international contexts. In the past, the terminological tangles so characteristic of this field may well have mattered less, yet as this set of institutions has achieved greater social, economic and policy relevance, greater clarity now seems more urgent. Indeed, the lack of a multi-disciplinary and international Encyclopedia dedicated to civil society and related topics has long been a major complaint among teachers, students, and researchers in the field, as well as among practitioners and policymakers around the world. The present Encyclopedia was developed with these multiple audiences and uses in mind. Though an unsettled, evolving body of knowledge with a complex, even confusing terminology could be seen as a chronic weakness of a research agenda, curriculum or policy field, we believe that in the case of civil society it is rather a sign of intellectual fertility. In the context of this evolving intellectual field, we have sought to offer an inventory of the conceptual landscape rather than set some standards —however defined— or privilege one definition over another. Nonetheless this meant that we had to come to terms with the diversity and richness of institutions, organizations and behaviors located between the ‘market’ and the ‘state’ — a task complicated by the great profusion of terms. Selecting the entries for this Encyclopedia was a complex process that involved many difficult choices. A basic premise was that given the relative newness of the field, the Encyclopedia should not only cover terms and concepts but also include entries on internationally relevant organizations and personalities in the field of civil society. Another premise was that the Encyclopedia should genuinely be internationally-oriented and provide coverage of concepts, traditions, and institutions from different parts of the world, thereby acknowledging the diversity of the field from a cross-national perspective. The field of civil society studies is a conglomerate of separate intellectual approaches and traditions that are reflected in this Encyclopedia and include: ● the resurgent interest in civil society across the social science and policy fields, particularly since the 1990s; ● the older traditions of civil society from Antiquity through the early 20th century, with several distinct intellectual, national and regional traditions; ● a tradition of philanthropic studies, largely US-based and focused on the role of foundations and philanthropy in American society; ● an emphasis on nonprofit organizations in economics since the 1980s; ● the rich intellectual approaches to voluntary associations, voluntarism and civic engagement in sociology; ● the anthropology and ethnology of voluntary associations and voluntarism; ● the different approaches to social capital in sociology and political science; ● work on altruism and helping behavior in psychology and economics; ● the study of advocacy, new social movements, interest associations and political associations in political science; ● the welfare state literature in political science, sociology and economics; ● the bourgeoning literature on nongovernmental organizations in developmental studies and international relations; ● the study of the social economy and its institutions in Europe and other parts of the world; and, of course, ● the impact of different legal systems (common law and civil law) and traditions.
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Preface
Table 1 Encyclopedia concept with entry samples NONPROFIT AND NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
SOCIAL CAPITAL
CIVIL SOCIETY
PHILANTHROPY
Substantive entries
Associations, definitions and history Civil society history Civil society theory Civility Civic culture
Foundations, definitions and history Charity Gift, Giving Wakfs Venture Philanthropy
Theories of nonprofit organizations Partnerships Third party government Social investment Social entrepreneurship
Civic participation Reciprocity Social capital, definition Social cohesion Social trust
Organizational profiles
Charta 77 Civicus Transparency International
European Foundation Centre Ford Foundation Tata Trusts
Ashoka BRAC Caritas
Free Masons Boy/Girl Scouts Rochdale Society
Bibliographic entries
De Toqueville, Alexis Ferguson, Adam Dahrendorf, Ralf
Carnegie, Andrew Rowntree, Joseph Soros, George
Dunant, Jean-Henri Yunus, Muhammad
Bourdieu, Pierre Coleman, James Putnam, Robert
In trying to address these different approaches and traditions, we used an approach whereby we developed an initial list of concepts, organizations and personalities to be covered. We did so by specifying four major ‘streams’ that roughly correspond to the intellectual and policy divisions in the field, although much overlap exists among them: civil society, philanthropy, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, and social capital. In each of these four ‘streams’, policy fields, traditions, and literatures, we identified key concepts, institutions/organizations and personalities. Table 1 offers an illustration of our approach. We submitted an initial list to the International Advisory Committee for comments and, in particular, encouraged each member to suggest additions and modifications. After incorporating further suggestions from entry authors and the field at large and several iterations, we arrived at a list that forms the basis of the Encyclopedia. This Encyclopedia includes 628 entries: 267 conceptual terms, 222 organizations and institutions; and 139 biographies – available both in hard print copy and in electronic format accessible via the Internet. Entries of similar type, e.g., regionally focused entries, civil society history essays, biographical or organizational entries, follow a standardized structure. All entries are arranged in alphabetical order from A to Z, are cross-referenced, and provide suggestions for further readings. They represent original contributions by the corresponding authors; editorial input was for the most part reserved for structural aspects. Of course, in a first edition, any encyclopedia will suffer from omissions and unevenness in the treatment and the quality of entries. We hope that future editions will remedy such shortcomings and build on knowledge we have managed to assemble in the course of this initial intellectual stock-taking. Helmut K. Anheier Stefan Toepler Regina List
Acknowledgements Many people have been involved in the development of the Encyclopedia. Cooperation is in the very nature of the encyclopedia ‘genre’, and it requires the cooperation and goodwill of many. First, we owe deep gratitude to our collaborators at Springer, especially Teresa Krauss, who in the best of editorial traditions approached us to take on this task in the first place. We are also grateful to Michaela Bilic and Jennifer Carlson, as well as their assistants Katherine Chabalko, Susan Bednarczyk and Saskia Ellis, who all kept us going throughout this process and were always there to give a helping hand. Their patience in guiding us through numerous international conference calls made the difference between feelings of progress rather than frustration. We are also grateful to the members of the International Advisory Committee, listed on a separate page, who lent their expertise and not only advised us on the content of the Encyclopedia, but also recommended suitable authors and, in many cases, contributed entries. In particular, Myles McGregor-Lowndes, Ju¨rgen Kocka, Craig Calhoun, Marlies Glasius, Dave Brown, Susan Pharr, Alnoor Ebrahim, Hagai Katz, and Eva Kuti stand out, and their contributions are well beyond what we could have reasonably expected. They are outstanding exemplars of the kind of scholars one hopes to have involved in projects like this one. Special thanks are also due to Ebenezer Obadare (University of Kansas) and Samiul Hasan (United Arab Emirates University), who offered advice regarding their areas of regional expertise, and to David Horton Smith for his wise advice. At the University of Heidelberg and George Mason University, we thank our research assistants, Anael Labigne, Martin Ho¨lz, Francisco Martinez, Filip Zielinski, and Jan Sacharko, who conducted background research, especially for many of the biographical and organizational entries. Of course, we could not have done this without the contributions of nearly 400 authors, among them scholars and practitioners – both renowned and up-and-coming – from every major world region, who prepared their entries – in many cases more than one – on a voluntary basis. We are especially grateful to those who came in at the last minute to fill in on those occasions where the originally assigned authors had to drop out.
About the Editors-in-Chief
Helmut K. Anheier (Ph.D. Yale University, 1986) is Professor of Sociology, Heidelberg University, and Academic Director of the Center for Social Investment and Professor of Sociology. From 2001 to 2009 he was Professor of Public Policy and Social Welfare at UCLA, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. He founded and directed the Centre for Civil Society at LSE (1998–2002), the Center for Civil Society at UCLA (2001–2009), and the Center for Globalization and Policy Research (2004–2009), also at UCLA. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Associate and Project Co-director at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Before embarking on an academic career, Dr. Anheier served as Social Affairs Officer to the United Nations. Dr. Anheier’s work has focused on civil society, the nonprofit sector, philanthropy, organizational studies, policy analysis and comparative methodology. He is author of over 300 publications, including over thirty authored and edited books. He has won several national and international awards, including the 2006 PNP Best Book Award of the American Academy of Management. He is currently researching the role of philanthropy internationally, and interested in methodological questions at the intersection of globalization, civil society, and culture. Dr. Anheier serves on the board of several scholarly and philanthropic organizations.
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About the Editors-in-Chief
Stefan Toepler (Dr. rer.pol., Free University of Berlin, 1995) is Associate Professor of Nonprofit Studies in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. Prior to joining George Mason in 2002, he was on the faculty of the Institute of Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he coordinated, inter alia, the legal, Central European and Middle Eastern components of the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. Dr. Toepler was a doctoral fellow of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin from 1992 to 1995, a Philanthropy Fellow at Johns Hopkins in 1993/94; and a Fellow in Museum Practice at the Smithsonian Institution in 2004. Dr. Toepler’s research interests range from the study of philanthropic foundations and nonprofit management and policy more generally to arts policy and cultural economics. With over 70 publications in both English and German, his work has appeared in such journals as Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Administration & Society, the International Journal of Public Sector Management, the International Journal of Public Administration, the Journal of Cultural Economics, and VoluntasInternational Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. He is the contributing co-editor of Private Funds, Public Purpose: Philanthropic Foundations in International Perspective (New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 1999); Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, 1999)—winner of Independent Sector’s 2001 Virginia Hodgkinson Research Prize; and The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations: US and European Perspectives (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).
About the Editors-in-Chief
About the Managing Editor
Regina A. List is an independent editor, researcher and writer living in Hamburg, Germany. She is also Managing Editor of the Journal of Civil Society. Previously, she served as Research Projects Manager at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies and Co-Ordinator for Developing Countries for the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, as well as overall Project Manager. She is co-editor with Helmut K. Anheier of A Dictionary of Civil Society, Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector, and co-author of Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector, Volume One, and Cross-border Philanthropy, among other works. After completing an M.A. in International Development at the American University (Washington, DC), she served as Program Co-ordinator and Executive Director of the Esquel Group Foundation.
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International Advisory Committee Martin Albrow London School of Economics and Political Science London UK
Joseph Chan University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China
Daniele Archibugi Italian National Research Council Rome Italy University of London Birkbeck UK
Neera Chandhoke University of Delhi Delhi India
Avner Ben-Ner University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN USA Gabriel Berger Universidad de San Andres Buenos Aires Argentina Patrick Bond University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban South Africa Elizabeth Boris Urban Institute Washington, D.C. USA L. David Brown Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA Craig Calhoun New York University New York, NY USA
Ramesh C. Datta Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai India Paul Dekker Tilburg University Tilburg The Netherlands Alnoor Ebrahim Harvard Business School Boston, MA USA Heba Raouf Ezzat Cairo University Cairo Egypt Mamadou Gaye Groupe Institut Africain de Management Senegal Africa Giuliana Gemelli Universita di Bologna Bologna Italy
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International Advisory Committee
Marlies Glasius University of Amsterdam Amsterdam The Netherlands Xavier Greffe University of Paris Paris France Steven Heydemann United States Institute of Peace Washington, DC USA Mary Kaldor London School of Economics and Political Science London UK Hagai Katz Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Be’er Sheva Israel Ju¨rgen Kocka Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Berlin Germany Eva Kuti Budapest College of Management Budapest Hungary
Francis Nyamnjoh Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Dakar Senegal Tae-Kyu Park Yonsei University Seoul South Korea Vı´ctor Pe´rez-Dı´az Analistas Socio-Politicos (ASP) Madrid Spain Susan Pharr Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA Jan Aart Scholte University of Warwick Coventry UK London School of Economics London UK Hakan Seckinelgin London School of Economics and Political Science London UK
Myles McGregor-Lowndes Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD Australia
Steven Rathgeb Smith University of Washington Seattle, WA USA
Henrietta Moore London School of Economics and Political Science London UK
Volker Then University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
Alejandro Natal El Colegio Mexiquense Toluca Mexico
Michel Wieviorka Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris France
International Advisory Committee
Filip Wijkstro¨m Stockholm School of Economics Stockholm Sweden
Dennis R. Young Georgia State University Atlanta, GA USA
Naoto Yamauchi Osaka University Osaka Japan
Annette Zimmer University of Mu¨nster Mu¨nster Germany
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List of Contributors FRANK ADLOFF Free University of Berlin Berlin Germany
MORRIS ALTMAN Victoria University of Wellington Wellington New Zealand
DIETER AHLERT Westphalian Wilhelms-University Mu¨nster Germany
GABRIEL AMITSIS Institute of Social Innovation Athens Greece
MAHTAB AHMAD Asian Institute of Technology Pathumthani Thailand MOKBUL MORSHED AHMAD Asian Institute of Technology Pathumthani Thailand SALVATORE ALAIMO School of Public and Environmental Affairs Decatur, GA USA MICHAEL ALBERG-SEBERICH Forum for Active Philanthropy Berlin Germany OLGA ALEXEEVA Charities Aid Foundation London UK
CHARLOTTE ANHEIER Pitzer College Sherman Oaks, CA USA HELMUT K. ANHEIER University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany Hertie School of Governance Berlin Germany EDITH ARCHAMBAULT University of Paris Paris France ZEYNEP ATALAY University of Maryland College Park, MD USA
SAIF ABD AL-FATTAH Cairo University Giza Egypt
JAMES E. AUSTIN Harvard Business School Boston, MA USA
ANNE ALSTOTT Harvard Law School Cambridge, MA USA
GERALD AUTEN US Department of the Treasury Washington, DC USA
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List of Contributors
HOLGER BACKHAUS-MAUL The Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg Halle (Saale) Germany
MICHAEL BISESI Seattle University Seattle, WA USA
HARRY BAUER International Relations London UK
FLORIAN BLAESS Centre for Social Investment Heidelberg Germany
ARND BAUERKA¨MPER Free University of Berlin Berlin Germany
HANS BLOMKVIST Uppsala University Uppsala Sweden
LEHN M. BENJAMIN George Mason University Fairfax, VA USA
INGO BODE Universitaet Wuppertal Wuppertal Germany
GABRIEL BERGER Universidad de San Andres Buenos Aires Argentina
CLAUDIA BODE-HARLASS Woergl Austria
P. ISHWARA BHAT University of Mysore Mysore India SHAHJAHAN BHUIYAN Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research (KIMEP) Almaty Kazakhstan ERIC BIDET University of Maine LeMans France
THOMAS P. BOJE Roskilde University Roskilde Denmark JESSE O. BOLLINGER Regis University Independence, MO USA PATRICK BOND Kwa-Zulu Natal School of Development Studies Durban South Africa
CHRISTOPHER S. BIGGERS Asheboro, NC USA
ELIZABETH T. BORIS The Urban Institute Washington, DC USA
ANAEL BIGNE University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
THOMASINA BORKMAN George Mason University Fairfax, VA USA
List of Contributors
A. JOSEPH BORRELL Shippensburg University Shippensburg, PA USA
JENNIFER M. BRINKERHOFF George Washington University Washington, DC USA
ODILE BOUR Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales Berlin Berlin Germany
ASPEN BRINTON Northwestern University Evanston, IL USA
MATT BOWDEN Dublin Institute of Technology Dublin Ireland
EVELYN BRODY Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA
WOODS BOWMAN DePaul University Chicago, IL USA
L. DAVID BROWN Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA
LORI A. BRAINARD George Washington University Washington, DC USA TACO BRANDSEN Radboud University Nijmegen Nijmegen The Netherlands KAI BRAUER Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Berlin Germany BETH BREEZE University of Kent at Canterbury Kent UK
JEFFREY L. BRUDNEY Cleveland State University Cleveland, OH USA FREYA BRUNE University of Mu¨nster Mu¨nster Germany JANA BRUNKE University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany RONELLE BURGER Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch South Africa
ELEANOR BRILLIANT Rutgers University Scarsdale, NY USA
JAN R. BUSSE Eschede Germany
DERICK BRINKERHOFF George Washington University Washington, DC USA
JORGE CADENA-ROA Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Mexico City Mexico
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SABINE CAMPE Free University of Berlin Berlin Germany
CARLOS CORDOURIER REAL Centro Mexicano para la Filantropia Mexico City Mexico
RAQUEL CAMPOS FRANCO Universidade Catolica Portuguesa Porto Portugal
SUE CRAWFORD Creighton University Omaha, NE USA
ELAINE CHAN The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China
MARIANO CROCE Sapienza - Universita di Roma Rome Italy
JOSEPH CHAN The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China
RUTH CROCKER Auburn University Auburn, AL USA
KIN-MAN CHAN The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China
HANS-CHRISTIAN CRUEGER Universitaet Bonn Bonn Germany
OLIVIER CHAVAREN George Mason University Paris France
LAWRENCE S. CUMMING International Development and Civil Society Ottawa, ON Canada
MARTHA CHEN Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA
KLA´RA CZIKE National Volunteer Centre of Hungary Budapest Hungary
JOHN D. CLARK World Bank (retired) Washington, DC USA
ROD DACOMBE King’s College London London UK
RAM CNAAN University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA USA
TIMOTHY R. DAHLSTROM Arizona State University Litchfield Park, AZ USA
STEPHEN COMMINS UCLA Los Angeles, CA USA
ROBERT DALZIEL University of Birmingham Birmingham UK
List of Contributors
ASHOK DAS San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA USA
MA OLIVA Z. DOMINGO University of the Philippines Quezon City Philippines
THOMAS DAVIES City University London London UK
YASHAVANTHA DONGRE University of Mysore Mysore India
ANDREA DE JONGE Van Andel Institute Grand Rapids, MI USA
FREDA DONOGHUE Trinity College Dublin Ireland
CAROL J. DE VITA The Urban Institute Washington, DC USA
HEATHER DOUGLAS Kenmore, QLD Australia
PAUL DEKKER The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) The Hague The Netherlands GLORIA S. H. DENOON New York University Manhattan, NY USA
GEORGETTE DUMONT Northern Illinois University South Bend, IN USA HAI VAN DUONG DINH Westphalian Wilhelms-University Mu¨nster Germany
REBECCA DIBB Centre for Development Services Cairo Egypt
ALEXIA DUTEN University of Mu¨nster Mu¨nster Germany
EVA DIDION Universitaet Bamberg Bamberg Germany
BERNHARD EBBINGHAUS Fakultat fur Sozialwissenschaften Mannheim Germany
DIANA DIGOL Centre for OSCE Research (CORE) Hamburg Germany
ALNOOR EBRAHIM Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA
ROUMEN DIMITROV University of Western Sydney Penrith South DC, NSW Australia
STEVE VAN ECK Meyer Memorial Trust Portland, OR USA
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MARC EDELMAN City University of New York New York, NY USA
ANTHONY J. FILIPOVITCH Minnesota State University Mankato, MN USA
ANGELA M. EIKENBERRY University of Nebraska at Omaha Omaha, NE USA
ALAN FOWLER University of KwaZulu Natal Herbetsdale South Africa
JENNY ELMACO University of Mu¨nster Mu¨nster Germany
JONATHAN FOX University of California Santa Cruz, CA USA
JED EMERSON Uhuru Capital Management New York, NY USA
MARIA RAQUEL FREIRE University of Coimbra Coimbra Portugal
ANJA ERBEL London UK
MATTHEW FREISE University of Mu¨nster Mu¨nster Germany
AMITAI ETZIONI George Washington University Washington, DC USA
BRYAN T. FROEHLE School of Theology and Ministry Miami Gardens, FL USA
MARTIN FARRELL get2thepoint Kingston UK
BRENDA GAINER York University Toronto, ON Canada
LEWIS FAULK Georgia State University Atlanta, GA USA
ANJULA GARG European Commission ISPRA (VA) Italy
CARINNE FAVEERE Boston College Bradenton, FL USA
GIULIANA GEMELLI Universita di Bologna Bologna Italy
SUSAN K. FEIGENBAUM University of Missouri-St. Louis St. Louis, MO USA
BENJAMIN GIDRON Ben Gurion University Beer Sheva Israel
List of Contributors
LEAH GILBERT Georgetown University Washington, DC USA
SUZANNE GRANT University of Waikato Hamilton New Zealand
GUNNAR GLAENZEL University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
CHRISTOPHER L. GRIFFIN Yale Law School New Haven, CT USA
MARLIES GLASIUS London School of Economics & Political Science London UK University of Amsterdam Amsterdam The Netherlands TED G. GOERTZEL Rutgers University Camden, NJ USA CHRISTOPH GOLBECK University of Mu¨nster Mu¨nster Germany SHANTHI GOPALAN University of Mysore Mysore India DIETER GOSEWINKEL Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Germany
ANTJE GRONEBERG University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany DIRK GROWE LandsAid e.V. Kaufering Germany NORBERT GO¨TZ University of Helsinki Helsinki Finland MARY KAY GUGERTY University of Washington Seattle, WA USA MARK A. HAGER Arizona State University Phoenix, AZ USA SHARILYN HALE YWCA Toronto Toronto, ON Canada
MICHAEL GOUSMETT University of Canterbury Christchurch New Zealand
MICHAEL HALL Imagine Canada Toronto, ON Canada
CHRIS GOVEKAR First Cause Beaverton, OR USA
PETER DOBKIN HALL Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA
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LOEK HALMAN Tilburg University LE Tilburg The Netherlands
BERND HELMIG University of Mannheim Mannheim Germany
MARK HAMILTON Ellicot City, MD USA
LEIGH HERSEY Arizona State University Scottsdale, AZ USA
TULLIA HAMILTON Washington University Missouri St. Louis, MO USA DAVID C. HAMMACK Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH USA SARAH HARDS York UK JENNY HARROW City University London London UK SAMIUL HASAN United Arab Emirates University Al Ain United Arab Emirates
LISA HILL University of Adelaide Adelaide, SA Australia RICHARD HOLLOWAY Aga Khan Foundation Geneva Switzerland MARTIN HO¨LZ University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany MARTIN HOLZBERG Westphalian Wilhelms-University Mu¨nster Germany
THORSTEN HASCHE Goettingen Graduate School of Social Sciences Goettingen Germany
DAVID B. HOWARD UCLA Center for Civil Society Los Angeles, CA USA University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
MUHAMMAD EEQBAL FAROUQUE HASSIM University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC Australia
MARC MORJE HOWARD Georgetown University Washington, DC USA
VOLKHART F. HEINRICH Transparency International Melville South Africa
JANE HUDSON University of the West of England Bristol UK
List of Contributors
CHANG-SOON HWANG Soonchunhyang University Asan Korea
DAVID JOULFAIAN US Department of the Treasury Washington, DC USA
BARBARA LETHEM IBRAHIM American University in Cairo Cairo Egypt
MARK JUERGENSMEYER University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA USA
LEON E. IRISH International Center for Civil Society Law Crownsville, MD USA
RU¨DIGER H. JUNG University of Applied Sciences Remagen Germany
RENE´E A. IRVIN University of Oregon Eugene, OR USA
CHRISTOPHER KAAN Free University of Berlin Berlin Germany
YUDHISHTHIR RAJ ISAR The American University of Paris Paris France
PAULA KABALO Ben Gurion University Sede Boker Israel
ARMINE ISHKANIAN London School of Economics London UK
PANU KALMI Helsinki School of Economics Helsinki Finland
SARAH JASTRAM University of Hamburg Hamburg Germany
CHRISTOPHER KANN Free University of Berlin Berlin Germany
JANE JENSON Universite´ de Montreal Montreal, QB Canada
KARUTI KANYINGA University of Nairobi Nairobi Kenya
DEREK C. JONES Hamilton College Clinton, NY USA
HAGAI KATZ Ben Gurion University Beer Sheva Israel
NICOLA JONES Overseas Development Institute London UK
JOHN KEANE The University of Westminster London UK
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KONSTANTIN KEHL University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
SEBASTIAN KOOS Fakultat fur Sozialwissenschaften Mannheim Germany
ANDRAS KELEN Budapest College of Management Budapest Hungary
DENISA KOSTOVICOVA London School of Economics and Political Science London UK
JANELLE A. KERLIN Georgia State University Atlanta, GA USA
PATSY KRAEGER Arizona State University Phoenix, AZ USA
ANSGAR KLEIN Bundesnetzwerk Buergerschaftliches Engagement Berlin Germany
KRISTIAN KRIEGER King’s College London London UK
THOMAS KLIE Zentrum fuer zivilgesellschaftliche Entwicklung Freiburg Germany
BENEDIKT KROLLPFEIFER Braunschweig Neustadtring Germany
DAVID KNOKE University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN USA
JAN KUENZL Caucasian Review of International Affairs Berlin Germany
JU¨RGEN KOCKA Social Science Research Center Berlin Germany
BERTHOLD KUHN Free University of Berlin Bonn Germany
BEATE KOHLER-KOCH Mannheimer Zentrum fur Europaische Sozialforschung Mannheim Germany
STEIN KUHNLE Hertie School of Governance Berlin Germany
ANDREAS KOLLER Social Science Research Council New York, NY USA
PRADEEP KUMAR Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi India
AAFKE KOMTER University College Utrecht Utrecht The Netherlands
SARABAJAYA KUMAR University of Oxford Oxford UK
List of Contributors
SUNIL KUMAR London School of Economics and Political Science London UK
JEFFREY LEITER North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC USA
SHYAMA KURUVILLA Boston University School of Public Health Boston, MA USA
ELIZABETH LEVI The New School Montclair, NJ USA
E´VA KUTI Budapest School of Management Budapest Hungary
DAVID L LEWIS London School of Economics and Political Science London UK
ANAEL LABIGNE University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
ANTONIUS LIEDHEGENER University of Lucerne Lucerne Switzerland
DIRK LANGE University of Oldenburg Oldenburg Germany
GABRIELE LINGELBACH Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg Freiburg Germany
KEVIN LASKOWSKI National Center for Family Philanthropy Washington, DC USA
REGINA LIST University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
JEAN-LOUIS LAVILLE Cnam University Paris France
ANDREA LIVERANI London School of Economics London UK
MICHAEL D. LAYTON Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico Mexico City Mexico
ROGER A. LOHMANN West Virginia University Morgantown, WV USA
DIANA LEAT The City University London UK
PAULA DUARTE LOPES University of Coimbra Coimbra Portugal
SANG-EUN LEE Arizona University Phoenix, AZ USA
SUSAN LORD University of New Hampshire Durham, NH USA
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JIM LOTZ Halifax, NS Canada MARK LYONS University of Technology Sydney, NSW Australia CHARLES MACLEAN PhilanthropyNow Portland, OR USA IAN MACPHERSON University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada KYM MADDEN Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD Australia CARMEN MALENA CIVICUS Participatory Governance Program Stoneham, QC Canada
KERSTIN MARTENS University of Bremen Bremen Germany FRANCISCO MARTINEZ University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany JOHANNES MARX Universitaet Mainz Mainz Germany THORNTON MATHESON US Department of the Treasury Chevy Chase, MD USA MYLES MCGREGOR-LOWNDES Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD Australia PAUL-BRIAN MCINERNEY University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL USA
SINISˇA MALESˇEVIC´ National University of Ireland Galway Ireland
MICHAEL MCQUARRIE University of California-Davis Davis, CA USA
VESNA MALESˇEVIC´ National University of Ireland Galway Ireland
HERIBERT MEFFERT Westphalian Wilhelms-University Mu¨nster Germany
MIKLOS MARSCHALL Transparency International Berlin Germany
LUCAS MEIJS Erasmus University Rotterdam The Netherlands
HANNAH MARSDEN Overseas Development Institute London UK
ROSE MELVILLE University of Queensland Brisbane, QLD Australia
List of Contributors
BARBARA A. METELSKY Cary, NC USA MEGAN MEYER University of Maryland Baltimore, MD USA MICHAEL MEYER Vienna University of Economics and Business Vienna Austria TIMO MEYNHARDT University of St. Gallen St. Gallen Switzerland SILKE MICHALSKI University of Mannheim Mannheim Germany MARCO ANTONIO FIGUEIREDO MILANI FILHO Mackenzie Presbyterian University Sao Paulo Brazil CARL MILOFSKY Bucknell University Lewisburg, PA USA RANJITA MOHANTY Society for Participatory Research in Asia New Delhi India GA´BOR MOLNA´R University of Kaposvar Kaposvar Hungary COR VAN MONTFORT The Netherlands and Court of Audit Public-Private Sector The Hague The Netherlands
LAURIE MOOK OISE/University of Toronto Toronto, ON Canada JESSICA MOORE North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC USA EVA MORE-HOLLERWEGER Vienna University of Economics and Business Vienna Austria GARETH G. MORGAN Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield UK GIOVANNI MORO FONDACA Rome Italy BHEKINKOSI MOYO TrustAfrica Dakar-Fann Senegal CAMILLO VON MUELLER University of St. Gallen Hamburg Germany MAITRAYEE MUKERJI Institute of Rural Management Gujarat India DHRUBODHI MUKHERJEE Southern Illinois University Carbondale Carbondale, IL USA ALEX MURDOCK London South Bank University London UK
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MARTTI MUUKKONEN University of Eastern Finland Joensuu Finland
TAMAKI ONISHI Indiana University Indianapolis, IN USA
STEFAN NA¨HRLICH Aktive Burgerschaft Berlin Germany
CLAUDIA OPITZ-BELAKHAL University of Basel Basel Switzerland
ALEJANDRO NATAL El Colegio Mexiquense Toluca Mexico CAMERON NEWTON Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD Australia DOROTHY NORRIS-TIRRELL University of Memphis Memphis, TN USA GARTH NOWLAND-FOREMAN Unitec New Zealand Auckland New Zealand MICHAŁ NOWOSIELSKI Institute for Western Affairs Poznan Poland EBENEZER OBADARE University of Kansas Lawrence, KS USA
WIM VAN OPSTAL HIVA – Catholic University of Leuven Leuven Belgium PAURIC O’ROURKE Limerick Institute of Technology Limerick Ireland ANDREAS ORTMANN University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW Australia CERGE-EI Prague Czech Republic SUSAN A. OSTRANDER Tufts University Medford, MA USA MIRJAN OUDE VRIELINK Tilburg School of Politics and Public Administration Tilburg The Netherlands
KERRY O’HALLORAN Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD Australia
TRUDY OWENS School of Economics Nottingham UK
JULIUS OMONA Makerere University Kampala Uganda
RAUL PACHECO-VEGA University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC Canada
List of Contributors
SANG PEEL PARK Sungkonghoe University Seoul Korea
JENNIFER PREECE University of Maryland College Park, MD USA
TAE-KYU PARK Yonsei University College of Business and Economics Seoul Korea
CRISTINA PUGA National Autonomous University of Mexico Mexico City Mexico
ANNE BIRGITTA PESSI University of Helsinki Helsinki Finland
JACK QUARTER OISE/University of Toronto Toronto, ON Canada
BRHLIKOVA PETRA University of Edinburgh Edinburgh Scotland
ARVIND RAJAGOPAL New York University New York, NY USA
STEVE PFAFF University of Washington Seattle, WA USA
SUSHMA RAMAN Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Los Angeles, CA USA
CATHERINA PHAROAH Cass Business School London UK
SARA GORDON RAPPOPORT Circuito Mario de la Cueva s/n Ciudad Universitaria Mexico City Mexico
EMMA PLAYFAIR Ford Foundation London UK
ALLYSON REAVES ArC International Consultants Hilton Head Island, SC USA
TYMEN VAN DER PLOEG VU-University Amsterdam The Netherlands
RAQUEL REGO SOCIUS-ISEG Lisbon Portugal
MIROSLAV POSPI´SˇIL Center for Nonprofit Research Brno Czech Republic
FLORIAN REHLI University of St. Gallen Holzweid Switzerland
FRED POWELL National University of Ireland-Cork Cork Ireland
CHRISTOPH REICHARD Universitaet Potsdam Potsdam Germany
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DAVID O. RENZ University of Missouri-Kansas City Kansas City, MO USA TRAVIS REYNOLDS University of Washington Seattle, WA USA ANDREW RICH City College of New York New York, NY USA JONATHAN ROBERTS London School of Economics and Political Science London UK ROBBIE WATERS ROBICHAU Arizona State University Phoenix, AZ USA JEANETTE ROHR University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany MARIO ROITTER Center for the Study of State and Society Buenos Aires Argentina LISIUNIA ROMANIENKO Wroclaw University Wroclaw Poland
SAM ROYSTON York UK DIETER RUCHT Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Berlin Germany KATE RUFF Gloucester, MA USA ALAA SABER Near East Foundation Cairo Egypt JOHN SACCO George Mason University Fairfax, VA USA JAN SACHARKO George Mason University Arlington, VA USA ELEANOR W. SACKS Indiana University Cambridge UK REBECCA SAGER Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts Los Angeles, CA USA
DAMIEN ROUSSELIERE Universite Pierre Mendes France Grenoble II Grenoble France
LESTER M. SALAMON The John Hopkins University Baltimore, MD USA
SAMIRA ROUSSELIERE ENITIAA Nantes France
ANNE SANDER Hertie School of Governance Berlin Germany
List of Contributors
ANNA VAN SANTEN Hertie School of Governance Berlin Germany
ANDREAS SCHRO¨ER Portland State University Portland, OR USA
CURTIS SARLES New York University New York, NY USA
ANDREA SCHUESSLER Berlin Germany
WENDY SCAIFE Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, QLD Australia
CHRISTINA SCHWABENLAND London Metropolitan University London UK
JANINE SCHALL-EMDEN Beyond Development Consulting and Research Bolonga Italy
HAKAN SECKINELGIN London School of Economics London UK
EVELYNE SCHMID Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva Switzerland
KLODJAN SEFERAJ Albarian Socio Economic Think-Tank (ASET) Tirana Albania
JU¨RGEN SCHMIDT Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Berlin Germany SABINA SCHNELL The George Washington University Washington, DC USA GEORG VON SCHNURBEIN Universitaet Basel Basel Switzerland
SABINE SELCHOW London School of Economics London UK PER SELLE University of Bergen Bergen Norway ANIL SETHI European Commission ISPRA (VA) Italy
DOMINIK SCHOLZ Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin Berlin Germany
GORDON SHOCKLEY Arizona State University Phoenix, AZ USA
ALICIA SCHORTGEN University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX USA
FEDERICO SILVA CIVICUS Johannesburg South Africa
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KARLA SIMON Catholic University of America Washington, DC USA
NORMAN SPENGLER University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
DEBORAH SIMPSON University of New Brunswick Saint John, NB Canada
KATHARINA SPRAUL University of Mannheim Mannheim Germany
KARUN K. SINGH City University of New York New York, NY USA
HARI SRINIVAS Global Development Research Center Kobe Japan
KARL HENRIK SIVESIND Institute for Social Research Oslo Norway
SIMON STACEY University of Maryland Baltimore, MD USA
SIMONA SˇKARABELOVA´ Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic MARGARET F. SLOAN University of Kentucky Olive Hill, KY USA DAVID HORTON SMITH Boston College Bradenton, FL USA STEVEN RATHGEB SMITH The University of Washington Seattle, WA USA
DARWIN STAPLETON Rockefeller Archive Center Ossining, NY USA MAX STEPHENSON School of Public and International Affairs Blacksburg, VA USA RUPERT GRAF STRACHWITZ Humboldt University Berlin Germany MARTY SULEK Indiana University Center on Philanthropy Farmland, IN USA
ROGER SPEAR The Open University Walton Hall UK
BALAZS SZABO Budapest Hungary
BASTIAN SPECHT University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany
RAJESH TANDON ORI New Delhi India
List of Contributors
MARILYN TAYLOR University of the West of England Bristol UK
MATTHEW TURNOUR Neumann & Turnour Lawyers Brisbane, QLD Australia
NUNO S. THEMUDO University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA USA
KATRIN UBA Uppsala University Sweden
VOLKER THEN University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany EKKEHARD THUEMLER University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany HELEN STONE TICE Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD USA STEFAN TOEPLER George Mason University Arlington, VA USA
SARAH VALDEZ University of Washington Seattle, WA USA MARTA VARANDA SOCIUS-ISEG Lisbon Portugal SUSAN VERDUCCI San Jose State University San Jose, CA USA ALFRED VERNIS Ramon Llull University Barcelona Spain
ANA TOLEDO CHAVARRI Madrid Spain
BRAM VERSCHUERE University College Ghent and Ghent University Ghent Belgium
KIMAIRIS TOOGOOD-LUEHRS George Mason University Arlington, VA USA
MARCIA SERRA RIBEIRO VIANA Mackenzie Presbyterian University Cotia, Sao Paolo Brazil
YUTAKA TSUJINAKA University of Tsukuba Ibaraki Japan
PETER WALKENHORST Bertelsmann Stiftung Guterslon Germany
HOWARD P. TUCKMAN Fordham University New York, NY USA
LILI WANG School of Community Resources and Development Phoenix, AZ USA
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MARGARETHA WARNICKE Arizona State University Phoenix, AZ USA
TAKAYUKI YOSHIOKA Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University Indianpolis, IN USA
RICHARD D. WATERS North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC USA
DENNIS R. YOUNG Georgia State University Atlanta, GA USA
MEREDITH WEISS University at Albany Albany, NY USA LEVI A. WHITE George Mason University Fairfax, VA USA SHANNON ADAIR WILLIAMS University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA USA SEIBEL WOLFGANG University of Konstanz Konstanz Germany SCHIRIN YACHKASCHI Cape Town South Africa NAOTO YAMAUCHI Osaka University Osaka Japan YAEL YISHAI University of Haifa Haifa Israel
FEISAL A. YUNIS Cairo University Giza Egypt DALIA YUSUF Media International Giza Egypt XI ZHU University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN USA FILIP ZIELINSKI University of Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany ANNETTE ZIMMER Westphalian Wilhelms-University Mu¨nster Germany MELANI E. ZIMMER Peace Research Institute Frankfurt Germany
A AARP ANDREA DEJONGE
Address of Organization 601 E Street NW Washington, DC 20049 USA www.aarp.org
Introduction Originally known as the American Association of Retired Persons, AARP is an enormous association dedicated to enhancing the quality of life of the aging population. The motto of its constituents is ‘‘To Serve, and Not Be Served.’’ Membership is restricted to persons over fifty, and at the time of this writing AARP claims to have over 40 million US members. AARP and its related organizations provide services, advocacy, and education for its members. It actively lobbies for health-related issues such as Medicare and prescription drug coverage, as well as Social Security.
Brief History In 1947, Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, a retired high school principle, founded the National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA) when she discovered that private health insurance was not available to retired educators. Ten years later, after success in finding health resources and programs for the NRTA, Dr. Andrus expanded her mission to all aging Americans and founded the American Association of Retired Persons (in 1999 this name was shortened to only ‘‘AARP’’), subsuming NRTA within the structure of the AARP. With public policy changes over the years such as Medicare for the elderly (1965), AARP has expanded its programs to actively promote the wellbeing of older Americans through a variety of measures, including advocacy, education, and service.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas Although the original focus of AARP was providing to health care to older Americans, with a lesser focus on
other aspects of aging, successes in elderly access to health care have expanded AARP’s mission to include other issues, including enhancing the quality of life by increasing independence and encouraging community service by older Americans, and advocacy/lobbying efforts on local, state, and federal levels regarding public policy. Currently, AARP ‘‘is dedicated to enhancing quality of life for all as we age. We lead positive social change and deliver value to members through information, advocacy and service.’’
Activities AARP runs the gamut for services and membership benefits. Members (who no longer must be retired) are entitled to various benefits including travel discounts and home insurance discounts. AARP’s for-profit subsidiary, AARP Financial, Inc., provides services such as life insurance, and AARP’s web site, AARP.org, provides a wealth of information in every field, including leisure, money, and health. Besides AARP’s various member benefits and services (too numerous to list in this article), AARP also leads a powerful lobbying group in Washington, D.C., actively lobbying on issues relating to public policy as it affects the aging population of the US.
Structure and Governance AARP is a nonprofit 501(c) (4) membership organization with for-profit subsidiaries, including AARP Services, Inc., (offers benefits and services to AARP’s members) and AARP Financial Inc., (manages AARP-endorsed financial products). The AARP Foundation is AARP’s affiliated charity. AARP has a national office in Washington, D.C., as well as offices in all 50 states. There are also offices in the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. AARP is governed by a Board of Directors (23 members) to oversee all policies and programs, and an Executive Team, which has members dedicated to specific leadership roles within AARP.
Funding Major funding sources for AARP (as reported in its 2007 financial report) include (from highest revenue to lowest), royalties (AARP makes insurance programs available to its
H. Anheier, S. Toepler (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-93996-4, # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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members through various insurance agencies and retains a portion of those premiums collected, which are reported as royalties on its intellectual property), membership dues, publications and advertising, investment income, grants (both federal agencies and private organizations), contributions, program income, and other income.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions With revenues of over $1 billion per year, AARP is one of the most powerful nonprofit lobbying organizations in the United States. Its lobbying efforts have most impacted the health care public policy debates, and it was instrumental in lobbying Congress to pass the law creating Medicare Part D in 2003, which is a federal insurance program to subsidize prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients. AARP also conducts a wide variety of research, including polling and surveys, on various topics of elderly care issues relating to the over-50 population.
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Civil Society and the Elderly ▶ Lobbying ▶ Membership and Membership Associations
References/Further Readings Morris, C. R. (1996). The AARP: America’s most powerful lobby and the clash of generations. New York, Time Books. Litwak, E., & Butler, R. N. (1985). Helping the elderly: The complementary roles of informal networks and formal systems. New York: Guilford. Peterson, P. G. (1996). Will America grow up before it grows old? How the coming social security crisis threatens you, your family, and your country. New York: Random House.
Abbe, Ernst CHRISTOPH GOLBECK
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1840 in Eisenach, Thuringia (Germany) to a rather poor working-class family, Ernst Abbe went on to become an award-winning physicist, professor at the University of Jena, successful businessman, and a generous philanthropist to his employees and his adopted home town of Jena. Abbe owed his superb educational biography to his
outstanding intellect but also to a couple of benefactors who repeatedly helped him financing his studies. After he received his habilitation from Jena University, he joined the company of Carl Zeiss, an optician, and became an associate of the Carl Zeiss stock corporation in 1875, which by then was one of Germany’s most important companies. The same year Abbe started the company’s health insurance scheme, what would over the upcoming decades become one of the most generous corporate benefit schemes of its time. In 1889 he established the Carl Zeiss Foundation in order to ensure the sustainability of his social inventions. He died in 1905 in Jena.
Major Contributions Already a professor at the University of Jena, Abbe was engaged by Carl Zeiss to improve the manufacturing process of optical instruments. He designed the first refractometer, invented the today so-called ‘‘Abbe condenser’’ and described important details of the mathematical foundation of microscope design. But even if he was a great scientist, Abbe is probably best known for his innovations in the field of social and labor rights. He not only introduced exceptional social rights such as the 8-hour work day, an employer-based health insurance as well as a pension scheme, but also pioneered with a system of profit sharing for the employees of the Carl Zeiss AG particularly with regard to preventing their participation in potential losses. After the death of his associate Carl Zeiss, Abbe founded on May 19, 1889 the so-called ‘‘CarlZeiss-Stiftung’’ (Carl Zeiss Foundation). Its statute, issued by Abbe after long case studies of English and Australian labor law in 1896, has to be acknowledged as one of the early and pioneering documents of the German welfare state. Up until today the foundation encourages the promotion of science, for example with the Carl Zeiss Research Award. But Abbe also was a great philanthropist who dedicated much of his money to local people as well as to the University of Jena, including financing a children’s hospital and a civic auditorium for the purpose of political gatherings.
Cross-References
▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Foundations, Independent
References/Further Readings Gerth, K., & Wimmer, W. (2005). Ernst Abbe – Wissenschaftler, Unternehmer, Sozialreformer. Jena: Bussert & Stadeler. Linck, G. (1930). Ernst Abbe – Rede zum Geda¨chtnis seines 25. Todestages. Jena: Fischer.
Accountability
Abed, Fazle SHAHJAHAN BHUIYAN
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1936 in Sylhet in erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to a wealthy landowner family, Fazle Hasan Abed went to the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the University of Glasgow, Scotland, to study accountancy. After graduation, then in his thirties, Abed joined Shell Oil and was holding a senior executive position in its outlet in Chittagong. The Bangladesh liberation war, which took place in 1971, played a significant role on the direction of his life and career. In the wake of the severity and brutality of the war, Abed felt moral responsibility to support his countrymen who were engaged in war for what he considered a just cause. As a result, he quit his job in 1971, and traveled to London to raise awareness in the international community about the genocide and generated funds for the independence war through a campaign called Help Bangladesh. After the liberation war was ended, he returned home to the newly independent Bangladesh in 1972 with the hope of contributing to the reconstruction of his war-ravaged motherland.
Major Contributions Millions of displaced people, who took refuge in India during the war, started returning home, which warranted immediate efforts for their relief and rehabilitation. Abed decided to contribute to this venture and set up BRAC (formerly, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) in 1972, of which he is now the Chairperson. The relief work was soon finished, but poverty and vulnerability still existed. He then expanded that organization to provide services to people affected by abject poverty, discrimination, and exploitation. BRAC, now one of the largest non-government organizations in the globe, is recognized internationally for programs such as micro-credit, health care, education, social development, capacity building, human rights and legal services. With a view to empower poor, BRAC has so far reached 110 million people covering all 64 districts of the country and thus has contributed to the reduction of human suffering. Abed has also established many development organizations in the fields of higher education (BRAC University), information and communication technology (bracNet), banking (BRAC Bank), and house building financing (Delta BRAC Housing Finance).
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On the social responsibility front, Abed is actively working to improve the human condition of poor of developing countries. To meet the vision, BRAC has expanded its programs in Asian and African countries (Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, Liberia, and Sierra Leone) and is successfully working to alleviating poverty and empowerment of the poor in these regions. In recognition of his services to society, Abed has received awards and recognition both at home and abroad. Some of them include: The Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (1980), the UNESCO Noma Prize for Literacy (1985), the UNICEF’s Maurice Pate Award (1992), the Gates Award for Global Health (2004), the UNDP Mahbub ul Haq Award for Outstanding Contribution in Human Development (2004), the Henry K. Kravis Prize in Leadership (2007), the PKSP Lifetime Achievement in Social Development and Poverty Alleviation (2007), an Honorary Doctor of Law by Columbia University (2008), and an Asiatic Society Fellowship (2008).
Cross-References ▶ BRAC ▶ Grameen Bank
References/Further Readings Alliance Magazine (2005). Interview- Fazle Hasan Abed, from http://www. alliancemagazine.org/node/1344, accessed February 4, 2009. BRAC Homepage (2008). Founder and Chairperson: Fazle Hasan Abed, from http://www.brac.net/index.php?nid = 104, accessed February 5, 2009. Lovell, C. H. (1992). Breaking the cycle of poverty: The BRAC strategy. Dhaka: University Press.
Accountability ALNOOR EBRAHIM Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Introduction Calls for greater accountability in all sectors of society – public, private, and nonprofit – have become increasingly common over the last two decades. For the first time in 2007, a public relations survey known as the Edelman Trust Barometer recorded a decline in trust in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), after six years of consistent increases (Edelman, 2007). NGOs are no doubt still widely trusted, but not in all places. The divide between the wealthy nations of the North and the poorer countries of the South is especially stark: While NGOs are most
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trusted in many Northern countries such as the United States, France, and Germany, businesses are more trusted in many rapidly growing economies such as Brazil, India, and Russia. While these findings are limited, they capture a wedge of public unease and uncertainty about NGOs, and about civil society organizations (CSOs) more broadly. Over the past decade, regulators, funders, and civil society actors themselves have moved to increase accountability in CSOs, particularly in terms of financial disclosure, transparency in governance, and measurement of performance. Accountability even emerged as the key theme of the 2007 World Assembly organized by CIVICUS, the World Alliance for Citizen Participation.
Definition The term ‘‘accountability’’ is not easily translated across languages or cultures, sometimes being interchanged with terms that are not quite synonymous such as ‘‘responsibility’’ or ‘‘answerability’’ (e.g., the Spanish and Portuguese Responsabilidad(e), the Hindi Jawaabdaari, or the German Verantwortlichkeit). Mel Dubnick attributes Anglican roots to the concept, tracing it back to a census ordered by King William 1 of England, published as the Domesday Books in 1086. That census, for the first time, not only required property holders ‘‘to ‘render a count’ of what they possessed’’ but they were ‘‘to do so in terms set by the king’s agents,’’ thus effectively establishing the notion of accountability as a foundation for governance (Dubnick, 1998: 71). In contemporary English usage, various definitions of accountability have been offered by scholars and practitioners including, for example, ‘‘the process of holding actors responsible for actions’’ (Fox & Brown, 1998: 12), or ‘‘the means by which individuals and organizations report to a recognized authority (or authorities) and are held responsible for their actions’’ (Edwards & Hulme, 1996: 967), or ‘‘the capacity to demand someone engage in reason-giving to justify his/her behavior, and/or the capacity to impose a penalty for poor performance’’ (Goetz & Jenkins, 2002: 5). What many definitions share is a ‘‘core sense’’ of accountability that Mulgan (2000: 555) identifies as having a set of three key features: the account is given to an external authority; there is social interaction and exchange, with one side seeking answers, while the other responds and accepts sanctions; and, it implies rights of authority, where those calling for an account assert rights of superiority over those who are accountable. This is essentially a principal–agent view of accountability, in which the lead actor or principal sets goals and employs agents to accomplish them.
This view of accountability is also widely shared among scholars of global governance and international politics. Definitions here likewise refer to the authority of some actors over others, for example, ‘‘that some actors have the right to hold other actors to a set of standards, to judge whether they have fulfilled their responsibilities in light of those standards, and to impose sanctions if they determine that those responsibilities have not been met’’ (Grant & Keohane, 2004: 3). The literature further identifies four core components of accountability in global governance (Ebrahim & Weisband, 2007): (1) Transparency, which involves collecting information and making it available and accessible for public scrutiny; (2) Answerability or Justification, which requires providing clear reasoning for actions and decisions, including those not adopted, so that they may reasonably be questioned; (3) Compliance, through the monitoring and evaluation of procedures and outcomes, combined with transparency in reporting those findings; and (4) Enforcement or Sanctions for shortfalls in compliance, justification, or transparency. For numerous observers, this enforceability is what underlies the power of accountability mechanisms. Other scholars, particularly in the nonprofit and social sectors have suggested that this is a limiting view of accountability, and have argued that the concept is not only about being held accountable by others but also about ‘‘taking responsibility’’ for oneself (Cornwall et al., 2000). As such, it is not only a reactive response to overseers, but also a proactive one linked to ensuring that the public trust is served. This internal dimension of accountability is motivated by a ‘‘felt responsibility’’ as expressed through individual action and organizational mission (Fry, 1995). Reflecting a balancing of these external and internal components, the UK-based One World Trust defines accountability as ‘‘the processes through which an organization makes a commitment to respond to and balance the needs of stakeholders in its decision making processes and activities, and delivers against this commitment’’ (Lloyd et al., 2007:11).
Key Issues At the very least, what all of the above definitions share is an understanding that accountability involves relationships among various actors. Most discussions about the concept also pose two further questions: Accountability to whom? And accountability for what? Accountability to Whom?
Accountability relationships are complicated by the fact that CSOs are expected to be accountable to multiple actors: upward to patrons, downward to clients, and
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internally to themselves and their missions (Edwards & Hulme, 1996; Kearns, 1996; Lindenberg & Bryant, 2001; Najam, 1996). CSO-patron accountability or ‘‘upward’’ accountability usually refers to relationships with donors, foundations, and governments and is often focused on the use of funds. CSO accountability to clients refers primarily to ‘‘downward’’ relationships with groups receiving services although it may also include communities or regions indirectly impacted by CSO programs. The third category of accountability concerns CSOs themselves. This internal accountability centers on an organization’s responsibility to its mission and staff, which includes decision makers as well as field-level implementers. Some scholars have even suggested that there are as many types of accountability as there are distinct relationships among people and organizations (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999: 256). Civil society actors engaged in policy advocacy face an additional accountability challenge increasingly leveled by their critics: ‘‘Whom do you represent? Who elected you?’’ The problem of representation is especially thorny when CSOs seek entry to policy arenas (as compared to their involvement in service delivery projects), ostensibly the domain of elected representatives in democratic societies. This challenge is less of a problem for CSOs that are membership based, and who can thus claim to be accountable to their members for their lobbying and advocacy activities. Nonmembership CSOs, on the other hand, tend to claim authorization on the grounds of what, rather than whom, they represent – such as a set of values, a social purpose or mission, expertise and experience in an issue area such as health or humanitarian relief, or a particular set of interests such as those of marginalized or unorganized groups (Peruzzotti, 2006: 52–53). In short, the demands of accountability ‘‘to whom’’ are multifold and can seldom be reduced to simple principal–agent terms. Accountability is a relational concept; its mechanisms do not stand alone as technical fixes to organizational problems, but are embedded in a social and institutional environment. This suggests that asymmetric relationships among stakeholders are likely to result in a skewing toward accountability mechanisms that satisfy the interests of dominant actors. In other words, accountability is also about power, in that asymmetries in resources become important in influencing who is able to hold whom accountable. Accountability for What?
Given that civil society actors face demands for accountability from multiple actors, it follows that they are expected to be accountable for different things by different people. These expectations may be broken down
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into four broad, but far from comprehensive, categories: accountability for finances, governance, performance, and mission (Behn, 2001; Ebrahim, 2009). Questions about finances have received considerable attention in the wake of various accounting scandals and crises not only in civil society but also in the private sector (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, and more recently the mortgage investments industry). Public policy responses to such crises typically call for greater disclosure of financial transactions, transparency in the use and oversight of funds by executives and trustees, as well as protections for whistleblowers who reveal information about mismanagement. Accountability, in this context, is constituted as coercive or punitive, with an emphasis on disclosure, a reliance on legislative or regulatory oversight, and backed up by threats of sanctions for noncompliance, such as fines, imprisonment, or loss of tax-exempt status. The second type of expectation focuses on organizational governance which, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, has often centered on the role of the board of directors. The basic premise is that boards are responsible not only for policy direction, but also for oversight of internal controls, and that failures within an organization are reflective of failures of guidance and oversight at the board level. The board is the nexus of standards of care, loyalty, and obedience: board members are responsible for seeking and considering adequate information on which to base decisions (care), for disclosing conflicts of interest and placing the organization’s interests over personal ones (loyalty), and for acting within the organization’s mission while also adhering to internal organizational protocols for decision making (obedience). The past decade has witnessed the emergence of an array of voluntary codes of conduct and third-party certification standards that detail what constitutes appropriate board composition, responsibility, and conflict of interest. While these self-regulatory codes and certifications are less coercive than governmental regulatory requirements, their powers of coercion lie in their symbolic and legitimating value – the signals of good housekeeping they send to the outside world, regardless of whether they actually lead to better housekeeping. The third stream of accountability demands centers on performance, built on the premise that organizations should be held to account for what they deliver. The purpose of such accountability is to demonstrate ‘‘results.’’ Within an international development context, performance-based accountability often uses logical framework analysis tools, in which a project’s objectives and expected results are identified in a matrix with a list of indicators used in measuring and verifying progress. This kind of accountability
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relies on a range of technical and professional skills related to performance measurement, indicator development, evaluation, and rational assessment, all of which converge toward metrics that link goals to outcomes. This accountability regime is supported by funder-reporting requirements that reward clear outputs and outcomes, and pressures on bilateral and multilateral aid agencies to show that the activities supported by taxpayers are having an impact. Some critical observers have cautioned, however, that ‘‘[d]emanding ‘results’ can mean either pushing for quick fixes, or insisting upon digging up the seedling to examine its roots before it can bear fruit. Domestic poverty work often is abandoned when narrowly measured results are demanded – and not found’’ (Lindenberg & Bryant, 2001: 214). They stress a need to examine long-term effectiveness and less easily measurable goals of political and social change. This leads to a fourth and more emergent type of accountability that focuses on the very core of civil society activity: organizational mission. If CSOs exist for purposes of public good, why not ask them to demonstrate progress toward achieving that mission? One might describe this as a mission-centered variant of performance-based accountability. Yet, it is different in two respects. First, it embraces a long-term view of performance measurement by emphasizing iteration and learning – CSO managers are unlikely to know how best to achieve their goals and what to measure along the way, but repeated trials and critical scrutiny can lead to new insights and convergence. This suggests there are no panaceas to social problems, but instead that social problem solving requires an ability to cope with uncertainty and changing circumstances. And second, organizational goals and strategies are themselves subject to adaptation, as managers learn more about the social problems that they are trying to understand and solve. A central managerial challenge becomes putting in place processes that can engender systematic critical reflection and remain focused on solving social problems (Ebrahim, 2005). This type of strategic or adaptive accountability is not as well-established as the others above, but its nascent mechanisms – such as theories of change and organizational learning systems –are attracting attention among civil society actors. This is what some observers have called accountability as strategic choice (Brown et al., 2004; Jordan, 2007) or intelligent accountability (O’Neill, 2002). These four ‘‘whats’’ of accountability are not mutually exclusive. Boards are responsible for serving the mission and for overseeing performance. Donors consider mission in selecting which organizations to fund, and many
provide considerable flexibility with respect to performance assessment. Moreover, performance measurement can be both technocratic and adaptive. Accountability in Different Types of CSOs
The discussion has thus far only briefly touched upon the diversity among civil society organizations. Three basic categories are discussed here – membership organizations, welfare or service-oriented organizations, and advocacy and network organizations – although there are many others such as faith-based organizations, social movements, and labor unions. Membership organizations are largely oriented toward serving the interests of their members, and can include organizations as diverse as agricultural cooperatives, savings groups, and interest-based associations such as academic research societies and associations of retired persons. These organizations are often run by and for their members, and might also be called self-interest or self-help groups. The mechanisms of accountability available to members include franchise (voting for the organization’s leaders), revoking membership and dues (and joining another cooperative, for example), and attempting to reform the organization either by influencing leaders or by running for a leadership position. All of these options involve exit, voice, or loyalty (Hirschman, 1970). Because the members/clients are internal to the organization, membership organizations combine internal accountability (to members of the organizations) with downward accountability (to clients, who are members). In short, there is a structural equality between principals and agents, and thus a significant potential for the use of exit, voice, and loyalty options. The orientation of service organizations is often charitable in the sense that there is no profit motive, and that the clients and beneficiaries are generally external to the organization. These organizations provide a wide range of services, ranging from health and education to housing and rural development. The clients of service organizations are usually not involved in creating the CSO in the way that members are; they are external actors to the organization and therefore have less voice in shaping its activities and direction. As already discussed, they often face multiple competing demands for accountability – from funders, regulators, and clients. For many, the demands of funders or patrons (i.e., upward accountability) tend to be the most formalized, for example, through grant contracts, reporting requirements, and summative evaluations. They have relatively weak options for voice or exit in these relations, unless they are willing to risk losing
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grants. This imbalance is reproduced in CSO relations with clients, where the clients have only weak forms of voice or exit, unless they are willing to risk losing CSO services (except in highly competitive contexts where clients have multiple service-providers from which to choose). Some scholars have noted that the clients or beneficiaries of a service-delivery organization ‘‘are in a ‘take it or leave it’ relationship, quite similar to that of customers and employees of private firms’’ (Uphoff, 1996: 25) because ‘‘[u]nlike donors, [communities] cannot withdraw their funding; unlike governments, they cannot impose conditionalities’’ (Najam, 1996: 346–347). A third type of CSO includes those that operate through networks which may be regional, national, or transnational in scale. Many such organizations are involved in issue-based policy advocacy work. They display characteristics that are common to membership as well as service organizations, and also characteristics that are unique. For example, organizations like the Sierra Club and Amnesty International both have individual members who pay dues and thus have the option of taking their dues elsewhere should the organization fail to satisfy their interests. But they are not self-help organizations in the way that cooperatives are, and most members do not have direct access to organizational decision making or even to other members (nor do they necessarily desire such access), despite the fact that they elect board members. They are more like clients of service organizations. In other words, while their options for exit (e.g., franchise, and revoking membership dues) are potentially powerful, their actions are likely to be remote and isolated. On the other hand, some network organizations attract members by virtue of their policy advocacy work – thereby seeking to hold policy makers and public officials accountable to the views and values of their members. The mechanisms of accountability available to them are advocacy-oriented (voice), including lobbying, litigation, protest, negotiation, fact-finding, and demanding transparency in the reporting of information and events. These actions may be considered legitimate in a pluralistic society to the extent that they represent the collective voice of a group of people. Networks in which the members are organizations rather than individuals, involve an additional layer of accountability that depends on negotiation and coordination among member organizations. Accountability is collective in the sense that it depends on reliable coordination and pooling of resources among key players. In summary, the diversity among civil society organizations suggests that accountability relationships and mechanisms necessarily vary with CSO type. Mechanisms
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of accountability to clients, for example, are quite different in membership organizations (where clients or members are internal to the organization) than they are in service delivery NGOs (where clients are external). Accountability in membership organizations may be characterized as being largely member-centered, whereas it is multiple and contingent in service organizations. Advocacy networks represent still another type of organization, with accountability being negotiated and collective in nature.
Future Directions Public concern about accountability in civil society continues to grow globally, especially as CSOs become increasingly visible public actors. Many governments, funders, and citizens are responding with calls for increased oversight and regulation. A growth in compliance-driven or regulatory forms of accountability, however, raises an additional set of concerns – that funders and oversight agencies might abuse their powers of oversight, especially where regulators are themselves unregulated, and that efforts to control inappropriate behavior in a relatively small number of organizations might inadvertently stifle experimentation and innovation in civil society more broadly. The first of these concerns is quite real, particularly in cases where donors or regulators have the ability to punish CSOs by threatening to revoke their legal status, cut funds, impose conditions, or tarnish reputations. The past decade has witnessed a host of restrictive regulations enacted in over 30 countries around the world, ranging from limitations on the rights of individuals to form CSOs and raise funds, to excessive government discretion in shutting down or controlling what CSOs do (ICNL, 2006). Even CSOs in prosperous democratic societies, where the threat of abuse may not be as obvious, face the risks of co-optation, goal deflection, and censorship by their funders and regulators. These problems have become more pronounced in a post-9/11 context where CSO policy activities are subject to greater scrutiny by their governments, where funders are being asked to prove that their moneys are not being channeled to violent activities, and where some subsectors, such as Muslim CSOs, suffer ‘‘from a loss of the presumption of innocence’’ (Jordan & Van Tuijl, 2006: 8). A second, and related, apprehension about accountability is that a ‘‘strong unified accountability will be at the expense of diversity and innovation’’ in the social sector (Cnaan, 1996: 223–224). This is of particular relevance when considering external regulatory approaches to accountability. In examining the legal framework of accountability of nonprofit organizations in the
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United States, Chisolm (1995: 149) has cautioned that ‘‘there is a delicate balance between enough regulation to protect legitimate social interests in preventing diversion of charitable assets to private pockets . . . and enough regulation to squelch the qualities our society has most valued in the charitable sector,’’ such as creativity and independence of thought and action. Both of these concerns – about co-optation and abuse of power by donors and regulators, and about the loss of innovation and diversity as a result of more oversight and regulation – emphasize the potential fallouts of a rather narrow culture of accountability built on punitive notions of oversight and compliance. In the end, it is inescapable that CSOs will continue to face accountability demands from numerous actors. New innovations in CSO accountability are unlikely to lie in oversight and punishment alone, but in a more complex balancing of multiple kinds of accountabilities within a broader system of social relations. Arguably, there is a need for greater attention to mechanisms of accountability that can help align organizational missions with performance, and which might enable, rather than constrain, long-term systemic change.
Cross-References
▶ Amnesty International ▶ Civicus ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Codes of Ethics and Codes of Practice ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Evaluation and Civil Society ▶ Legitimacy ▶ Performance and Impact ▶ Sierra Club ▶ Social Audits ▶ Social Trust ▶ Transparency
References/Further Readings Behn, R. D. (2001). Rethinking democratic accountability. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Brown, L. D., Moore, M. H., & Honan, J. (2004). Building strategic accountability systems for international NGOs. Accountability Forum, 2 (Summer), 31–43. Chisolm, L. B. (1995). Accountability of nonprofit organizations and those who control them: The legal framework. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 6(2), 141–156. Cnaan, R. (1996). Commentary. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 7(2), 221–225. Cornwall, A., Lucas, H., & Pasteur, K. (2000). Introduction: Accountability through participation: Developing workable partnership models in the health sector. IDS Bulletin, 31(1), 1–13.
Dubnick, M. J. (1998). Clarifying accountability: An ethical theory framework. In N. P. C. Sampford & C. -A. Bois (Eds.) Public sector ethics: Finding and implementing values (pp. 68–81). Leichhardt, NSW, Australia: The Federation Press/Routledge. Ebrahim, A. (2005). Accountability myopia: Losing sight of organizational learning. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 34(1), 56–87. Ebrahim, A. (2009). Placing the normative logics of accountability in ‘thick’ perspective. American Behavioral Scientist, 52(6), 885–904. Ebrahim, A., & Weisband, E. (Eds.) (2007). Global accountabilities: Participation, pluralism, and public ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edelman (2007). Edelman Trust Barometer 2007. Available at: www. edelman.com/trust/2007/trust_final_1_31.pdf Edwards, M., & Hulme, D. (1996). Too close for comfort? The impact of official aid on nongovernmental organizations. World Development, 24(6), 961–73. Fox, J. A., & Brown, L. D. (Eds.) (1998). The struggle for accountability: The World Bank, NGOs, and grassroots movements. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Boston, MA: Pitman. Fry, R. E. (1995). Accountability in organizational life: Problem or opportunity for nonprofits? Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 6(2), 181–195. Goetz, A. M., & Jenkins, R. (2002). Voice, accountability and human development: The emergence of a new agenda. Background paper for the Human Development Report 2002. New York: United Nations Development Programme. Grant, R. W., & Keohane, R. O. (2004). Accountability and abuses of power, in world politics: International Law and Justice Working Paper. Institute for International Law and Justice, New York University School of Law. Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL). (2006). Recent laws and legislative proposals to restrict civil society and civil society organizations. International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, 8(4), 76–85. Jordan, L. (2007). A rights-based approach to accountability. In A. Ebrahim & E. Weisband (Eds.) Global accountabilities: Participation, pluralism, and public ethics (pp. 151–167). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, L., & Van Tuijl, P. (Eds.) (2006). NGO accountability: Politics, principles and innovations. London/Sterling, VA: Earthscan. Kearns, K. P. (1996). Managing for accountability: Preserving the public trust in nonprofit organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Kovach, H., Neligan, C., & Burall, S. (2003). The Global Accountability Report 1: Power without accountability? London: Global Accountability Project, The One World Trust. Lerner, J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999) Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 255–275. Lindenberg, M., & Bryant, C. (2001). Going global: Transforming relief and development NGOs. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Lloyd, R., Oatham, J., & Hammer, M. (2007). 2007 Global Accountability Report. London: One World Trust. Mulgan, R. (2000). ‘Accountability’: An ever-expanding concept? Public Administration, 78(3), 555–573. Najam, A. (1996). NGO accountability: A conceptual framework. Development Policy Review, 14, 339–353. O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust: The BBC Reith lectures 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AccountAbility Peruzzotti, E. (2006). Civil society, representation and accountability. In L. Jordan & P. Van Tuijl (Eds.), NGO accountability: Politics, principles and innovations (pp. 43–58). London/Sterling, VA: Earthscan. Uphoff, N. (1996). Why NGOs are not a third sector: A sectoral analysis with some thoughts on accountability, sustainability, and evaluation. In M. Edwards & D. Hulme (Eds.), Beyond the magic bullet: NGO performance and accountability in the post-cold war (pp. 23–39). West Hartford, CT: Kumarian.
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and ethical reporting. AccountAbility provides advisory and training services on the implementation of the standards, responsible competitiveness, stakeholder engagement and collaborative governance. In partnership with CSR network, AccountAbility publishes an annual accountability rating of the world’s 50 largest companies.
Structure and Governance
AccountAbility KATE RUFF
AccountAbility is a global not-for-profit self-managed partnership with locations in Beijing, Geneva, London, Sao Paolo and Washington D. C. AccoutAbility is governed by a multistakeholder network acting in accordance with the AccountAbility Charter. A governing council, with 13 members, stewards effective application of the charter.
Address of Organization
Funding
250-252 Goswell Road Clerkenwell London EC1V 7EB UK www.accountability21.net
AccountAbility’s revenue in the fiscal year ending March 2008, was £2.2 M with 88% from project income, 10% from membership subscriptions, 1% from training fees, and the remaining from sale of publications and other sundry. Of total revenue, 26% is attributable to the UK market, 36% is attributable to the US market and 38% is attributable to the rest of the world.
Introduction AccountAbility works to promote accountability innovations that advance sustainable development. It develops and promotes the AA1000 Series of standards for social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting.
Brief History AccountAbility, formerly The Institute for Social and Ethical AccountAbility, was launched in 1995 to professionalize the practice of social auditing and reporting and address the trust deficit between corporations and their stakeholders. Founding members included The Body Shop, The European Institute for Business Ethics, KPMG, Oxfam, and Shell. In 1999 AccountAbility launched the AA1000 Framework and subsequently additional standards and tools based on this foundation.
Mission/Objectives AccountAbility’s mission ‘‘is to promote accountability for sustainable development.’’ AccountAbility enables people to hold to account those individuals and institutions whose decisions and actions affect their lives.
Activities AccountAbility develops and promotes the AA1000 Series of standards, including principles for effective social and ethical reporting, and standards for the assurance of social
Major Accomplishments The AA1000 Series is a leading standard for sustainability auditing and assurance. It has been used by hundreds of organizations in over 30 countries. AccountAbility has contributed to the ongoing development of global standards through collaboration with the Global Reporting Initiative, Transparency International and the ISO Social Responsibility Working Group.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Global Reporting Initiative ▶ International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ▶ Oxfam International ▶ Social Audits ▶ Transparency International
References/Further Readings Burgis, T., & Zadek, S. (2006). A21: Reinventing accountability for the 21st century. London: AccountAbility. Zadek, S.(2005). Responsible competitiveness: Reshaping markets through responsible business practices. London: Fundac¸a˘o Dom Cabral (FDC) & UN Global Compact. Zadek, S., Raynard, P., & Forstater, M. (2006). What assures? London: AccountAbility with PricewaterhouseCoopers. www.accountability21.net www.accountabilityrating.org
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ActionAid
ActionAid CLAUDIA BODE-HARLASS
Address of Organization PostNet Suite #248 Private Bag Y31 Saxonwold 2132 Johannesburg South Africa www.actionaid.org
Introduction ActionAid describes itself as an ‘‘international antipoverty agency’’ working with the ‘‘world’s poorest and most disadvantaged people’’ through cooperation with local partners all around the world.
Brief History ActionAid was founded in 1972 by the British businessman Cecil Jackson Cole as a British Charity called ‘‘Action in Distress’’ when Cole and 87 other concerned British citizens came together to sponsor 88 poor children in India and Kenya to enable them access to education. In the following years the organization expanded not only the geographical but also the thematic areas it was working in. This resulted in a mission shift from solely giving charity to empowering poor people, which led to the renaming of the organization to ActionAid in 1985. In 2003 ActionAid International was founded as a foundation registered in the Netherlands with its headquarters based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mission The original mission of providing poor children with education was extended to include five more priority areas, namely HIV/Aids, food rights, emergencies, women and girls, and governance. In its work, the organization uses a rights-based approach, which means that it makes poor people aware of their own rights and conducts capacity building so that these people themselves can influence decisions that are affecting their lives. Besides, ActionAid has committed itself to an ‘‘Open Information Policy’’ meaning that it is following the principle of transparency and of providing information to all its stakeholders including donors as well as poor and marginalized people.
Activities In order to achieve its aims, ActionAid is working very closely with its local partners who have an equal say on the
ongoing operations. These can include the provisions of food and medicine in emergency situations, working with southern African governments to help them in establishing national AIDS commissions or the strengthening of women’s organizations and women’s leadership. ActionAid is also still offering the possibility to sponsor a child in a poor country. The organization is publishing a number of thematic reports and high quality research as well as an annual report on its activities, successes, and challenges. Furthermore, it is conducting analysis on international, national, and local systems and rules that disadvantage the poor and marginalized and prepare policy recommendations based on its findings. These are then used to lobby actors such as the World Bank, the European Union or the World Trade Organization for a policy sensitive to the needs of the poorest.
Structure and Governance Besides the International Secretariat in Johannesburg, the organization is also running four regional offices and a number of national level branches in each country a program is being conducted in. The regional office for Africa is based in Kenya, the one for Asia in Thailand, the European one in Belgium, and the office for the Americas in Brazil. ActionAid is headed by a Board of Trustees consisting of 11 members drawn from all over the world who are meeting three to four times a year. Furthermore, a Chief Executive is functioning as the organization’s official Secretary. All in all, ActionAid is employing more than 1,780 people and has around 484,000 supporters.
Funding The bulk of the organization’s budget, namely 70%, is provided by individual supporters, while 25% comes through partnerships with government agencies. The most important of these agencies is the British Department for International Development (DFID) which agreed in a Partnership Programme Arrangement for the years 2008 until 2011 to fund ActionAid with £13 million. The remaining 5% of ActionAid’s budget is provided by private trusts and foundations or companies. The total income of the organization for the year 2007 was €185.9 million.
Accomplishments In 2007 alone, ActionAid was reaching more than 13 million people in 42 countries all around the world. In the same year the organization was rewarded with the annual UN Sasakawa Award for Disaster Reduction
ADDES
recognizing not only the research being conducted by the organization but also its innovative ideas and inclusion of the grassroots. Besides, ActionAid is a cofounder of the Global Campaign for Education and was awarded with the United Nations International Literacy Prize in 2003 and 2005 for its approach to adult learning.
Cross-References
▶ INGOs ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Comparative Perspectives ▶ Transparency
Addams, Jane KARUN K. SINGH
Basic Biographical Information Jane Addams was born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois (USA). Although her parents were attentive and wealthy, her early childhood was marked by family tragedy with the deaths of three of her siblings and the death of her mother when she was only two. Additionally, she had a congenital spinal defect, which compromised her health for the rest of her life. Addams was educated in the United States and Europe. She graduated in 1881 from the Rockford Female Seminary. During a tour of England, she visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house for underprivileged and neglected boys in London’s East End. Taking inspiration from this model, she and her close friend Ellen Starr cofounded Hull House in 1889 in Chicago, Illinois. After the establishment of the first settlement house in the United States, she continued to achieve numerous socially beneficial outcomes until her death by cancer in 1935.
Major Contributions Today, Addams would rightly be considered a social worker, a community organizer, a social scientist, a peace advocate, a feminist, and a philanthropist. The agency she cofounded, Hull House, was a residence for women, a school for lifelong education, and a safe meeting space for neighborhood immigrants. Also, it functioned as a social laboratory and a training site for educating young people in social service theory and practice. Moreover, Addams strongly influenced the research practices of the Chicago School of Sociology, including its thematic emphases on ethnic group interaction, community conflict, stakeholder succession in community institutions, and social reform.
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Over time, Addams assumed many leadership positions. For example, in 1908 she assisted with the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, in 1909 she was selected as the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and in 1911 she joined the board of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1915 Addams was instrumental in creating the Women’s Peace Party and became its first president. As an ardent advocate for resolving world conflicts peacefully, she even publicly opposed the American intervention in World War I, which led to her being publicly chastised as unpatriotic and naı¨ve. True to form, Addams defended her pacifist ideals, and worked collaboratively with President Herbert Hoover to provide relief and food to women and children in war-torn enemy countries. Her humanitarian contributions to fostering peace on a global scale were eventually recognized when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Cross-References
▶ Peace and Conflict Resolution Organizations ▶ Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
References/Further Readings Farrell, J. C. (1967). Beloved lady: A history of Jane Addams’ ideas on reform and peace. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Knight, L. W. (2005). Citizen: Jane Addams and the struggle for democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Linn, J. W. (1935). Jane Addams: A biography. New York: AppletonCentury. Polacheck, H. S. (1991). I came a stranger: The story of a Hull-House girl. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Stiehm, J. H. (2006). Champions for peace: Women winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
ADDES EDITH ARCHAMBAULT
Address of Organization 33 rue des Trois-Fontanot 92002 Nanterre Cedex France www.addes.asso.fr
Introduction ADDES was created with a double objective: to improve and disseminate the knowledge of social economy
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organizations, especially by giving them a greater visibility in the official statistics and to promote this set of organizations in the public sphere and the public at large.
Adenauer, Konrad ▶ Konrad Adenauer Stifung
Brief History ADDES was founded in 1982 by an informal group of statisticians and academics, rapidly joined by employees of cooperatives, mutual societies and associations eager to give more acknowledgement to the economic and social role of these organizations. In 1983 a first conference was organized, followed by more than 20. Since 1986 two young researchers are annually awarded prizes by ADDES.
Mission, Objectives, Activities The first mission of ADDES was to draw the main lines of a satellite account of social economy and to lobby the government and the French statistical office to implement it. Facing political difficulties in this lobbying, ADDES turned toward a larger objective, the accumulation and dissemination of multidisciplinary research done in isolation. One of the vehicles for achieving this objective is the Revue des Etudes Cooperatives, mutualistes et associatives (RECMA), the only French journal on the social economy and related topics.
Structure, Governance and Funding ADDES is a declared association, with few members whose general assembly is the governing body. A larger scientific council composed of statisticians, academics, and representatives of social economy organizations prepares the annual conference and awards. ADDES’s annual budget is €30,000 and funding comes since the very beginning from Credit Cooperatif, a cooperative bank, and later from its corporate foundation.
Advocacy JOHN D. CLARK World Bank, Washington, DC, USA (retired)
Introduction Civil society advocacy embraces influential decision makers, media promotion, citizen education, and various forms of civic engagement, and has emerged strongly in recent decades. This is because of the increasingly multifaceted nature of politics in today’s cosmopolitan world, which makes it difficult for a small number of political parties to adequately represent the diverse concerns of citizens. There is a clear shift from representative to participatory democracy – with a profusion of pressure groups and the relative decline of political parties in most democracies. The CSOs and networks that result have a variety of forms, largely reflecting the degree of formality of their alliances. Given that the policy issues of popular concern may be global in nature, the rise of transnational civil society – uniting people who share common concerns everywhere – is one of the most important developments. This, however, presents CSOs considerable challenges concerning their organizational and governance arrangements. There is also a considerable establishment backlash challenging the legitimacy of such advocacy and which civil society must address robustly. In doing so, CSOs must recognize that their advocacy is a complement to, not substitute for, traditional party-based democracy.
Major Contributions By its awards and the publication of the papers delivered in its annual conference on line and through the RECMA journal, ADDES is now the main French reference on this topic. An academic community was created step by step.
Cross-References ▶ Associations ▶ Cooperatives ▶ Mutual Societies ▶ Social Economy
Definition The word ‘‘advocacy’’ derives from the Latin ad vocare – ‘‘to speak to,’’ in other words to argue for a particular position. Initially coined for legal professionals (advocates) who argue for one side or the other in a legal dispute, in recent decades the term has become increasingly associated with groups of citizens who argue for a particular position, or set of positions, on a given issue. While individuals and lawyers can conduct advocacy to advance their points of view, it is generally the nongovernmental organizations who seek to influence the policies
Advocacy
and programs of governments, corporations, and other institutions. These organizations may primarily exist for other purposes, with their advocacy being ancillary to these purposes. For example, professional associations and consumer associations primarily exist to provide services, support, and advice to their members but may also advocate policies and actions that would benefit those members. And many operational charities (e.g., in the service of development, humanitarian relief, disability, or conservation) undertake advocacy to seek policy shifts that would advance the causes they serve. Some organizations exist primarily or solely to conduct advocacy. Again, these can be divided into those which primarily serve the mutual interests of their members (these are typically political lobbying organizations, such as those that exist in profusion around Capitol Hill in Washington DC) and those that focus on public interest issues (such as pro- or anti-abortion, environmental activists, and women’s rights campaigners). The former are often referred to as lobbies or lobbyists, while the latter are often referred to as pressure groups.
Historical Background The growth of civil society advocacy relates closely to the evolution of democracy. In its earliest manifestation, in ancient Greece, citizens were directly involved in decision making. All free men could go to the forum and vote on issues they cared about. From this derives the term ‘‘democracy, from demos kratein or ‘‘people’s rule.’’ Such direct democracy is impractical, of course, in larger societies, and hence indirect or representative democracy evolved and took root – first in seventeenth-century Britain, through the civil wars and the ‘‘Glorious Revolution’’ that established supremacy of the parliament over the monarch. The system’s most evident deficiency was that there was no ready quality control over those early Members of Parliament; they could be ‘‘bought’’ by vested interests, or could be delinquent in their duties. Political parties emerged as the response. A party was defined by Edmund Burke in 1770 as ‘‘an organized assembly of men, united for working together for the national interest, according to the particular principle they agreed upon.’’ Hence, through its collectivity of members, parties provided something of a guarantee that its elected representatives would stay true to that ‘‘particular principle.’’ They therefore offered a wholesaling of representative democracy. This institution has been the cornerstone of politics for centuries. There have long been traditions of seeking to influence individual legislators outside the context of their party, however. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
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centuries, those seeking to influence a debate in either chamber of the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom would congregate in the Central Lobby (an area to which the public have access in the Palace of Westminster), waiting for the chance to beard the MP in question and press them to support their point of view. This custom has given the world the term ‘‘lobbyist.’’ Civil society advocacy is not a new phenomenon. The Anti-Corn Law League was an early example of successful campaigning, ironically in support of free trade. It was founded in 1839 to protest the extortionate price of staple foods, due to high import duties and market restrictions designed to protect British landowners. After 6 years of struggle and bread riots the government gave way and repealed the Corn Law. Most party-based democratic systems evolved with just two or a few political parties. This is to be expected in societies where there are just one or two defining political concerns, each of which can be addressed in just two or three ways. This was broadly the case in Western Europe during most of the nineteenth century, where the defining issue was between industrialization, trade, and the urban sector on the one hand and landed interests and the rural sector on the other. In the United States the defining issue at the same time was more a geographic one, between North and South. By the late nineteenth century, reflecting the progress toward universal enfranchisement, the fault line in politics became the issue of equity and class, particularly the massive inequalities of wealth, income, and working hours. This was the case on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly in Europe. The various manifestations of socialism that evolved, all gave central importance to the issue of the ownership of the means of production. Since World War II, progressive taxation, universal education, national health systems, unemployment benefits, public housing, and other policies have gradually reduced the class divide. At the same time, and partly because sheer survival can be increasingly taken for granted for most in the wealthier countries, citizens have increasingly become concerned about a host of political issues beyond class and equity. Citizens have become increasingly disenchanted with party politics. While political apathy is a major factor, this also reflects a variety of newer ways in which citizens exercise their political voice: joining advocacy CSOs, taking part in demonstrations, confronting local officials or employers, writing to newspapers, mounting petitions, etc. The growth of civil society advocacy can be seen as a response to the deficiencies of electoral democracy. Indeed, election of delegates is only a small part of
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today’s democracy. A transformation is underway, particularly in rich countries, from Representative to Participatory Democracy. Held argues (2002) that this new dynamic of ‘‘cosmopolitan democracy’’ is because people now live in a world of overlapping communities of interests and fate, and hence a political system in which one is represented just according to physical locality is anachronistic. Modern communications and the growth of civil society make possible more direct engagement between citizens and decision makers.
Key Issues Advocacy and the Evolution of Cause-Based CSOs
The plethora of political fault lines today does not fit well with a party-based democracy. The latter generally aggregates people according to ‘‘the particular principle they agree upon’’ and to their physical community. But when there are myriad principles at stake, citizens agree with one set of people on one issue, and a different set on a second topic. It is unlikely that a single political party will have a platform that matches one’s particular palette of interests. A ‘‘pick-and-mix’’ political system fits better with cosmopolitan societies than the limited choice offered by political parties. Advocacy groups permit this customizing of politics to one’s individual persuasions. CSOs permit people to associate outside their families or communities in pursuit of their particular interests or wishes. Scholte (2001) points out that in modern times such identification can be an affinity group (such as an ethnic Diaspora, sexuality, occupation, class, or even gender) as well as a group of people within a nation. In today’s more mobile and interconnected world, citizens increasingly identify with those who share their concerns wherever they live, not just with their immediate neighbors. So as constituents of democracies, people increasingly prefer to be represented according to the issues they care about rather than the place where they live. Moreover, these issues do not necessarily reflect ‘‘national interests’’ but global interests (Matherws, 1997). As a consequence, most countries (especially Western democracies) have seen the ascendancy of a host of advocacy groups that define positions on the most popular political issues of the times (Carothers, 1999). While some represent classic divides (such as those for and against abortion, immigration, gun-control, and free trade) others seek to elevate concerns that have no polar opposite constituency, but which languish because of political neglect (such as gender equity, conservation, and opportunities for disabled people).
The Rise of Advocacy Groups and the Decline of Political Parties
While pressure groups have a much longer history (e.g., the Anti-Slavery Society dates back to the eighteenth century), it was not until the 1960s and the 1970s that they mushroomed, with the profusion of issues of citizen concern that political parties largely eschewed – such as civil rights, feminism, the environment, nuclear power, nuclear disarmament, the Vietnam war, and racism. Pressure groups on such issues grew rapidly, and formed a new political culture of the ‘‘baby-boomers’’ that differed radically from the previous generation’s prewar political contours. And from this period the decline of party membership can be traced. For example, in the United Kingdom in 1971 Greenpeace was formed – then, an obscure organization concerned primarily with the protection of the marine environment. At that time the British Labour Party had 700,000 members – close to its peak. By 1990, Greenpeace had grown to about 320,000 members and had overtaken Labour. Today, Labour has declined further to just 180,000 members and hundreds of other environmental concerns compete with Greenpeace for public support (Clark, 2003). The decline of the UK Conservative Party’s membership has been even more dramatic – from over two million in the mid-1960s to less than 350,000 in 2000. Similarly elsewhere; about 25% of the New Zealand electorate were party members in the 1950s, as were 15% of Italians and 10% of the French; by the 1990s this had declined to below 5% for all of them (The Economist, July 24, 1999). There is other evidence for dwindling public confidence in the party-based democratic processes. Opinion polls in a range of countries reveal that public respect for politicians has declined rapidly. One survey of 14 OECD countries by Robert Putnam (2000) showed that public confidence in legislatures has declined from the 1970s to the 1990s in 11 of them. Public trust and confidence in politicians declined in 13 countries (all except the Netherlands). A 40-country survey, commissioned by the World Economic Forum in 2002, showed that of 17 leading institutions of influence in these countries, those least trusted were parliaments, large corporations, and the IMF; and those most trusted were NGOs and the military. Politicians are widely seen as making false promises, dishonest, just interested in getting votes, out of touch, and not caring. There are many reasons for such trends – scandals, broken promises, apparent impotence on issues of public concern, etc. – but a major factor is the proliferation of causes with which societies are concerned. The dominant
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political concern has shifted from a contest over the ownership of the means of production to more diverse debates about what is produced, how, and for what sort of society. Advocacy groups have a growing role, said the former Director of Friends of the Earth, UK, only because the public is ‘‘dissatisfied with traditional political institutions and processes that drive public debate and decision-making’’ (Secrett, 1996). If the parliamentary process, the media, industry, etc. ‘‘adequately represented the particular interests of citizens, ensured their direct participation in community affairs, and dealt with their concerns, there would be no pressure groups.’’
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Advocacy Tactics
Advocacy groups use a wide range of tactics including high-level lobbying, media work, public education campaigns, protests and other forms of direct action, boycotts, presenting testimony to parliaments, defending court actions, mounting court actions, shaming campaigns, street theatre, etc. This array embraces three broad goals:
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● Seeking to win the argument: showing that something being done at present is wrong, or that there is a better approach that could be taken ● Seeking to demonstrate that there are large numbers of people who demand and expect change (and that at least some of them are well-informed). ● Insinuating or inflicting costs: this can mean generating a ‘‘nuisance factor’’ in terms of the costs incurred by a target institution of not giving way to the campaign (the time its officers spend defending the institution’s position; reputational damage due to negative publicity, etc.) and it can mean incurring real costs such as through consumer boycotts and even inflicting physical damage to property (as with animal rights groups campaigns targeting laboratories that use live animal testing). ● Organizational Forms of Civil Society Advocacy
Civil society advocacy mechanisms, whether national or global, generally fall into one of six organizational forms representing a trade-off between campaign coherence and breadth of support (see Clark, 2003b; Lindenberg & Dobel, 1999). They comprise: ● Centralized organizations: Unitary organizations with a clear HQs and branches at local or national levels, albeit these may enjoy some degree of autonomy. Examples would include Greenpeace, Social Watch, and Jubilee 2000. Some are in effect national organizations in terms of their governance (i.e., their
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secretariats and boards) but have members and supporters elsewhere (such as the US-based Human Rights Watch or the US-based International Forum on Globalization). Federations: Networks comprising member CSOs with a common name and charter, single governing body, but also local self-determination. Examples would include Amnesty International and the Global Union Federations (such as Public Service International or Education International). Confederations: Looser structures in which the members are autonomous but agree on a set of common ground rules and work together on specific activities where there is mutual advantage. For example, Friends of the Earth International has 68 national chapters which decide by majority vote what campaigns to adopt globally, but allow each chapter to choose which of these it will actually promote. Informal networks: Fluid networks on a self-selecting basis; any group having broadly similar aims can join, but membership bestows few advantages (other than information and ‘‘belonging’’) and demands few responsibilities. While they bring together CSOs in different countries for the specific cause, these CSOs may have widely differing objectives and concerns otherwise. Arguably the first single issue transnational advocacy network was the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) – formed in 1979 by the NGOs attending the first ever multi-stakeholder meeting, organized by the World Health Organization and Unicef, on the threats posed by the marketing excesses of artificial baby milk manufacturers. Within months, hundreds of NGOs from North and South had joined IBFAN, which became pivotal in persuading governments to adopt, at the 1981 World Health Assembly, an international code to regulate the marketing of breast-milk substitutes. Social movements: These are not true organizations, but loose networks or affinities of people, lacking formal decision-making processes and leadership. Though not CSOs as such, they are an increasingly powerful form of civil society on the global stage. Examples include the feminist movement and the anti-globalization protest movement; Dot-causes: These are the Internet-based campaigns that have little or no presence outside the World Wide Web, but which can have considerable impact due to their ability to respond swiftly to changing situations (not having an elaborate governance structure) and to reach large numbers of like-minded people. Examples include the Nobel prize-winning
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International Campaign to Ban Landmines, ATTAC (the campaign to stem inequality through introduction of a Tobin Tax) and a smorgasbord of protest groups. Some, such as IndyMedia and Globalize Resistance, are multipurpose cause promoters, offering a ‘‘one-stop shop’’ for like-minded radical activists (Clark & Themudo, 2006).
International Perspectives International campaigns to shape international policy are not entirely new (notably the Anti-Slavery Society – which started in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century – drew support from various countries and made a pivotal contribution to its cause). However, it has only been in recent decades that transnational advocacy has become prominent and a new cast of civil society actors have emerged as a result. Transnational action on environmental issues has been the longest and strongest – dating back to 1972 and the first parallel NGO forum to a UN event (the Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm). The membership of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) grew from 572,000 in 1985 to five million in 2001. It now employs 3,300 staff and has an annual budget of $350 million. Greenpeace grew similarly to reach over four million members globally in 1994 with an annual budget peak of $179 million. By 1986 it had linked its network of 30 national offices via an international computer network – well before most TNCs did so. By 2000, Friends of the Earth comprised 68 autonomous national groups with, collectively, over one million members, 5,000 local groups, and a budget of over $200 million. Similar growth has been seen on other sectors. In human rights, Amnesty International has over one million members in 160 countries, and employs 400 staff. Jubilee 2000, the NGO promoting Third World debt relief, orchestrated the world’s largest petition (with 24 million signatures). And many NGOs that were previously considered to be humanitarian or service-delivery charities, such as Oxfam and World Wide Fund for Nature, have given increasing attention and resources to advocacy on issues that affect their programs or their partners. Other civil society actors, such as trade unions, professional associations, and consumer groups, have also evolved strong advocacy programs. For example, Education International – a federation of teachers’ unions representing over 35 million teachers worldwide – has come to exert significant impact on education policy internationally (Clark, 2003b). NGO lobbying is widely credited for securing debt relief for poor countries, the Rio Earth Summit agreement on controlling greenhouse gases, the creation of the
International Criminal Court, Antarctica being declared a world park – protected from mining, major reforms at the World Bank, and the international landmine treaty (Florini, 2000). The transnational advocacy phenomenon reflects an important paradox in traditional democracy: while much of the substance of politics has been globalized (climate change, trade, economics, HIV/AIDS, the SARS pandemic, terrorism, etc.), the process of politics has not. Its main institutions – elections, political parties, and parliaments – remain rooted at the national level. An increasing number of people argue that meaningful democracy today requires processes that enable citizens to help shape a framework of global values, policies, instruments, and governance; they argue that it cannot be achieved by powerful democratic nations imposing their will on the rest of the world. One indicator of the growth of transnational advocacy is the number of NGOs seeking consultative status at the UN’s Economic and Social Council. In the 1970s and 1980s there were 20–30 new applications per year; in 1998–1999 there were 200; in 2000–2001 400 and in 2002 there were over 800 applications. NGO participation in global conferences grew similarly. For example, with the women’s conferences: 114 NGOs attended the Mexico event in 1975, 163 went to Nairobi in 1985, but 2600 went to Beijing in 1995. Even more attended the parallel NGO forums at these UN conferences. Hence 6000 took part in the parallel NGO event at Mexico City, 13,500 went to the equivalent event in Nairobi and 300,000 to the NGO forum in Beijing (Cardoso Panel, 2004). Transnational advocacy has helped change the geography of democracy. It allows individuals to aggregate differently – with others who share burning concerns wherever they live. In other words community of neighborhood is being supplemented by community of interest – and, thanks to information technology, such communities can be global as easily as local.
Future Perspectives Backlash Against Civil Society Advocacy
As pressure groups have become increasingly influential, so too have the efforts of their targets to discredit them and the consequences of mistakes. While the media relish sensation, and therefore willingly publish the extravagant claims of advocates whatever their accuracy, errors diminish their credibility in the eyes of policy makers. Hence, when Greenpeace pressed Shell not to dump the Brent Spar oilrig at sea, but to dispose of it on-shore to avoid polluting the North Sea (a much more expensive option),
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the media gave full coverage and Shell finally gave way. Later, Greenpeace admitted it had got its calculations wildly wrong, and this seriously damaged its reputation (Clark, 2003a). Such mistakes, though perhaps rare, provide ammunition to their political adversaries. That pressure groups erode democracy is a charge increasingly leveled by those most comfortable with the status quo. After the street protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, 1999, there was a chorus of such attack. The Economist (September 23, 1999), for example, said: ‘‘The increasing clout of NGOs, respectable and not so respectable, raises an important question: who elected Oxfam, or, for that matter, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International? Bodies such as these are, to varying degrees, extorting admissions of fault from law-abiding companies and changes in policy from democratically elected governments. They may claim to be acting in the interests of the people – but then so do the objects of their criticisms, governments and the despised international institutions. In the West, governments and their agencies are, in the end, accountable to voters. Who holds the activists accountable?’’ Such reprisals harp on three issues: that pressure groups are not elected; that they are not accountable; and that they have no right to influence changes in their target institutions. The defense is easy at one level. Universal freedoms of speech and association would be rendered meaningless if citizens did not have the right to form associations to promote causes they believe in. Associations need not be of a minimum size and need only be accountable to their members, not to the broader society. If they damage property, intimidate or defame people, or cause a public nuisance, there are laws that can be used against them. However, the charges of irresponsibility are not so easy to shrug off at a broader level. Responsible CSO leaders are increasingly concerned that unscrupulous or over-zealous campaigns are discrediting their trade and could undermine democracy, not least because newer entries into the field may display a more lax attitude to accuracy and a greedier thirst for publicity. They care increasingly about the opinion of the media, parliamentarians, and the public at large – not just their supporters – and hence increasingly urge their peers to join with them in defining codes of conduct for their advocacy. For example, a group of leading international campaigning organizations concerned variously with the environment, human rights and development have formed the International Advocacy NGO Network to agree common high standards of advocacy. Civil society advocacy – though a powerful force in policy making – is a complement to, not a substitute for, traditional politics. It allows governance by representation
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to be complemented by more direct participatory governance. Misgivings about advocacy stem from an assumption – sometimes grounded – that pressure groups do not just seek to influence decisions through argument, but to replace legislatures and political parties. An excessive influence of advocacy can lead to the atomizing of politics as government strategy loses coherence and logic to a scatter of ad hoc responses to myriad interest groups. This can result in a drift toward elitism, since pressure groups are often middle class and capital-citybased. It is also likely to leave important gaps. There are no pressure groups for things one takes for granted – until those things, like sewerage and postal services, disappear. Hence, civil society advocacy is most effective where democracy is working well. It achieves influence by persuading people to use the democracy at their fingertips – not just through their voting choices, but as consumers, shareholders, lobbyists, demonstrators, educators of their children, workers, employers, and investors. ‘‘Pressure groups demonstrate that individuals do matter and can meaningfully help shape society’’ (Secrett, 1996).
Cross-References
▶ Amnesty International ▶ Anti-Slavery Movement ▶ Attac ▶ Charity Law ▶ Citizenship ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Dotcauses ▶ Friends of the Earth ▶ Governance, Organizational ▶ Greenpeace ▶ Human Rights Watch ▶ Interest and Pressure Groups ▶ International Advocacy NGOs and Networks (IANGO) ▶ International Baby Food Action Network ▶ International Campaign to Ban Landmines ▶ Jubilee 2000 ▶ Lobbying ▶ NGOs and international relations, UN ▶ Oxfam International ▶ Social Watch ▶ Theories of the Nonprofit Sector, Political ▶ World-wide Fund for Nature
References/Further Readings Cardoso Panel (2004). Report of the panel of eminent persons on UN–civil society relations, and ‘‘UN System and Civil Society: an Inventory and Analysis of Practice’’, Background Paper for the Panel, prepared by its secretariat. United Nations, from www.un.org/reform/panel.htm
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Carothers, T. (1999). Civil society: Think again. Foreign Policy. Winter. Castells, M. (2004). The crisis of democracy, global governance, and the rise of the global civil society (Mimeo), Paper Prepared for the Inaugural Seminar of the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Sao Paulo. Clark, J. (2003a). Worlds apart: Civil society and the battle for ethical globalization. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press; London: Earthscan. Clark, J. (Ed.) (2003b). Globalizing civic engagement: Civil society and trans-national action. London: Earthscan. Clark, J., & Themudo, N. (2006). Linking the web and the street: Internetbased ‘‘dot-causes’’ and the ‘‘anti-globalization’’ movement. World Development, 34(1). Edwards, M., & Gaventa, J. (Eds.) (2001). Global citizen action. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Florini, A. (Ed.) (2000). The third Force: The rise of transnational civil society. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Held, D. (2002). Cosmopolitanism and globalization. Logos, 1(3), 1–17. Keck, M., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Lindenberg, M., & Dobel, P. (1999). ‘‘Globalization and Northern NGOs: The Challenge of Relief and Development in a Changing Context’’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Supplement, 29–4. Matherws, J. (1997). Power shift. Foreign Affairs, 76(1), January/February, 50–66. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Scholte, J. (2001). New citizens action and global finance. Notes for seminar ‘‘Translator-national civil society: Issues of governance and organisation’’, London: School of Economics, 1–2 June. Secrett, C. (1996). Why do pressure groups matter? Paper for the Social Market Foundation (June). Friends of the Earth, London.
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outreach in 16 countries. The organization with more than 3,000 staff is now busy doing profitable and nonprofit activities from North to South.
Brief History The AKF was founded in 1967 in Geneva by the Prince Karim ‘‘Aga Khan’’ to work for the development of marginalized areas in the developing world. As part of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), AKF is a ‘‘private, not-for-profit, non-denominational, development agency’’ (AKF, 2008), and due to the visionary chairpersonship, the Foundation is now widely accepted as a development and philanthropic organization.
Mission/Objectives AKF was established to turn various international development agencies to the poorest parts of the world (Ebrahim, 2002). With the objectives of global poverty reduction, gender equality and advancement of pluralistic values, the Foundation is committed to uplift rural communities of coastal and mountainous areas regardless of any specific faith or origin (AKF, 2008). AKF firmly believes in civil society’s role in development, and recognizes civil society organizations (CSOs) as the best facilitators. The policy of AKF encourages rapid growth of CSOs in various sectors. The Foundation is keen to promote tolerance, pluralism, and equity, and seeks the implementation of the ‘‘corporate social responsibility’’ idea through partnerships between CSOs, the business sector and governments.
▶ Association Franc¸aise contre les Myopathies
Focus Areas
Aga Khan Foundation MAHTAB AHMAD, MOKBUL MORSHED AHMAD
Address of Organization 1-3 avenue de la Paix 1202 Geneva Case Postale 2369 1211 Geneva 2 Switzerland www.akdn.org
Introduction The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) is one of the largest international nongovernmental organizations with
AKF focuses on five major areas: rural development, health, education, civil society, and environment, with cross-cutting issues of participation, gender development, and binding state-society relations (see Kaiser, 1995 for its relevance in Tanzania).
Activities The activities include operating more than 300 schools (Machiwala, 2008) and two universities executing transcultural quality education programs in Asia, Africa, MiddleEast, and the United Kingdom (AKF, 2008; Smith, 1997); providing primary and curative health care in over 200 health outlets; assisting local communities with village planning, sanitation, and water supply systems; and giving humanitarian assistance to victims. The service delivery of the Foundation is undoubtedly exemplary, however, the access to its costly higher education programs specifically by the poor communities is deemed debatable.
Aga Khan, Prince Karim
Structure and Governance The AKF is a branch of social development, one of three facets under AKDN. AKDN administratively controls the economic development, social development, and culture facets, serves under the Chairmanship (the Imamat) at Geneva, and strictly adheres to the International Nongovernmental Organizations’ Accountability Charter. AKF both mobilizes funding and implements the relevant projects (social development).
Funding Sources Income from the endowment and capital investments in the business sector, donations from individuals Ismailis, and grants from partners, e.g., host governments and joint-ventures are the AKF’s major funding sources. The Aga Khan, founder and chairman of the AKF, contributes funds himself toward administrative costs, new program initiatives, and the endowment. The Foundation is estimated to control assets of more than $1.5 billion (AKDN, 2002).
Major Accomplishments/Contributions UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Heritage Award of Excellence for Work in Herat, Afghanistan; World Habitat Award; Global Development Award for Innovative Development Project; Green Oscar for Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP); and the CGAP Financial Transparency Award signify AKF’s diverse contributions in development.
Cross-References
▶ Aga Khan, Prince Karim ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ INGOs ▶ NGOs and Humanitarian Assistance ▶ NGOs and Socioeconomic Development
References/Further Readings Aga Khan Development Network (2002). Geneva Briefing Book. Geneva, Switzerland: AKF. Aga Khan Foundation (2008). Annual report. Geneva, Switzerland: AKF. Ebrahim, A. (2002). Information struggles: The role of information in the reproduction of NGO-funder relationships. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 31(1), 84–114. Kaiser, P. (1995). State-society relations in an international context: The case of Aga Khan health-care initiatives in Tanzania. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 36(3–4), 184–197. Machiwala, I. (2008). Aga Khan Education Services (akes), from http://www.articlesbase.com/education-articles/aga-khan-educationservices-akes-366652.html Shamatov, D. A. et al. (2005). Reconceptualization of teacher education: Experiences from the context of a multicultural developing country. Journal of Transformative Education, 3(3), 271–288. Smith, S. E. (1997). Increasing transcultural awareness: The McMasterAga Khan-CIDA Project workshop model. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 8(2), 23–31.
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Aga Khan, Prince Karim SHAHJAHAN BHUIYAN
Basic Biographical Information Born in Geneva on December 13, 1936, Prince Karim Aga Khan, the Aga Khan IV, is the eldest son of Prince Aly Salman (Salomone) Khan. During WWII, his father joined the Allies and Karim, along with his other family members, moved to Nairobi in 1941. By the age of seven, Karim became well-versed in his religion (‘‘Sevener Shi’a Islam’’) under the private tutorship of a Muslim missionary, and showed the agility for his future religious leadership. Right at the end of the War, Karim entered the Institute le Rosey in Switzerland followed by the Harvard University (earning a bachelor degree in Islamic history in 1959). Karim, at the age of 20 in 1957, being appointed by his grandfather the Aga Khan III as the ‘‘Imam’’ (49th) and ‘‘Pir’’ (spiritual leader) of Shi’a Ismaili followers, became the Aga Khan IV. In 2007, the Ismaili community embarked on a one-year celebration of the golden jubilee of his Imamate (religious leadership).
Major Contributions Upon becoming the Imam, His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, determined to materialize his grandfather’s (the Aga Khan III) vision of improved quality of life of the global community, and the Ismailis in particular, founded the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), one of the largest international NGOs, in 1967. In addition, Karim Aga Khan has been instrumental in the establishment of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) with agencies like the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance, Aga Khan Health Services, Aga Khan Planning and Building Services, Aga Khan Education Services, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and Aga Khan University. The combined involvement of community services by these organizations extends as much as 300 schools, two universities (offering transcultural quality education in Asia, Africa, Middle East and the United Kingdom), 200 health care outlets, and the offering of humanitarian services to victims of war and famine. Under his patronage, since 1977, the Aga Khan Award of Architecture, deemed to be the largest in the field, has become a prestigious award and a source of data on thousands of innovations on ‘‘green architecture.’’ Karim Aga Khan chairs the Institute of Ismaili Studies, which he established in 1977 in the United Kingdom to promote scholarship and learning of Muslim cultures and societies, and understanding and harmony among religions.
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The Aga Khan IV has received many prestigious awards like the Hadrian Award (World Monuments Fund, 1996) for his contribution to preserve and revitalize historic cities in the Muslim world, the Knight Commander in the Order of the British Empire (2003) for his services to international development, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Philanthropy (2005). He has received honorary degrees from universities in Pakistan, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Cross-References
▶ Aga Khan Foundation ▶ Sadaqa ▶ Wakfs ▶ Zakat
References/Further Readings Moosa, M. (2007). Prince Karim Aga Khan – A true leader of Islam, from http://ezinarticles.com/?Prince-kARIM-Aga-Khan—A-True-Leaderof-Islam&id = 1401609. Tajddin, M. A. (2007). Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, from http://www. ismaili.net/heritage/node/10524.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Rafael Alegrı´a was one of the promoters of the Belgium conference in which a group of farm leaders formally constituted Via Campesina in 1993. This social movement took the form of an organization that coordinates small and medium peasants and indigenous communities from America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Rafael Alegrı´a was then elected to hold the operational secretariat of the organization, a post he retained until 2004. With his work he has contributed to criticizing the liberalization of agriculture and food, showing the consequences of deregulation policies on rural livelihoods in the context of the World Trade Organization international market rules. He also played a role in finding progressive alternatives to this neoliberal alimentary model. He worked to promote people’s food sovereignty and land reforms to recover natural resources on behalf of the communities. At present, he is still a peasant leader and an active member of the International Coordinating Committee of Via Campesina.
Cross-References
▶ Cooperatives and Employee-owned Enterprises ▶ Peasant and Farmers’ Organizations ▶ Social Movements
AKF ▶ Aga Khan Foundation
Alegrı´a, Rafael
References/Further Readings Bello, W. F. (2004). Deglobalization: Ideas for a new world economy. London: Zed Books. Bove´, J., Dufour, F., Luneau, G., & De Casparis, A. (2000). The world is not for sale: Farmers against junk food. London: Verso. Cummings, C. H. (2008). Uncertain peril: Genetic engineering and the future of seeds. Boston, MA: Beacon.
ANA TOLEDO CHAVARRI
Alliance for Justice Basic Biographical Information Born in the village of San Marquitos Morolica in Honduras in a peasant family, Rafael Alegrı´a has become an agrarian leader and one of the founders of the international organization Via Campesina. He was raised and educated in Potrerillos, in the Honduran department of Olancho. In this village, he started working with agricultural cooperatives and organizing producers that demanded land rights. After some episodes of repression he was exiled from his native region. He kept working with cooperative enterprises and also got involved in ‘‘Glass of Milk’’ programs, not just in rural areas but also in popular neighborhoods of Honduran cities.
PATSY KRAEGER
Address of Organization 11 Dupont Circle NW 2nd Floor Washington, DC 20036 USA www.afj.org
Introduction Alliance for Justice (AFJ) describes itself as ‘‘a national association of environmental, civil rights, mental health,
Altruism
women’s, children’s, and consumer advocacy organizations. Since its inception in 1979, AFJ has worked to advance the cause of justice for all Americans, strengthen the public interest community’s ability to influence public policy, and foster the next generation of advocates.’’ AFJ has a diverse group of approximately 80 member organizations who join in on policy debates regarding access to justice. AFJ has two offices, in Washington D.C. and a West Coast office in California.
Brief History Alliance for Justice was founded in 1979 by Nan Aron, a former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawyer who litigated cases against companies accused of racial and sexual discrimination. She brought 20 advocacy organizations together to form AFJ, which became prominent though its judicial selection project during the confirmation hearings for Judge Robert Bork’s seat on the Unites States Supreme Court: Aron and AFJ helped to defeat that nomination. AFJ was a significant voice when the Supreme Court nominations of Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Harriet Myers and Samuel Alito were before the Congress.
Mission AFJ’s original mission was to address issues that affected the survival of public interest law. Today, the mission has been broadened to lead ‘‘progressive advocacy and strengthening the progressive movement to ensure robust and equal access to levers of government power.’’ AFJ leadership has been committed to the broader goal of policy advocacy and the formation of advocacy coalition networks for nonprofits in areas separate from judicial selection. To support its mission expansion, AFJ opened a West Coast Office in 2004.
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Structure and Governance AFJ is an incorporated entity which also has been designated by the I.R.S. as a 501(c)(3) public charity. AFJ is led by its founder and President and a 16-member Board of Directors.
Funding Alliance for Justice’s work is financed primarily through donations from foundations and individuals. AFJ does not receive government contributions for its work. In 2005, AFJ reported revenues of slightly more than $5 million.
Major Accomplishments AFJ claims its major accomplishment was the defeat of the Bork nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, which propelled the organization as a policy leader in judicial selection and advocacy.
Cross-References ▶ Advocacy ▶ Human Rights ▶ Networks ▶ Social Justice
References/Further Readings Aron, N. (1989). Liberty and justice for all: Public interest law in the 1980s and beyond. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Payne, E. (2008). The practical progressive: How to build a twenty-first century political movement. New York: Public Affairs. Pickering, C. W. (2005). Supreme chaos: The politics of judicial confirmation & the culture war. Macon, GA: Stroud and Hall.
Altruism Activities To pursue it mission, AFJ combines advocacy campaigns at the grassroots level with research and publications relating to advocacy and judicial nominations to train others to advocate. AFJ has expanded its capacity through technology and is able to reach more than 53,000 total activists and supporters, including 1,640 law professors and 2,654 students. The organization’s Nonprofit Action Network grew to more than 8,100 members, and in 2005 they launched an Access to Justice update with more than 6,000 subscribers. Its main programs are the judicial selection project; access to justice project; the nonprofit advocacy project/foundation advocacy initiative; and the student action campaign.
ANNE BIRGITTA PESSI University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Introduction Altruism as a form of helping behavior forms the cornerstone of societal cohesion, the everyday well-being of individuals and the central manifestation of human values. Still, much research views humans and humanity in a way best described in David Hume’s words as ‘‘homo homini lupus.’’ Altruism is thus often neglected as a secondary ad hoc explanation, as its explanatory power compared to selfishness is considered to be less. This,
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however, need not nor should it be the case with altruism. Appreciation of various forms of altruism can bring considerable benefit for the understanding of the interaction between people both in theoretical considerations and empirical studies. Altruism, an essential and pivotal part of humanity, can be regarded as a universal phenomenon, since it is found in all known societies. However, the forms of altruism vary greatly between and within societies and probably between different eras in the same societies. Today’s societal context creates an especially interesting framework for altruism: While individuals are less dependent on traditional social ties and traditions, they are increasingly tied to other types of networks, including global ones. Individuals live in the midst of multiple novel networks in several senses of the word; people may, for instance, not be interested in helping their neighbors but have godchildren on the other side of the world. As the networks of individuals are changing, so too is altruism. The changes in the forms of altruism and helping behavior might even be playing a role in the transformation of social networks.
Definition Altruism, in general, refers to actions that take other human beings into consideration: action concerned with the well-being of others. The concept was brought into the social sciences by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in the mid-nineteenth century as the antonym of selfishness. The term derives from the Latin words ‘‘alter’’ and ‘‘other.’’ In Comte’s often restated view, individuals have two distinct motives: egoism and altruism; the latter for him is ‘‘the most important sociological question.’’ Similar views were later put by E´mile Durkheim (1858–1917) in his early work ‘‘The Division of Labour in Society.’’ Durkheim argues that wherever there are communities, there is altruism since communities exhibit solidarity. Durkheim linked egoism and altruism to the deepening of the societal division of labor, the transformation from mechanical to organic solidarity. Likewise, he linked egoism and altruism to the maintenance of moral communality demanded by and included in the transformed solidarity. According to Durkheim, both egoism and altruism have been a part of each human consciousness from the very beginning: consciousness that does not reflect these elements cannot exist. For Durkheim, unselfishness is expected to come from the deepest foundation of our social life; people cannot live together without mutual understanding, and thus without mutual sacrifice, and without being bonded together in a strong, durable manner.
During the twentieth century, an increasing part of the literature on altruism-related themes has been encompassed specifically by the concept of altruism. Research can indeed be found on various fields: philosophy, religious studies, developmental psychology studies, social psychology, organisational studies, political science, economics, evolutionary studies both in psychology and biology, etc. However, today, there is a remarkable lack of agreement over what is meant by the term. Macaulay and Berkowitz’s classic definition of altruism is ‘‘behaviour carried out to benefit another without anticipation of rewards from external sources’’ (1970: 3). This definition includes internal rewards, such as alleviation of guilt, increase in self-esteem, and feeling good about oneself. Such a definition offers the advantage of avoiding both the philosophical dilemma of true unselfishness and unobservable variables. Another classic study by Monroe (1996) has defined altruism as ‘‘behaviour intended to benefit another, even when this risks possible sacrifice to the welfare of the actor.’’ Monroe has further outlined six critical points in the definition: 1. Altruism entails action. 2. The action must be goal-directed, either consciously or reflexively. 3. The goal must concern the welfare of another. 4. Intentions count more than consequences. 5. The act must carry some possibility of decrease in the actor’s own welfare. 6. There must be no conditions or anticipation of reward. Some of these points, however, divide scholarly views. The sixth criterion, ‘‘no conditions or anticipation of reward,’’ is particularly tricky. In other words, the question of whether the actor is allowed to gain joy from altruism or expected to gain it prior to the action is a divisive issue between scholars. For instance, one can look at the definition by Montada and Bierhof (1991: 18) that differs from the one by Monroe: altruism is voluntary ‘‘behaviour that aims at a termination or reduction of an emergency, a neediness, or disadvantage of others and that primarily does not aim at the fulfilment of one’s own interests.’’ A further age-old debated issue concerns whether altruism really exists; what is the relation between selfishness and non-selfishness in helping-behavior. It is actually logically rather difficult to demonstrate altruism to those thinking that helping is always inherently selfish; for instance, those who do personally value altruism most likely do derive positive feelings from altruistic behavior. Thus, a cynic can always claim that there is always a selfish gain. She/he could respond that it may be true that
Altruism
helping others brings one pleasure, yet this is by no means the same as showing that one has helped in order to primarily please oneself. Similarly, as noted by Felscher and Worthen (2007), pleasure, as such, is never an end motive in itself but something causes one pleasure; the fact that altruism brings joy particularly indicates true altruistic motives that have been provided by biological and cultural evolution (both nature and nurture). Additionally, a continuum perspective from pure egoism to pure altruism can be utilized as a key to this dilemma: the problem with theories of motivation based on self-interest is not that they are false but that they are only partly true. In other words, neither egoism nor altruism is adequate explanation on its own. Considering the pure form of thinking and acting (either egoism or altruism) as extremely rare, and taking most human thinking and behavior as including elements of both these poles, leads to an understanding that helping others and gaining joy from it (or the increased social respect and status) are two sides of the same coin. There are overall considerable fundamental differences in the criteria for altruism in the literature; in other words, what is considered ‘‘pure altruism’’ or even just ‘‘altruism’’ and ‘‘helping behaviour,’’ looking at these phenomena in the continuum perspective. Some scholars consider that altruism resembles self-sacrifice and heroism, while others link it more loosely to pro-social behavior, taking it as a synonym for helping-behavior. How then does one resolve this puzzle of the criteria for altruism? One solution is to return to the original concept in Latin — altruism is ‘‘other-ism,’’ behavior that primarily takes the other into account, as a starting point. The essence of altruism then is in putting someone else’s welfare and well-being above one’s own benefit. Seeing altruism as ‘‘other-ism’’ does not prevent one from being able to separate something that could be labelled as ‘‘more extreme altruism’’ from ‘‘milder altruism’’; different forms of altruism indeed can be seen as a continuum not only forming a continuum from egoism, but a continuum of their own. Many researchers have indeed rejected the dichotomy between egoism and altruism in various frames of reference, e.g., in educational studies and psychology (Krebs & Van Hesteren, 1992).
Key Issues The mainstream of the altruism discussion in various disciplines can be seen as roughly constituting three eras. At the first stage, up to the 1970s, the discussions concerning altruism in different disciplines went on in their own spheres and contexts, and there was little interaction between disciplines. Furthermore, much social
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science research focused on more negative aspects of human action, such as crime. All in all, the altruism research of the time – at least in hindsight – was not all that productive, considering the amount of further research and the number of significant publications. In the second era of altruism research, from the middle of the 1970s to the early 1990s, work in various disciplines and applications was marked by disputing and questioning unselfish altruism. Researchers aimed to show that phenomena appearing to be altruistic ultimately serve the altruist’s own interest and own good. Even actions that in the short term can be interpreted as altruistic were discovered to work to the advantage of the altruist in the long term. This view was reflected most clearly in sociobiology and economics research in which altruism was interpreted mainly as nepotism or efficient solutions to recurring problems. During the third era of altruism research, the last 15 years, the questions have changed again and common themes for research have increased. More importantly, in social psychology, sociology, economics and political science, a clear paradigm shift away from the position that behavior must reveal egoistic motivation has taken place, recent theory and data being more compatible with the view that ‘‘true altruism’’ does exist. The starting point of research is to a greater extent ‘‘pro-social’’ behavior, the human being considered capable of unselfish altruism which cannot be reduced to favoring of relatives. The various disciplines focus on different elements in their explanations of altruism. Sociocultural explanations focus on the demographic correlations of altruism (religion, age, gender, wealth, education, political views, etc.). Economic explanations, on the other hand, consider altruism a good, and stress the role of the rewards of altruism (material or psychological). Evolutionary biology and psychology base their explanations on very similar grounds to economic explanations. Biologists stress kin and/or group selection and emphasise elements such as birth order and community size. Psychologists prefer to emphasise developmental matters (socialisation, level of cognitive development, etc.) in their altruism explanations, as well as more contextual elements such as norms and culture (e.g., habits of reciprocity, moral judgements). One of the most heated debates on altruism has recently taken place in evolutionary studies in biology and psychology. The early version of kin-selection theory has been traced to the father of the evolution theory, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who explained the altruistic behavior of ants by natural selection, the survival of the fittest, which applies at the level of the family. A central source of tension in evolutionary studies has then
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been the question of the extent to which social and cultural behavior ultimately supports biological and genetic objectives. The core debate concerns the question of whether altruism is developed and to what extent by individual-selection, kin-selection, or group-selection, or is it rather a question of co-evolution in which the evolution of genes and cultures is quite closely linked. The game theories of evolution biology, as well as those in economics, have identified the altruistic and cooperative inclinations of humans. Altruism has been tested using these classic games (e.g., Prisoner’s Dilemma, Ultimatum) in which short- and long-term advantages of an individual’s are set in contrast to each other, and the solutions of the second players determine the usefulness of one’s own strategy. Game theory experiments have repeatedly shown that individuals cooperate more than the rational choice theory predicts. Furthermore, in repeated games patterns of reciprocity between the players soon appear. Also findings in neurobiology indicate that in situations in which one player would have cooperated but the co-player would not, there is a negative response in the dopamine system in the more cooperative player’s brain. In more empirically oriented studies of altruism there are two strong currents of research. First, several researchers have analysed heroes and their choices. Subjects of such hero research have included people who saved Jews during the Second World War, and people who have led an exceptionally altruistic life such as Gandhi or Mother Teresa. In these cases individuals have made choices that underscore the common good and require sacrifices, choices that have deviated from the dominant cultural models. Organ and blood donation research forms the second study area, most of which has sought the donors’ motivation. Much of altruism research in various fields has concerned the question of what separates an altruist from a non-altruist, or a more altruistic individual from a less altruistic one. One example is Monroe’s theory of altruism (1996); she concludes based on empirical exploration that altruism is constituted most fundamentally by perspective, a different way of seeing oneself and one’s world. This perspective might easily be activated by different factors, such as religious teachings. The basic explanation of altruism, however, consists of the individuals’ perceived identity (not identity as such) and their perspective of themselves in relation to others. Five concepts are crucial: ● Cognition; cognitive framework and processing, including intentionality, agency as well as both biological and cultural self; in other words, the processes by which people come to make sense of the world
● World view; group membership and connection with others playing a crucial role ● Canonical expectations concerning what is normal, or what is ordinary; expectations ● Empathy and/or sympathy including both cognitive and affective elements; resulting from socialisation and developmental processes ● Views of self; identity and perception of who one is, including in relation to others Similarly, in their classic study on individuals who had rescued Jews during the Nazi era, the Oliners (1988) indicated that the rescuers where marked by ‘‘extensivity,’’ being more attached and committed to people in their social relationships and having empathy as well as an inclusive sense of obligation towards various groups. In other words, both the propensity to attach oneself to others and the propensity towards inclusiveness in respect of individuals and groups are critical to altruism. Various scholars have provided evidence supporting the theory that altruism is learned and can be further developed by teaching and learning. Hunt (1990) has summed up three elements that are characteristic of altruists, particularly altruistic children: being (1) happy, welladjusted and socially popular, (2) being sensitive and emotionally expressive and (3) having high self-esteem. Thus, teaching by parents, schools, civil society agents, among others that support these elements will also support the development of altruism.
Future Directions In the forthcoming studies, the best basis for altruism research is not to strictly separate the core phenomenon from closely related pro-social acts such as giving, sharing and co-operating. Rather, innovative research exploring individual-level experiences and views concerning networks of altruism is needed: for instance, what constitutes altruism, and particularly networks of altruism, for latemodern individuals? Such research would both benefit the interdisciplinary links and the links between theory and praxis. Thus some re-direction of research must be accounted for. Five such ways will be outlined next. First, in order to understand altruism in the context of the novel forms of social ties and networks, peoples’ attitudes, trust and expectations – not only deeds – should be accounted for. Researchers should not divide people beforehand into altruists and non-altruists or offer presumptions about where to find the altruists, but explore the present-day experiences and views of altruism with more open eyes. What is the nature and substance of altruism networks now?
Altruism
Second, previous research has largely restricted itself one-sidedly to the acts of altruism by individuals as givers, not receivers. However, in order to understand altruism as a societal and social phenomenon, both directions should be explored. The present-day support and altruism is highly likely to include sporadic and hybrid stories of altruism, as well as series of such stories, and should be studied as such. Third, our understanding of altruism will remain limited if focus is placed simply on individuals, neglecting the role of social groups and institutions in the construction, well-being and maintenance of altruistic values. Even though public institutions such as welfare agencies, schools, associations and churches do not assist or teach altruistic norms primarily because they experience altruistic wishes (but have, for example, statutory responsibilities and regulations), individuals’ expectations and trust in institutional support should be explored. It would also be valuable to explore the way the individuals view the role institutions have in promoting societal values and common faith in compassion and altruism. Fourth, in order to understand experiences and views of altruism more thoroughly, one should include not only the life-cycle viewpoint (past–present–future), but also a wide range of cognitive, rational, emotional and societal elements. Traditionally, explanations of altruism (sociocultural, economic, biological and psychological) have all focused primarily on the explanations found in their own niches. Furthermore, most studies have primarily emphasised cognitive factors. Additionally, both values and, for instance, religion-related elements affect views, acts and attitudes of altruism, as well as individual faith and trust in the networks of altruism supporting them. Fifth, altruism is methodologically most often studied through extreme cases (e.g., people rescuing Jews during the Second World War) and instances quite distinct from individual everyday lives (e.g., blood and organ donation). One next step in altruism research should involve exploration of everyday experiences and views of altruism through combining survey and qualitative data. Research taking these notions into consideration will enable better understanding of the nature of altruism in the intricate present-day interconnections between individualism and collectivism. The relationship between altruism and civil society is a dual process; different forms of altruism promote civil society and participating in civil society activities promotes altruism and altruistic values. In other words, civil society socializes us into further altruism. Altruism is usually thought to decrease when the group-size increases. Moreover, the further the group is from an individual, the less
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altruism. Civil society may transform perspective, even to global spheres. Involvement in civil society may ‘‘mess up’’ the circles; a group not so close to an individual might start to feel closer; it may come to represent one of the meaningful others to an individual, also in altruistic sense.
Cross-References
▶ Community Philanthropy ▶ Compassion ▶ Comte, Auguste ▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Durkheim, E´mile ▶ Gift, Giving ▶ Philanthropy ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Social Cohesion ▶ Solidarity
References/Further Readings Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003). The nature of human altruism. Nature, 425, 785–791. Felscher, A. E., & Worthen, D. L. (2007). The altruistic species: Scientific, philosophical, and religious perspectives of human benevolence. New York: Templeton Foundation Press. Field, A. J. (2004). Altruistically inclined? The behavioral sciences, evolutionary theory and the origins of reciprocity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gintis, H. (2003). Solving the puzzle of prosociality. Rationality and Society, 15(2), 155–187. Hardin, G. (1993). Discriminating altruism. In G. Hardin, (Ed.), Living within the limits (pp. 225–237). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunt, M. (1990). The compassionate beast. What science is discovering about the humane side of humankind. New York: William Morrow. Kohn, A. (1990). The brighter side of human nature. Altruism & empathy in everyday life. New York: Basic Books. Krebs, D. L., & Van Hesteren, F. (1992). The development of altruistic personality. In P. M. Oliner, et al., (Eds), Embracing the other. Philosophical, psychological, and historical perspectives on altruism (pp. 142–169). New York: New York University Press. Macaulay, J. R., & Berkowitz, L., (Eds.) (1970). Altruism and helping behavior: Social psychological studies of some antecedents and consequences. New York: Academic Press. Monroe, K. R. (1996). The heart of altruism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Montada, L., & Bierhof, H. W. (1991). Studying prosocial behavior in social systems. In L. Montada, & H. Bierhof, (Eds.), Altruism and social systems (pp. 1–26). New York: Hogrefe & Huber. Oliner, S. P., & Oliner, P. M. (1988). The altruistic personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: Free Press. Piliavin, J. A., & Charng, H. W. (1990). Altruism: A review of recent theory and research. Annual Review of Sociology, 16, 27–65. Rushton, J. P., & Sorrentino, R. M. (Eds.), Altruism and helping behavior: Social, personality and developmental perspectives. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Seidler, V. J. (1992). Rescue, righteousness, and morality. In P. M. Oliner, et al. (Eds.), Embracing the other. Philosophical, psychological, and
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historical perspectives on altruism (pp. 48–65). New York: New York University Press. Sober, E., & Wilson, D. S. (1998). Unto others. The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
AEI in 1954, Baroody led the organization for over 26 years coining its prominent slogan: ‘‘Competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society.’’ Many of AEI’s scholars and fellows were recruited by the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas
American Association of Retired Persons ▶ AARP
American Enterprise Institute ROBBIE WATERS ROBICHAU
AEI’s founding mission statement was to promote ‘‘greater public knowledge and understanding of the social and economic advantages accruing to the American people through the maintenance of the system of free, competitive enterprise.’’ The institute later changed its purpose statement to ‘‘defend the principles and improve the institutes of American freedom and democratic capitalism – limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate.’’
Activities Address of Organization 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20036 USA www.aei.org
Introduction The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) describes itself as one of America’s ‘‘oldest and most respected think tanks.’’ AEI is primarily dedicated to education and research on governmental issues such as politics, social welfare, and economics. It promotes fact-finding, empirical research on public policy topics that are distributed to various government officials, business executives, academics, and journalist across the United States.
Brief History Founded in 1943 during World War II, the American Enterprise Association (AEA) started out as a partnership between prominent policy experts (e.g., Roscoe Pound, Henry Hazlitt, Raymond Moley) and executives from the business and financial communities (e.g., Bristol-Myers, General Mills, Chemical Bank). From the beginning, the Washington, DC-based association was libertarian and conservative, but had a commitment to being nonpartisan, apolitical, and objective in their research. AEA wanted to ensure that Congress understood the economic consequences of their actions. Later changed to the American Enterprise Institute, the organization was highly influenced by William J. Baroody’s leadership. Joining
In its research and publication endeavors, AEI maintains an unbiased and nonpartisan approach. Through its employees, fellows, and scholars, the Institute publishes several books, monographs, e-newsletters, and periodicals as well as sponsors conferences, seminars, and lectures. One of their major publications, The American magazine, is distributed six times a year. A few of AEI’s projects include the National Research Initiative, Future of American Education Project, Global Governance Watch, and Reg-Market Center.
Structure and Governance AEI is designated as an education, nonprofit institute under the Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3). It employs approximately 190 individuals at their Washington, DC office and around 100 additional fellows and scholars located around the United States. Research is performed by three main research branches: Economic Policy Studies, Social and Political Studies, and Defense and Foreign Policy Studies. Additionally, AEI works with several other specialized programs such as the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies or the Brady Program on Culture and Freedom to perform its mission. A Board of Trustees governs AEI and selects the institution’s president. The Board and president are advised by the Council of Academic Advisers.
Funding In addition to receiving funding from their internal endowment, AEI primarily obtains funding from individuals, foundations, corporations, and its conferences, book sales, and other revenues. The organization rarely receives
Amnesty International
governmental grants and avoids engaging in contract research. AEI’s revenues were $31.3 million and its expenses were around $27.4 million in 2007. According to their website, over 80% of AEI’s resources go to supporting its research, publications, and conferences.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions AEI has contributed to government, business, and society’s awareness of public policy issues facing the United States through its many publications and conferences. Many of its scholars and fellows have received positions in presidential cabinets, testified before Congress, appeared on televised public affairs programs, and lectured on various topics. According to their website, AEI scholars have published more op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post than all other DC-based think tanks combined.
Cross-References ▶ Think Tanks
References/Further Readings Abelson, D. E. (2002). Do think tanks matter?: Assessing the impact of public policy institutes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rich, A. (2005). Think tanks, public policy, and the politics of expertise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weaver, R. K. (1989). The changing world of think tanks. Political Science and Politics, 22(3), 563–578.
Amnesty International REGINA LIST
Address of Organization International Secretariat 1 Easton Street London WC1X 0DW UK www.amnesty.org
Introduction Amnesty International (AI) describes itself as a ‘‘worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights.’’ AI has grown into one of the largest international NGOs with more than 2.2 million members, supporters, and subscribers in over 150 countries and territories.
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Brief History Amnesty International’s work began in 1961 when British lawyer, Peter Benenson, launched the ‘‘Appeal for Amnesty’’ with the publication of a widely reprinted article that brought attention to those imprisoned, tortured or executed because their opinions were unacceptable to government. Several months after the article’s publication, delegates from six European countries and the United States agreed to establish a permanent international movement to defend freedom of opinion and religion, and in 1962, delegates from 14 national groups decided to set up the organization known as Amnesty International.
Mission From its original mission to draw attention to prisoners of conscience, AI’s mandate has expanded in response to new needs and its own capacities. AI’s Statute states that its mission is ‘‘to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights.’’ At its 2007 International Council Meeting, AI’s leadership committed to the broader goal of ‘‘tackling poverty and disparity as the gravest global threats to universal human rights.’’
Activities To pursue its mission, AI combines research and publications, including reports, news releases, and urgent action alerts, with campaigns at the grassroots, national, international and inter-governmental levels. Recent global campaigns focus on torture and the ‘‘war on terror,’’ arms control, abolition of the death penalty, support for human rights defenders, refugees and migrants, among others. Members of AI’s Urgent Action network in some 70 countries respond to its alerts by sending correspondence to responsible parties to hinder specific cases of human rights abuse. AI’s annual reports on ‘‘The State of the World’s Human Rights’’ highlight its work and current concerns.
Structure and Governance AI is an unincorporated global movement, which includes formally organized ‘‘sections’’ in more than 50 countries, ‘‘structures,’’ i.e., aspiring sections, and international members. Its International Secretariat, led by a Secretary General appointed by AI’s International Council, is incorporated in the UK. In 2005–6, AI participated in the drafting of and adheres to the International Nongovernmental Organizations’ Accountability Charter.
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Funding Amnesty International’s work is financed primarily through individual contributions, special events, and donations from foundations and corporations. Although AI receives no governmental contributions for its campaigning, it does accept restricted funds for human rights education projects. The International Secretariat alone reported total expenditures of more than £28.8 million for the year ending March 31, 2006.
Accomplishments Among its other achievements, AI was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for its contributions to ‘‘securing the ground for freedom, for justice, and thereby also for peace in the world’’. In addition, for its innovative use of email, AI won ‘‘The Revolution Awards’’ for its ‘‘Stop Torture’’ website.
Cross-References ▶ Human Rights ▶ INGOs
References/Further Readings Clark, A. M. (2001). Diplomacy of conscience: Amnesty International and changing human rights norms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hopgood, S. (2006). Keepers of the flame: Understanding Amnesty International. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Power, J. (2001). Like water on stone: The story of Amnesty International. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Annenberg, Walter Hubert DAVID B. HOWARD
television. President Richard Nixon appointed Annenberg as Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Great Britain, for which he served from 1969 to 1974. Annenberg sold Triangle Publications to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $3 billion in 1988, enabling him to become one of the country’s most active philanthropists. He died in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania in 2002 at the age of 94.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Even in Annenberg’s early publishing and media career, he showed a desire to improve educational opportunities by way of television. One of the first to air educational programming on television, he was awarded the Alfred I. Dupont award in 1951 and the Marshall Field Award in 1958. He extended his interest in education by founding two separate Annenberg Schools of Communication – one at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 and one at the University of Southern California in 1971. In 1981, Annenberg pledged $90 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to put college courses on the air – the largest pledge in the history of public broadcasting. In 1991, Annenberg and wife Leonore donated their $1 billion Impressionist and Post- Impressionist art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Annenberg Foundation was established in 1989 to advance the public well-being through improved communication. In 1993, the foundation created the Annenberg Challenge, a $500 million, 5-year reform effort and the largest single gift ever made to American public education. This historic gift generated more than $600 million in matching funds. In 2006, the Annenberg Foundation was the 19th largest in the US with assets nearing $2.7 billion. Annenberg supported a variety of institutions over time, including presidential libraries, universities, hospitals, orchestras, children’s museums, and science centers. Throughout his lifetime, it is estimated that Annenberg donated over $2 billion.
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1908 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA) to a Jewish family, Walter H. Annenberg would become a pioneer in media and publishing, diplomat, and philanthropist. After taking over the family publishing business – Triangle Publications – in the early 1940s, Annenberg sought ways to expand the company just as television was becoming the next major communication medium. He created Seventeen Magazine for teenage girls in 1944 before establishing TV Guide, a weekly magazine about television programming, which became the most read and circulated magazine in the country by the 1960s. Over the years, Annenberg’s company delved into radio and television broadcasting, and he became an early pioneer in and supporter of public
Cross-References
▶ Grantmaking Foundations ▶ Philanthropy and the media
References/Further Readings Cervone, B. T. (1996). Walter H. Annenberg’s challenge to the nation: A progress report. Providence, RI: Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Cooney, J. (1982). The Annenbergs. New York: Simon & Schuster. Fonzi, G. (1970). Annenberg: A biography of power. New York: Weybright and Talley. The Annenberg Foundation (2005). Creating opportunities: Fifteen years of advancing the public good, from http://www.annenbergfoundation. org/usr_doc/Retrospective.pdf; 1/6/2009.
Anti-Slavery International
Anti-Slavery International PATSY KRAEGER
Address of Organization Thomas Clarkson House The Stableyard Broomgrove Road London SW9 9TL UK www.antislavery.org
Introduction Anti-Slavery International (ASI) describes itself as ‘‘the world’s oldest international human rights organization’’ claiming roots back to 1787 with the establishment of the first abolitionist society in England.
Brief History Anti-Slavery International is origins date back to 1787 with the establishment of the first abolitionist society in England. The organization’s early leaders included Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Thomas Clarkson, and other notable British Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists. In 1839, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was formed and in 1990 the society changed its name to AntiSlavery International.
Mission The original mission of the organization was a commitment to abolish slavery throughout the world. In the 1890s, the mission was expanded to abolish the ill treatment of indigenous peoples, merging with the Aborigines’ Protection Society in 1909. Today, the organization seeks to work against slavery and its related abuses throughout the world.
Activities Anti-Slavery International has two teams, a program and a communications team. The Program Team works with partner organizations around the world to collect information on: debt bondage, forced labor, forced marriage, the worst forms of child labor, human trafficking, and traditional slavery. Anti-Slavery International publishes information and works through international bodies in order to promote laws to protect those exploited by these practices. The Communications Team is comprised of campaign, education, and press officers who produce action briefings, educational materials, and a quarterly magazine
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called the Reporter, to inform both the public and policy makers about slavery issues around the world. AntiSlavery International also lobbies national governments, the United Nations and the European Union to adopt policies which will help to bring about the end of all forms of slavery.
Structure and Governance Anti-Slavery International is a British charitable and advocacy organization. It works with partner agencies throughout the world to abolish slavery and related abuses. The organization has a director, a staff of less than 25 and a Board of Trustees as well as affiliated worldwide partners.
Funding Anti-Slavery International’s work is financed primarily through public and private charitable trusts, foundations, individuals, governments, the European Union and other institutions. The organization reported £1,700,725 in funds received in 2006 and expenditures of £1,541,318 for that same year. Eighty percent of received funding goes directly into projects and campaigns.
Major Accomplishments In 2003, following ASI’s first national survey of slavery in Niger, the Niger Government introduced a new law against slavery with sentences of 30 years in prison for offenders. Within 6 months of this measure over 200 slaves were freed. In 2002, after years of pressure from Anti-Slavery International, the Nepalese Government passed a law declaring bonded labor illegal. In 2000, Anti-Slavery International initiated a new program with local partners in six West African countries to end the cross-border trafficking of children, leading to the first anti-trafficking network of its kind in the region.
Cross-References ▶ Advocacy ▶ Human Rights ▶ INGOs
References/Further Readings Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders. Ithaca, NY/ London, England: Cornell University Press. McDonagh, P. (2002). Communicative campaigns to effect anti-slavery and fair trade: The cases of Rugmark and Cafedirect. European Journal of Marketing, 36(5/6), 642–666. Sharman, A.-M. (Ed.) (1993). Anti-Slavery Reporter (Vol. 13, No. 8). London: Anti-Slavery International.
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ANZTSR ▶ Australia New Zealand Third Sector Research (ANZTSR) Inc.
APPC ▶ Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium (APPC)
Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) EVA DIDION
Address of Organization Heinrich-Albertz-Haus Blu¨cherstraße 62/63 10961 Berlin Germany www.awo.org
AWO was reconstituted in 1946 in the western sectors, this time independent from the Social Democratic Party, but nonetheless committed to the social democratic movement. AWO joined the ‘‘Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege,’’ an umbrella organization created in 1956, lobbying for the six large welfare organizations in Germany: Deutscher Caritasverband, Diakonisches Werk der EKD, AWO, German Red Cross, Parita¨tischer Wohlfahrtsverband – Parity and Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland. After the German reunification, AWO reestablished the organization in former East Germany.
Mission AWO is driven by the values solidarity, tolerance, freedom, equality, and justice, based on its history as part of the workers’ movement. AWO substantially differs from other voluntary welfare associations by proclaiming priority to public over private welfare organizations.
Activities
Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) is one of six central voluntary welfare associations in Germany. It describes itself as a ‘‘member association fighting for a socially just society and taking political influence.’’ This is achieved by voluntary action and professional services. 430,000 members, 100,000 volunteers and 146,000 professionals support the association and perform services in more than 14,000 facilities including about 2,100 residential homes with approximately 330,000 beds.
The activities of AWO comprise the whole sector of social work including stimulation of self-help, encouragement of voluntary work, offering and maintaining institutions and services in fields of healthcare, prevention and aid as well as support for women, children and adolescents. AWO is also engaged in education and foreign aid. Another important field is to comment on questions of public and private welfare and assist the planning of social services and institutions. AWO also addresses delegates of the democratic parties and thereby tries to participate in legislation on a local, federal, national, and European level. Finally, AWO collaborates with other associations and self-help groups. AWO’s bimonthly journal ‘‘Theorie und Praxis’’ informs about various aspects of social work.
Brief History
Structure and Governance
In 1919, the German Social Democratic Party founded the ‘‘Hauptausschuss fu¨r Arbeiterwohlfahrt’’ (Main Committee for Workers’ Welfare) as a social support organization aiming at more independence for workers from bourgeois poor relief and strengthening their self-help. The organization grew rapidly: in the mid-1920s the organization comprised more than 1,000 residential homes. The main initiator of the organization was Marie Juchacz (1897– 1956) who also became the first chairwoman. In 1933, the National Socialists banned the AWO. As a consequence, all institutions were either dissolved or taken over by the national socialist welfare organization. Marie Juchacz and other leaders left the country.
Members of the Federal Association are the 29 state or regional associations. Those are composed of 480 district and 3,800 local associations. The federal conference, consisting of 440 elected delegates, is the main decision-making body of the organization. The delegates meet every 4 years, elect the 19 board members, decide about membership fees, proposals and focus areas.
Introduction
Funding The federal association’s main sources of income are private grants and governmental subsidies. In 2006, those two sources together constituted €27.9 million. Other
ARNOVA
important financial sources are revenues from the association’s activities which added up to €9.7 million in 2006.
Cross-References
▶ Diakonisches Werk der EKD ▶ Umbrella Organizations
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ARNOVA in 1990; (e) the establishment of an awards program in 1993; (f) the hiring of the first paid executive director in 1994, and (g) the establishment of ARNOVA’s first sections in 1999. Today, ARNOVA has almost 1,300 members from 24 countries and is widely recognized for its leadership in the advancement of nonprofit and voluntary action scholarship.
References/Further Readings
Mission
Boessenecker, K.-H. (1995). Spitzenverba¨nde der freien Wohlfahrtspflege in der BRD: eine Einfu¨hrung in Organisationsstrukturen und Handlungsfelder. Mu¨nster, Germany: Votum-Verlag. Eifert, C. (1993). Frauenpolitik und Wohlfahrtspflege: zur Geschichte der sozialdemokratischen ‘‘Arbeiterwohlfahrt’’. Frankfurt/Main, Germany: Campus Verlag.
ARNOVA is a leading interdisciplinary community of people dedicated to fostering through research and education, the creation, application, and dissemination of knowledge on nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, civil society and voluntary action.
Activities
ARNOVA BARBARA A. METELSKY
Address of Organization 340 W. Michigan St., Canal Level, Suite A Indianapolis, IN 46202 USA www.arnova.org
Introduction The Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) is a nonprofit professional membership organization dedicated to advancing scholarship on nonprofit organizations and voluntary action. ARNOVA members include scholars and practitioners from the United States and abroad who conduct research on issues affecting the nonprofit sector. This research often informs nonprofit policy and practice.
Brief History In 1971, ARNOVA was founded as the Association for Voluntary Action Scholars (AVAS) by David Horton Smith. Funding for AVAS was provided by the Center for a Voluntary Society. Major historical milestones include: (a) the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Voluntary Action Research in 1972; (b) the convening of the first annual conference in 1974; (c) the journal’s name change to Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) in 1989; (d) the organization’s name change to
ARNOVA’s mission is advanced by three primary means: publications, an annual research conference, and dialog groups. ARNOVA publishes NVSQ and ARNOVA News. ARNOVA’s conference provides scholars with opportunities for dissemination and feedback on their research, and includes an awards program that honors and highlights outstanding achievement in nonprofit scholarship. Members are afforded ongoing opportunities for dialog through participation in ARNOVA-L (a listserve) and ARNOVA’s sections (subgroups focused on: Teaching; Community and Grassroots; Pracademics; Social Entrepreneurship/Enterprise; Theories, Issues, and Boundaries; and Values, Religion, and Deviance).
Structure and Governance ARNOVA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which is governed by a 15-member board of directors. The organization’s executive director and the coeditors of NVSQ serve as ex-officio directors. ARNOVA offers two membership types; individual and institutional. An annual membership meeting is held in conjunction with its conference.
Funding ARNOVA’s largest revenue sources are conference revenue and membership dues. Philanthropic support has come from individuals and foundations that include the Ford Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Accomplishments ARNOVA has undertaken several strategic initiatives that have focused on strengthening the community of nonprofit and voluntary action scholars by increasing membership growth, disciplinary diversity, and practitioner participation. As a result membership has grown from
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Article 19
an estimated 150 in 1976, to 464 in 1994, to 1,049 in 2000 to 1,287 in 2008. ARNOVA’s Occasional Paper Series has made a significant contribution by inviting leading scholars to examine pertinent issues in the field. Most recently, in partnership with the Council on Foundations and the Foundation Center, ARNOVA has established a ‘‘Research & Practice Think Tank.’’
Cross-References
▶ Council on Foundations ▶ Ford Foundation ▶ Foundation Center ▶ Lilly Endowment ▶ Mott Foundation, Charles Stewart ▶ Smith, David Horton
References/Further Readings Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action. 2007 annual report: A year of change and progress, from http://www. arnova.org/pdf/07AnnualReport.pdf; 12/10/2008 Johnson, T. E. (2004). Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). In D. Burlingame (Ed.), Philanthropy in America: A comprehensive historical encyclopedia (Vol. 1, pp. 35–37). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Smith, D. H. (2003). A history of ARNOVA. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 32(3), 458–472. Van Til, J. (1993). ARNOVA and its journal: Some reflections. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 22(3), 201–205.
expression’’ which includes the rights to ‘‘receive and impart information and ideas through any media.’’
Brief History The founding of the organization is based on the idea of the Chicago businessman Roderick MacArthur who worked towards the establishment of an organization focusing solely on the human right to freedom of expression and information on an international scope. After his early death, it was his son Greg who fulfilled his father’s vision and founded Article 19 in 1987.
Mission The basic idea of being an organization that supports defenders of freedom of expression and provides expertise for them was soon expanded to include advocacy and campaigning for freedom of expression and information worldwide. Article 19 is emphasizing the anchorage of freedom of expression and information in the human rights framework and regards these freedoms as central for the protection of other rights, be it basic ones like the right to food, medical care and housing or an accountable and transparent government. Article 19 is working with 80 partner organizations all around the world and is following a rights-based approach which means that it is focusing on the improvement of citizen participation in its decision-making processes at all levels.
Activities
Article 19 CLAUDIA BODE-HARLASS
Address of Organization 6-8 Amwell Street London EC1R 1UQ UK www.article19.org
Introduction According to the organization itself, Article 19 is a ‘‘global campaign for free expression’’ that ‘‘defends and promotes freedom of expression and freedom of information all over the world.’’ Its name is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states in its 19th Article that ‘‘everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and
Article 19 conducts a variety of different activities in order to fulfil its aim. Their monitoring and research on the situation of freedom of expression and information all around the world is accompanied by legal standard setting, the drafting of model laws to protect these freedoms and the promotion, campaigning and lobbying for legal change. Besides, the organization is conducting legal and professional trainings for relevant actors including NGOs, journalists, lawyers, and so on. Furthermore, the organization is supporting individuals whose rights have been violated, which can even include their litigation in national as well as international courts. A recent campaign is, for example, focusing on the freedom of the Burmese Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The organization’s work and findings are presented not only in their annual report but also in special reports, handbooks, and research papers on special issues as well as on certain countries.
Structure and Governance Besides its headquarters in London, Article 19 is also running field offices in Kenya, Senegal, Lebanon, Mexico,
Ashoka
and Brazil. The organization is headed by an international board consisting of lawyers, human rights activists and journalists from all over the world.
Funding The organization is funded by donations which it receives from individuals, foundations and governments. Regular supporters are, for example, the Norwegian Fritt Ord Foundation and the Open Society Institute. More recently, also the Ford Foundation became one of Article 19’s donors. Total revenues in 2007 amounted to just over ₤2 million.
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Environment, Health, Human Rights, and Learning/ Education. Globally, Ashoka has been electing Fellows for almost 30 years, and the Ashoka-US program is in its eighth year. A network of social entrepreneurs, Ashoka rewards fellows for their leading work in innovative social change.
Brief History
In 1989 Article 19 set up and coordinated the International Rushdie Defence Committee following the issuing of a fatwa against the author. Besides, the organization was one of the founding members of International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) established in 1992. Furthermore, it is the coordinator of the Global Transparency Initiative working against corruption.
Founded by Bill Drayton in 1980, Ashoka elected its first fellows in India one year later. During its first decade in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Central Europe, Ashoka focused exclusively on launching leading social entrepreneurs and helping them succeed. As the citizen sector evolved and grew in the 1990s, Ashoka responded with a wider range of programs and initiatives to deal with the sector’s growing needs. Ashoka grew as well, tripling in size from 1988 to 1990, and again from 1999 to 2002. Today Ashoka is in its third period of rapid growth, electing record numbers of Fellows recently and expanding its programs in Western Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.
Cross-References
Mission/Objective/Focus Area
Accomplishments
▶ Human Rights ▶ INGOs ▶ Transparency
References/Further Readings Boyle, K. (Ed.) (1988). Article 19 information, freedom and censorship. Cambridge: Keesing’s Reference Publications. MacDonogh, S. (Ed.) (1993). The Rushdie letters: Freedom to speak, freedom to write. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Ashoka ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization Ashoka Global Headquarters 1700 North Moore Street, Suite 2000 (20th Floor) Arlington, VA 22209 USA www.ashoka.org
Introduction Registered as a not-for-profit organization in the United States, Ashoka has established programs in over 60 countries and supports the work of over 2,200 Fellows in Civic Engagement, Economic Development,
Ashoka supports fellows that are leading social entrepreneurs whose work presents innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society.
Activities Ashoka’s supportive programming for elected fellows is represented through three areas of activities: Supporting Social Entrepreneurs, Promoting Group Entrepreneurs, and Building Social Infrastructure. In its work to support entrepreneurs, Ashoka awards fellows with a living stipend for an average of 3 years, allowing them to focus full-time on building their institutions and spreading their ideas. Through the initiative to promote group entrepreneurship, Ashoka facilitates collaboration among the fellows globally. Ashoka also assists the work of the fellows by building a social infrastructure, which includes seed financing and capital, bridges to the business and academic sectors, and strategic partnerships that deliver social and financial value. Other activities include Youth Venture, Ashoka’s organization on youth programming. Youth Venture invests in teams of young people to start and lead their own social ventures, and it is currently operating in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, India, South Africa, Thailand, France, Germany, and Spain. Ashoka’s Changemakers is another well known program that ‘‘open sources’’ innovative solutions to social problems worldwide. Changemakers has sourced over 500 high-impact action blueprints for solving social problems.
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Established as a separate organization in 1999, Changemakers granted over $2 million to community-based social change philanthropies. Due to economic and fundraising challenges, Changemakers discontinued its programming in October 2008.
Elkington, J. (2008). The power of unreasonable people: How social entrepreneurs create markets that change the world. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Yunus, M. (2008). Creating a world without poverty: Social business and the future of capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs.
Structure and Governance Ashoka’s 8-member Board of Directors serves the specific needs of both Ashoka and the social entrepreneurship movement. Bill Drayton serves as the Chair and CEO of Ashoka. As one of three members of the Leadership Team, his special responsibilities are leadership of the new group entrepreneurship and social financial services programs as well as staff search and marketing functions. Diana Wells serves as the organization’s President.
Funding At first funded with an annual budget of $50,000 from founder Bill Drayton’s own resources, the organization is now financed by individuals, foundations, and business entrepreneurs from around the world. Ashoka does not accept funding from government entities. Individual and institutional endowment funds provide for Ashoka’s long-term stability. As of the end of its 2007 fiscal year (8/31/2007), Ashoka reported total assets of $74,681,835 and total giving of $10,270,07.
Accomplishments Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. In 2005, he was selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. Other awards include the Yale Law School’s highest alumni honor, the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Achievement Award International, and the National Academy of Public Administration National Public Service Award. Notable fellows include Muhammad Yunus (Founder, Grameen Bank). Yunus was elected as a founding member of Ashoka’s Global Academy in 2001, and 2006, Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Cross-References
▶ Social Entrepreneurship ▶ Venture Philanthropy ▶ Yunus, Muhammad
References/Further Readings Bornstein, D. (2007). How to change the world: Social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium (APPC) CHRISTOPHER S. BIGGERS
Address of Organization 2nd Floor, Lexington Condominium 65 Xavierville Avenue Loyola Heights, 1108 Quezon City Philippines www.asiapacificphilanthropy.org
Introduction The APPC is an independent nonprofit association of organizations and philanthropic institutions, encouraging the growth and further development of philanthropy in the Asia-Pacific region. Through its extensive multinational network, the APPC contributes to the creation of international standards in the nonprofit sector by developing critical studies and making recommendations with partner organizations.
Brief History The APPC is the final culmination of three high level research conferences that took place in Bangkok (1989), Seoul (1993), and Osaka (1994). By the end of 1994, the APPC officially emerged as a nonmembership based informal network of grantmaking philanthropy institutions with its home established out of Manila in the Philippines. Since then, the APPC has worked diligently with governments, corporations, and individuals to further public awareness and fund-raising capacity establishing internationally recognized priorities and mechanisms to improve cooperation among regional players.
Mission The mission and objective of the APPC focus on the qualitative and quantitative aspects of philanthropy by helping build the ‘‘institutional infrastructures’’ as well as the proper ‘‘operating environment’’ for organizations in the region. In order to fulfill its mission, the Consortium acts as a vehicle to bring like minded individuals and
Asociacio´n Espan˜ola de Fundaciones
organizations together by addressing issues that affect the nonprofit sector and through disseminating operational knowledge at conferences and in policy papers.
Activities The APPC carries out projects focused on four major areas: policy advocacy, raising awareness, resource mobilization, and capacity building. In support of these areas, the Consortium maintains an active exchange program for grantmakers, legal experts, and NGO leaders in order to create a responsible and capable nonprofit community. In addition, the APPC hosts biannual conferences where leaders in the nonprofit sector gather to present ‘‘background’’ briefs and policy papers advocating new practices while raising awareness. Like most philanthropic organizations, the Consortium host fundraising events spearheading programs for corporate giving often coupled with corporate social responsibility campaigns.
Structure and Governance The structure and governance of the APPC is led by a 17 member Board of Directors made up of senior members from various philanthropic organizations, NGOs, and academic institutions. The Board includes a Chair, Deputy Chair, and Treasury positions as well as various honorary posts and subcommittees. Additionally, there is a Secretariat which functions as the primary administrative apparatus for the organization’s finances and research programs operating throughout the region.
Funding Since the APPC is not a membership-based organization, funding comes entirely from generous contributions of private and corporate foundations. Due to the success of the APPC and its sponsored events, funding has grown to include resources not only from the public and private sectors of the Asia-Pacific region but also from Europe and the Americas.
Accomplishments Among the Consortium’s most notable accomplishments include various corporate social responsibility campaigns launched throughout the Asia-Pacific area. Much of this effort grew out of the annual Asian Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility which the APPC has co-organized with the Asian Institute of Management’s RVR Center since 2002. Above all, the Consortium’s continued growth attests to the vitality of the organization despite the financial crisis and recent natural disasters that have plagued the region.
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Cross-References
▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Fundraising ▶ Philanthropy in Southeast Asia ▶ Social Capital
References/Further Readings Silk, T. (1999). Philanthropy and law in Asia: A comparative study of the nonprofit legal system in ten Asia Pacific societies. New York: Jossey-Bass.
Asociacio´n Espan˜ola de Fundaciones MARTIN HO¨LZ, REGINA LIST
Address of Organization
C/ General Castan˜os, 4 – 4a Planta 28004 Madrid Spain www.fundaciones.org
Introduction The Asociacio´n Espan˜ola de Fundaciones (AEF – Spanish Association of Foundations) is an umbrella organization, headquartered in Madrid, Spain, providing support to Spanish foundations and promoting the strength of the foundation sector.
Brief History AEF was created in January 2003 through the merger of the Centro de Fundaciones (Foundation Centre) and the Confederacio´n Espan˜ola de Fundaciones (Spanish Confederation of Foundations).
Mission/Objectives AEF’s obectives are threefold: to promote the foundation sector in Spain and to serve as its representative to the public at large; to provide information and services to its members and serve as a platform for exchange; and to strengthen the foundation sector by providing opportunities for networking and collaboration.
Activities AEF pursues these objectives through a variety of activities. As a representative of the foundation sector, AEF
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works with policy makers and participates in the formulation of reform measures. It also provides its more than 1,000 members advice in legal matters and offers courses and seminars on management and other topics. Through its publications, including Cuadernos de la Asociacio´n Espan˜ola de Fundaciones (Magazine of the Spanish Association of Foundations) and a weekly newsletter, AEF presents information about its members’ activities and analysis of pressing issues affecting the Spanish foundation sector. It also publishes a directory of Spanish foundations, the latest edition covering more than 8,600 foundations. Like many other umbrella organizations, AEF hosts affinity groups organized by topics, such as culture, employment, and environment, and by region (Consejos Autonomicos – Autonomous Advisory Groups). As part of its networking function, AEF cooperates with the European Foundation Centre and WINGS.
Structure and Governance As a membership organization, the highest governing body is its General Assembly of all members. A Board of Directors with a maximum of 33 members provides general direction. In 2009, the Board’s President was Carlos A´lvarez Jimenez and its honorary President was His Royal Highness Carlos de Borbo´n. An Executive Committee oversees the day-to-day operations. Rounding out the governance structure are an Advisory Board and a Patrons Board.
Funding Membership dues constituted the majority of AEF’s annual revenue of some €1.2 million.
Major Accomplishments Through a survey of its membership in 2007, AEF found that the majority of its members were satisfied in particular with its information-provision activities, including its publications and website, and its training and consulting services.
Cross-References
▶ European Foundation Centre ▶ WINGS
References/Further Readings Asociacio´n Espan˜ola de Fundaciones. (2007). Directorio de Fundaciones Espan˜olas. Madrid: Asociacio´n Espan˜ola de Fundaciones.
Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) ▶ ARNOVA
Association Franc¸aise contre les Myopathies ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Address of Organization 1, rue de l’Internationale BP 59 91 002 Evry Cedex France www.afm-france.org
Introduction The Association Franc¸aise contre les Myopathies (AFM) was established in 1958 and is one of the most active of many organizations focused on supporting medical research to cure genetic diseases and on bettering the living conditions of people afflicted by diseases. AFM is a nonprofit association regulated by the French law of 1901.
Brief History After having been founded in 1958 by a group of patients and their families, AFM was recognized as being of public utility by decree of March 26, 1976. In December 1987, AFM launched the first French telethon fundraising campaign. The idea of the telethon was ‘‘imported’’ from the United States in 1986 by Pierre Birambeau, a French entrepreneur whose child was affected by myopathy. He was looking for sponsoring and resources and went therefore to New York to learn about the telethon mechanism. He and AFM adopted a French version and introduced it successfully. AFM chose a major French television channel to host their first telethon show and the French Lions Club, whose members are volunteers, to answer the pledge calls. This campaign has since had growing success and involves temporary volunteers throughout France.
Association of Charitable Foundations
Mission The organization’s declared objective is to defeat neuromuscular diseases which are devastating muscle-wasting diseases.
Activities AFM has three major fields of activities. It promotes research that leads to a direct or indirect understanding of neuromuscular diseases. The research focuses on genetics, the treatment of diseases and the prevention of disabilities. Second, the organization is involved in the opinion-making process on a national and international level and provides financial and technical as well as moral assistance to patients. Third, AFM advocates for the social integration of patients.
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its privately-raised funds thereby breaking the quasimonopoly held by public agencies in France over the direction of basic research.
Cross-References
▶ Fund-raising ▶ Membership and Membership Associations
References/Further Readings Leat, D. (1989). Fund-raising and grant making: A case study of ITV Telethon’88. Kent: Charities Aid Foundation.
Association of Charitable Foundations Structure and Governance AFM is governed by a Board of Directors made up of patients and their families and elected by the General Assembly of members. This Board defines AFM’s policy and actions and makes decisions relating to its financial commitments. Within the Board, the Executive Committee makes decisions passed on to it by the Board, prepares the Board’s deliberations, implements them, and assists the general management in the day-to-day running of the Association. Every year, the Board appoints a new President. It also makes sure AFM’s general management implements the policy and actions that have been defined.
Funding AFM finances itself mainly through proceeds from its annual telethon, which have amounted to more than €100 million in 2006 and 2007. More than 80% of the proceeds are devoted to AFM’s research and advocacy activities, with less than 20% used for publicity, planning, and administration.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions One of AFM’s major contributions was the introduction to France of the telethon fundraising concept. The telethon is a unique fund-raising event combining a 20- to 30-hour televised show along with tens of thousands of local events, organized by volunteers. It has become almost the only means of collecting funds used by AFM. The second important contribution to civil society, besides of the exemplary telethon fundraising campaign was the establishment of the research center, Ge´ne´thon. It supports government-employed research teams with
DIANA LEAT
Address of Organization Central House 14 Upper Woburn Place London WC1H 0AE UK www.acf.org.uk
Introduction The Association of Charitable Foundations is the leading membership organization for foundations and grantmaking charities in the UK. It is based in London but holds various meetings and conferences in other parts of the UK.
Brief History ACF held its inaugural meeting in 1989 attracting representatives of 80 foundations. The creation of ACF was led by a group of eight foundations, despite opposition and apathy by some others. Those opposed to ACF’s creation were concerned that an association would detract from the autonomy and individuality of foundations, that it would encourage bureaucracy – and that it was unnecessary. After a feasibility study the eight supporting foundations decided to create an experimental organization (with a review after three or four years) designed to bring together trustees and administrators ‘‘which could where necessary carry the weight of the foundations themselves into discussions with government; which would bring a professional staff to develop notions of good practice in grantmaking (much aired orally) into practical guidance
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for those running trusts; and which would improve public understanding of foundations and of philanthropy, assist prospective settlers, and develop international links’’ (ACF, 1992: 3).
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas On the back cover of its news magazine, Trust and Foundation News, ACF today describes its role today as providing ‘‘help and support for the distinctive role of foundations, while respecting –and protecting – their independence. Through its services ACF provides a framework in which members can learn from each other’s experience, explore matters of common concern and achieve good practice in grantmaking.’’ ACF also has a strong track record on representing the common interests of foundations to government, regulators, and the media.
Activities ACF engages in a wide range of activities including a Professional Development Programme of ‘‘training’’ and development for grant-makers, as well as a series of special seminars on topics of current interest and concern to foundations; it runs conferences and special events and publishes studies and reports as well as a quarterly magazine – Trust and Foundation News – and a regular briefing paper on recent developments in the foundation world and in government. In addition ACF provides individual support to members and runs a series of Issue Based Networks (IBNs) on a variety of topics determined by members; the Woburn Place Collaborative – a group of funders committed to issues of social justice and environmental sustainability – is also administered by ACF. Philanthropy UK is a project of ACF to promote giving and is a leading resource for free and impartial advice to aspiring philanthropists. Philanthropy UK also publishes a quarterly free online newsletter. In recent years ACF has been increasingly involved in representing foundations in discussions with government and has been influential in gaining recognition of the special needs and interests of grantmaking foundations (previously treated as no different from operating charities). ACF maintains close links with other associations of foundations in Europe and throughout the world.
Structure and Governance ACF currently has over 300 members. ACF is governed by 15 trustees elected by the membership at the Annual General Meeting, and 8.4 FTE staff including 2 working for Philanthropy UK.
Funding ACF’s annual revenues of approximately £600,000 are secured predominantly from membership subscriptions and supporting grants from members, approximately £70,000 from sponsorships, and earned income.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions In 20 years ACF has moved from being a ‘‘minority’’ organization to an established part of the UK philanthropic landscape. It has been instrumental in changing the way in which foundations are perceived and perceive themselves, raised the profile and level of understanding of foundations within government and legislation, and contributed to the transparency and development of foundation thinking and practices. In these ways ACF has contributed to public benefit, to grant seekers and to grantmakers.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Umbrella Organizations
References/Further Readings ACF. (1992). The first three years 1989–1992. London: Association of Charitable Foundations.
Association of Fundraising Professionals LEIGH HERSEY
Address of Organization 4300 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 300 Arlington, VA 22203 USA www.afpnet.com
Introduction The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) is a membership-based organization that advances philanthropy. With more than 30,000 members, it is the largest organization in the world that represents the charitable fundraiser. The organization sets high standards for fundraising and emphasizes continuous growth of the fundraising professional.
Association of Fundraising Professionals
Brief History The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) was founded as the National Society of Fund Raisers (NSFR) in 1960, as the first association that represented the needs of the professional charitable fundraiser. The organization was formed by three fundraisers – William R. Simms of the National Urban League, Benjamin Sklar of Brandeis University and Harry Rosen of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Dr. Abel Hanson served as the first president. The organization served as the first to meet the needs of the charitable fundraiser by aiding in professional performance, promoting high standards for fundraisers, interpreting the objectives of fundraising to those in the profession and to the public, and encouraging research and grantmaking. In 2001, the name was changed to the Association of Fundraising Professionals to better reflect a broader scope of fundraising-related professions, including marketing, communications, advocacy, and public relations.
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fundraising issues and by hosting an annual international conference.
Structure and Governance AFP has 200 chapters worldwide, each with its own local level board of directors. While, most chapters are located in the United States, the areas of recent growth have been with the international and collegiate chapters. At the international level, the board consists of nine officers, 12 district representatives, and 11 at-large members. There is also an AFP – Canada which has its own governance structure.
Funding AFP is funded predominantly through its membership base. Approximately three-quarters of the $12.4 million received in FY 2007, came from membership dues, the annual conference, and registration fees. Another $1 million was received through contributions and grants. The organization spent approximately $13.3 million in the same FY.
Mission According to AFP documents, its mission is to ‘‘advance philanthropy by enabling people and organizations to practice ethical and effective fundraising. The core activities through which AFP fulfills this mission include education, training, mentoring, research, credentialing and advocacy’’. This mission evolved from the 2004–2006 Strategic Plan and was updated to reflect the changing role of the professional fundraiser.
Activities The Association participates in a variety of programming to support its mission statement. AFP was part of a group of four organizations that created the Donor Bill of Rights to help maintain donors’ confidence in philanthropic causes. The cocreators are the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP), the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), and the Giving Institute: Leading Consultants to Non-Profits. In the mid-1980s, AFP established the Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE) program for fundraising professionals committed to high standards. In 1997, the certification program merged with a similar program offered by the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy to establish an independent certification program known as CFRE International. An advanced certification program (ACFRE) is also available. The Association continues to educate fundraisers by conducting and disseminating research on current
Major Accomplishments/Contributions AFP has played an important role in enhancing the fundraising profession. In the 1990s, the organization testified before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Financial Accounting Standards Board to discuss impacts of proposed legislation on fundraising and the philanthropic community. The organization has also served as a forerunner in emphasizing ethical standards in fundraising, adding credibility to the profession. In 2008, AFP president and CEO Paulette Maehara was named to The Nonprofit Times’ annual ‘‘Power and Influence Top 50’’ list for the tenth consecutive year. The list recognizes leaders that impact and shape the nonprofit sector.
Cross-References
▶ Fundraising ▶ Professional Associations
References/Further Readings Association of Fundraising Professionals, from www.afpnet.org CFRE International, from www.cfre.org Chobot, R. B. (2004). Fundraising credentialing. New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising, 43, 31–49. The Non-profit Times. (2000). NSFRE to officially become AFP. The Non-profit Times, 14(21), 5. The Non-profit Times. (2008). The 2008 NPT Power & Influence Top 50. The Non-profit Times, 22(15), 17–22.
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Association pour le De´veloppement de la Documentation sur l’Economie Sociale
Association pour le De´veloppement de la Documentation sur l’Economie Sociale ▶ ADDES
Associations, Definitions and History ANNETTE ZIMMER Westfa¨lische Wilhelms-Universita¨t Mu¨nster, Mu¨nster, Germany
Introduction According to Talcott Parsons modern societal communities foster the proliferation of three distinct forms of social organization: markets, bureaucracies, and associations. As such associations constitute a central feature of modernity. Today’s universe of associations in democratic societies differs widely form premodern associational life. There is a clear distinction between traditional involuntary associations such as kin groups, castes, or communities and modern voluntary associations. Historically, the shift from involuntary groupings to the modern association has been made possible by the evolution of the concept of freedom of association. The coming into being of the concept was closely linked to modernity in terms of both the development of modern statehood and societal differentiation. Today, the concept constitutes an integral part of the majority of the constitutions of modern democracies, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulating that (1) everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association; (2) no one may be compelled to belong to an association (Art. 20). But associational life is by no means restricted to the world of politics. Looking back upon a long history that goes back to ancient times, in modern societies associations are ubiquitous: Associations are to be found all over the world, taking up very different tasks and duties. Besides associations being active in politics, there are those working on behalf of the business interest of their members, and others facilitating the private life of their membership by providing an institutional setting for a wide range of leisure activities. Against this background, associations constitute an interesting topic of research for various disciplines of the social sciences, amongst those at least history, sociology, political science, and third sector research. But, each discipline highlights different features and functions of associations. While historians, political
scientists and sociologists stress the importance of associations for processes of modernization and societal stratification as well as for interest politics and the formation of social capital, third sector research draws the attention to the economic dimension of associations, and thus to their service providing functions. Therefore, what makes associations such a fascinating topic for the social sciences is closely connected with their multitasking and indeed multifunctional character (Fig 1). As lobbyists and interest organizations associations are supporting as well as criticizing government; as service providers they are working on par with for-profit business enterprises; and as membership organizations they are embedded in social milieus, providing avenues for civic engagement and societal integration. In sum, associations are not an easy topic to address. What makes it even more complicated is the fact that associations do not restrict their scope of activities to just one level of operation. Instead, many of them are complex organizations with local, regional, federal, and even international chapters and departments. Moreover, there are many associations based on individual membership; however, there are also many umbrella organizations or consortia which do not allow for individual membership but are exclusively based on organizations and thus on corporate actors. In order to understand the complex universe of associations it is necessary to both differentiate between the various levels of analysis of associational research and take the respective environment of the associations in terms of their political, legal, and social, and thus historical and regional embeddedness into account. Due to the legacy of history there are culturally and thus regionally bound differences. Associational life in the USA differs from the situation with which associations are faced in the
Associations, Definitions and History. Fig. 1 Multifunctional character of associations
Associations, Definitions and History
developing world or in West Europe or in the countries of the former so-called Eastern bloc. According to the level of analysis, research questions and topics that are addressed with respect to associations as well as the theoretical perspectives and methodologies applied in associational research differ significantly: At the micro- or individual/personal level which traditionally has been linked to the investigation of political culture, associations are looked upon as vehicles for civic engagement and participating. Hence, at the micro-level of analysis associations are currently investigated by applying the social capital approach. The meso- or organizational level constitutes the prime arena of third sector research. This level of analysis has traditionally been addressed by organizational theory. Currently with respect to associations, the central topics of research focusing on the meso-level are issues of associational leadership, management, and governance. Finally, research topics addressed at the macro level have always aimed at investigating impact and importance of associations for the society at large as well as for the political system. Democratic theory and civil society research are the most important approaches of associational research at this level of analysis. Since there is no chance of covering all the topics and research questions linked to the study of associations, in the following selected issues will be highlighted, particularly the topics of how to define and how to develop a typology of associations, as well as the historical background of the differentiation of associational research.
Definition According to David Sill’s classical definition an association is an organized group of persons (1) that is formed in order to further some common interest of its members; (2) in which membership is voluntary in the sense that is neither mandatory nor acquired through birth; and (3) that exists independent from the state (Sills, 1968: 363). Hence associations are membership-based organizations that – guided by interests – are independent from the state apparatus, although they might cooperate intensively with government, and of which membership is not compulsory. Definitions based in an Anglo-Saxon context typically focus on the voluntary dimension of associations. Providing prime avenues for social participation, volunteering, and discourse, associations constitute an important part of the infrastructure of civil society that in the words of Habermas, Walzer, Dahrendorf, and other civil society scholars is characterized as an intermediary organizational field functioning as a public sphere between state, economy, and private life. In contrast to stressing the embeddedness of associations in civil society,
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Max Weber took a different approach by defining association as a domain of sovereign rule. This definition focuses on the steering and ruling capacities of associations. It is particularly referred to in Continental Europe, where the term association is primarily used for large, encompassing organizations that often are integrated into corporatist governance arrangements, and as such are working on par or at least in close cooperation with government. Associations that are small and membershipbased organizations operating first and foremost at the local level are generally referred to as voluntary organizations and more specifically as clubs in Europe, and in many countries that once belonged to one of the European Empires such as the British Commonwealth. Clubs are supposed to generate high degrees of reciprocity among their members, and they are generally associated with notions of sociability that is facilitated by an active club life. Despite these differentiations in Europe and elsewhere the term association is used in the sense that excludes primary groups and commercial companies but admits an exceptionally wide area of institutions and organizations that – pervading every functional sector of society – ranges from business related activities, trade, and labor unions, clubs, churches, and congregations, civic service associations, third sector organizations, social welfare councils, self-help groups, secret societies, professional societies, and other ‘‘collectivist organizations’’ (Knoke, 1985: 212). Against this background, a variety of typologies has been developed, each of those, depending on the respective discipline, focuses on certain features and functions of associations. Typologies developed in political science structure the universe of associations according to policy fields or area of pressure politics; those referred to in sociology highlight the societal dimension of associations; and finally typologies and models based in organizational theory take a look at associations from a public choice perspective. Many typologies categorize associations with respect to their area of activity. These classifications are outward-bound highlighting the functions of associations for their members and the society or polity at large. They broadly distinguish between associations that foster the self-interest of their members and those working either on behalf of a third party (i.e., children, the elderly) or for the advancement of a public purpose and/or common good (i.e., human rights or clear water). This specific type of typology, which is closely linked to policy fields, is commonly referred to in political science (Table 1). Gordon and Babchuk (1959) added a further dimension to those typologies differentiating between associations either working on behalf of their members
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(expressive association) or fostering the common interest (instrumental association). By introducing the variables ‘‘accessibility-’’ and ‘‘status-conferring capacity of the association,’’ Gordon and Babchuk drew the attention to the prestige factor of associational membership. Their typology highlights that associations significantly Associations, Definitions and History. Table 1 Typology of associations according to fields of activity 1. Business and labor relations Business, employers and professional associations Labor unions Consumer organizations 2. Social services and health Service organizations, e.g., the German Welfare Associations Interest associations, e.g., Association for the Blind Self-help groups, e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous 3. Leisure and sports Leisure clubs, e.g., Sports clubs, gardening societies Hobby associations, e.g., Carnival societies Service clubs, e.g., Zonta, Rotary 4. Religion, science, the arts and humanities Churches, sects, and religious congregations Scientific associations, e.g., International Political Science Association (IPSA) Arts societies, e.g., Friends of the Boston Symphony Orchestra 5. Promotion of public goods Ecological associations, e.g., Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth Human rights, e.g., Amnesty International, Society for Threatened People Source: von Alemann (1989: 71)
contribute to the stratification of modern societies. This specific type of typology is helpful for studies that aim at providing a sociological portrait of a community or society (Table 2). Finally, there are typologies that take a closer look at the structural dimension of associations. They are helpful for analyzing governance problems of organizational structure and control. In a very broad sense these typologies distinguish between centralized and federalized organizations. The ‘‘centralized type’’ of association is modeled in accordance with a ‘‘corporate or hierarchical governance structure’’ (Anheier and Themudo, 2002: 316ff.). A characteristic feature of this model is a topdown approach of decision making that leaves little room to maneuver for departments or chapters and for associated membership organizations. The Catholic Church or Greenpeace are organized according to the ‘‘corporate model.’’ Associations modeled according to the ‘‘federation type’’ constitute loosely coupled systems, which give way to a larger degree of membership participation (individual or corporate) and hence democratic decision making within the organization. The Red Cross, the Diakonie and the Protestant Church are federalized associations. Charles Handy (1988) developed a typology categorizing associations in accordance with their organizational culture. He differentiated between a club, a role, a task and a person culture of associations as voluntary organizations. Associations with a club culture are ruled by a very strong leader, in the words of Handy by ‘‘Zeus, the king of gods in Ancient Greece. . . a very personal ruler with the habit of direct interventions’’ (Handy, 1988: 86). Associations based on a role culture are highly structured and formalized organizations, where everybody knows what he or she has to do. Associations developing a task culture are governed in accordance with the managerial approach of ‘‘management by objectives.’’ The ‘‘person culture’’ is a highly individualistic approach of running an association.
Associations, Definitions and History. Table 2 A typology of voluntary associations High accessibility High status
Low status
Low accessibility High status
Low status
Instrumental
Young Republican Club
Klu Klux Klan
League of Women
Instrumental–expressive
Kiwanis
American Legion
American Sociological Society
Alcoholics Anonymous
Expressive
Boy Scouts of America
YMCA
Daughters of the American Revolution
Omega
Source: Gordon and Babchuk (1959: 28)
Associations, Definitions and History
According to Handy ‘‘stars, loosely grouped in a cluster or constellation, are the image of a person culture’’ (Handy, 1988: 92). Referring to Handy’s typology, the reader might like to identify the culture of the association of which he or she is a member.
Historical Background The work of historians clearly shows: Associations have constituted the most important societal force since the beginning of modernity. There have been forerunners of the modern associations in earlier times. A case in point were burial funds in Ancient Greece and Rome as well as traditional guilds and brotherhoods in the Middle Ages. However, membership in these social entities was obtained by birth or marriage, and therefore not based on the premises of the ‘‘freedom of association.’’ The diversification of the associational universe constitutes in itself a historical development. At the beginning of modernity, in terms of terminology there was no differentiation between various groups, organizations, and institutions. Association was used as a catchall term for describing any groupbased activity, either business or public purpose oriented. "
‘‘In truth’’ wrote William Ellery Channing as early as 1829, ‘‘one of the remarkable circumstances or features of our age is the energy with which the principle of combination, or of action by joint forces, by associated numbers, is manifesting itself. . . Those who have one great object find one another out through a vast extent of county, join forces, settle their mode of operation, and act together with the uniformity of a disciplined army.’’ (Schlesinger, 1944: 9)
Today, there is a remarkable variety of terms and expressions related to the realm of associational life, ranging from formal and sometimes highly institutionalized organizations (NGOs and NPOs) to loosely coupled groups and networks which came into being and still are operating in the context of social movements. The diversification of associational life including the development of specific legal forms constitutes the outcome of societal differentiation that – having started in the late Middle Ages – came to full swing in the course of the nineteenth century. One of these differentiations is related to the purpose of the association and distinguishes between (1) associations whose goal is linked to business activities or making a living for its members, and (2) those that are serving the common weal. Among those organizational forms and legal stipulations that serve the business interests of the association’s membership, cooperatives, and mutual associations/societies count most prominently. Although in many countries in the second half of the
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nineteenth century, legal stipulations for business related activities of associations were developed, this was rarely the case with respect to activities of associations advancing the common weal. Instead of enjoying a special legal form, in many countries associations serving a public purpose are still exclusively acknowledged by the tax laws. The German legal stipulation Verein represents a case in point. A Verein is a legal entity that thoroughly fulfills the criteria of David Sill’s definition. However, in order to be filed as an instrumental association serving the common weal, the organization has to be checked by the respective fiscal authority that is entitled to both granting tax privileges and withdrawing the legal status of a public benefit association. The Verein, codified as a legal entity under the rule of the German Empire, served at that time as a textbook example and blueprint for the development of legal stipulations in many other European countries, particularly in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. A differentiation of the associational universe that was closely linked to the development of the modern state is related to the scope of associational activity. All over the world, in Europe and in the US associations started as small locally based organizations. In the course of the nineteenth century, alongside with a significant growth in membership, many of these organizations extended their scope of operation significantly by setting up regional, federal, and even international chapters. The associational universe developed from a local club culture into a multilevel setting of highly structured, federalized organizations which, like trade unions, parties, and other traditional associations, always were and still are based on individual membership, but nevertheless express a high degree of bureaucracy. The various layers of the organizational setting of the multilevel associations were set up in accordance with the administrative layers of government. Today with respect to organization-building history repeats itself. With globalization and Europeanization, associations are becoming more and more active at the European and at the global level of governance, while the national level as a prime area for lobbying activities of associations is increasingly losing importance, particularly in the European setting. Modernity in the sense of economic proliferation via the breakthrough of the capitalistic market economy and the softening of the three estates of the Middle Ages were the driving forces of the ‘‘associational revolution’’ in the nineteenth century. Avenues for new societal alignments and hence for a blossoming of associational life were opened up in Europe, the USA, and in any region and country where the trends of modernity took roots. Comparing different regions and cultures, there are many
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similarities with respect to the distinctive periods of associational life, which were identified by associational research. However, depending particularly on the political environment of associations, there are also striking differences between regions and countries. If a distinction is made in accordance with the work of Ulrich Beck between ‘‘early modernity,’’ ‘‘classical modernity,’’ and ‘‘postmodernity,’’ there are specific types of associations that were embedded in social movements and put forward by representatives of a particular social class and are typical for each period. However, in addition to these commonalities, there are also, depending on the political and economic environment of the respective association, distinctive differences that set the associational movement in the USA apart from the development in other countries, and particularly in Europe at that time (Table 3). Typical for the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were associations that were founded by members of the growing bourgeoisie and took up issues of political life and self-governing. These associations constituted the building units of a public sphere and self-governed communities. ‘‘Salons,’’ ‘‘reading and secret societies,’’ ‘‘fraternities and brotherhoods’’ as well as ‘‘patriotic societies,’’ which were associations taking up local welfare related issues, were founded all over Europe, and in the USA. Associations facilitating various kinds of leisure activities ranging from sports to singing or gardening became popular all over the western hemisphere from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Indeed, the industrial revolution along with urbanization significantly furthered the growth of associations. The world of business, labor relations and party politics was increasingly organized via associations. In close alliance with trade unions, associations were also founded in order to buffer the risks of industrial life. Besides friendly societies, which were the forerunners of health and accident insurance, housing and consumer cooperatives facilitated the daily life of workers in the industrial centers and of farmers in the
deprived rural areas. The second half of the nineteenth century also stands out for the proliferation of business and labor associations in the sense of large and federalized organizations whose daily operations were and still are managed by professional bureaucrats. Doubtlessly, the emergence of the federalized countrywide operating association, organized in regional chapters and local departments, was in accordance with the organizational culture of the time. The world of country and even worldwide operating associations resembled the business world that at that time was dominated by huge agglomerates of corporations that combined under one ownership many companies operating in numerous locations. Moreover, this era also witnessed the foundation of many associations lobbying for humanitarian purposes such as the International Red Cross or the American Conference of Social Work (Schlesinger, 1944: 17). In order to round up the picture of the associational universe of ‘‘classic modernity’’ the foundation boom of those associations has to be mentioned which still today operate for the promotion of professional and particularly research interest such as the Association for Social Policy in Germany or the American Political Science Association. The period of ‘‘classical modernity’’ doubtlessly constituted the heyday of associational growth and proliferation. Nevertheless, ‘‘postmodernity’’ again paved the way for new forms of associations and societal groups. The international area became a prime field of associational operation. Alongside the internationalization of ecological, social, and political problems began the development of nongovernmental organizations that are associations, which primarily operate internationally. Associations of the postmodernity period again have much in common with the modern business enterprise. They are loosely coupled ‘‘network organizations,’’ managed by a highly professionalized central unit. In contrast to the federalized associations of the former period, the modern association is no longer primarily financed by membership dues.
Associations, Definitions and History. Table 3 Associational life over time Era
Early modernity
Classical modernity
Postmodernity
State
Liberal state
National welfare state
Postmodern state
Economy
Farming
Heavy industry
Service industry
Society
Development of the bourgeoisie
Societal differentiation, development of societal milieus
Individualization, privatization of milieus
Associations
Salons, reading societies, charity associations
Trade unions, professional ass., business, and employers ass., service clubs, leisure clubs, parties, cooperatives, mutual societies
Self-help groups, NGOs, clubs
Source: Zimmer (2007: 48)
Associations, Definitions and History
Instead it relies on income of fundraising drives and sponsoring as well as on the income of merchandizing. A further significant feature of associational life in the postmodern period translates into the division of labor between the professional center and the supporting periphery of the modern associations. The professionals of the associations are responsible for both campaigning and effective lobbying, primarily conducted in the capitals of the world. Although the periphery of the supporting membership and affiliated organizations have no say in associational politics, they are nevertheless supposed to guarantee the regional and local embeddedness of the respective association. This particular division of labor where the members no longer enjoy the right of democratic participation within the organization gave way to a sharp critique of well-known scholars such as Theda Skocpol (1999) and Robert Putnam (1995).
International Perspectives Despite common features and similarities, associational life has always been country-bound and thus reflecting the political, social, and economic embeddedness of the respective organization. In the USA, from the very beginning, associational life has been influenced by ‘‘American Exceptionalism’’ (Lipset, 1996), which ever since has set it apart from the development in European countries. Two cultural features were distinctive for the early associational movement in the USA: First, unlike in Europe, in the post-feudal society of the US associations were not necessary for bridging class distinctions between the nobility and the new classes of entrepreneurs and professionals. In Europe, associations provided an important tool for the democratization of both state and society. Secondly, ‘‘the United States is the first country in which religious groups became voluntary organizations’’ (Lipset, 1996: 61). Indeed, it was religion as one central domain of societal life where associational life firstly took roots the USA. In European societies, churches have traditionally been linked to the state. Although secularization constituted one important step of modernization, in many European countries, there has never been a clear-cut division between the two powers of the state and the churches. The reason associational life in America proliferated to such an extent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century that it attracted the admiration of Alexis de Tocqueville and many others, Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci included, has to be judged against the very different societal and political backgrounds of Europe and the USA at that time. While Europeans slowly embarqued on their way to democratize state and society with the
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help of associations, Americans – with the exception of blacks and women – already lived in a modern democratic society, in which associations were legitimate tools for selforganization and democratic governance. Against this background, associations in the USA developed into an expression of ‘‘liberal democracy’’ in the sense that associations safeguard the rights of the citizenry vis a vis the state. Compared to the USA, in many European countries, government – association relationships took a very different road. That is why from a comparative perspective civil society differs significantly in the various regions of the world. Particularly in Continental Europe, in Germany and partially also in Austria, the authoritarian state – by recognizing the power of associations at a very early stage of modernity – incorporated these organizations into its modernizing strategies. A textbook example is provided by Germany, where in the course of the nineteenth century traditional guilds as well as modern associations active in the area of social services and health were acknowledged as private legal entities operating in close cooperation with the local, regional, and federal authorities. The ‘‘German Free Welfare Associations’’ (Caritas, Diakonie) were integrated into a particular public-private partnership that backed by the principle of subsidiarity developed into a very specific arrangement of corporatism after the Second World War (Zimmer, 1999). Again, in Eastern Europe associational life took a very different path. In the nineteenth century, these countries by and large did not enjoy sovereign rule but were governed either by Austria, Prussia, or Russia. In all these countries, associations active in the area of the arts and culture blossomed and enjoyed widespread public support because these associations worked on behalf of and for the advancement of a national identity. Consisting of numerous singing clubs, salons, and theater associations and societies this was a civil society against the state that developed in Eastern Europe, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the associational revolution that took place in the majority of the Eastern European countries took up the tradition of antietatism: Civil society was conceptualized as an institutional alternative against the state. Compared to Central and also Eastern Europe the Scandinavian countries look back upon a very different story with respect to government – associational relationships. Since the period of ‘‘classic modernity’’ associations are acknowledged by the state enjoying a high degree of legitimacy, particularly in Sweden. But, in contrast to Germany, associations are not incorporated into the social service production of the welfare state.
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They are primarily perceived as either pressure groups acting on behalf of the interests of their members or as self-governing entities, and thus clubs primarily organizing leisure activities for their membership. This is the case because according to the political scientists Scandinavia stands out for a developmental or social democratic model of democracy, in which the state guarantees and facilitates civic participation via associations without incorporating the organizations into policy implementation strategies. In sum, while in the US associational life has always been an expression of self-governing that is distinct from the state, associational life, particularly in Continental Europe has developed either in the shadow of or even against the state, whereas in Scandinavia associational life has been organized in accordance with the so-called arms-length principle: The state facilitates associational activities including lobbying and hence distances itself from putting the organizations under its control.
Key Issues/Future Directions Depending on the level of analysis as well as on the discipline very different topics are addressed as key issues of both the further development of associational life and research. For political scientists addressing a macro level topic, a key concern definitely constitutes the question of the relationship between democracy and associations. The questions are whether, to what extent and how associations as the infrastructure of civil society contribute to the functioning, strength, and advancement of democracy both in countries which look back upon a long and enduring tradition of democratic rule and also in countries that have just recently moved into the direction of democratization. Indeed, since the work of de Tocqueville the topic of the associational underpinning of democracy has been a key issue of associational research that in the post-socialist countries and in many other regions of the world is enjoying a high priority. Key issues addressed at the meso-level and thus focusing on the organizational dimension of associational life are also connected to the topic of democracy. However, with respect to the organizational setting, particularly researchers of organizational theory have since the seminal work of Max Weber and Robert Michels always asked for innovative ways to overcome problems of bureaucratization and oligarchization in the sense of the establishment of an informal leadership of the very few that are increasingly deprived of democratic legitimacy but nevertheless continue to act on behalf of the membership. A new issue of the meso-level of associational research is the topic of competition among associations and between
associations and business entities. Along with the shift from the welfare state to a welfare society all over the world, associations are increasingly referred to as service providers. Documented by the results of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, service provision of associations constitutes a growing segment of modern economies. However, since service provision of associations is no longer generously subsidized by the state, the organizations have to turn to the market in order to safeguard their organizational survival. This puts them in direct competition with service providers of the business sector. But, competition and increasing engagement in business activities has a significant impact on the culture and governance of associations. Due to the growth of the association in size and particularly employed workforce, the organizations become more and more businesslike. Accordingly, commercialization and professionalization are key buzzwords of the current debate related to associations, particularly in Europe. Moreover, these trends are not restricted to large supraregional associations. Many locally active clubs, specifically in sports, are increasingly faced with competition from for-profit providers, and hence tending to shift their governance structure and organizational culture towards the business sector. For these associations what will the future look like? Will they be able to safeguard the uniqueness of associational life that still relies on reciprocity among the members of the association; or will they end up as professionally run small business entities? In recent decades the micro-level and thus the capacity of associations to provide avenues for civic participation and engagement have been key concerns of research. Bewildered by the results of quantitative surveys, social researchers all over the world were afraid of facing a significant downturn in civic engagement that might translate into a loss of overall trust and social capital. Particularly Robert Putnam (1995) but also others feared that due to the widespread tendency of ‘‘bowling alone’’ among citizens, also the ‘‘old democracies’’ have to face a transformation and deterioration of their political culture. Although the results of recent surveys did not confirm the hypothesis of a citizenry that increasingly turns its back to civic engagement and volunteering, citizens, nevertheless, do not trust the democratic institutions such as the parliament, the political parties or the politicians leading the country. In other words: This topic continues to be on the agenda. The same holds true for another key issue of associational research investigated at the micro-level. Does associational membership foster bridging or bonding capital? The topic whether associations facilitate the integration of their members into the
Associative Democracy
community and the society at large or, to the contrary, whether they have an impact just in the opposite direction by preventing particularly members of ethnic minorities and migrants from getting access to the old-established members of local communities still constitutes an open question that is of high relevance particularly against the background of the increased multiethnicity of local communities worldwide.
Cross-References
▶ Caritas Internationalis ▶ Churches and Denominations ▶ Civil Society Theory: Dahrendorf ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci, Antonio ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Walzer ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Cooperatives and Employee Ownership ▶ Corporatism ▶ Diakonisches Werk der EKD ▶ Freedom of Association ▶ International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ Mutual Organizations, Mutual Societies ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Definition and History of ▶ Professional Associations ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Secret Societies ▶ Self-help Groups ▶ Skocpol, Theda ▶ Sociability ▶ Social Capital ▶ Social Movements ▶ Subsidiarity ▶ Weber, Max
References/Further Readings von Alemann, U. (1989). Organisierte Interessen in der Bundesrepublik. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Anheier, H., & Themudo, N. (2002). Fu¨hrung und management in internationalen Mitgliederorganisationen. In C. Frantz & A. Zimmer (Eds.), Zivilgesellschaft international: Alte und neue NGOs (pp. 304– 325). Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Gordon, W. C., & Babchuk, N. (1959). A typologo of voluntary associations. American Sociological Review, 24, 22–29. Handy, C. (1988). Understanding voluntary organizations. London: Penguin Books. Knoke, D. (1985). The political economies of associations. Research in Political Sociology, 1, 211–242. Lipset, S. M. (1996). American exceptionalism. A double-edged sword. New York/London: Norton.
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Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–77. Schlesinger, A. (1944). Biography of a nation of joiners. The American Historical Review, L(1), 1–25. Sills, D. L. (1968). Voluntary Associations II: Sociological aspects. In D. L. Sills (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences (pp. 362–379). New York: Macmillan. Skocpol, T. (1999). Advocates without members: The recent transformation of American civic life. In T. Skocpol & M. Fiorina (Eds.), Civic engagement in American democracy (pp. 461–509). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Zimmer, A. (1999). Corporatism revisited – The legacy of history and the German nonprofit-sector. Voluntas, 10(1), 37–49. Zimmer, A. (2007). Vereine – Zivilgesellschaft konkret. Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag.
Associative Democracy NICOLA JONES, HANNAH MARSDEN Overseas Development Institute, London, UK
Introduction Given growing concern about the state of democracy and governance more broadly in the developed as well as developing worlds, revisiting different schools of thought on democratic models is of critical contemporary importance. Associative democracy – referring to a model of democracy where power is highly decentralized and responsibility for civic well-being resides with like-minded civic associations – is one such model. On the one hand, the model has specific sociocultural roots in early twentieth century Britain (Cole, 1930, in Hirst, 1989), and again in efforts under the New Labour Government (1997–) to recraft the relationship between citizens and the state in the management of new welfare architecture (Lister, 2005). On the other hand, however, associative democracy, with its focus on combating growing individualism and fears about the unbridled power of the state, clearly has wider relevance for thinking about the role of civil society in an international context. It raises important questions about state-civil society relations, as well as about the characteristics, composition, and role of civil society itself, at the subnational, national, and international levels.
Definition/Historical Background The concept of associative democracy emerged in the context of fears of growing centralized state power and authority in the 1920s and 1930s. Political pluralists such
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as Cole, Figgis, and Laski promoted an associative democracy model, in which groups sharing a ‘‘common purpose,’’ such as churches and trade unions, contribute to social wellbeing. To allow ordinary citizens regular participation in the structures of society, the approach called for power to be decentralized and dispersed among associations (Hirst, 1989: 188). "
A well-organised society is one in which not merely is the administration good, but the wills of the members of the community active, and find expression through the various associations and institutions of which society is made up. (Cole, 1930, in Hirst, 1989: 89)
Since the 1980s, Hirst (2001, in Hirst and Bader, 2001) has pointed to the increased hierarchal control of governments, arguing that associative democracy represents the ‘‘real third way’’ between free-market individualism and centralized state control. Associative democracy offers a means to establish organization amongst increased societal plurality and complexity. ‘‘Associationalism is defined by its combining of pluralism with a cooperative mutualism.’’ It is the ‘‘collection of the diverse’’ (Martell, 1992: 168, 170). Within this model, voluntary organizations, based on cooperation and self governance, would play a greater role in providing public services. Although resourced and protected by the state, such organizations should also act as a counterbalance to state power. ‘‘Associative democracy aims at a manageable and accountable state’’ writes Hirst (1994: 20). In a globalized context, Edwards suggests the role of civil society to be in negotiating the ‘‘social contracts between governments and citizens that development requires’’ (2004: 13). Group cooperation in political life is a critical component of Cohen and Rogers’ model of associative democracy (1995: 34). There is however the risk of emerging factions within associations. Thus, the state’s role is seen to be in ‘‘curbing’’ such instances and encouraging associations to be more ‘‘other-regarding’’ (Perczynski, 1999: 8). "
The way to do this is to stand by the idea of autonomous and diverse individuals and interests in society but to integrate them into systems of association and pluralist social negotiation within which they must pursue their own identities and interests in negotiation with others and with regard for others’ priorities. Associational democracy describes a political structure and system of relations intended to facilitate the pluralist social negotiation of social priorities. (Martell, 1992: 169)
More recent discussions are heavily influenced by the work of Tocqueville (1840, in Goldhammer and Zinz,
2004) and his concern with the decline in associations based on reciprocal and common activity in the context of industrialization and commercialism. Associative democracy proponents call for a ‘‘lively public sphere,’’ in which citizens discuss and criticize public issues, as an antidote to the rise in individualism and a more powerful state in America (McLaverty, 1998). This call for renewed associational life has gone hand in hand with a revival of communitarian approaches, including Etzioni’s (1993) work which held that community institutions should rebuild America’s ‘‘social base.’’ Associative democracy approaches are primarily concerned with citizens’ involvement in formalized groups. Associations are to function within institutionalized politics, through managing resources and channeling voices in an organized fashion in order to achieve ‘‘a radical, but nonauthoritarian redistribution of economic and political power’’ (Hirst, 2001 in Hirst and Bader, 2001: 15). This emphasis is distinct from the concept of participatory democracy which is based on dialog and deliberation at the grassroots level, but does not necessarily involve associations given that not all citizens can or wish to be mobilized into formal organizations (see Brock and McGee, 2002). A distinction is also apparent between associative thought and that of social movement theory which places more emphasis on contentious collective action (Tarrow, 1998), defiance (Eckstein et al., 2001), and the expression of grievances against powers.
Key Issues Channeling Voice and Agency
Fundamental to associative democracy are the principles of cooperation and voluntarism, and that organizations function as a mechanism for citizens’ agency and voice (Moyser and Parry, 1997). In the context of authoritarian rule in Latin America and East Asia, for instance, when political parties were largely banned or driven underground, urban poor, labor, religious (informed by liberation theology) and women’s associations played a critical role in channeling citizens’ voice against military rule (see Waylen, 1993; Smith, 1991; Weyland, 1995; Kim, 2000). Collectively they succeeded in overcoming repressive state practices and demanding citizenship rights for all in the private and public spheres, irrespective of class, ethnicity, or gender. Other examples in the literature include more microlevel grassroots efforts to foster democratic community participation through cooperative organization. For instance, the antiviolent Basista movement in Argentina, based on solidarity and community, focuses on poverty reduction in the shanty towns of Buenos Aires (Schapira,
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1999), while the Indigenas de la Sierra de Motozintla (ISMAM), a successful worldwide producer of organic coffee in Mexico, builds on a traditional cooperative model to support the democratic participation of its members (Nigh, 1997: 431, 428). However, because such associations are often resourced by the state (Hirst, 1994: 10), the practice of associative democracy may tend to be closer to corporative democracy where an explicit agreement to share power is reached between state and non-state groups. Baccaro (2002) highlights that many real-world experiments with associative democracy are built on a corporatist core, such as the experience of Ireland. In the 1990s strong corporatiststyle social partnerships developed, involving religious organizations, farmers’ associations, youth councils and community workers cooperatives. These were seen as playing a pivotal role in democratic life and in ensuring continued economic and social progress. Autonomy Versus Cooptation
Associative democratic thought places importance on the self-governance of associations. In both Hirst’s (1994) and Cohen and Rogers’ (1995) models, associations are both connected to yet autonomous from the state. Critics, however, have questioned whether the state’s role in monitoring associations damages their spontaneity (Perczynski, 1999: 8). To Tripp (2001), for example, the influence of the Ugandan women’s movement on policy making is directly tied to it having remained a degree of associational autonomy from the dominant political party. It is however increasingly questioned whether NGOs are facilitating participation and empowerment. Fisher (1997: 445) cautions that NGOs risk losing their autonomy, to become ‘‘technical solutions’’ to ‘‘development problems.’’ It has similarly been debated whether popular associations are able to serve as an adequate counterweight in postauthoritarian states as associations often become carefully regulated by the state and/or marginalized from mainstream politics following democratic transitions (Molyneux, 1998; Jones and Tembo, 2008). However, to Bader (2001 in Hirst and Bader, 2001: 59) what is needed is the ‘‘skilful combination of the state approach and the societal approach towards associations’’ (Perczynski, 1999: 14). Practicing Citizenship and Social Responsibility
A major concern within the associative democracy school is that associations must be democratic themselves. To Percynski (1999: 13–14), associative democracy offers a model of participatory democracy in which individuals participate through membership in associations which in turn serve as ‘‘schools of democracy and citizenship.’’
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Through active involvement in decision-making and implementation, members develop personal and social responsibility, and have opportunities to ‘‘learn and practice their civic skills.’’ This is in keeping with Putnam’s thinking on the links between associational life, active citizenship and democratic performance. Putnam’s (1993) seminal work on ‘‘making democracy work’’ in Italy focuses on the social capital derived from participation in associations, of which he identifies two main types: bonding (horizontal ties which create shared identities) and bridging (ties which transcend social divides) social capital. The latter is particularly needed in pluralist societies for ‘‘healthy social life’’ (Putnam and Feldstein, 2003: 72). Blind Spots and Challenges Anomie/Fragmentation
The concept of associative democracy emerged in response to increased individualism and commercialism. More recent advocates have similarly stressed the important role of associations in light of the challenges of globalization and the failure of political systems to provide adequate social welfare. It is arguable, however, that the level of anomie and complexity in current societies may be too difficult to overcome. Streek (1995 in Cohen and Rogers, 1995), for instance, is pessimistic about the prospect of moving towards an associative democracy, given the level of fragmentation, differentiation of identities, and the refusal of some groups to participate in organized democratic politics. Associative democracy models arguably struggle to deal with diversity in contexts of, for example, increased migration and unstable borders. Power
Associative democracy is premised on the redistribution of power to citizens through associations. However, the extent to which this can be achieved through a associative democracy is an open question. In particular, Gramsci (1971) maintained a more contested notion of civil society, pointing to embedded power relations, while Lewis emphasizes that civil society organizations span the spectrum of those that uphold the existing social order to those engaged in conflict with the same order (2004: 303). It is also difficult to assume that citizens’ involvement in associations equates with power sharing. For example, while new global social movements, such as the environmental and women’s movements, involve large numbers of organizations, these face a huge task in pursuing ‘‘all available paths to power and influence,’’ suggests Tinker (1999: 33; 2004). As well as highlighting the boundaries to political
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participation and decision-making in global governance structures, this exposes the limitations of the associative democratic model which works only within institutional politics. Arguably, what is needed is a change in existing power relations between activists and power holders. The associative democracy model also appears to overlook various hidden costs of participation, for example, unpaid labor and its constraints on membership and participation. Molyneux (2002) argues in particular that social capital approaches, and programs which attempt to ‘‘create’’ it, frequently maintain a conservative bias and neglect social and gendered inequalities. Similar criticisms have been leveled at the burgeoning women’s ‘‘self-help’’ micro-credit groups heavily promoted by donor agencies in South Asia, which have had a limited impact on transforming broader power imbalances within households and broader economic markets (see Goetz and Gupta, 1996; Kabeer, 2001). In addition, participation in associations can be costly and time consuming, as Delap (2001) concluded in an analysis of citizen juries’ in Scotland, which have been integral to New Labour thinking on decentralization. Evaluation findings with participants suggested that the 2½ days commitment to participate was too lengthy, especially given that the issues under deliberation were not deemed to be sufficiently concrete in nature in order to be able to influence local policy making. The focus of associative democracy on individuals also tends to be at the expense of an understanding of the interplay of structural power relations. Morgan (1996: 6), for instance, criticizes Hirst for casting citizens as ‘‘institutional consumers.’’ The model neglects material constraints on participation, including class, gender, occupation, and geographical location, and the fact that a certain level of material and time resources are required in order to afford to volunteer or be involved in associations. Agrawal and Gupta (2005), for instance, explore efforts in Nepal to decentralize common pool resources, and find that the socially and economically better-off held an advantage in community participation. Similarly, Waylen (1993) discusses how middle-class women’s groups in Chile remained active throughout the democratic consolidation years inside and outside institutional politics, but in contrast, working-class and poor women’s groups experienced more fracturing and marginalization. In these circumstances, women often face a ‘‘triple burden’’ of productive, reproductive, and community labor (Moser, 1993). In the same vein, the rationale for states and markets in Hirst’s model is uncertain (Morgan, 1996). Potential difficulties in decentralizing power to voluntary associations are largely overlooked. Not only do existing voluntary agencies lack the financial and organizational capacity to deliver welfare services on a large scale, but it is
also unclear how the state would retain power over fiscal policy and taxation to overcome this. Representation and Efficiency Concerns
There are a number of concerns regarding the quality of representation and efficiency offered by associative democracy models. Immergut (1995) emphasizes the dilemma of whose interests to include and exclude in decision making processes, and argues that ‘‘arrival at consensus on the public good means that some interests may not be accommodated’’ (205). Successful corporatist democratic systems owe part of their success to the exclusion of some interests. Sweden is an example. In the post-World War II period, various small businesses, craft unions and professionals were underrepresented, while the three main producer organizations (LO, TCO, and SAF) were represented and influential in policy-making. Immergut also points out that reaching a consensus on issues of social inequality can be challenging. Baccaro (2002: 11) highlights that associative democracy models can only accommodate associations which are membership based. Yet in practice this is not always possible. In contexts such as Bangladesh, for example, where hundreds of NGOs claim to speak for the same groups of people, this principle becomes more problematic. Accounts of decentralization and participatory user-committees recall problems with leadership, where national or local elites have failed to hand over power fully (see Pradnja Resosudarmo, 2004; Agrawal and Gupta, 2005). It seems that associations should not be overromanticized. There is a tendency to equate state with inefficiency and civil society with efficiency (Baccaro, 2002: 6). White (1999) highlights that organizations themselves can be hierarchal, and argues that a more critical and local-specific analytical framework is needed.
International Perspectives Relevance in Context of Globalization
Discussions of democracy now go beyond the nation state (Pieterse, 2001), and within this there is a recognition that the role of civil society is certain to grow as global governance becomes more pluralistic and less confined to statebased systems. As Edwards et al. (1999) argue, new forms of solidarity and cooperation are emerging in response to this complexity between citizens and authorities at different levels internationally. In this, NGOs are expected to act as a countervailing force to the expanding influence of markets and declining authority of states. ‘‘Transnational advocacy networks’’ and ‘‘multiple channels of access to the international system’’ are opening up and uncovering information which sustain multiple abuses of power (Keck and
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Sikkink, 1998: 1). Such networks are arguably reframing international and domestic debates, changing their terms, their sites and the configuration of participants (ibid). Indeed, many ostensibly consolidated democracies now find themselves being challenged by movements rallying against the failure of states to universalize democratic practices and secure political autonomy. Social movements championing the rights of ethnic minorities, in contexts such as Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador, for instance, have come increasingly to contest the foundations and contours of contemporary democratic and liberal institutions. These emergent movements have sparked political debates about territorial autonomy, legal pluralism, citizenship, representation, and multiculturalism. However, some analysts such as Cooley and Ron (2002: 6) caution that there is a high degree of competition between organizations for funding and public profile, and as such this makes it difficult to equate the proliferation of INGOs with a ‘‘robust global civil society.’’ Fowler (2000) goes so far as to argue that: "
It would appear that NGDOs are about to succumb to the homogenising forces of economic globalisation in favour of a market-inspired model of NGO identity and behaviour (644).
In other words, there is growing concern with the qualitative dimensions of INGOs rather than their numbers alone. In this regard there is a call for greater decentralization of INGOs to the South, the creation of more genuine North-South partnerships (Malhotra, 2000), and greater efforts to promote more truly mass movements based on a broad change of values and a commitment to: ‘‘A new social order requires those who gain power to make room for those with less’’ (Edwards and Sen, 2000: 608). Another critical variable concerns the historical evolution of civil society in different regional contexts. While associational life typically enjoys positive connotations in a North American, European, or Latin American context, in former Soviet Bloc countries and other socialist states (e.g., Vietnam, Ethiopia), membership in associations (e.g., youth associations, women’s associations) is often linked with top-down state mobilization of citizens and ‘‘compulsory’’ participation in civic life. As such following the democratic transition in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, analysts for instance, in the early 1990s, analysts observed a marked retreat away from associational life because of its historic roots. For instance, due to a lack of independently organized women’s organizations in the region, there were no established women’s movements to advocate for gender equality in the new democracies and instead there was a greater tendency to reject the affirmative action measures and gender quotas of the Communist era.
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In other contexts, with historically weak civil societies, such as many parts of Africa, more pressing questions have focused around how to create an associational life. The democratic transitions of the 1990s in the region have sparked considerable interest in the potential role of civil society in promoting good governance and better development outcomes. However, civil society organizations are still fledgling in many countries and face significant resource and capacity challenges (e.g., Longwe, 2002; Fatton, 1999). As a result, some analysts see a positive potential role for international organizations to play in fostering more active civil society associations. Gawaya (2008) for example argues that INGOs could play a valuable role in supporting the mobilization of the rural poor so that they can more effectively participate in policy processes which too often seem remote from their lived experiences. However, others such as Manor (2004) and Jones et al. (2007) are more circumspect, and in the context of the now widespread user committees in South Asia, call attention to concerns about the artificiality of created volunteer associations to monitor basic service delivery, which may practice limited transparency in decision-making, fail to overcome structural barriers (especially caste and genderbased) to exercising voice and agency, and risk being little more than a cheap source of labor for understaffed social and agricultural policy programs. Indeed, more cynical interpretations of this trend are that such associations serve as a useful way for governments to secure international funds but that such initiatives are then rolled out in such a way as to manipulate, control, and contain committees and civil society (Manor, 2004).
Future Directions Associative democracy’s focus on the role of organized civil society as a counterbalance to individualism on the one hand, and the power of the state on the other, is an important one. In order to enhance the resonance of the associative democracy model in debates about global civil society, however, there are a number of possible research questions and themes that could fruitfully be explored. First, associative democracy as conceptualized by Hirst underemphasizes the importance of difference and the contestation of different identities which can be played out in associational life. However, the emergence of new civil society networks and social movements focusing on identity politics suggests that it is important to incorporate a wider understanding of ‘‘sociopolitical citizenship’’ that is achieved through ‘‘struggles for social recognition of their existence and for political spaces of expression’’ (Escobar and Alvarez, 1992: 4). Second, associative democracy has largely paid attention to group membership, but in the context of an
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increasingly complex globalized world, focusing on a diversity of approaches to associational life could be fruitful. In order to promote greater representativity, Font (2002), for instance, highlights the need to consider models of civic participation that involve individuals rather than groups in policy deliberations, such as consultative councils, citizens’ juries, participatory budget processes, children’s/youth councils, and so forth. Finally, given a growing recognition of the important intersection between knowledge and power, it is important that proponents of associative democracy inform their analysis with an understanding of the role that associations play in generating and reinforcing hierarchies of knowledge that may exclude the poorest and most marginalized. More attention could be paid to the ways that civil society organizations and networks could help to address power imbalances and promote the generation and uptake of new forms of (citizen-led) knowledge.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History ▶ Citizenship ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci, Antonio ▶ Communitarianism ▶ Corporatism ▶ Etzioni, Amitai ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Government Nonprofit Sector Relationships ▶ INGOs ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Third Way
References/Further Readings Agrawal, A., & Gupta, K. (2005). Decentralization and participation: The governance of common pool resources in Nepal’s Terai. World Development, 33(7), 1101–1114. Baccaro, L. (2002). Civil society meets the state: A model of associational democracy. ILO Discussion Paper, 138, 1–23. Bader, V. (2001). Problems and prospects of associative democracy: Cohen and Rogers revisited. In P. Hirst & V. Bader (Eds.), Associative democracy: The real third way (pp. 31–70). London: Frank Cass. Brock, K., & McGee, R. (2002). Knowing poverty: Critical reflections on participatory research and policy. London: Earthscan. Cohen, J., & Rogers, J. (1995). Secondary associations and democratic governance. In J. Cohen & J. Rogers (Eds.), Associations and democracy (pp. 7–98). London/New York: Verso. Cole, G. D. H. (1930). The Social Theory by G. D. H. Cole In P. Hirst (Ed.) (1989). The Phralist Theory of the state: Selected writings of G. D. H. Cole, J. N. Figgis and H. J. Laski. (pp. 51–108). London: Routledge. Cole, G. D. H., Figgis, J. N., Laski, H. J., & Hirst, P. (Eds.) (1989). The pluralist theory of the State. Selected writings of Cole, Figgis and Laski. London/New York: Routledge.
Cooley, A., & Ron, J. (2002). The NGO scramble: Organizational insecurity and the political economy of transnational action. International Insecurity, 27(1), 5–39. Delap, C. (2001). Citizens’ juries: Reflections on the UK experience. In Deliberative democracy and citizen empowerment (pp. 39–42), from http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/G01929.pdf Eckstein, S. et al. (2001). Power and popular protest. Latin American social movements. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Edwards, M. (2004). Civil society. Oxford: Blackwell. Edwards, M., & Sen, G. (2000). NGOs, social change and the transformation of human relationships: A 21st century civic agenda. Third World Quarterly, 21(4), 605–616. Edwards, M., Hulme, D., & Wallace, T. (1999). NGOs in a global future: Marrying local diversity to worldwide leverage. Public Administration and Development, 19(2), 117–136. Escobar, A., & Alvarez, S. (1992). The making of social movements in Latin America. Identity, strategy and democracy. Oxford: Westview. Etzioni, A. (1993). The spirit of community. Rights, responsibilities, and the communitarian agenda. New York: Crown Publishers. Fatton, R. J. (1999). Civil society revisited: Africa in the new millennium. West Africa Review, 1(1), from http://westafricareview.org Fisher, W. (1997). Doing good? The politics and antipolitics of NGO practices. Annual Review of Anthropology, 26(1), 439–464. Font, J. (2002). Local Participation in Spain: Beyond Associative Democracy. WP 210, Institute de Ciencies Politiques I Socials, Barcelona, 1–27. Fowler, A. (2000). NGDOs as a moment in history: Beyond aid to social entrepreneurship or civic innovation? Third World Quarterly, 21(4), 637–654. Gawaya, R. (2008). Investing in women farmers to eliminate food insecurity in Southern Africa: Policy-related research from Mozambique. Gender and Development, 16(1), 147–159. Goetz, A. M., & Gupta, R. S. (1996). Who takes the credit? Gender, power and control over loan use in rural credit programmes in Bangladesh. World Development, 24(1), 45–64. Gramsci, A. (1971). Americanism and Fordism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hirst, P. (1989) (ed): The Pluralist Theory of the State. Selected Writings of G. D. H. Cole, J. N. Figgis and H. J. Laski. London: Routledge. Hirst, P. (1994). Associative democracy. New forms of economic and social governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hirst, P. (2001). Can Associationalism Come Back? In P. Hirst & V. M. Bader (eds.), Associative Democracy: The Real Third Way (pp. 15–30) London: Frank Cass. Immergut, E. (1995). An institutional critique of associative democracy. In J. Cohen & J. Rogers (Eds.), Associations and democracy (pp. 201–206). London/New York: Verso. Jones, N., & Tembo, F. (2008). Deepening democracy through civil society-legislator linkages: Opportunities and challenges for policy engagement in developing country contexts. Global Civil Society and Democratic Cultures ISTR Conference, Barcelona, July 2008. Jones, N., Lyytikainen, M., & Reddy, G. (2007). Decentralization and participatory service delivery: Implications for tackling childhood poverty in Andhra Pradesh, India. Journal of Children and Poverty, 13(2), 1–23. Kabeer, N. (2001). Conflicts over credit: Re-evaluating the empowerment potential of loans to women in rural Bangladesh. World Development, 29(1), 63–84. Keck, M., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders. Advocacy networks in international politics. New York: Cornell University Press.
ATD Quart-Monde Kim, S. (2000). The politics of democratization in Korea: The role of civil society. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Lewis, D. (2004). On the difficulty of studying ‘‘civil society’’: Reflections on NGOs, state and democracy in Bangladesh. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38(3), 299–322. Lister, R. (2005). Investing in the citizen-workers of the future: Transformations in citizenship and the State under new labour. In H. Hendrick (Eds.), Child welfare and social policy: An essential reader (pp. 449–469). London: Policy Press. Longwe, S. H. (2002). How can civil society influence the work of international organizations in developing countries? The World Civil Society Forum official report: The role of civil society organizations in Africa, from http://www.worldcivilsocietyorg/documents/ 16.17_longwe_sara.doc Malhotra, K. (2000). NGOs without aid: Beyond the global soup kitchen. Third World Quarterly, 21(4), 655–668. Manor, J. (2004). User committees: A potentially damaging second wave of decentralisation. The European Journal of Development Research, 16(1), 192–213. Martell, L. (1992). New ideas of socialism. Economy and Society, 21(2), 152–172. McLaverty, P. (1998). The public sphere and local democracy. Democratization, 5(3), 224–239. Molyneux, M. (1998). Analysing women’s movements. Development and Change, 29(2), 219–245. Molyneux, M. (2002). Gender and the silences of social capital: Lessons from Latin America. Development and Change, 33(2), 167–188. Morgan, D. (1996). Associative democracy: Decentralisation of societal and industrial governance? A critical discussion. Journal of Sociology, 32(1), 1–19. Moser, C. (1993). Adjustment from below: Low-income women, time and the triple burden in Guayaquil, Ecuador. In S. Radcliffe & S. Westwood (Eds.), ‘‘Viva’’: Women and popular protest in Latin America (pp. 173–196). London : Routledge. Moyser, G., & Parry, G. (1997). Voluntary associations and democratic participation in Britain. In D. Jan & V. Deth (Eds.), Private groups and public life: Voluntary associations and political involvement in representative democracies (pp. 24–44). London: Routledge. Nigh, R. (1997). Organic agriculture and globalization: A Maya Associative Corporation in Chiapas, Mexico. Human Organization, 56(4), 427–436. Perczynski, P. (1999). Citizenship and associative democracy. European consortium of political research (pp. 1–22), from http://www.essex.ac.uk/ ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/mannheim/w20/perczynski.pdf Pieterse, J. N. (2001). Participatory democracy reconceived. Futures, 33(5), 407–422. Pradnja Resosudarmo, I. A. (2004). Closer to the people and trees: Will decentralisation work for the people and forests of Indonesia? The European Journal of Development Research, 16(2), 110–132. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work. Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ/Chichester: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R., & Feldstein, L. (2003). Better together. Restoring the American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Schapira, M. F. (1999). From Utopia to pragmatism: The heritage of Basismo in local government in the greater Buenos Aires region. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 18(2), 227–239. Smith, C. (1991). The emergence of liberation theology: Radical religion and social movement theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Streek, W. (1995). Inclusion and secession: Questions and the boundaries of associative democracy. In J. Cohen & J. Rogers (Eds.), Associations and democracy (pp. 184–192). London/New York: Verso.
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Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in movement. Social movements and contentious places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tinker, I. (1999). NGOs: An alternative power base for women? In M. Meyer & E. Prugl (Eds.), Gender politics in global governance (pp. 1–39). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, from http://www. onlinewomeninpolitics.org/beijing12/ProleadNGOE.pdf Tinker, I. (2004). Quotas for women in elected legislatures: Do they really empower women? Women’s Studies International Forum, 27(5–6), 531–546. Tocqueville. (1840). On the use that Americans make of association in civil life. In Goldhammer, A (trans) & Zunz, O (eds) (2004) Democracy in America (pp. 595–599). New York: Penguin Putnam Inc. Tripp, A. (2001). The politics of autonomy and cooptation in Africa: The case of the Ugandan Women’s Movement. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 39(1), 101–128. Waylen, G. (1993). Women’s movements and democratization in Latin America. Third World Quarterly, 14(3), 573–587. Weyland, K. (1995). Latin America’s four political models. Journal of Democracy, 6(4), 125–135. White, S. (1999). NGOs, civil society, and the State in Bangladesh. Development and Change, 30(2), 307–326.
ATD Quart-Monde ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Address of Organization 114 avenue du Ge´ne´ral Leclerc 95480 Pierrelaye France www.atd-fourthworld.org
Introduction The international NGO Aide a` Toute De´tresse QuartMonde (ATD Quart-Monde or ATD Fourth World, in English) mobilizes poor families and communities in housing estates, slums, and isolated towns, researches issues of poverty with the participation of those affected, and informs public opinion. It does this with help from the members of its international Volunteer Corps.
Brief History In 1956, Father Joseph Wresinski (1917–1988), the son of a poor immigrant family, was assigned by his bishop to be a chaplain to 250 families placed in an emergency housing camp in Noisy-le-Grand, near Paris, France. In 1957, Wresinski and the families of the camp founded an association, which was later to become ATD Quart-Monde. Wresinski chose the term ‘‘Quart-Monde,’’ or ‘‘Fourth
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World,’’ to represent all people needing help, not only those in the so-called Third World, but also in places such as France. From its modest roots, ATD QuartMonde has grown into an international movement with associations in more than 30 countries (in Europe, Africa, North & Central America, and Asia) and with consultative status to the UN’s ECOSOC and other UN agencies.
Funding ATD Quart-Monde France receives most of its income from receipts from private donations. Worldwide organizational members of the International Movement depend mostly on donations and other private funding, with some income from governments and other public sector funding sources.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas The mission of ATD Quart-Monde is to fight poverty and to obtain official representation for the poorest people in society. The International Movement ATD Fourth World that grew out of the French group describes itself as a nongovernmental organization with no religious or political affiliation that engages with individuals and institutions to find solutions to extreme poverty. Working in partnership with people in poverty, ATD Fourth World’s human rights-based approach focuses on supporting families and individuals through its grassroots presence.
Activities On the ground in France and other countries where there are members, ATD Quart-Monde provides direct assistance to needy communities, helping families find housing, providing clothing and health services, and obtaining entrance to the local social security system. ATD Quart-Monde also undertakes research and other knowledge-building efforts relating to all areas affecting the lives of the poorest. These activities are conducted predominantly through the Research and Training Institute, also based in Paris, which was created in 1960 at the request of Joseph Wresinski. ATD Quart-Monde in France was commissioned by the Economic and Social Council of France to prepare a report, ‘‘Chronic Poverty and Lack of Basic Security,’’ published in 1987 and better known as the Wresinski Report. One of the report’s key concepts is partnership, stressing that the best informed experts on poverty are the poor, and that they must be involved in the planning and management of any effort undertaken on their behalf.
Structure and Governance ATD Quart-Monde in France is, like other French associations, governed by a board. The International Movement ATD Fourth World is governed by a board of international members and led by an International Leadership Team selected every 4 years by a Discernment Group, consisting of Volunteer Corps members and other members of the organization. The International Movement’s membership consists of activists, Volunteer Corps members (more than 350 worldwide), and approximately 100,000 friends and allies.
Within France, ATD Quart-Monde gained notoriety because of its charismatic founder and leader Joseph Wresinski, as well as its focus on creating public awareness of and eradicating extreme poverty within its own borders. Internationally, the International Movement ATD Fourth World has contributed to the understanding of extreme poverty in both wealthy and poor countries by bringing the voices of the poor and the people who work with them into its research.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Social Inequality ▶ INGOs ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Comparative Perspectives
References/Further Readings Fourth World University Research Group (2007). The merging of knowledge. People in poverty and academics thinking together. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Godinot, X., & Wodon, Q. (2006). Participatory approaches to attacking extreme poverty: case studies led by the International Movement ATD Fourth World. Washington, DC: World Bank. Wresinski, J. (1994). Chronic poverty and lack of basic security. A report of the economic and social council of France. 1. ed. Landover, MD: Fourth World Publications.
Attac (Association for Transaction Taxes to Aid Citizens) ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Address of Organization 66-72 rue Marceau 93 100 Montreuil-sous-bois France www.attac.org
Introduction The Association for Transaction Taxes to Aid Citizens, better known as Attac, is a French-based international NGO that has become emblematic of the
Attac (Association for Transaction Taxes to Aid Citizens)
antiestablishment organizations that mushroomed with the deepening of the economic recession of the late 1990s. Attac claims to act as advocates for the rights of those ‘‘without rights’’ and has many links to the wider antiglobalization movement.
Brief History In 1972, James Tobin (1918–2002), an American economist and Nobel Prize winner, proposed a worldwide standardized tax on currency speculations, the so-called Tobin tax. His idea was to make short-term currency speculation less attractive, since he considered it detrimental to the economy. In December 1997, Ignacio Ramonet, editor of the French journal Le Monde diplomatique wrote an article titled ‘‘De´sarmer les marche´s’’ (‘‘Disarm the Markets’’), in which he advocated the establishment of the Tobin tax and the creation of an organization to promote the introduction of the tax around the world, with the proceeds devoted to fighting poverty and injustice. Together with Bernard Cassen, General Director of the journal, and others including Pierre Bourdieu, Ramonet followed up on his call and helped organize the first constitutive assembly of Attac in June 1998. As time went on, national groups in other European countries were also established and became active on a wide range of issues, including international financial institutions, debt, tax havens, public services, water, and free trade zones. Attac’s renown grew following the July 2001 meeting of the G7/G8 nations in Genoa, Italy. On this occasion, Attac and other groups organized one of the largest demonstrations of its history (some 100,000 demonstrators) against what they called ‘‘neoliberal globalization.’’ Segments of the demonstrators and the Italian government’s military police clashed, leading to riots and violence, with one dead, hundreds wounded, and significant destruction of shops and autos.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas Attac’s first concrete proposal was to introduce the Tobin tax on international financial transactions in order to create a general fund (thus, Attac’s name: the Association for the Transaction Taxes to Aid Citizens), but the range of target issues has expanded over time. Joint actions of Attac have the following goals: to hamper international speculation; to tax income on capital; to penalize tax havens; to prevent the generalization of pension funds; to promote transparency in investments in developing countries; to establish a legal framework for banking and financial operations in order not to penalize consumers and citizens; and to support the general annulment of the public debt of developing countries, and
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the use of the freed-up resources on behalf of populations and for sustainable development, which many call paying off the ‘‘social and ecological debt.’’
Activities Attac seeks to enable political processes of learning and experiencing, to build a platform that enables political communication, and to consolidate various political views in discussions and common actions, which, in turn, lead to the possibility of acting jointly in commonly defined political fields. Attac offers seminars and open discussion rounds, publishes through its local groups in small newspapers, and distributes flyers highlighting its goals. Attac has also frequently supported specific political parties during elections. Its informal organization leads to various activities like free concerts for the people, demonstrations, declarations, discussion rounds, often in a small and unprofessional context and often depending on the local people involved. Attac France does not support violence, but even it admits that some among its members take to violence.
Structure and Governance Attac functions on a principle of decentralisation: local associations organise meetings and conferences, and compose documents (another reason why there are different voices speaking for Attac). Currently, there are about 90,000 members in 50 national subgroups, which each control themselves and are not ruled by a higher council. The topics which have international importance are coordinated internationally among the groups. For example when there is a meeting of the World Economic Forum, the Attac national groups decide jointly what to do. But generally, most of the decisions rely on the national groups. However, there are coordinating bodies including the General Assembly, an Administrative Council, ‘‘le Bureau’’ (headquarters), Founders’ College and Scientific Council.
Funding The resources of Attac comprise mainly fees and other contributions by the members. The exact amount of those fees is fixed by the General Assembly on recommendation of the Administrative Council. Attac’s organizational documents indicate that it is open to accepting every allocation it is able to get legally, even regularly or exceptionally with the agreement of the responsible authority. This allows for flexibility in receiving other funds, but corporate and governmental grants and contracts are – not surprisingly – rare, if any.
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Australia New Zealand Third Sector Research (ANZTSR) Inc.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Originally founded in France, Attac now exists in some 50 countries around the world. It has attracted the involvement of many well-known political figures and intellectuals, including, for example, many left-oriented politicians in France. Through Attac’s efforts, the Tobin tax and similar ideas to develop solidarity-based alternatives to neoliberal orthodoxy became known to a broader spectrum of activists. Despite negative press as a result of violence occurring at some Attac-organized or led demonstrations, Attac has still managed to bring concrete proposals to the table.
community, or voluntary organizations and the activities of volunteering, philanthropy and social enterprise.
Brief History The third sector is an important, but frequently undervalued, misunderstood, and under researched sector of society. ANZTSR was launched in 1993 as a response to the growing awareness of the importance of third sector activities in Australia and New Zealand societies, and the paucity of reliable information about the sector and its activities which existed at that time. In doing so, the isolation and difficulties many third sector researchers experienced began to be addressed.
Cross-References
▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ Dotcauses ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ INGOs ▶ World Economic Forum
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas "
‘‘ANZTSR aims to develop a better understanding and recognition of the Third Sector and its role in the development of a strong civil society by:
● encouraging interest and support for research in the Third Sector;
References/Further Readings Attac. (2007). Manifeste altermondialiste. Construire un monde solidaire, e´cologique et de´mocratique. Paris: E´dition Mille et Une Nuits. Fro¨hlich, R., & Wimmer, J. (2007). The determination of the success of organizational relationship management through network structure: The Attac case. In S. Duhe´ (Ed.), New media and public relations. New York: Lang.
● promoting research and scholarship in matters relating to the Third Sector;
● building networks of individuals and organisations interested in better understanding the Third Sector;
● serving as a centre for information on all aspects of the Third Sector;
● developing and maintaining relations with other organisations concerned with the Third Sector;
● convening seminars and conferences for participants
Australia New Zealand Third Sector Research (ANZTSR) Inc. SUZANNE GRANT
Address of Organization ANZTSR Secretariat c/- Social Justice & Social Change Research Centre University of Western Sydney Locked Bag 1797 Penrith South DC NSW 179 Australia www.anztsr.org.au
Introduction The Australia New Zealand Third Sector Research (ANZTSR) Inc is a network of people interested in pursuing and encouraging research into not-for-profit,
in, researchers of, and all those interested in the issues and activities of the Third Sector.’’ (www.anztsr.org.au)
Activities ANZTSR produces a quarterly newsletter to keep members informed of news, published research and conferences from around the region as well as international third sector developments. An annual membership directory is compiled to facilitate contact between researchers and practitioners in New Zealand and Australia. Academic papers, relevant research findings and theoretical developments are published in ANZTSR’s refereed journal – Third Sector Review (TSR). Two issues of TSR are published each year. ANZTSR conferences are biennial, bringing together third sector researchers and practitioners from both sides of the Tasman Sea, as well as the wider Pacific region. The 9th Biennial ANZTSR conference was held in Auckland, New Zealand, November 2008. Formal links are maintained with similar organizations/networks around the world, including ISTR
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(International Society for Third Sector Research), and the ISTR Asia Pacific Regional network.
sector researchers and practitioners around Australia and New Zealand. Research dissemination, awareness of and advocacy for the third sector is thus facilitated.
Structure and Governance ANZTSR is an incorporated association, with membership open to any individual and/or organization who shares the organization’s objectives. Governance is undertaken by an elected executive committee comprising a Chairperson, Deputy Chairperson, Treasurer, and six non-office bearing committee members. Office Bearers are elected annually at the Annual General Meeting.
Funding
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Australia and New Zealand ▶ ISTR ▶ Philanthropy in Australia ▶ Third Sector
References/Further Readings Third Sector Review (ISSN 1323 9163) (ISBN 1 86365 805 X).
Membership fees and TSR journal subscriptions are the main sources of ANZTSR income. Revenue from TSR copyright royalties is becoming increasingly significant.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Through newsletters, conferences, and the TSR journal ANZTSR provides a network of support, linking third
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AWO ▶ Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO)
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Barnett, Samuel Augustus JENNY HARROW
Basic Biographical Information Born in Bristol, England, in 1844, Samuel Barnett’s invention of and advocacy for the university settlement underpins his achievements as a social entrepreneur and change advocate. As an institutional structure and social relations concept, the settlement became and remains significant in the development of subsequent Anglo-American community-based social action. A member of a prosperous merchant family (although its first to go to university), Barnett was ordained in the Church of England in 1867, after education at Wadham College, Oxford. In his first fashionable London parish he learnt from Octavia Hill, the social housing reformer. Marriage to Henrietta Rowland, one of Hill’s young workers, matched Barnett with an intending and subsequently successful social reformer in her own right. In 1873, their move to St Jude’s parish, Whitechapel (‘‘the worst’’ in the Diocese of London), began a period of immense combined parochial and social action led by Barnett, in areas including housing, education, arts and children’s needs. In 1884, after Barnett’s advocacy for ‘‘university settlements,’’ Toynbee Hall, the first university settlement with Barnett as its first Warden, was founded. Its Whitechapel location and Oxford-collegial style accommodation for volunteer settlers made it an institutional innovation for community activities and a practical base for social projects. The founding of a string of university settlements in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom followed, gaining strength from other reformers’ support and visits. (These visits included Jane Addams
in 1887 and 1889, prior to her founding of Hull House; visited in turn by the Barnetts in 1891.) Barnett’s ‘‘practicable socialism,’’ voice and action for reform, gained a critical platform in his Wardenship; as did his focus on the Christian imperatives for neighborly and friendly social interaction; though Toynbee Hall was not denominationally or church-linked. Latterly appointed Canon of Bristol Cathedral in 1893, and of Westminster Abbey in 1906, Barnett’s thoughtful, pragmatic, generous churchmanship was integral to his social action.
Major Contributions Barnett was not the first advocate of the responsibilities of the university-educated to live with and work for and among the poor. However his skills of social entrepreneurship ensured that the first university settlement was emulated, firstly in London, then in the United Kingdom and notably in the United States. It proved capable of replication without damage, but rather with improvement, interpretation and growth. Moreover, his wardenship model looked for and gained leadership from others. Toynbee Hall and its fellow settlements became – and continue to be – incubators for new and flourishing organizations, offering organizational independence and further innovation. Elements in Barnett’s creation remained uncertain, with social interactions leaving patterns of political leadership intact, the resulting interclass harmony fragile and prime beneficiaries (neighbors or settlers themselves) often unclear. The model never lacked critics. Critically, in England, an integrating closeness (educational or financial) between universities and ‘‘their’’ settlements remained absent. Yet Barnett’s gifts for social organization, institution-building and social convenorship created and inspired a vital community movement and an enduring social action model.
Cross-References
▶ Addams, Jane ▶ Hill, Octavia ▶ Social Entrepreneurship
References/Further Readings Barnett, H. O. (1919). Canon Barnett his life, work and friends by his wife. (2nd ed., 2 Vols.). London: John Murray.
H. Anheier, S. Toepler (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-93996-4, # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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Barnett, S. A. (1895). Practicable socialism. London: Longman, Green and Co. Briggs, A., & Macartney, A. (1984). Toynbee Hall. The first hundred years. London: Routledge. Carson, M. (1990). Prologue; the English background. In M. Carson (Eds.), Settlement folk and the American Settlement Movement 1885–1930 (pp. 2–9). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. O’Day, R. (2004). Caring or controlling? The east end of London in the 1880s and 1890s. In C. Emsley, E. Johnson & P. Spierenburg (Eds.), Social control in Europe, 1800–2000 (Vol. 2, pp. 149–166). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Berger, Peter Ludwig SUSAN LORD
Basic Biographical Information Sociologist Peter L. Berger was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria. He immigrated to the United States in 1946 at the age of 17, and became a US citizen in 1952. He received a BA from Wagner College in New York City in 1949 and an MA (1950) and Ph.D. (1954) from the New School for Social Research in New York City. He has been on the faculty of University of Georgia, Evangelical Academy (Bad Boll, West Germany), University of North Carolina, Hartford Seminary Foundation, New School for Social Research, Rutgers University, and Boston College. Currently Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Theology at Boston University where he has been on the faculty since 1981, he is also, since 1985, the Director of Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, a center for research, publication, and education on how culture affects economic and political developments worldwide. He holds honorary doctorates from Loyola University, Wagner College, and the University of Notre Dame, and in 1992 he was awarded the Manes Sperber Prize, presented by the Austrian government for significant contributions to culture.
Major Contributions Berger is known for his writings on sociological theory, the sociology of religion, and the interface between issues of global economic development and sociocultural change. His scholarly work is noted for its accessibility, and for the breadth and depth of his analyses, as he grapples with issues of modernity as they pertain to human beings and to sociocultural institutions. He purports that
institutions that affect everyday life, such as schools and churches, make up the foundation of democracy, and claims that capitalism is the economic system that cultivates the highest levels of civic virtue and liberty. Essentially, he says that a market economy is necessary to democracy, and that capitalism introduces institutional forces that have a certain independence and balance out governmental controls. He is interested in the human yearning for transcendental experience and how this yearning affects everyday life. Over his long career, he has changed his claim that modernization leads to increasing secularization, and now claims that most of the world is not secular; it is very religious. His phenomenological approach offers a certain balance to the positivism of other sociological endeavors, as he attempts to apply a scientific approach to such studies as the role of religion in the public realm. His mixing of a scientific approach with religious beliefs has met with both positive and negative critiques; while many applaud his application of the scientific method to religion, some view it as a betrayal of the method. A selfproclaimed orthodox Weberian, he believes in value-free science, and that social scientists should base their theories on the weight of empirical evidence. In her 11/22/92 New York Times Book Review of Berger’s A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (1992), Eleanor Munro characterized Berger’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (with Thomas Luckmann, 1966), The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967), and The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979), as ‘‘milestones in the study of the life of ideas in contemporary society.’’ Among his more recent books are: Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity (2003), and Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (1997).
Cross-References
▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Religious Organizations
References/Further Readings Hunter, J. D., & Ainley, S. C. (Eds.) (1986). Making sense of modern times. In L. Peter (Ed.), Berger and the vision of interpretive sociology. New York: Routledge. Woodhead, L., Heelas, P., & Martin, D. (Eds.) (2001). Peter Berger and the study of religion. New York: Routledge. Wuthnow, R., Hunter, J. D., Bergesen, A., & Kurzweil, E. (1984). Cultural analysis: The work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas. New York: Routledge.
Bernard van Leer Foundation
Bernard van Leer Foundation JAN SACHARKO
Address of Organization P.O. Box 82334 2508 EH, The Hague The Netherlands www.bernardvanleer.org
Introduction The Bernard van Leer Foundation operates globally, funding organizations and sharing gained knowledge about childhood development. Its vision is a world where all children can reach their full potential despite any social or economic disadvantages. From its origin in Switzerland with the equivalent of a few €100,000, today it operates over 150 major programs in more than 40 countries with an annual budget over €25 million.
Brief History Bernard van Leer (1883–1958) of the Netherlands began the original foundation in 1949 in Switzerland. He had made his fortune running his own container production company, Royal Packaging Industries, which specialized in barrels and barrel closures. Though his companies were sold under duress to German operators during WWII, he returned to business after the war and would soon set up his foundation with broad humanitarian interests that operated often anonymously. After his death, his son Oscar van Leer (1914–1996) would be inspired by the developmental psychologist, Martin Deutsch, and narrow the focus of the foundation to child development issues. He legally established the foundation in 1971 in The Hague.
Mission Its mission since the 1960s has been ‘‘to develop and support programs that create significant positive change for children up to the age of eight who are growing up in circumstances of social and economic disadvantage.’’
Activities To accomplish its mission, it operates a grant-making program that funds innovative programs in over 40 countries (most of which are countries where van Leer’s company operated) and work to disseminate information about early childhood development to better inform public policy decisions. One of its main publications, Early
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Childhood Matters, is published at least once a year and details new theories on childhood development and reports on its work in the field. Its three main areas of interest within this arena are strengthening vulnerable families and communities; improving childcare and preschool programs as well the way children transition from home to these programs; and promoting diverse and inclusive environments in which children may develop.
Structure and Governance At the same time that the foundation was legally established in The Hague, the Van Leer Group Foundation was also established with the same nine members of the board of trustees. The Governors of the Van Leer Group Foundation continue to be the trustees of the Bernard van Leer Foundation and decide questions of governance, board composition, tenure, etc.
Funding The Bernard van Leer Foundation derives all of its income from the Van Leer Group Foundation. Originally the Group Foundation received its income from its shares of Royal Packaging Industries, which it fully owned. However, the Group sold the company in the 1990s and now receives all income from its investment portfolio and a venture capital company.
Major Accomplishments FM Weekly, a professional journal on philanthropic organizations in The Netherlands, named Bernard van Leer the ‘‘greatest philanthropist in Dutch history’’ in 2004. The foundation has moved in the direction of being a convener and facilitator for other organizations in the past few years. One of its successes in that matter has been to publish ‘‘A Guide to General Comment 7 ‘Implementing Child Rights in Early Childhood’’’ with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2006. Prior to this, most rights programs under the United Nations Conventions for children under 18 focused on older children, leaving the earliest years unprotected.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Functions of
References/Further Readings An English language pre´cis, from http://www.bernardvanleer.org/about/ bernard_van_leer_biography. Micheels, P. (2002). De vatenman Bernard van Leer (1883–1958). Amsterdam.
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Bertelsmann Foundation
Bertelsmann Foundation ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization Carl-Bertelsmann-Straße 256 33311 Gu¨tersloh Germany www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de
Introduction The foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung functions as a private operating foundation and supports its own research, projects, and initiatives. Headquartered in Gu¨tersloh, Germany, the foundation has offices in Barcelona, Brussels, and Washington, DC. Employing about 330 staff members, it is one of the largest foundations in Germany and has provided approximately €728 million in support since its inception.
Brief History After the international growth and success of Bertelsmann AG, initially a regional, small publishing company founded by Carl Bertelsmann in 1835, the eponymous foundation was created in 1977 by Reinhard Mohn, who was also the major stakeholder in Bertelsmann AG. Ensuring the permanence of the foundation, Mohn, then chairman of the company board and majority shareholder, transferred his shares in Bertelsmann AG to the foundation. The shares are without voting rights.
Mission/Objective/Focus Area The foundation is committed to developing programmatic initiatives, research, and think-tank forums on international social concerns. With 18 focus areas in education, integration of immigrant and minority students, globalization and its impact (especially on Germany as a business location), and healthcare, the foundation launches programming and research practices around the most current pressing issues.
Activities The activities of the Bertelsmann Stiftung fall into four categories: programming, convening, research, and competitions. The foundation is engaged in more than 60 specific projects that are all designed, launched, and implemented by the foundation and frequently involve other foundations, government entities, businesses, and nonprofit partners. By hosting events such as the Democratic Change Forum, the Kronberger Middle East Talks, the International
Bertelsmann Forum and the Brussels Forum, the foundation is active in network- and coalition-building. With more than 50 publications released each year, the foundation promotes research and information dissemination. The foundation also hosts two major international competitions each year. While the ‘‘Neue Stimmen’’ International Singing Competition focuses on young opera talents (awarded biannually), the Carl Bertelsmann Prize, at €150,000, is awarded annually to organizations, companies, individuals, teams, and civic bodies (countries, towns, and regions) that have demonstrated exceptional progress in a thematic area. Previous awards have been given in the areas of Civic Engagement, Higher Education, Integration, and Employment Policy.
Structure and Governance As of January 1, 2005, the 14-member Board of Trustees, appointed by founder Reinhard Mohn, serves as a supervisory board for consultation and controlling activities, while the 5-member Executive Board functions as a management board. Reflecting a corporate governance practice, the roles of the Executive Board and the Board of Trustees are separated, and their functions and powers are clearly defined.
Funding The foundation is the majority shareholder (76.9%) in Bertelsmann AG, and it is funded predominantly by income earned from its shares in the company, which in 2007 yielded €72 million. Additional funding comes from the foundation’s project partners and financial management of assets. In fiscal year 2007, the foundation’s total resources were €84 million, of which €48 million was dedicated to project work. The largest programming expenditures were made in international relations.
Major Accomplishments Among organizational achievements, the foundation’s leadership has also been recognized for the foundation’s progress. Liz Mohn, vice-chair of the Bertelsmann Foundation Executive Board, has received the Atlantik Bru¨cke organization’s Vernon A. Walters Award, Spain’s Grand Cross of the Order for Civil Merit (La Gran Cruz de la Orden del Me´rito Civil), and an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Tel Aviv. Founder Reinhard Mohn has been awarded the 2007 German Founders Prize, an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Mu¨nster, and the Spanish royal family’s Prince of Asturias Award. This internationally recognized honor is Spain’s most prestigious award.
Bhatt, Ela R.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ Philanthropy in Europe
References/Further Readings Mohn, R. (1997). A sense of community – bridging the gap between the individual and society. Gu¨tersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers. Mohn, R. (2000). Humanity wins a strategy for progress and leadership in times of change. New York: Crown Publications. Mohn, R. (2005). An age of new possibilities: How humane values and an entrepreneurial spirit will lead us into the future. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Beveridge, Lord William Henry ANNE SANDER
Basic Biographical Information William Henry Beveridge – economist and one of Britain’s most famous social reformers – was born in March 1879 in Rangpur (British India) as the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian civil service officer. Originally trained as a lawyer, his early interest in social services and social justice brought him to the Morning Post as a leading writer in 1905 where he wrote about social problems until he entered the Board of Trade and became a civil servant in 1908. During his years as the Director of labor exchanges (1909–1916) he already proved to be one of the leading experts on unemployment in Britain. His ideas influenced and led to the passing of the National Insurance Act which for the first time introduced an unemployment insurance for heavy industry workers. In 1919 he joined academia as the Director of the renowned London School of Economics where he stayed until 1937. During World War II he set up the Academic Assistance Council to shelter refugee scholars and help them escape the Nazi oppression. Beveridge today is most well-known however for his 1942 Beveridge Report which eventually led to the foundation of the modern welfare state in Britain, as described below. He died in March 1963 still working on his ‘‘History of Prices.’’ His last words were: ‘‘I have a thousand things to do.’’
Major Contributions Even though Lord Beveridge worked as an analyst of social injustice and welfare for most of his life and published numerous works on this, his name is still most
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famous for his 1942 ‘‘Social Insurance and Allied Services Report’’ to the British government. More well-known as the ‘‘Beveridge Report’’ his recommendations eventually led to the set up of the modern welfare state in Britain, including the National Health Service and have since then served also to categorize a specific type of welfare state. Beveridge, who had been highly influenced by the Fabian Society British intellectual socialist movement, had joined the government in 1940. In his report which then served as the basis for the postwar Labour government’s legislation program for social reform, Beveridge stressed that full employment should be the main pivot and target of any social welfare program, including Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, state control of the means of production and more direct control of manpower. The report reflected his strong belief in social justice and in the creation of an ideal postwar society and urged the government to fight the five ‘‘Giant Evils: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’’ For Beveridge the discovery of objective socioeconomic laws would lead to solving injustice and the problems of society. It is also remarkable that Beveridge managed to also convince the Conservatives that his proposed welfare institutions would be both socially and economically profitable.
Cross-References
▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Jose, H. (1997). William Beveridge: A biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bhatt, Ela R. MARTHA CHEN
Basic Biographical Information Ela R. Bhatt, the founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India, is recognized around the world for her visionary ideals, her pioneering work, and her quiet centered humility. Known as the ‘‘gentle revolutionary,’’ she has dedicated her life to improving the lives of working poor women in India and beyond. Born in 1933 in Ahmedabad, India into a prominent family.
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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Her father was a lawyer, and her maternal grandfather was a freedom fighter who took part in the Salt March led by Mahatma Gandhi. Ela Bhatt trained as a lawyer. After completing her legal studies, she joined the legal department of the Textile Labour Association which was founded in 1920 by Mahatma Gandhi and Anasuyaben Sarabhai (the daughter of a prosperous industrial family). Some years later, Ela Bhatt had the opportunity to work in a desert kibbutz in Israel where she learned about the joint action of labor unions and cooperatives. When she returned to India, she was determined to form a union of working poor women who did not have formal jobs but who, she felt, should enjoy the same benefits that organized labor received. Established in 1972, SEWA is today the largest union in India and the largest union of informal workers in the world. Ela Bhatt and her late husband Ramesh, who shared her commitment to the working poor, had two children: a daughter Ami who lives in the USA with her husband and their two children; and a son Mihir who, with his wife and their two sons, lives next door to his mother in India.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Founded and led for two decades by Ela Bhatt, the SelfEmployed Women’s Association (SEWA) is world-renowned for its unique and effective blend of trade union activism and development interventions with, as its core function, the building of membership-based organizations of working poor women, including a union with over one million women members from multiple trades, a cooperative bank, an insurance cooperative, and over 100 producer and service cooperatives. Ela Bhatt was a member of the Indian Parliament and subsequently the Indian Planning Commission. She cofounded and served as chair of Women’s World Banking and of the global network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). She also served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation for a decade. She continues to serve as a pioneering leader and abiding inspiration to three international movements: the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the micro-finance movement. She has received many awards, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award and the Right Livelihoods Award, as well as honorary degrees from Harvard University, the University of KwaZulu Natal, Yale University, and other academic institutions.
Cross-References
▶ Cooperatives and Employee Ownership ▶ Gandhi, Mahatma ▶ Informal Sector
▶ Labor Movements/Labor Unions ▶ Self Employed Women’s Organization
References/Further Readings Bhatt, E. R. (2006). We are poor but so many. London/New York: Oxford University Press. Chen, M. A. (2006). Self-employed women: A profile of SEWA’s membership. Ahmedabad: SEWA Academy. Rose, K. (1992). Where women are leaders: The SEWA movement in India. New Delhi: Vistaar Publications. Sreenivasan, J. (2000). Ela Bhatt: Uniting women in India. New York: The Feminist Press.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation MICHAEL BISESI
Address of Organization P.O. Box 23350 Seattle, WA 98102 USA www.gatesfoundation.org
Introduction The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is currently the largest philanthropic foundation in the world. In addition to its grant-making impact, the Foundation plays an important leadership role by identifying emerging issues and focusing its funding in a relatively small number of program areas where significant change is possible.
Brief History Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft, and his wife, Microsoft executive Melinda French Gates, decided in 1994 to focus their charitable giving on global health and on community issues in the Pacific Northwest. Bill Gates Sr. took on the key leadership role with the creation of the William H. Gates Foundation. In 1997, Bill and Melinda Gates started the Gates Library Initiative to provide computer and Internet access for US and Canadian low-income communities. The William H. Gates Foundation continued operating as a separate foundation. In 1999, the Gates Library Initiative was renamed the Gates Learning Foundation, and the William H. Gates Foundation became The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bismarck, Otto von
By the year 2000, the Gates Learning Foundation and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation merged. As a result, grant-making was targeted at four key program areas: Global Health, Education, Libraries, and the Pacific Northwest. These program areas were further consolidated in 2006 into three grant-making divisions: Global Development, Global Health, and United States programs. Warren Buffett’s 2006 gift to the existing endowment made the Foundation the world’s largest philanthropy, with assets projected eventually to be worth some $60 billion. At the end of 2008, the Foundation employed nearly 700 people and had an asset trust endowment of some $35 billion.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas The mission of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is to increase opportunity and equity for those most in need. Among the Foundation’s 15 Guiding Principles, the family has made it clear that the Foundation may fund and shape philanthropic initiatives but that action and implementation will be the responsibility of others. Grant-making is limited to three areas of interest: Global Development, Global Health, and United States programs, including the Pacific Northwest region that is the home base for the Gates family.
Activities, Major Accomplishments, and Contributions Since its inception, the Foundation has made grant commitments totaling over $17 billion, including some $2 billion in 2007. Grants have been made to an array of organizations for a variety of purposes, ranging from the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative ($287 million) and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa ($264 million) to the Opportunity Online Program ($8.3 million) and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor ($24 million).
Cross-References
▶ Buffett, Warren ▶ Foundations, Family ▶ Foundations, Grant-making ▶ Gates, William H.
References/Further Readings The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website: www.gatesfoundation.org Collinson, S. (June 26, 2006). Buffett-Gates merger creates 60 billion dollar charity giant. Agence France-Presse, from http://www.aegis. com/NEWS/AFP/2006/AF060645.html
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Bismarck, Otto von JAN R. BUSSE
Basic Biographical Information Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born in 1815 in Scho¨nhausen (Prussia) as a son of a Prussian Junker. Between 1862 and 1890 he was Prime Minister of Prussia. He was chiefly responsible for the formation of the German Empire which resulted from the war of German particular states – led by Prussia – against France in 1870/1871. In this sense, Germany was not unified by a revolution from below, but from above by ‘‘blood and iron.’’ As the first Chancellor of the German Empire (1871–1890) he had important influence on European ‘‘great power’’ relations. In order not to engender the mistrust of the other European powers Bismarck declared that the German Empire does not pursue any territorially expansive ambitions. In 1888, the Year of the Three Emperors, Wilhelm I – under whom Bismarck had served since being Prussian Prime Minister – died. He was succeeded by his son Frederick William who died already after 99 days of rule. Only 2 years after, in 1890, Bismarck resigned from office as Imperial Chancellor due to continuous conflicts about German domestic and foreign politics with Wilhelm II who had been Emperor since 1888. Bismarck died in 1898 in Friedrichsruh near Hamburg.
Major Contributions Bismarck’s social legislation represents a seminal achievement for social justice and can be considered as the foundation of the welfare state as such. In detail, the following bills were part of Bismarck’s social legislation: Health Insurance (1883), Accident Insurance (1884), Old Age and Disability Insurance (1889). These social policy measures need to be seen in context with the consequences of industrialization to German society. As Bismarck feared revolutionary aspirations within the working class he tried to contain and combat Social Democrats by Anti-Socialist Laws in 1878. In this sense, Bismarck’s social insurance program can be seen as Realpolitik by which he tried to increase workers’ identification with the state. Despite these obvious tactical considerations, Bismarck’s reforms were also motivated by a belief in ‘‘applied Christianity.’’
Cross-References ▶ Welfare State
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References/Further Readings Gall, L. (1986). Bismarck: The white revolutionary. Vol. 2, 1871–1898. London: Allen & Unwin. Pflanze, O. (1990). Bismarck and the development of Germany. Vol. 3, The period of fortification, 1880–1898 (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Blended Value JED EMERSON Uhuru Capital Management, New York, NY, USA
Definition First introduced in 2000 (Harvard Social Enterprise Series, 2000), Blended Value is a theory of both capital and organizational value creation which posits that value itself is whole and nondivisible. Within a Blended Value framework, all value is understood as being generated (by organizations and the application of capital) through the interaction over time of three primary value components: social, economic, and environmental, which together comprise organizational value creation and capital returns.
Historical Background Traditionally, philanthropy and NGO/nonprofit corporations have been understood as the domain responsible for the creation of social value and impacts, with for-profit corporations and investors charged with the creation of economic value. While it was understood that (primarily through job creation and tax payments) there was an inherent element of social value to mainstream business, the fundamental value proposition of business was viewed as one of economics and returns to shareholders, whereas the value proposition of nonprofits was viewed as social and creating broader public good. By the late 1990s, social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, social investing, mission-related investing, sustainable and/or development finance, microfinance, venture philanthropy, strategic philanthropy, and a host of related activities had evolved. While each of these has its individual adherents and specific concepts/ terms, when viewed as part of a larger movement it becomes clear that what these activities share is an understanding of value creation as the product of more than the traditional ‘‘nonprofit versus for-profit’’ dynamic. Actors in each of these related silos of activity all understand value as not ‘‘either/or’’ (for-profit versus nonprofit; economic versus
social/environmental), but rather ‘‘both/and’’ – a blend of economic, social, and environmental performance. In terms of organizations, these initiatives demonstrated that for-profit corporations could manage for social and environmental impacts/value creation, while nonprofit organizations could seek to maximize various aspects of economic value and returns. In terms of capital, it is increasingly understood that investment funds could be structured to create not only economic value and return, but also social and environmental value – and that mainstream financial investors should take social and environmental factors into account as they seek to maximize the performance/returns of their investment portfolio. When viewed in total, what these various initiatives demonstrate is that rather than focusing first upon whether a corporation is nonprofit or for-profit, or whether an investment is generating social or financial returns, asset owners and entrepreneurs should seek to maximize the total Blended Value of both organizations and capital. Furthermore, by operating within a Blended Value conceptual and practice framework, one may more effectively understand the various types of value and multiple returns one seeks to create. With this framework in mind, one may then structure the most appropriate type of legal entity or investment strategy to best maximize the elements of the total Blended Value one seeks to generate through the application of capital and management of organizations.
Key Issues Core implications of a Blended Value framework: Unified Investment Strategies and Integrated Wealth Management
Asset owners have traditionally viewed the creation of economic value and financial returns as being completely separate from the allocation of charitable dollars and creation of social value. While this has been true of traditional asset management strategies used by pension funds, educational endowments, and other owners of significant assets, one clear example is that of private, endowed foundations. Private foundations most often manage financial assets to maximize economic returns with no reference to whether those assets are being managed in alignment with the institutional, philanthropic mission. These financial assets usually amount to 95% of the total capital of a private, endowed foundation, while 5% of the annual payout is used for both grantmaking and to cover the administrative costs of operating the foundation. Within a Blended Value framework, foundation trustees and fund managers design a unified investment strategy (UIS) which seeks to align various types of grant
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investments (program, general operating, research and development, etc.) with how the balance of the investment portfolio is managed (cash/cash equivalents, equities (private and public), and alternative investments). Such an investment approach might draw upon tools from program-related investing, mission-related investing, social investing, sustainable investing, and so forth to complement mainstream investment products. However, the key point is that just as in traditional investing, the correct mix of both strategy and investment instruments will differ from investor to investor based upon the risk profile and investment goals of the investing institution. There is no single, correct way to invest – rather, there is simply the commitment to seek to maximize the total Blended Value of the portfolio in a manner most consistent with the institutional mission of the foundation, pension fund, or other investor. These same principles hold true for individual investors seeking to maximize Blended Value. Accordingly, individuals seek to engage in an integrated wealth management strategy which integrates the life goals of the individual with the investment strategy of capital assets under management. The intent is not to maximize financial returns of the investment portfolio first and then secondarily seek to ‘‘do good’’ with some remaining portion allocated to personal philanthropy. Rather, the intent is to understand the total value trajectory of an individual’s life – all the components of value which are joined together as one – and create an investment approach which reflects the values and value creation elements of each individual investor’s life. New Metrics and Blended/Multiple Returns
Over recent years, CSR reporting, Social Return on Investment analysis, and Triple Bottom Line accounting have each advanced a family of new metrics by which investors and managers have sought to assess extra-financial performance of capital and organizations. A Blended Value framework does not replace these various approaches to metrics and performance measurement, but rather, builds upon and seeks to integrate a set of indices in order to better reflect the full Blended Value generated by organizations through their allocation of capital investments. For example, Triple Bottom Line accounting tracks a variety of individual metrics assessing economic, social, and environmental performance of organizations – yet if that analysis remains at the level of the Triple Bottom Line the value created remains bifurcated and disaggregated. Accordingly, many CSR and Triple Bottom Line reports include separate sections addressing economic, social, and environmental performance. While extremely
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helpful in assessing the three individual components of value, such approaches foster an understanding of value creation as a set of trade-offs among limited value components and resources as opposed to a set of strategic decisions made with the intent of maximizing total performance at each level in the form of multiple returns and Blended Value. With individual metrics in place, what remains is to reintegrate these metrics and multiple returns into a holistic framework of performance assessment – a blended metric or return. In the same way banking institutions often ‘‘tier’’ interest rates (combining a federal funds rate with a risk rate and an institutional capital costs rate to create a single blended interest rate which is then charged to the borrower), the multiple returns of capital investment and three aspects of organizational performance must ultimately be viewed as a single blended return in order for analysts to truly assess the total value creation of any given investment or organization. Leadership and Organizational Development
In previous decades nonprofit managers were trained as social work administrators, and business managers received their MBAs. Today, corporate CEOs are being held accountable for social and environmental impacts and performance, and executives of NGOs need to be versed in capital structure finance. In response to these evolving shifts in required skills, business schools are offering courses in social entrepreneurship and national conferences bringing together civic sector leaders include sessions on finance and capital markets. The reality is that increasingly managers in all types of organizations must develop a blend of skills which apply equally to the nonprofit and for-profit corporate environment. By building an integrated skill set and vision of leadership, these ‘‘mutant managers’’ are leading organizations that seek to capture their full Blended Value through acting as disruptive agents in global, regional, and local markets.
International Perspectives Blended Value is a conceptual framework applicable in a variety of nations and international contexts. Whether one considers Bovespa’s Social Stock Exchange, Kiva’s lending platform, or any number of for-profit corporations, social enterprises and microfinance institutions operating around the world, each of these and other initiatives reflect a movement away from an understanding of the world as being divided along the lines of traditional, bifurcated value propositions and organizations.
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This movement across a host of for-profit and NGO entities, being supported with a range of capital investments seeking blended returns, reflects the reality that the value pursued by today’s managers and investors is increasingly blended and moving across global markets. Blended Value is a linking framework that allows one to place each of these enterprise and capital investment practices across a continuum of market activity which together maximizes the performance of actors seeking to create more than simply social or economic impact. Since there is no single, culturally determined manner in which Blended Value is created, the framework translates equally well to both developed and developing market contexts.
Cross-References
▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Social Accounting ▶ Social Entrepreneurship ▶ Strategic Philanthropy ▶ Venture Philanthropy
References/Further Readings A Capital Idea: Total Foundation Asset Management and The Unified Investment Strategy, Stanford Business School, Research Paper Number 1786, January 2002. Blended Value: Papers may be found at www.blendedvalue.org Emerson, J. (2003). The blended value proposition: Integrating social and financial returns. California Management Review, Summer, 45(4). Emerson, J. (2003). Unified investment strategy. Where money meets mission: Breaking down the firewall between foundation investments and programming. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer. Emerson, J., & Bonini, S. (2003). The blended value map: Tracking the intersects and opportunities of economic, environmental and social value creation. Hewlett Foundation, October. Emerson, J., Spitzer, J., & Mulhair, G. (2006). Blended value investing: Capital investment opportunities for social and environmental impact. World Economic Forum, Ref. Paper No. 270306, March. Social Enterprise Series No. 17 (2000). The nature of returns: A social capital markets inquiry into the elements of investment and the blended value proposition. Harvard Business School Working Paper. Spitzer, J., Emerson, J., & Harold, J. (2007). Blended value investing: Innovations in real estate. Oxford University, Said Business School, ISBN: 978–1–905551–56–9, Fall.
Bloch-Laine´, Franc¸ois ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1912 in Paris into a middle-class Catholic family, Franc¸ois Bloch-Laine´ was a French civil servant who
played a decisive role in the evolution of French nonprofit organizations during the 1970s. In his youth he was active in social movements inspired by the social Catholic French movement and, at the age of 17, participated in the creation of a group called Come´diens routiers, a scouting group that traveled throughout the country. The problems he observed as he came into contact with young working class adolescents through Catholic associative structures became the topic of his Ph.D. thesis: Le proble`me de l’e´ducation populaire (translated: The problem of working class education). After studying law and politics, he began his civil service career as a finance inspector in 1936 and held numerous important positions in various government departments. At one time, he was responsible for the national budget and later became the director of the Caisse des De´poˆts, the state investment bank. Bloch-Laine´ died in Paris in 2002.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions His enduring fight for a place for associations in the French relation between the state and the nonprofit sector made Bloch-Laine´ one of the most important civil society actors in France. While in office, he implemented public sector financial incentives and favorable regulations towards nonprofit organizations. Especially toward the end of his career, he brought his extensive knowledge and experience as a state official to bear in the development of the French third sector. In 1975, he led the creation of the Association pour le de´veloppement des associations de progre`s (DAP), which translates to the Association for the Development of Associations for Progress. The DAP organized three colloquiums in 1977, 1979, and 1981 and published Pour le progre`s des associations (‘‘For the Progress of Associations’’). In 1988 Bloch-Laine´ became the president of the Comite´ de la Charte, a French certification committee for ethical fundraising and today a branch of ICFO (International Committee on Fundraising Organizations). Furthermore, when he retired he chaired the Union of Health and Welfare Non-Profit Organizations (UNIOPSS), which became an example of partnership between the state and social-service organizations. In his 1999 book on French civil society organizations, he poses questions on modernizing the legal framework for the French associative sector, measuring the third sector’s impact, and building donor trust. To this effect he brought together economists, sociologists, and jurists. In recognition of his accomplishments, Bloch-Laine´ received several awards including the Me´daille de la Re´sistance and the Grand-Croix de la Le´gion d’honneur.
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Cross-References
▶ International Committee on Fundraising Organizations ▶ UNIOPSS
References/Further Readings Bloch-Laine´, F. (1999). Faire socie´te´. Les associations au coeur du social. Paris: Syros (Alternatives sociales). Margairaz, M. (2005). Franc¸ois Bloch-Laine´, fonctionnaire, financier, citoyen. Paris: Comite´ pour l’histoire e´conomique et financie`re de la France.
Boards GABRIEL BERGER Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Introduction Governance design, leadership, and management represent some of the critical organizational issues faced by civil society organizations. Several authors suggest that governance boards play a crucial role in successful civil society organizations, for they provide strategic direction, a counterbalance to the power of executive and management staff, and a vision that inspires and guides individuals directly involved in and supporters of these organizations (Knauft et al., 1991). However, boards come in several forms and shapes, and empirical studies have shown a more complex view of their role and function in civil society organizations (Middleton, 1987; SEKN, 2006).
Definitions Good governance is widely viewed as a crucial factor for organizational performance. Therefore the notion of governance calls for some clarification, since it is often unclear and undifferentiated from other aspects of strategic leadership, especially in civil society organizations where governance is frequently confused with administration or management in regulatory frameworks of several countries. An organization’s governance is expressed in the formal authority and actual influence distribution among its members as regards its core decisions (Knoke, 1990). Thus, the term ‘‘governance’’ is associated with two different meanings: one that relates to the definition of who has final responsibility and is legally authorized to make core decisions and to clarify rights
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and duties, and another that focuses on the distribution of actual power to make the organization’s fundamental decisions. Boards are the bodies which have final legal authority over civil society organizations and are legally authorized to make decisions that affect directions, activities, and resource allocation. Authority over some decisions is delegated to other actors, even though final responsibility remains within these boards. These governance structures or bodies, which are called differently depending on organizations’ legal status and home countries – Board of Directors, Administrative Council, Governance Committees, are usually made up by individuals who participate in these organizations on a volunteer basis. In civil society organizations, the role of governance bodies involves making fundamental decisions that determine organizations’ purposes, strategies, and goals, enabling the allocation of their collective resources to those ends (Knoke, 1990). Governance bodies are supposed to focus on general, broad and core policies, rather than on operating decisions of lesser significance to the entire organization. The design of organizations’ governance structures is intertwined with the definition of implementation and operating structures and processes, which reflects in the differentiation between governance and management spheres. Management structures refer to the distribution of authority and responsibility in the execution of tasks and activities intended to implement the policies, strategies, and decisions made by governance structures, as well as to the organization of core and support functions and activities derived from civil society organizations’ mission. Although the set of issues related to organizational governance mainly depends on the context, mission, and development phase of the organization, primary governance responsibilities include the organization’s mission, strategy, performance monitoring and control, and accountability. Thus, governance functions engulf the decisions and actions involving the authority to determine or revise organizational vision, mission, values, and core strategies, assess organizational results in the pursuit of its mission and in achieving its main objectives, establish fundamental institutional policies, allocate major organizational resources, and finally set mechanisms used to delegate authority within organizational structure and among its actors. Altogether, these functions can be summarized by two key concepts that capture the focus of governance and boards as the bodies in which governance is performed in civil society organizations: fiduciary responsibility and trusteeship.
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Key Issues Key issues in the analysis of civil society organizations’ boards are their role and responsibilities, their structure and organization, their composition and contribution of their members, and the relationship with the staff leadership of civil society organizations. In the field of civil society organizations, normative literature suggests that, although governance structures and processes may vary according to the organization’s type, size, and evolution stage, governance responsibilities are not dependent on specific organizational features. A vast bibliography refers to a civil society organization’s board responsibilities, which may be summarized as follows: 1. Setting and revising organization’s mission, objectives, and major strategies, and analyzing its accomplishments and results 2. Establishing key institutional policies 3. Ensuring the formulation of a suitable strategic plan 4. Approving and monitoring major programs and services provided by the organization 5. Allocating adequate resources and ensuring economic sustainability 6. Monitoring financial performance and protecting organization’s net worth 7. Assuring compliance with legal requirements 8. Recruiting, supporting and evaluating the individual that will have overall managerial responsibilities 9. Promoting organization’s public image, acting as a link between society and the organization, and being accountable for the actions of the organization 10. Strengthening and assessing governance body performance This list of responsibilities details and specifies the governance definition advanced earlier, and according to normative approaches, effective performance of civil society organizations is affected to a large extent by the degree in which boards ensure themselves that they are adequately covered. Meeting these responsibilities prompts board members to go beyond traditional governance duties to perform several roles in addition to that of trustees, such as organizational ambassadors, fund-raisers, and donors. How these responsibilities are met and assigned is one of the key challenges in designing board structures and processes. Beyond the definition of responsibilities and how delegation is done, normative literature on civil society organizations show consensus that effective governance is based on a collective effort geared to establishing adequate processes to enable actions that ensure advancement towards shared goals consistent with the organization’s mission. This means that, according to this literature,
governance should be exercised by a collective body that has been assigned authority and not by individual members acting independently (Andringa & Engstrom, 1997; Carver et al., 1997). However, there are several alternatives to design and operate these governance structures, such as the creation of executive, standing, and ad hoc committee bodies, the involvement of advisory boards, etc. Different proposals and recommendations have surfaced to reformulate governance structure operations. In the corporate arena, some authors state that responsibilities are often inadequately fulfilled due to several reasons, such as limited dedication or insufficient information available to board members. Governance body members are demanded greater accountability for their performance, and companies are now challenged to design suitable mechanisms and processes to enhance their work. Topics such as board independence from management, board member appointments, term limitations or internal stakeholder group engagement are widely accepted as subjects requiring greater research in order to determine their contributions to corporate performance. In order to address these problems, different solutions have been proposed, such as changes in governance meeting processes, the incorporation of outside members with no interest in the company, a limited number of company executives serving at boards, the separation of the roles of company CEO and board chair, greater regulation on board auditing committees, more involvement of stockholders and investors in boards, governance member selection and appointment process redesign, or greater authority of stockholders over boards (Carter & Lorsch, 2004). Along these critical lines, civil society governance performance analysts point out that these bodies often restrict their responsibilities to a passive or traditional role, focusing on report analysis and approval, management supervision, and pursuing specific activities of interest to each member (Chait et al., 2005; Taylor et al., 1996). However, for these analysts, the increasingly important role played by these entities in society demands that, in order to deliver effective governance, board members should focus their work on strategic tasks, which require new commitment rules to ensure responsibility fulfillment. These strategic tasks refer to crucial issues for the organization’s future. Actions can be planned with specific deadlines and clearly-defined success measures, and their implementation requires the engagement of internal and external actors. Adopting this strategic approach implies the recognition of governance bodies as one of the major leadership sources in civil society organizations, working jointly with management teams. Unlike the focus of corporate discussions, that are keyed on strengthening governance bodies’ overseeing functions
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to ensure their performance as a counterbalance for executive management, the nonprofit world has stressed the role of governance body members as managers’ partners in organizational leadership and as a source of leadership for organizations (Drucker, 1990; Chait et al., 2005). The topic of boards and governance in civil society organizations has received greater attention in countries with Anglo-Saxon origins, and the vast majority of writing and empirical research on this topic has been conducted in these countries with few exceptions. Recent research conducted in Latin America and Spain suggests some significant aspects in civil society governance models that are to be considered and that open up questions about normative perspectives (SEKN, 2006). First, in spite of the fact that most analysts would recommend term limits and renewal in board membership, there seems to be a significant continuity in board composition – members hold their positions for many years, and membership turnover in governance structures is low. What seems to be critical is that governance body members tend to add value to their social ventures by contributing or enabling access to the legitimacy, credibility, capabilities, and economic resources required for their development. Finally, research findings showed that governance body members may be involved in executive tasks, while organization executives may be involved as well in governance tasks, indicating a certain degree of role overlapping between governance members and management teams. Given the complexity and creativity involved in the issues addressed by civil society organizations, continued governance members’ permanence may become an asset, since it allows for experience and knowledge acquisition on issues addressed, taking advantage of learning. Governance body composition continuity may take various forms, but, whatever the format chosen, it helps to endow civil society organizations with a long-term perspective. For example, in civil society organizations, it is usual for the founding group or initial social entrepreneurs that launched the initiative to remain in the governance body for a long time, thus providing a stable framework for major policies and strategies in some cases. When there is turnover in governance body composition, other institutional mechanisms are found to be in place to ensure continuity in organizations’ core decisions: when there is a higher controlling body or hierarchy that launched a specific initiative or that oversees a social venture’s governance body, immediate, or direct governance body members may be subject to turnover. Setting time constraints for governance body members is an institutionally designed mechanism that has been
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viewed as protecting organizations from self-perpetuating leadership roles. However, observations from successful civil society organizations in some regions of the world seem to contradict Anglo-Saxon normative bibliography on nonprofit governance (Andringa & Engstrom, 1997; Axelrod, 1994; Grummon, 1995). In this literature, setting standards for governance body members’ permanence – either limiting the number of periods to be served at the board, the number of terms to serve at the same position, the specific duration of terms, or any such rule – are viewed as essential to promote internal democracy, encourage community involvement, facilitate organizations’ adjustments to environmental changes through outlook renewal, and avoid the risk of organizational ‘‘appropriation’’ by governance body members. However, a governance body member’s prolonged stay may contribute to a deeper and specific knowledge of the organization’s focal issues. Second, member continuity provides a sense of stability and long-term outlook for social ventures. Third, stable governance body composition may effectively enhance economic resource mobilization towards social ventures by boosting donors’ trust. Governance body members enhance their performance by providing legitimacy, credibility, critical yet scarce capabilities, and network access to raise required economic resources or political support for venture success. Social venture governance body composition and member profiles significantly shape initiatives’ performance by providing them with any of the following elements that are crucial to their sustainability. In some cases, the primary resource for a social venture is an intangible attribute, such as legitimacy among critical stakeholder groups, ‘‘permission’’ or validation of decisions made regarding mission, strategies, and actions that render them acceptable. This leads to a discussion on how legitimacy is built. A starting point for this analysis involves an understanding of the relationship between governance bodies and organizations’ members and stakeholders. In civil society organizations, the relationship between governance bodies and organization members is usually characterized as ‘‘fiduciary’’ or as trusteeship. Basically, in a fiduciary relationship, some individuals are considered trustworthy and are designated to look after the resources or net worth transferred to or produced by an entity. Thus, governance body members agree to act on behalf of others, to whom they are legally and morally bound. Fiduciary obligations entail loyalty, honesty, and a bona fide effort to act in the organization’s best interest. These relationships are based on the recognition that governance bodies represent a larger group of people, who legally and morally ‘‘own’’ organizations and to
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whom these bodies are to be held accountable (Carver, 1997). Since civil society organizations lack shareholders governance bodies of civil society organizations must explore and answer the following questions: How does the organization legitimize its decisions for its critical stakeholders? Who grants its authority to an organization’s governance body? Who should governance bodies and their members be accountable to? The stakeholder involvement achieved through governance body engagement effectively validates the policies and strategies adopted by organizations. In this way, legitimacy can be understood as key third-party recognition of organizations’ decisions, positions, and beliefs as valid. Considering stakeholders’ concerns and needs and reaching consensus through governance body involvement for all sectors involved provide legitimacy to the policies and strategies adopted by organizations. In turn, this legitimacy ensures the support of those who must collaborate in implementation. When the public interest pursued by an organization needs to be especially safeguarded and there are circumstances that may jeopardize the organization’s trustworthiness or the belief that the organization seeks to protect a collective interest (stated in its mission) to the expense of its employees’ or governance body members’ interests, incorporating renowned business, social, political, and academic leaders to governance bodies may enhance organizational credibility. Another alternative to enhance organizational credibility involves incorporating people who ‘‘reflect’’ or share the characteristics of specific stakeholder groups. Governance bodies may include members with fundamental characteristics for organizations’ effective performance, because they contribute specific technical and professional expertise and cannot be ‘‘acquired’’ or afforded by these organizations. Engaging people with these capabilities in governance bodies effectively enhances institutional decisions and actions. In some cases incorporating business-oriented people to civil society organizations’ governance bodies is often viewed as a success factor, for their experience may be helpful to bring to these organizations an orientation towards efficient management. In the same line of reasoning, board membership profiles can be critical to provide access to or networks of economic resources and political support rather than direct economic contributions through personal, professional, and business connections. Often, more than direct resource contributions, social ventures seem to primarily need their governance bodies to provide them with access to other individuals or organizations that may contribute the resources required. Through their personal, professional, or business connections, governance body members help organizations to raise the
necessary resources and materials. It seems, therefore, that the Anglo-Saxon motto that describes civil society organizations’ expectations for their governance body members – Give, Get, or Get Off – should be adjusted slightly to read, instead, ‘‘Get, Help to Get, or Get Lost.’’ Civil society organizations often turn to Advisory Councils or Consultation Committees to attain key capabilities for their organizations or to expand their access to resource providing networks, expanding with these bodies their governance structures. Advisory or Consultation Committees enable governance structures to engage – with no decision-making responsibilities – people who supply their experience, connections, and networks, professional and academic credentials, sound image or credibility to organizations, thus broadening their resource portfolio to enhance their governance quality. An Advisory Council may also improve the bond between organizations and communities by incorporating other stakeholders’ perspectives, as well as reaching other organizations that operate in the same communities or that may collaborate through networks and alliances (Axelrod, 1991; Saidel & D’Aquanni, 1999). From a traditional standpoint, governance and execution roles should be clearly differentiated, since this separation contributes to the establishment of control systems and balanced management models for effective organizational performance. In this light, governance body members must remain detached from organizational management (Carver & Carver, 1997). However, contrary to these views, often civil society organizations show a wide range of board member involvement in several implementation aspects, with three major schemes for high governance involvement in social venture operative management: presidents (board chairpersons) who lead organizations and are involved in management, chairpersons who also serve as executive directors or general managers, and governance body members who are responsible for several operating areas or functions. In civil society organizations in which leadership is exercised by their chairpersons, their involvement in organizational performance is perceived as natural, especially when they have been the founders of the organizations and/or they are simultaneously in charge of management. In other civil society organizations, leaders-founders have differentiated the chairpersons and executive director positions, but they have left their mark on management as well. Finally, at the very extreme of board member involvement in organizational management, board members also headed several operating areas and devoted many weekdays to their organizational duties. In this case, there is a functional overlapping between board members and the
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organization’s management structure. Other civil society organizations prefer a low involvement model for governance body members. Some organizations view rare board involvement in daily operations as a practice contributing to good organizational performance, since it allows board members to focus on strategic courses, global performance monitoring and support network construction. Thus, they have given ample leeway to their executive directors for strategic management. In these cases, governance body members are rarely or never involved in implementation or operational issues. Regardless of board member involvement in organizational management or operations, in general terms, civil society organizations’ executive employees are involved in some way in governance tasks, engaging in the formulation of strategic priorities, primary policies and core decisions and contributing to enhance institutional decision-making quality, with the top executive as a member of the organization’s Executive Committee, or with the management team attending board meetings, actively participating in strategy formulation and planning. When civil society organization governance bodies meet on rare occasions and have an oversight function, or when they are almost exclusively devoted to contributing in a specific and critical area such as fund-raising, organizations’ management teams tend to be actively involved in governance tasks and formulate strategies, policies, and core decisions, which are then submitted for governance body approval, as it is mandatory according to their bylaws. This scheme is often used when civil society organization founders choose to hold executive positions but not to formally join governance bodies, although they significantly influence organizational governance. At the same time, some of them lay the groundwork and encourage other governance body members to actively engage in strategic tasks, such as institutional relations, partnership building or project oversight. A good working relationship between an organization’s executive, in charge of management structures, and the board chair seems to be a key factor for the development and enhancement of executive contributions to organizational governance. This good working relationship may be based on complementary functions, capabilities, and personal traits. This specific relationship between an organization’s top executive who is an employee in charge of management and its volunteer leader formally in charge of governance has been identified as one of the most salient features of civil society organizations’ leadership (O’Connell, 1985; Drucker, 1992). All in all, the engagement of at least some governance body members in executive and management tasks helps
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to articulate polices, strategies, operating plans and activities, granting greater internal consistency and more effective institutional performance. In addition, the involvement of individuals holding executive positions in governance body meetings usually enriches decisionmaking processes relating to social venture policies and strategies (SEKN, 2006). This approach often implies that these bodies become ‘‘working’’ governance bodies or assume an active role in organizational leadership, along with top management, developing a ‘‘generative governance’’ model (Chait et al., 2005).
Future Directions Understanding how civil society organizations’ governance schemes, processes, and structures must be designed to respond to sustainability requirements remains a key issue for further development. While boards need stability, persistence, and continuity there are risks associated with these features, such as the potential lack of new ideas, limited options considered in strategic decision making, or public perception that organizations are controlled by a self-perpetuating group. At the same time, often governance body member continuity is unfeasible or politically unacceptable, thus the challenge seems to be how to devise more complex governance structures that preserve a medium or long-term perspective on some critical issues while ensuring periodic changes in board membership. A second issue for further attention relates to how to integrate the need to have boards with the appropriate profiles to contribute value to civil society organizations while at the same time considering some form of stakeholder representation. Recruiting for governance bodies must on the one hand consider mechanisms and processes to screen for suitable profiles, and clarify candidates’ expected contributions. At the same time, appropriate stakeholder representation becomes a growing demand for civil society organizations, in the quest for greater legitimacy and public expectations of democratic participation within them. How to balance these two aspects of recruiting and board composition, or how to design models that respond to these challenges is an area that calls for greater theoretical analysis and empirical research. Board accountability and evaluation in the context of civil society organizations constitute a third issue that future research must address (Herman et al., 1997; Holland & Jackson, 1998; Jackson & Holland, 1998). Greater calls for accountability in civil society organizations have become commonplace. Fulfilling this expectation is one of the central challenges for boards, not only with regards to overall performance and impact of their organizations, but also on the boards’ own contribution. In the same
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vein, evaluation of board performance remains an area in which best practices have to be developed and studied. To the extent that individual and group performance evaluation be introduced as a tool for board management, the process for greater board accountability will probably be paved. Finally, governance body members’ involvement in activities or tasks that exceed the traditional oversight, control, and policy or priority setting functions and lead them to participate in strategic or operational issue management seems to lead to improved performance as it enhances commitment and motivation, encouraging them to continue their engagement and to reinforce their personal contributions to civil society organizations. However, this approach entails risking interference in management tasks. How to build board member involvement in strategic and operational issues, how to manage this engagement and how to adjust it periodically as needed constitute an area in which much needs to be learnt.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Governance, Organizational ▶ Legitimacy ▶ Nonprofit Management ▶ Social Enterprise ▶ Social Enterprise Knowledge Network ▶ Stakeholders ▶ Trusteeship
Holland, T., & Jackson, D. (1998). Strengthening board performance: Findings and lessons from demonstration projects. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 9(2). Jackson, D., & Holland, T. (1998). Measuring the effectiveness of nonprofit boards. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quaterly, 27(2), 159–182. Knauft, E. B., Berger, R. A., & Gray, S. (1991). Profiles of excellence: Achieving success in the nonprofit sector. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Knoke, D. (1990). Organizing for collective action. New York: Aldyne de Gruyter. Middleton, M. (1987). Nonprofit boards of directors: Beyond the governance function. In W. W. Powell (Ed.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (pp. 141–153). New Haven, CA: Yale University Press. Nelson, J. G. (1995). Six keys to recruiting, orienting, and involving nonprofit Board members. Washington, DC: National Center for Nonprofit Boards. O’Connell, B. (1985). The board member’s book. New York: The Foundation Center. Saidel, Judith & D’Aquanni, Alissandra. (1999). Expanding the Governance Construct: Functions and Contributions of Nonprofit Advisory Groups. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute. SEKN. (2006). Effective management of social enterprises: Lessons form businesses and civil society organizations in Iberoame´rica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Taylor, B., Chait, R., & Holland, T. (1996). The new work of the nonprofit board. Harvard Business Review, September–October, 36–46.
Bodelschwingh, Friedrich von ALEXIA DUTEN
References/Further Readings
Basic Bibliographical Information
Andringa, R., & Engstrom, T. (1997). Nonprofit board answer book: Practical guidelines for board members and chief executives. Washington, DC: National Center for Nonprofit Boards. Axelrod, N. (1991). Creating and renewing advisory boards: Strategies for success. Washington, DC: National Center for Nonprofit Boards. Axelrod, N. (1994). Board Leadership and Board Development. In R. D. Herman & Associates (Eds.), The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management (pp. 119–136). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Carter, C. B., & Lorsch, J. W. (2004). Back to the drawing board: Designing corporate boards for a complex world. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publising. Carver, J., & Carver, M. (1997). Reinventing your board. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Chait, R., Ryan, W. P., & Taylor, B. (2005). Governance as leadership: Reframing the work of nonprofit boards. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Drucker, P. F. (1990). Managing the non-profit organization. New York: Harper Collins. Grummon N. J. (1995) Six keys to Recruiting, Orienting, and Involving Nonprofit Board Members. Washington, DC: National Center for Nonprofit Boards. Herman, R., Renz, D., & Heimovics, R. (1997). Board practices and board effectiveness in local nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 7(4), 373–385.
Born in 1831 in Tecklenburg, Germany, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh is known to contemporaries as Friedrich von Bodelschwingh Senior, in contrast to his son, born in 1877, named after him. Bodelschwingh was a pastor and theologian from a politically ultraconservative background. His family was one of the oldest in Westphalia; he personally was very close to the emperor-to-be, Friedrich III. Although reportedly authoritarian and a maverick, he was said to be a charismatic and warmhearted individual. After a botany course at Berlin University, Bodelschwingh encountered poverty in the field. Young Bodelschwingh felt he had to help and started studying theology. His first post was located at the Protestant Mission for Germans in Paris where he worked from 1858 to 1864 with immigrant workers. Back in Germany, Bodelschwingh became pastor in the rural town Dellwig where he stayed with his family from 1864 to 1871. After having lost all of his four children to diphtheria, he moved to Bielefeld in 1872 to manage an institution for epileptic
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and mentally disabled children, which he named Bethel, literally ‘‘the House of God.’’ Although most of the credit for the ‘‘v. Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel’’ (v. Bodelschwingh’s Bethel Foundation) goes to Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, the premises had existed since 1867 thanks to an initiative of the Inner Mission and donations of local merchants. Bethel soon received support for its activities from the mother house ‘‘Sarepta’’ and its friar equivalent, the ‘‘Nazareth.’’ In order to finance the rapid growth of the Bethel institutions, Bodelschwingh practiced highly successful fundraising. The pastor received funds from the Emperor as well as from workers, the latter he particularly focused on in his letters of thanks for which he employed several people. He also instituted ‘‘penny clubs.’’ His fundraising activities led him to the nickname ‘‘the most brilliant beggar that Germany has ever seen’’ (Heuss, 1951). The Bethel Foundation started with 27 deaconesses working in eight stations. Within a decade, 263 deaconesses were operative at Bethel. No other mother house knew such an expansion. Even though Bodelschwingh did not really believe in the necessity of a welfare state, he initiated two welfare services before his death. First, the ‘‘Lex Bodelschwingh’’ was meant to protect wayfarers and migrant workers who were often arrested by the police. Bodelschwingh created colonies where migrants could work and rest temporarily in line with his motto ‘‘Work, not charity.’’ Second, the pastor sent Bethel-trained sisters to the Protestant Mission for German-East Africa. In 1903, he created a hospital including a station for the mentally ill in East Africa as well as facilities for the education of liberated slave children.
Major Contributions The Bethel Foundations that von Bodelschwing founded soon became a reference for treatment of the mentally deficient, an example for nonprofit management and a historical milestone for social and health welfare. Their administration has also been a mirror of structural change within the German foundation landscape: from its origins as a private institution belonging to the Inner Mission in the 1870s, it became a Christian establishment under public regulation in 1895 before turning into a deaconal corporation affiliated to the Diakonisches Werk (since the mid-1980s).
Cross-References
▶ Diakonisches Werk der EKD ▶ Fundraising ▶ Missionary Societies
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References/Further Readings Bradfield, M. (Ed.) (1961). The good samaritan: The life and work of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. London: Marshall Morgan & Scott. Heuss, T. (1951). Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. Verl.-Handl. d. Anstalt Bethel: Verlag. Schmuhl, H.-W. (2005). Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. Reinbeck bei Hamburg Rowohlt Taschenbuch: Verlag.
Bo¨ll, Heinrich ▶ Heinrich Bo¨ll Stiftung
Bosch, Robert ODILE BOUR
Basic Biographical Information Born in Albeck (South Germany) in 1861 as last son of a wealthy Swabian farmer of democratic liberal convictions, Robert Bosch went on to found one of Germany’s most important automobile equipment manufacturing firms, introducing in his plant a progressive social and welfare policy and displaying a consistent philanthropic activity. Following school graduation he went in precisioninstrument maker apprenticeship in Ulm, and after his military service studied electrical engineering for one semester in Stuttgart before he left for New York where he worked with Thomas Edison. In 1886 he opened his own craft workshop in Stuttgart which grew into a huge firm, developing the spark plug and the magneto, assisting thus the birth of Germany’s auto industry. He died in 1942 in Stuttgart.
Major Contributions The strong influence socialist thinking had had on Robert Bosch during his journeyman year in America was evident in his concern about political and economic aspects of the workers movement. His plant soon stood for pioneer social policy and social welfare: all employees enjoyed high wages, an 8-hour day (1906), retirement security, Saturday afternoons off, and graduated vacation time (1910). Bosch used to say: ‘‘I don’t pay good wages because I am rich; I am rich because I pay good wages.’’ Robert Bosch considered himself a successful entrepreneur whose responsibility it was to care for public welfare
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inside and outside his firm by bettering the social condition of his own employees and establishing foundations for the common good: he supported among others education on the job, popular education, research and teaching, homeopathy, French-German and American-German understanding, and the Paneuropean movement. Simultaneously he regarded philanthropy as a mean of pursuing his objectives of society improvement and progress and thus counterbalancing the state where he thought it was necessary. This strong social commitment turned into an undeniably political one, as he became the walk-in center for political resistance against Hitler’s regime from the end of the 1930s with the so-called ‘‘Bosch circle of resistance.’’ Settling his inheritance and his former donations, the Robert Bosch Foundation was created 1964 following his last will and testament. By 2008, it was one of the largest foundations in Germany.
Cross-References
▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH
References/Further Readings Heuss, T., Gillepsie, S., & Kapczynski, J. (1994). Robert Bosch – His life and achievements. New York: Henry Holt (German ed. 1946). Lessing, H.-E. (2007). Robert Bosch. Hamburg: Rohwolt. Scholtyseck, J. (1999). Robert Bosch und der liberale Widerstand gegen Hitler (1933–1945). Munich: Beck.
Boulding, Kenneth Ewart DAVID HORTON SMITH
Basic Biographical Information Kenneth Boulding was born January 18, 1910, in Liverpool, England. He graduated in 1931 from Oxford University with first class honors in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (B. Litt.). Although he did some post-graduate work elsewhere, he never earned a higher degree. In 1936, Boulding emigrated permanently to the United States, becoming a US citizen in 1948. Boulding spent most of his career as a Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan (1949–1967) and then at the University of Colorado at Boulder (1967– 1980; subsequently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus).
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Although principally an economist (J. B. Clark Medal, 1949; President of the American Economics Association,
1968), Boulding’s greatest contributions to civil society/ nonprofit sector studies came from his broad, interdisciplinary interests and work. He attempted to broaden the narrow, highly mathematical, and profit/‘‘utility’’-oriented approach of economics. He argued forcefully for economists to include less precise and more interdisciplinary approaches to understanding human behavior and groups. Boulding was convinced, unlike most economists, that human behavior can only be understood by studying people in their totality. Boulding was the first major economist to give careful attention to the nonprofit sector. He concluded that in studying only the ‘‘exchange’’ economy, economists were missing a great deal of important economic activity. In a 1966 article, he wrote that economists needed to grapple with the ‘‘grants economy,’’ which was his term for what non-economists see as the financial part of the nonprofit sector. Elaborating on this theme with others, Boulding co-founded (1968) the Association for the Study of the Grants Economy/ASGE, which still exists. He was President of ASGE from 1970 to 1989. The exchange economy usually studied by economists involves two parties each giving something to the other (usually money for goods or services) so that the net worth of each party is unchanged. But in the grants economy, transfers between two parties/entities result in the reduction of the net worth of one party (the grantor) and increase in the net worth of the other party (the grantee). Both charitable giving by individuals and by organizations (e.g., foundations, corporations) meet this criterion, because Boulding interprets the term ‘‘grants’’ quite broadly. In nonprofit studies, the focus is usually on (voluntary) grants made out of altruism or ‘‘love’’ in Boulding’s terms. But there is also the ‘‘threat’’ (coercive) grants economy, as when a robber steals from us or when some government taxes us. Boulding’s classic discussion of the grants economy was published first in his book The Economy of Love and Fear (1973). Boulding also hinted at the (historically recent) revolutionary growth of associations in his book The Organizational Revolution (1953). In a later journal article, D. H. Smith (1972) first expanded on this idea for the nonprofit sector and volunteer/grassroots associations specifically.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Gift, Giving ▶ Smith, David Horton
Boy Scouts
References/Further Readings Boulding, K. E. (1953). The organizational revolution. New York: Harper. Boulding, K. E. (1973). The economy of love and fear: A preface to grants economics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Smith, D. H. (1972). Modernization and the emergence of volunteer organizations. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 13, 113–134.
Bourdieu, Pierre ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Basic Biographical Information Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, was born in 1930 in Denguin, France. After receiving his agre´gation from the E´cole Normale Supe´rieure, he worked as a teacher in France until taking a post as a lecturer in Algiers. His first book, The Algerians (1962), resulted from ethnographic research on selected groups during the Algerian War. Upon his return to France, Bourdieu taught and held research positions at the University of Paris (1960–1964), the E´cole Pratique des Hautes E´tudes (1964–1981), and the Colle`ge de France (from 1981). From 1968 until his death, he also directed the Centre de Sociologie Europe´enne. In 1996, together with other social scientists seeking to focus on social issues, Bourdieu founded the publishing company Raisons d’agir (Reason to Act). The company publishes critical books and papers concerning social problems linked to state responsibility, the media, intellectuals in France and global economy developments. Bourdieu died of cancer in 2002 in Paris.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Bourdieu’s contributions to the field of study of civil society and social capital are numerous. In his piece, ‘‘Forms of Capital’’ (1986), he introduced and expanded upon terms relating to different types of capital which act as a social relation within a system of exchange. The forms of capital include economic, cultural, symbolic, and also social capital. In Bourdieu’s terminology, social capital refers to the resources provided by personal networks such as families, communities, and other associations within a society. In his 1984 work, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, Bourdieu focuses on the reproduction of social patterns of power and on the structural analysis of society and systems of distinction. Here he developed the concepts of habitus and different fields with different rules
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of power. Habitus describes a set of ‘‘durable dispositions’’ that condense traditions, knowledge, and practices, and which guide choices. A field is a setting, which has its own logic and in which agents and their social positions – depending on their capital and their habitus – are located. For Bourdieu, social science and political action were strongly linked. In the 1990s he became more and more present in public debates on globalization and in international intellectual networks. He wrote several articles encouraging the creation of a European social movement to promote a European Union that is more than just a strong market held together by the economic interests of nation states. He called on European citizens, especially intellectuals, to create the European Union the way they want it. In addition to his academic work, Bourdieu himself was an important actor of civil society as a cofounder and strong supporter of the Attac movement.
Cross-References
▶ Attac ▶ Gift, Giving ▶ Social Capital, Definition of
References/Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Contre-feux 2. Pour un mouvement social europe´en. Paris: Raisons d’agir. Bourdieu, P. (2008). Political interventions: Social science and political action. London: Verso Books. Poupeau, F., & Discepolo, T. (2005). Scholarship with commitment: On the political engagements of Pierre Bourdieu. In L. Wacquant (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu and democratic politics. The mystery of ministry (pp. 55–63). Cambridge: Polity.
Boy Scouts A. JOSEPH BORRELL
Address of Organization Rue du Pre´-Jeroˆme 5 PO Box 91 CH-1211 Geneva 4 Plainpalais Switzerland www.scout.org
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Introduction The Boys Scouts are organized as a worldwide federation of non-governmental organizations whose purpose is to offer leadership and character-development skills to boys as they make the transition to adulthood. Religious involvement and a programmatic emphasis on physical activities are hallmarks of the Boy Scout approach to youth development.
Brief History The Boy Scout movement was started by Sir (later Lord) Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941), a former British soldier who had served in India and South Africa. Disheartened by seeing youth inactivity and unemployment when returning to the United Kingdom, Baden-Powell drew upon his military experience to design the early Scouting program. Baden-Powell held the first camp for Scouts in 1907 where he and other volunteer adults supervised a group of boys as they camped, cooked, and played games. BadenPowell used this experience to refine his conception of Scouting as a youth activity and the next year published Scouting for Boys, which became the first handbook of the movement.
that includes ‘‘duty to God.’’ Scouting is open to members of all recognized religions, but a belief in God is held as a central tenet and atheists have been denied membership and leadership roles in the organization. Modern Scouting has its critics. A common criticism of Scouting worldwide is that too much attention is paid to preparation for military service and development of patriotic fervor. In addition, the ban on gay leaders has provoked much controversy, particularly in the United States, where other civic and nonprofit organizations, including grant makers, have been unable to work with the Boy Scouts of America due to its policy on gay men.
Achievements The Scout motto of ‘‘be prepared’’ has become known worldwide. Over the last century, the scouting movement has spread to over 150 countries and is known for its effective, informal educational methods. Prominent alumni of the Boy Scout movement include musician Paul McCartney and former US President Gerald Ford.
Cross-References
▶ Federations, Nonprofit ▶ Girl Scouts
Mission and Activities Scouting has three primary development objectives for its members: character, citizenship, and fitness. Across the world, the organization appeals to adolescents since it provides friendship and outside the home activities that are often physically challenging. The acquisition of skills, as measured by earning merit badges, and the completion of community service projects are required to advance to the higher levels of scouting. While the uniform of the Boy Scout is easily recognized, this vestment is also a symbol of the Scouting’s egalitarian premise. Shared activities, such as overnight camping, also help to deemphasize the class, culture, and racial differences among its members.
BRAC MARTIN HO¨LZ, REGINA LIST
Address of Organization BRAC Centre 75 Mohakhali Dhaka Bangladesh www.brac.net
Introduction Structure Scouting is organized at the local level into small groups of Scouts, sometimes called a patrol or den. The Scoutmaster, a volunteer adult, provides leadership and mentoring to the group and is responsible for the safety of the youth involved. In addition to regular group meetings, Scouts have the opportunity to participate in a camp experience, known as a jamboree, with other Scouts outside their group. Churches are often sponsors of scouting groups, and religion is viewed by the organization as an important element of Scouting. Scouts take an oath or promise
The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, now known by its acronym BRAC, is one of the largest development NGOs in the world, headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Founded in 1972, it employs more than 100,000 workers, most of them women, and reaches more than 100 million people in Asia and Africa.
Brief History BRAC has its roots in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. After the country won its independence from Pakistan, the economy and its people were devastated.
BRAC
In 1972, Fazle Hasan Abed, who had left his position as an executive with Shell Oil, founded BRAC to provide relief to refugees returning from India. During its first year, BRAC focused on emergency rebuilding, constructing homes, boats, and medical centers, but then turned to longer term strategies to fight poverty, predominantly by concentrating on women. BRAC’s first lending program was launched in 1974 and its support for woman handicraft workers in 1975. As its successful approach gained renown, BRAC established programs in other parts of Asia, including Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, and in several African countries. In addition, BRAC now has affiliated organizations in the United Kingdom and the United States, which mobilize support for its efforts.
Mission/Objectives BRAC’s primary goals are to alleviate poverty, with all its ramifications and causes, and to strengthen the poor to participate fully in society. According to its materials, BRAC is led by a vision of ‘‘a just, enlightened, healthy and democratic world free from hunger, poverty, environmental degradation and all forms of exploitation.’’
Activities Reflecting its holistic approach to poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor, BRAC is active in economic development, health, education, social development, and human rights/legal services. Village organizations (VOs), each with 30–40 women members, are the hubs for service delivery to both members and nonmembers, but also for awareness-raising and participation. BRAC’s economic development programs include group-based micro-lending and skills training and technical assistance to engage in small-scale income-generating activities such as livestock, fisheries, and social forestry. Basic health care services, in particular maternal and child health services, are provided by trained volunteers as well as through clinics. BRAC has also entered into partnerships to undertake diagnosis and treatment of and raise awareness of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. With education considered a key element of empowerment and higher living standards for the poor, BRAC runs primary schools, preschools, schools for children with special needs, teacher training programs, community libraries, and, since 2001, BRAC University, based in Dhaka. In 2008, BRAC inaugurated the BRAC Development Institute based at BRAC University. In addition to its development and disaster relief programs, BRAC also operates a number of incomegenerating social enterprises. In addition to enterprises generating seeds and chicks to support its agricultural
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and livestock projects, BRAC also controls a dairy, which markets the produce of milk producers. Another prominent example is Aarong, which began as a small fair-trade organization marketing the wares of rural craftswomen and now has expanded to become a chain of shops selling fashion and home de´cor – still made by rural artisans. BRAC Bank, established in 2001, was a natural extension of BRAC’s economic development-related activities.
Structure and Governance BRAC’s Governing Body consists of 16 members, with Fazle Hasan Abed serving as Chair. An Executive Director manages the various development programs, while a separate Managing Director oversees BRAC’s enterprises. Additionally there is an Executive Director for BRAC’s International Programmes. An ombudsman was also installed.
Funding In 2007, BRAC’s revenues amounted to more than US $300 million. BRAC reports that it has brought the proportion of donor coverage of its expenditures from 100% in 1980 to some 20% in 2007. The bulk of its income derives primarily from service charges on loans to VO members, income-generating projects, and revenue generated by support enterprises.
Major Contributions/Accomplishments In the early 1970s following the Liberation War, BRAC helped rebuild war-ravaged Bangladesh. Since then, it has grown to become one of the largest povertyoriented NGOs in the world, affecting millions of people, and a pioneer in poverty reduction and development approaches. BRAC has also blazed trails in South-South cooperation by transferring its approach to other Asian and African countries. In 2008, BRAC received the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize for its work to alleviate human suffering and has consistently (twice) won the CGAP Financial Transparency Award for its annual reports and financial statements.
Cross-References
▶ Abed, Fazle Hasan ▶ NGOs and Socioeconomic Development ▶ Nonproft Sector and Poverty Reduction ▶ Transparency
References/Further Readings Ahmed, M. (1977). BRAC. Building human infrastructure to serve the rural poor. Essex, CT: International Council for Educational Development. Economics and Governance of Nongovernmental Organizations in Bangladesh. Bangladesh Development Series Paper No 11. Edited
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2006 by the World Bank Office Dhaka, from http://siteresources. worldbank.org/BANGLADESHEXTN/Resources/NGOreport_Dev_ Series.pdf Rhode, J. E. (Ed.) (2005). Learning to reach health for all. Thirty years of instructive experience at BRAC. Dhaka, Bangladesh: The University Press Limited. Smillie, I. (2009). Freedom from want: The remarkable success story of BRAC, the global grassroots organization that’s winning the fight against poverty. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
been concerned with the maintenance of a consistent style and tone of voice and ensuring that a consistent personality is projected (Tapp, 1996). Furthermore, Grounds (2005) argues that such practices are the very essence of brand management, irrespective of whether an organization’s management chooses to call them as such.
Definition
Brands and Branding JANE HUDSON University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Introduction The twenty-first century has seen companies recognize the power of a strong brand. At the time when the global economy is subject to changing market dynamics and heightened competition, the role of brands in the commercial domain has never been greater. Furthermore, with the war in the Middle East causing political and economic unease, investors, customers, and employees are questioning whom they can trust; the ability of a familiar brand to deliver proven value is undeniable (Khermouch, 2002). Brands and brand management have been key focal areas for academics and practitioners alike. The ability of a strong brand to differentiate itself from similar competitors is not in question. Nonprofit branding appears to have come of age. The Habitat for Humanity brand, for example, was recently valued at $1.8 billion (Quelch et al., 2004) reinforcing the significance of the practice of branding to nonprofit organizations. It is argued that such recognition is well overdue. Historically, nonprofits have been relatively slow to adopt branding practices because of difficulties in committing internal stakeholders to the process (Grounds & Harkness, 1996) and a perception on the part of some nonprofit managers that branding is too ‘‘commercial’’ or even immoral (Ritchie et al., 1998). Furthermore, there has been concern that formally recognizing a charity as a brand may have a negative impact on donations as potential donors may believe those to be unjustifiable expenses and inappropriate use of donors’ money involved in branding (Grounds, 2005). Despite this underlying reticence to use ‘‘commercial’’ terminology, nonprofit organizations have increasingly
There are various definitions presented in the branding literature largely because as brands have evolved in the last century, they have become a complex means of, sometimes unspoken, communication between the brand owner and the consumer. Each definition tends to emphasize rather different dimensions of brands or the way that they may enhance or detract from consumer relationships. Historically, these definitions have been largely based around the physical product and explain how any combination of the name, term, sign, or design can be used to differentiate the brand from its competition. The notion of brands as differentiating devices has perhaps received the most attention in the literature. Brands can be differentiated on the basis of their tangible performance attributes and symbolic representational functions (Bhat & Reddy, 1998). The latter says something about the buyer – a statement of who they are and who they aspire to be. It is, therefore, perceived that brands reassure and enhance consumer self-perception and enable consumers to differentiate on that basis (de Chernatony & Dall’Olmo Riley, 1997, 1998). In addition, they can also satisfy experiential needs, in that they can provide sensory pleasure, variety, and stimulation (Whan Park et al., 1986). These too can provide the basis for differentiation. However, it has been argued that such productbased definitions are dated as they are too preoccupied with the physical product, too mechanical, and too input-orientated (Crainer, 1995). Furthermore, in the context of nonprofit brands, it fails to take into account the intangible, service orientated nature of nonprofit organizations. Gardener and Levy’s (1955: 7) definition focuses on a brand as a more complex symbol, which is representative of a variety of ideas, attributes, and bodies of association that are communicated to consumers over a period of time. In this vein, authors such as de Chernatony and Dall’Olmo Riley (1998) have posited brands in a more holistic manner and have considered various themes such as brands as a legal instrument, as a differentiating devise, as a company, as an identity system, as an image in consumers’ minds, as a personality, as a relationship, as adding value, and as an evolving entity. In the nonprofit
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context, these definitions are particularly helpful as they identify the need to consider not only all that is associated with the brand name but also all the brand activities. More contemporary is the holistic definition offered by the United Kingdom’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children brand, which encompasses who they are, what they say, and what they do and the set of relationships built on that.
Historical Background It is thought that the roots of brands lie in Greek and Roman times, where signs or route descriptions to shops were carved in stone and there were markings (thought to be brands) applied to pieces of silver (Riezebos, 2003). Given the widespread illiteracy in this era, the signs used by traders were pictures or maps of where the products were sold and were the only way to effectively communicate with the consumer. In Europe, the English word ‘‘brand’’ was probably conceived in the Middle Ages as a degenerate of the old Norse word brandr, which refers to the branding of cattle to denote ownership. At this time, three types of signs were used on products: craftsman, guild, and city signs. The craftsman signs were a method of identification and normally applied to the bottom of a product, as such they had little effect on stimulating purchase unlike today’s brands (Riezebos, 2003). The guild marks were used to guarantee the quality of a product and may be comparable to the contemporary quality certificates such as those used in the precious metal and gem industries. A city sign was used to state where the product was made as is like the contemporary ‘‘made in’’ assurance. After the Middle Ages, the use of branding developed as trade increased and tradesmen wished to be recognized for their products. This development is particularly noticeable in the alcoholic drinks sector (e.g., Drambuie, 1745), probably due to the nonperishable nature of the product. Such brands could survive long journeys and, as such, were marketed over a wider geographical area. The demand for branded goods notably increased with the advent of the Industrial Revolution (1830–1870), and many brands that are still available today, such as Levi’s (1850) and Heinz (1869), were developed. Riezebos (2003) argues that three factors contributed to the development of branded goods: 1. The migration of the population into industrial areas leading to urbanization and inability to produce their own goods led to an increase in demand for prepackaged goods.
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2. Mass production and improved infrastructure improved the transport of goods, making them more widely available. 3. An increase in the number of shops and grocers increased the availability of goods. Despite these improved market conditions, branding at this time is not comparable to branding in the twenty-first century. There was little or no brand advertising conducted throughout the Industrial Revolution and the distribution power lay with the wholesale trader (de Chernatony & McDonald, 1992). The wholesaler controlled the producer and the availability of goods in the grocers. This changed toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the manufacturer-owned brand became more prevalent (Riezebos, 2003). The manufacturer-owned label became more dominant in the twentieth century when the power in the distribution chain shifted toward the manufacturer. The demand for prepackaged goods grew as consumers demanded a constant price and quality product. As products developed, the manufacturer’s trademark became more important to the consumer, and manufacturers starting using advertising in the early twentieth century to stimulate greater demand (de Chernatony & McDonald, 1992). As the market became more competitive, manufacturers realized that they needed to expand their product range to gain competitive advantage. This led to the introduction of brand and category managers that considered the company’s portfolio of brands. With the advent of more effective transport and communication links, international trade increased and the global brand developed. Within the nonprofit sector, Roberts Wray (1994) was one of the first to acknowledge and debate the relevance of branding. He argued that charities could brand in the same way as commercial organizations. Managing a nonprofit as a brand should enhance it by emphasizing its strengths and projecting its distinct beliefs and values to its stakeholders (Saxton, 1995). Clearly, these views are controversial, and there are heated debates surrounding such commercial practices in the nonprofit arena.
Key Issues The Importance of Branding in Nonprofits
Branding is of critical importance to nonprofits because it can impact dramatically on income generation (Dixon, 1996; Grounds & Harkness, 1998) and has consistently been shown to assist fund-raising. Furthermore, a strong brand can convey the values and beliefs of a nonprofit to potential donors and suggest very persuasive
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reasons as to why it might be worthy of support (Dixon, 1996). This is significant as it has been argued that, where donors lack knowledge of the charities’ image, they may either ignore or distort a communications message to excuse themselves from making a donation (Bendapudi & Singh, 1996). There are, however, four key ways in which branding is of benefit to nonprofit organizations. First, brands are considered an aid to learning and can be used as a tool to educate members of the public. A nonprofit is not working from a ‘‘zero base’’ if members of the public are already familiar with a charity’s brand, their name, and the values associated with that name. Through branding, there will already be a fundamental understanding of the work the organization undertakes and its values in the minds of potential supporters. Second, it is argued that branding reduces risk for a donor. Using ‘‘Agency theory’’ donors are effectively using nonprofits to act as their agents in disbursing funds. Donors may see evidence of an individual charity’s performance in their brand image. Where fund-raising relies on impersonal communications such as direct mail, press, or radio advertising, the brand’s image will be particularly important as the donor may be completely reliant on their perception of the organization in deciding whether to offer a donation. Third, brands can serve to enhance trust between a nonprofit and its donors/potential donors (Tapp, 1996). Brands provide assurance that an organization is worthy of trust and that funds donated will be used in a manner consistent with standards that have been established over time (Ritchie et al., 1998). Finally, branding can also offer a form of reputation insurance to a nonprofit. Having built up a consistent image over time that becomes trusted and increasingly well-understood, short-term crises can be survived. The Aramony scandal, for example, rocked the United Way in the United States. The chief executive was accused of wasting donated funds on unnecessary flights on the Concord. In the short term, this had a dramatic impact on donations. However, the reputation of the organization is very strong, and it quickly regained donations and its relative position in the market (Sargeant & Jay, 2004). Brand Constituents
There are many elements of brands that can be actively managed over time. Broadly speaking, such elements are largely categorized by whether they are rational or emotional (de Chernatony & Dall’Olmo, 1998). The rational elements of brands include the physical benefits and functional attributes. The emotional elements include brand image, brand personality, brand essence, and the added value that it offers.
The rational elements of the brand are perhaps easier to understand and within the nonprofit context would refer to the functional physical benefits provided by an organization. For example, Cancer Research UK may use their brand to convey information about the research undertaken and the practical benefits (such as improving survival rates) of the work undertaken. The emotional elements are less tangible and are concerned with how the brand makes the donor feel and what the brand says about that donor. The brand can be seen as representative of the donor. Arguably, the most critical of these emotional elements is that of brand personality which has been accepted by practitioners and academics alike in the commercial sector. Furthermore, the notion of brand personality is being explored in the nonprofit sector (Hudson, 2008). Research suggests that brand personality helps to differentiate brands, develops the emotional aspects of the brand, and augments the personal meaning of a brand to the consumer (Aaker, 1997; Crask & Laskey, 1990). In its most simplistic form, brand personality can be described as the human characteristics associated with a brand (Aaker, 1997). Expanding on this definition, brand personality is operationalized by literally personifying a brand. The brand performs ‘‘intentional behaviours’’ and consumers make attributions about the brand’s personality such as its character and values (Aaker, 1995: 392). The management of brand personality is rather complex as it considers how a brand can be imbued with particular human and emotional characteristics (Hudson, 2008). Furthermore, it has been argued that the emotional elements of branding have dominated consumer brand management. McEnally and de Chernatony (1999) posit that individuals form a self-concept based on their perception of the response of others to their brand choice. As such, they choose symbolic brands with common values and ascribe attributes or status to others by their ability to purchase these specific brands. Brands, thus, become a means of self-representation and communicating values to others. Additionally, when consumers make brand choices, they assess the projected personality of the brand and how it might represent them, thus choosing brands with the personality that they wish to project. Brand personality is built and communicated to consumers through the use of advertising and other elements of the marketing mix (Aaker, 1997). Where consumers accept a brand personality they know what the brand stands for, develop opinions of the brand, and have an ‘‘‘active awareness.’’ The brand transcends being just another product, and it is argued that the consumer can develop a relationship with the brand (Fournier, 1991).
Brands and Branding
Within the nonprofit context there has been little empirical work conducted into brand personality, despite the acceptance that branding, and brand personality as a key element of brand, is critical especially to fund-raising. In choosing to purchase brands with particular personalities, consumers can seek to convey representation of themselves and reinforce their self-image (Fournier, 1991). This may be equally important in the nonprofit sector, as research has shown that the act of offering a donation can bestow an identity on the donor (Schwartz, 1967). This identity is likely to vary; however, Yavas et al., (1980) suggest that a generous, loving self-image has more importance for donors than non-donors. Sargeant et al. (forthcoming) explored how charity personalities may be structured and whether there are some personality traits that may be considered generic to the sector. Their research highlighted that donors appear to ‘‘imbue’’ an organization with specific characteristics by virtue of its charitable status. The analysis also suggests that these common/shared characteristics reflect the voluntary, benevolent nature of nonprofits and the role that they play in instigating change. Consequently, they recommend that charity marketers consider the nature of the emotional stimulant used and the voice projected by the charity, the character of their service provision, and the extent to which the organization can be perceived as traditional when seeking to differentiate their brand. This work suggests that charity brands may not be as distinct as previously thought. However, further research is warranted to explore this interesting notion.
Future Directions Branding literature within the nonprofit domain is still growing as research attempts to explore this complex notion outside of the commercial sector from which it originated. It is important to recognize that despite branding’s obvious advantages some parties, including donors and internal stakeholders, may be hostile toward the organization spending money on building and maintaining a brand. Spruill (2001) has argued that branding creates barriers to collaborative partnerships with each other for service delivery or fund-raising. Brand managers are unwilling to confuse or dilute their brand by being involved in partnerships. Furthermore, Spruill argues that branding increases competition between charities for greater visibility which will not directly benefit the intended beneficiaries of the charity. However, the reality is that nonprofits have brands whether they wish to call them so or not. The critical issue is finding the most appropriate means to manage these nonprofit brands and as such brand management is necessary and warrants serious management attention.
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Greater clarity is required with regard to the lessons that may be legitimately applied from the commercial sector in respect of nonprofit brand management. Nonprofit branding should be a subject of study in its own right. The issue of brand personality is crucial and the management of this component of nonprofit brands is particularly complex. As discussed by Sargeant, Hudson et al. (forthcoming) some aspects of personality are outside of direct control of any specific organization. Brand personality in the nonprofit context most certainly warrants further investigation. Furthermore, the donor and brand relationship has not been explored in the nonprofit sector.
Cross-References
▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Fundraising ▶ Habitat for Humanity ▶ National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children ▶ Nonprofit Management ▶ Social Marketing ▶ Stakeholders ▶ United Way International
References/Further Readings Aaker, D. A. (1995). Building strong brands, New York: Free Press. Aaker, J. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research, 34 August, 347–356. Bendapudi, N., & Singh, S. N. (1996). Enhancing helping behavior: An integrative framework for promotion planning. Journal of Marketing, 60(3), 33–54. Bhat, S., & Reddy, S. (1998). Symbolic and functional positioning of brands. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 15(1), 32–43. Crainer, S. (1995). The real power of brands. Making brands work for competitive advantage. London: Pitman. Crask, M. R., & Laskey, H. A. (1990). A positioning-based decision model for selecting advertising messages. Journal of Advertising Research, 30(S), 32–38. de Chernatony, L., & McDonald, M. (1992). Creating powerful brands: The strategic route to success in consumer, industrial and service markets. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. de Chernatony, L., & Dall’Olmo Riley, F. (1997). The chasm between managers’ and consumers’ views of brands. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 5, 89–104. de Chernatony, L., & Dall’Olmo Riley, F. (1998). Defining a ‘‘brand’’: Beyond the literature with experts’ interpretations. Journal of Marketing Management, 14, 417–443. Dixon, M. (1996). Small and medium sized charities need a strong brand too: Crisis’ experience. Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing, 2(1), 52–57. Fournier, S. (1991). A meaning-based framework for the study of the consumer-object relations. In R. Holman & M. Soloman (Eds.), Advances in consumer research (Vol. 18, pp. 736–742). Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research. Gardener, B., & Levy, S. (1955). The product and the brand. Harvard Business Review, 33 (March–April), 33–39.
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Grounds, J. (2005). Editorial special issue on charity branding. International Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing, 10, 65–67. Grounds, J., & Harkness, J. (1996). Developing a brand from within: Involving employees and volunteers when developing a new brand position. Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing, 3(2), 179–184. Hankinson, P. (2001). Brand orientation in the charity sector: A framework for discussion and research. Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing, 6(3), 1465–4520. Hudson, J. (2008). The branding of charities. In A. Sargeant & W. Wymer (Eds.), The Routledge companion to nonprofit marketing (pp. 65–74). Oxon: Routledge. Khermouch, G. (2002). The best global brands. Business Week (3794), 92–95. McEnally, D. C., & de Chernatony, L. (1999). The evolving nature of branding: consumer and managerial considerations. Journal of Consumer and Market Research, 99(2). Murphy, J. M. (1990). Brand strategy. Cambridge: Director Books. Quelch, J. A., Austin, J. E., & Laidler-Kylander, N. (2004). Mining gold in the not-for-profit brands. Harvard Business Review, 82(4), 24. Riezebos, R. (2003). Brand management: A theoretical and practical approach. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Ritchie, R. J. B., Swami, S., & Weinberg, C. (1998). A brand new world. International Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing, 4, 26–42. Roberts Wray, B. (1994) Branding, product development and positioning the charity. Journal of Brand Management, 1(6), 350–370. Sargeant, A., & Jay, E. (2004). Fundraising management. London: Routledge. Sargeant, A., Hudson, J., & West, D. (forthcoming). Conceptualising brand values in the charity sector: The relationship between sector, cause and organisation. Service Industry Journal. Saxton, J. A. (1995). Strong charity brand comes from strong beliefs and values. Journal of Brand Management, 2(4), 211–220. Schwartz, B. (1967). The social psychology of the gift. American Journal of Sociology, 73, 1–11. Spruill, V. (2001). Build brand identity for causes, not groups. Chronicle of Philanthropy, 13 (June), 45. Tapp, A. (1996). Charity brands: A qualitative study of current practice. Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing, 1, 327–336. Whan Park, C., Jaworski, B., & MacInnis, D. (1986). Strategic brand concept-image management. Journal of Marketing, 50 (October), 135–145. Yavas, U., Riecken, G., & Parameswaran, R. (1980). Using psychographics to profile potential donors. Business Atlanta, 30(5), 41–45.
Bread for the World TIMOTHY R. DAHLSTROM
Introduction Bread for the World is an ecumenical Christian advocacy group dedicated to ending hunger. Its members advocate with United States policy makers to change policies, programs, and conditions that allow hunger and poverty to persist. It is a 501(c)(4) organization. The associated Bread for the World Institute provides policy analysis on hunger and strategies to end it. The Institute educates its advocacy network, opinion leaders, policy makers and the public about hunger in the United States and abroad. It is a 501(c)(3) organization.
Brief History In October 1972, a small group of Catholics and Protestants met to consider how people of faith could be mobilized to influence United States government policies on hunger. In the spring of 1974, the group began to implement its ideas under the leadership of the Reverend Arthur Simon. By year’s end, more than 500 people had joined as citizen advocates for hungry people. Since then, Bread for the World has grown into a nationwide advocacy network.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas Bread for the World is a collective Christian voice urging decision makers in the United States to end hunger at home and abroad. Its stated focus and motivation is: ‘‘God’s grace in Jesus Christ moves our members to help our neighbors, whether they live in the next house, the next state, or the next continent. Food is a basic need and it is unjust that so many people go without enough to eat.’’ Bread for the World describes itself as, ‘‘A Christian Voice for ending hunger.’’
Activities Working through churches, campuses, and other organizations, Bread for the World engages people in advocacy to end hunger. Members write personal letters and emails to, and meet with their representatives in the United States Congress. In its advocacy activities, Bread for the World works in a bipartisan manner. It also collaborates with other organizations to build the political commitment needed to overcome hunger and poverty.
Address of Organization
Structure and Governance
50 F Street, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20001 USA www.bread.org
Bread for the World is governed by a Board of Directors under the leadership of a President. Members are individuals, and coalition partners include religious and nonreligious organizations dedicated to the eradication of
Bremner, Robert Hamlett
hunger. The Bread for the World Institute is a member of the Alliance to End Hunger.
Funding The major funding for Bread for the World comes from public contributions and membership, with a smaller portion coming from church and denominational support. For 2007, Bread for the World reported $5,256,750, in revenue, with net assets of $2,507,763.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Bread for the World led the US legislative coalition of the Jubilee movement to reduce the debts of low-income countries. Since 2000, the organization has helped to double US funding for poverty-focused development assistance. Since the late 1990s, Bread for the World has also helped to win increases in nutrition assistance for foodinsecure people in the United States – to a total that now exceeds $50 billion a year.
Cross-References
▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Jubilee 2000
References/Further Readings Beckmann, D., & Simon, A. (1999). Grace at the table: Ending hunger in God’s world. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Simon, A. (1985). Bread for the world. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing.
Bremner, Robert Hamlett TULLIA B. HAMILTON
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continued to write and mentor students. He was the recipient of a number of honors throughout his lifetime including the Distinguished Teaching Award from The Ohio State University and the Lifetime Achievement Award from ARNOVA.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Bremner is recognized as a pioneer in the development of three areas of historical inquiry: poverty, philanthropy, and childhood. Bremner’s 1956 book From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States examines shifts in thinking about poverty in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the New Deal. According to Alice O’Connor, this work took a subject absent from the public agenda and ‘‘made it part of the historical canon.’’ In 1960, he published American Philanthropy, an historical overview of benevolent activity in America. Historians such as David Hammack have pointed out the importance of the book as defining a new topic for historical study. In many respects the book is dated by today’s standards. It has little to say about the role of women or racial and ethnic groups. Writing prior to the Filer Commission and the conception of the ‘‘Third Sector,’’ Bremner’s characterization of philanthropy lacks definition. In addition, he has little to say about the sometimes complex motives behind American benevolence. Despite these limitations, the book remains an important starting point for many interested in the evolution of American philanthropy. Along with Philippe Aries and Erik Erikson, Bremner is recognized for his role in stimulating historical research on childhood. In 1966, Bremner was named lead editor for Children and Youth in America, a three-volume documentary history of children in the United States spanning the years 1600–1970. Like most of Bremner’s work, Children and Youth is useful to both scholars and practitioners.
Cross-References Basic Biographical Information Robert Bremner was an American social historian whose work focuses on benevolence and social welfare. Born in Brunswick, Ohio, Bremner received his B.A. from BaldwinWallace College (1935) and the MA (1939) and Ph.D. (1943) from The Ohio State University. During WWII he worked in Washington, D.C. as a civilian employee of the War Department and the Red Cross. From 1946 to 1980 he was a member of the history department of The Ohio State University during which time he advised over 40 Ph.D. students. After his retirement in 1980, Bremner
▶ ARNOVA ▶ Philanthropy in North America
References/Further Readings Bremner, R. H. (1956). From the depths: The discovery of poverty in America. New York: New York University Press. Bremner, R. H. (1960, 1988). American philanthropy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bremner, R. H. (1970). Children and youth in America (Vols. I–III). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hammack, D. (2003). Robert Bremner and the study of philanthropy in the US: Four appraisals. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 32, 439.
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Brookings Institution
Brookings Institution ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization 1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW Washington, DC 20036 USA www.brookings.edu
Introduction The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization conducting high-quality, independent research to strengthen democracy and secure a cooperative international social system. Through its conferences, publications, and other activities, Brookings operates as an analyst and a critic that is committed to providing research, policy recommendations, and analysis on a full range of public policy issues. Brookings scholars regularly provide reporters with commentary, analysis, and background information; appear on television and radio programs; testify before US Congress; and brief policymakers and their staff on important current issues.
Brief History The Brookings Institution traces its beginnings to 1916, just before the US entry into WWI, when Robert S. Brookings joined a group of government reformers in creating the Institute for Government Research (IGR), the first private organization devoted to analyzing public policy issues at the national level. Brookings also created two sister organizations: the Institute of Economics in 1922 and a graduate school in 1924. In 1927, the institutes and the school merged to form the present-day Brookings Institution, with the mission to promote, conduct, and foster research ‘‘in the broad fields of economics, government administration, and the political and social sciences.’’ During the war, the institution fell under the management of the National Defense Council. Once the council ended, the Brookings Institution analyzed issues of national concern such as the budgetary consolidation of the country. During World War II, the research organization worked on investigating prices control and war economy. Later, in 1946, it focused on rebuilding Europe and assisted with the development of the Marshall Plan.
Mission/Objective/Focus Area The Brookings’ mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to
provide innovative, practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: strengthen American democracy; foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system.
Activities The core work of the Brookings Institution addresses existing and emerging policy issues while offering practical approaches to solving them to policy-makers as well as the general public. It is devoted to improving the performance of American institutions and the quality of the policies they make. Brookings’s work is conducted in five program research areas (Economic Studies, Foreign Policy, Global Economy and Development, Governance Studies, and Metropolitan Policy), and under these program areas falls the management of ten specialized policy centers (which focus on specific subjects ranging from Asian Policy Studies to Social and Economic Dynamics), and the research is classified into 24 major projects.
Structure and Governance The 50 Trustees and 58 Honorary Trustees serve 3-year terms and meet three times a year. The Board’s role is to provide governance of the business and affairs of the Institution, approve the fields of scholarly research, and preserve the independence of the Institution’s work.
Funding The Brookings Institution is supported largely by an endowment and through contributions from philanthropic foundations, corporations, and private individuals. Though it is not directly supported by the government, Brookings undertakes government contract studies. By reserving the right to publish its findings from them, it maintains its independence from governmental control.
Accomplishments In the 1990s, the federal government devolved many of its social programs back to cities and states, and Brookings shaped a new generation of urban policies to help build strong neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan regions. As President Bill Clinton prepared to sign historic welfare reform legislation, experts at Brookings teamed up to study the nation’s policies on children and families. In 2001, a Brookings proposal for a child tax credit became part of major tax legislation.
Buffett, Warren Edward
Cross-References ▶ Lobbying ▶ Think Tanks
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▶ Civil Society Theory: Smith, Adam ▶ Public Choice
References/Further Readings
References/Further Readings
Brainerd, W., & Perry, G. (Eds.) (2003). Brookings papers on economic activity. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Brennan, G., & Buchanan, J. M. (1985). The reason of rules: Constitutional political economy (Vol. 10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buchanan, J. M. (1975). The limits of liberty: Between anarchy and leviathan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of constitutional democracy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Collected Works of James M. Buchanan by Liberty Fund, Inc. Reisman, D. (1990). The political economy of James Buchanan. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.
Buchanan, James McGill GORDON SHOCKLEY
Basic Biographical Information Born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (USA) in 1919, James McGill Buchanan, Jr. is an American economist. He received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 ‘‘for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decisionmaking,’’ which is known as public choice theory. Professor Buchanan earned a B.A. from Middle Tennessee State College in 1940, a M.S. from the University of Tennessee in 1941, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948. Before joining the economics faculty at George Mason University (GMU) in the 1980s, he taught and conducted research at the University of Virginia, UCLA, and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. At GMU he presently serves as the advisory general director of the James Buchanan Center for Political Economy.
Major Contributions Public choice theory is James Buchanan’s major contribution. In its essence the application of microeconomic principles to politics, public choice theory is premised on the insight that individuals act in their own self-interest not only in market settings such as commerce but also in nonmarket settings such as politics and civil society. (In the term public choice, ‘‘public’’ refers to people and ‘‘choice’’ to selecting among alternatives.) Buchanan’s public choice ideas have been applied widely in constitutional political economy. Buchanan once wrote, ‘‘The American constitutional structure is in disarray.’’ According to Reisman (1990), Buchanan is influenced by Adam Smith’s ideas of the minimal state and liberal economics and Knut Wicksell’s insight that ‘‘a rule of unanimity for reaching collective decisions provides the institutional analogue to two-person trade in strictly private or partitionable goods’’ (p. 4).
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Buffett, Warren Edward DAVID B. HOWARD
Basic Biographical Information Warren E. Buffett was born in 1930 – less than a year after the stock market crash – in Omaha, Nebraska, and would become one of the world’s most successful investors, the world’s richest person, and one of the most prominent philanthropists in history. Filing his first tax return at the age of 13, Buffett showed early signs of business acumen and would eventually earn the nickname ‘‘The Oracle of Omaha.’’ After studying business at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and economics at the University of Nebraska and Columbia University, Buffett began an immensely successful career as a businessman. When he was 26 years old, Buffett created Buffett Partnership, Ltd., an investment partnership. Over the next few years, Buffett would create several more partnerships, finding myriad lucrative investment opportunities. In 1965, he took over the textile firm Berkshire Hathaway, which became a holding company for his highly profitable investments over the years. In 2008, Forbes Magazine named Buffett the richest man in the world, surpassing Bill Gates, with a net worth of approximately $62 billion. Buffett still resides in the same Omaha home that he purchased in 1958 for $31,500.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions In 2006, Buffett made the largest charitable donation in history when he pledged to gradually give 85% of his Berkshire stock to five foundations (valued at $37 billion in 2006). The largest portion – 10 million shares of
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Berkshire Hathaway stock – was pledged to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (valued at approximately $30.7 billion at the time the gift was made). According to Gates, Buffett’s contribution – amounting to about $1.7 billion a year – will be used to seek cures for the world’s worst diseases and improve the US education system. Along with the historic gift to Gates, Buffett made the request that all the money be distributed in the year it is donated and not added to the foundation’s assets for future giving. Buffett’s gift to the Gates Foundation represented a significant piece of his plan to give away the bulk of his fortune to charity. The other foundation gifts that Buffett is making will go to foundations headed by Buffett’s three children, Susan, Howard, and Peter, and to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. The latter was for 40 years known simply as the Buffett Foundation and was recently renamed in honor of Buffett’s late wife, Susie, who died in 2004. The foundation has mainly focused on reproductive health, family planning, and pro-choice causes, and on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Buffets’ gifts made the Foundation one of the largest in 2007, with assets nearing $4 billion.
Cross-References
▶ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ▶ Foundations, Family ▶ Grantmaking Foundations
References/Further Readings Buffet, W., & Cunningham, L. (2008). The essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for corporate America (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: The Cunningham Group. Kilpatrick, A. (1998). Of permanent value: The story of Warren Buffett. New York: McGraw-Hill. Lowenstein, R. (1995). Buffett: The making of an American capitalist. New York: Random House. Schroeder, A. (2008). Snowball: Warren Buffett and the business of life. New York: Bantam Books.
Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen FREYA BRUNE
Address of Organization Haus Deutscher Stiftungen Mauerstr. 93 10117 Berlin Germany www.stiftungen.org
Introduction The Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen (BVDS) represents the consortium of foundations in Germany. Its constitution describes its purpose as supporting ‘‘the charitable foundation sector in Germany.’’ As an umbrella organization, the BVDS represents an overall number of approx. 6,000 foundations.
Brief History In 1948, the representatives of the larger foundations in Germany joined into the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Wohlta¨tigkeits-, Erziehungs- und Kultus-Stiftungen (Working Group of German Charitable, Educational, and Cultural Foundations), which later developed into the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Stiftungen (Working Group of German Foundations). It became the agency of the German foundations, and its work added to the strengthening and acknowledgment of the German foundation system. Since 1986 it carries its current name: Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen to underline its national importance. In 1990, the members determined the official statute and thus defined it as a registered association (Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen e.V.). In 2008, the BVDS was awarded ‘‘Association of the Year’’ by the 11th German Association Congress.
Mission The formal mission of the BVDS is the support of the public welfare oriented foundation landscape. The association is attending to the interests of foundations that follow charitable, church related or benevolent goals. Furthermore, the BVDS seeks to foster foundation cooperation and networks. Through the creation and improvement of a foundation-friendly climate and the enhancement of the foundations’ effectiveness, as well as the advancement of the legal and fiscal framework for foundations requirements, the BVDS aims at creating a more stable, active, and free democratic civil society.
Activities In order to fulfill its mission, the BVDS is carrying out different activities, such as the support of research projects, the arrangement of events and publications, public relations, data collection and documentation, education, and further training, international exchange, awards to institutions and individuals who have rendered outstanding services to the foundation landscape, as well as consultancy for foundations and sponsors.
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Furthermore, the BVDS organizes the German Foundation Day, bestows the KOMPASS Award for good public relations work of foundations, and edits a variety of publications, such as the magazine ‘‘Stiftungswelt,’’ the foundation yearbook, and the annual ‘‘Stiftungs Report.’’ On the European level, the BVDS works closely together with the European Foundation Center (EFC).
Structure and Governance The BVDS is a nonprofit organization, divided into five departments, with one head each. All heads build together the association board, led by a secretary general. In 2008 the secretary general was Dr. Hans Fleisch, who also holds the position of the federal commissioner for civic engagement, which leads to a rare close attachment between the BVDS and the German government. Outside the organizational structure, but connected, stands the Deutsche Stiftungs Akademie (DSA – German Foundation Academy), which is a joint project of the BVDS and the Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft. Overall, the BVDS has 30 employees. In 2008, the BVDS had 3,200 listed members, the largest part being foundations (approx. 2,500), the other being foundations’ administrators (individuals and legal entities). Due to the latter, the BVDS itself claims to represent approx. 6,000 members in total, which are 40% of approx. 15,000 foundations in (2008) all over Germany.
Funding The revenues of the association come from member fees and donations. In its statute the BVDS bounds itself to the exclusive disposition of funds for charitable and statutory purposes.
Accomplishments The BVDS supports third sector research via informing about the activities of the sector, the awarding of good practices, and producing a variety of publications about the foundation system in Germany.
Cross-References
▶ European Foundation Centre ▶ Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft ▶ Umbrella Organizations
References/Further Readings BVDS. (2001). Zahlen, Daten, Fakten zum deutschen Stiftungswesen. Darmstadt, Germany: Darmstadt Hoppenstedt. BVDS. (2007). Stiftungsjahr 2006. Berlin, Germany: Trigger.Medien. GmbH.
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Business and Employers’ Associations BERNHARD EBBINGHAUS, SEBASTIAN KOOS Universita¨t Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
Introduction According to Friedrich Engels, business is always organized and therefore does not need a formal association. Nevertheless traditional guilds and craftsmen associations existed before the first trade unions were founded. With the industrial and democratic revolutions the organization of business interests changed substantially, first challenging and later becoming an important partner for organized labor. Research on business and employers’ associations is less advanced and more recent than research on labor unions. Comparatively, business interest organizations are often more powerful and more specialized than labor interest organizations.
Definition A business association (BA) is a voluntary organization of enterprises (or entrepreneurs) that represents the interests of (for-profit) business in the political arena and provides services to its members. As trade associations, these organizations promote the economic interests of a particular sector, be it in relation to international trade (fostering export, limiting import), favorable economic conditions (tax concessions and subsidies), or sector-specific issues (industrial norms, joint research and development, advertisement). Peak associations unify these BAs under one umbrella and represent their interests on a national or even international level. Some of these organizations include besides the economic interests of companies also the function of employer associations. In some cases, instead of formal associations of companies, ‘‘clubs’’ of entrepreneurs or networks of managers (CEOs) play an influential role in coordinating business interests. In addition, chambers organize business interests, particularly of small and medium sized companies and artisanal trades. These chambers promote the interests of local business and provide common services, e.g., coordinating vocational training. In some countries, membership in the respective local or national chamber is mandatory, while some international chambers are set up to promote multilateral trade and business relations. An employer association (EA) represents the interests of employers (entrepreneurs or companies) in the industrial relations and political arena. These voluntary organizations engage in collective bargaining with labor unions
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on wage and working conditions, they also engage in lobbying of political decision-makers on matters of labor law and social policy. In contrast to trade unions that organize workers, EAs organize companies from small shop owners with few employees to large multinational companies with a separation between managers and owners (shareholders). In several countries and many sectors, companies may engage in bargaining with local unions by themselves and larger companies can afford to lobby political decision-makers separately thereby circumventing EAs. Some EAs organize only private companies, while others are constituted by or include public administration, state owned companies and not-for-profit organizations, including churches and NGOs.
Historical Background Historically three factors have been crucial for the development of business (and employers’) associations, all of which foster specific interests: labor relations, competition, and public policy. At the end of the nineteenth century, employers ‘‘colluded’’ in reaction to the collective organization of their workers in strike action and increasingly in trade unions (Crouch, 1993), first by opposing, later by recognizing them. While larger companies were capable to react single handedly, small-, and medium-sized firms were often the first to form a ‘‘cartel’’ on the labor market and coordinate lock outs-against strike action. With the increased recognition of collective bargaining, particularly after its breakthrough during and after World War I, the formation of EAs boomed and peak associations were formed in many industrializing countries. Following the integration of national labor markets and the rise of national welfare states, EAs engaged not only in multiemployer collective bargaining, but they also sought to lobby lawmakers in respect to the increased regulation of employment and expansion of social rights. Antiunion activities such as yellow unions or black lists against unionized workers were outlawed in some countries after 1918 and internationally after 1948. Another reason to form BAs was to ensure political voice in emerging democratic systems. With the introduction of universal suffrage, the majority of voters were dependent employees, thus entrepreneurs faced the risk of state intervention into business and employer prerogatives. BAs promote the idea of a liberal market economy, with private ownership, free trade and a non-interventionist state. Hence in countries with state-owned sectors they push for privatization. In many instances, BAs seek to fight redistributive policies, direct state intervention, and codetermination since these policies are seen as a threat to business autonomy and private property. To meet their
objectives organized business relies on the one hand on public communication geared towards a wider public audience and on the other hand on informal channels of lobbying public bureaucracies and political actors. By means of public relations, BAs try to promote and gain public support for their policy recommendations; they often operate special bureaus, close to lawmakers’ offices, for instance, the US policy-makers in Washington or EU Commission in Brussels, thereby getting easier access. A third reason for business to form ‘‘cartels’’ was to prevent foreign competition and to limit the dependence on providers of raw materials. For keeping foreign business at bay and controlling suppliers, tariff unions were established. While generally pushing for free trade, cutthroat competition or a monopoly can threaten the functioning of the whole economic system. Therefore in some countries BAs came to agree on coordination. Especially in neo-corporatist systems a tripartite mode of concerted action between employers’ associations, labor unions and the state came into existence to prevent wage competition. On the international level, the International Organization of Employers (IOE) was founded in 1920 in response to the formation of the ‘‘tripartite’’ International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1918 with representatives of national governments, employers, and trade unions. Initially an organization of industrialized countries, the IOE today organizes over 140 national peak employers’ associations in the member-states of ILO, a special division of the United Nations since 1945. With increased European economic and political integration after World War II, UNICE coordinated business and employers’ interests at a European level following the Common Market in 1957. Today, BUSINESSEUROPE (renamed in 2007) organizes 40 national peak associations from 34 countries, including all member states of the European Union plus several other countries.
Key Issues Power Asymmetry Between Organized Capital and Labor
Pluralist theory postulates that in liberal democracies interest groups compete equally for influence, while neo-Marxist and corporatist approaches assume that capital has more structural power than labor in influencing public policy and determining employment relations. Offe and Wiesenthal (1980), building upon Marxist class theory, postulated ‘‘two logics of collective action’’ to the advantage of organized capital and to the detriment of labor. Capitalists are a smaller group with more narrow
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instrumental interests and plentiful (financial) resources; they can also use their structural power by going separately, while workers are a much larger and heterogeneous group with diffuse political and economic interests that have to rely on collective action for lack of individual bargaining power. Comparative studies on business and employers’ associations in OECD countries (Traxler, 1995) have challenged this thesis. Although employer associations are more concentrated and better organized than trade unions, ‘‘producer coalitions’’ are more fragmented and narrower, given the competitive pressures within each sector and the anti-cartel policies in market economies. Corporatist analyses studied the self-regulative function of business interests, in particular in respect to standard setting, vocational training, and labor relations (Streeck and Schmitter, 1985), indicating substantial crossnational variations in the degree of corporatist interest intermediation. The increased global competition and the political turn toward neo-liberal policies has been seen as a factor limiting the potential for corporatism, although in some European countries a renaissance of ‘‘social pacts’’ between government, employers, and organized labor occurred following the European Monetary Union. Internationalization of Business Interests
The promotion of international trade, free market institutions and foreign direct investments need not much coordination at global level as multinational companies often can do this on their own and international competition has been hampering supranational cooperation. The organization of employers’ interests has been particularly problematic, even though EAs are represented on the international governmental organizations (e.g., ILO, OECD). Within the European Union (EU), EAs were reluctant to give up competencies, in particular to allow negotiations at supranational level, thereby limiting the possibilities to reregulate at EU-level what was deregulated with the ‘‘Internal Market’’ since 1992. After longer efforts to foster European ‘‘social dialogue’’ between capital and labor since the 1970s, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 introduced the possibility to negotiate EU-level agreements between employers and trade unions on social issues that would otherwise be legislated by the European Union; this led to a reallocation of resources and competencies at the EU-level and some joint agreements (Sadowski and Jacobi, 1991). Role of Business in Policy Making
In one perspective business associations are perceived as ‘‘cartels in disguise,’’ that are more or less undermining antitrust laws and democratic institutions. In a different
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view, they are said to enhance democracy in at least three distinct ways by checking power, by representing interests, and by direct governance (Fung, 2003). Firstly, business associations contribute to democratic governance by checking power and resisting illegitimate authority. There is empirical evidence that especially in young democracies business associations help overcoming corruption, by monitoring public officials and signaling resistance to law violations (Duvanova, 2007). BAs thereby become agents of development, assisting in establishing core economic and democratic institutions. Secondly, their core feature is the representation of business interests, channelling and transmitting the needs and preferences of the business community to governments. As an intermediary between state and companies, BAs assume the role of pressure groups, seeking to influence legislative decision-makers and governmental agencies through legal actions, law expertise, party support and lobbyism. This raises also the issue of asymmetric power, if not illegitimate influence. Business associations are accused of using ‘‘money for politics’’ and thereby threatening the functioning of democracies. A third way of enhancing democracy is by direct self-governance. In some – mostly neo-corporatist – countries business (and employers’) associations assume the role of ‘‘private interest governments’’ (Streeck and Schmitter, 1985) by self-regulating and implementing policies for the common good. Through collaboration in advisory councils and boards (especially regarding social security, vocational training, and labor administration) they perform a self-regulatory function. This can often be found in compulsory chambers that have the power to control, tax, and even sanction their members in order to produce public goods.
International Perspectives Business (and employer) interests are better organized in OECD economies than elsewhere, though research has largely focused on few (western) European and North American countries, less on Japan and other non-European OECD countries. Given the different historical development during industrialization, there are considerable differences in the organization of business and employer interests across OECD countries. Corporatist theories (Crouch, 1993) as well as the ‘‘Varieties of Capitalism’’ approach (Hall and Soskice, 2001) point at major differences between liberal (or uncoordinated) and corporatist (or coordinated) market economies: the capacity of business and employer interests to overcome collective action problems and coordinate joint activities for the common good is lower in liberal market economies and higher in corporatist countries.
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In liberal market economies (Britain and the USA, but also other Anglophone OECD countries) business and employers’ associations are more fragmented (lacking often a peak association), direct lobbying and collective bargaining by large (multinational) companies coexists, and corporatist social dialogue is rare (an exception is Ireland since the late 1980s). Not only labor unions tend to be less organized with low union density and high fragmentation, but also employer associations have less encompassing membership (in both number of firms and employees employed) and bargaining coverage is considerably lower than in the other countries. Thus a large majority of employees are not covered by collective bargaining and have to negotiate employment conditions individually. Responding to the criticism of a narrow shareholder value orientation, ‘‘corporate social responsibility’’ has been advanced by some business communities in liberal countries as a strategic goal, reaching out to civil society organizations and the local communities. In coordinated market economies a ‘‘stakeholder’’ orientation and corporatist coordination have a long tradition, dating back to the premodern guilds (Crouch, 1993). Business associations, chambers of commerce and artisans, and employer associations tend to be more centralized, better organized in terms of firm membership (and size of workforce covered), and more functionally differentiated (Traxler et al., 2001). These organizations coordinate and join resources to produce common goods for the business community, ranging from lobbying for subsidies to engaging in self-regulation and negotiating nation- or sector-wide collective wage agreements. Enforcing compliance by all members, employers associations have played an important role in taking wages out of competition and providing minimum standards of employment. Interbusiness coordination through chambers facilitates also the organization of dual vocational training (most prominently in Germany) as smaller companies train young people to acquire skills for later employment in larger companies. Outside the OECD countries there is only scattered research on business and employers’ associations, reflecting the more varied organizational landscape. In the postcommunist countries of Eastern and Central Europe and Asia employers are generally perceived to be rather weak or even disorganized. Nevertheless, for instance, in Russia or Slovenia somewhat powerful BAs emerged after communist collapse. In Hungary a compulsory membership in chambers of commerce was introduced, and like in the Czech Republic, tripartite institutions emerged, while in Poland only weak BAs came into existence. BAs in postcommunist countries often assume the role of promoters
for small businesses. Contrary to fears of BAs’ power to exploit governments for business short term interests, they often play a role in establishing economic institutions and helping to overcome problems of bribery and lacking state support for businesses. Many African countries have adopted corporatist elements for example in Senegal, Nigeria, or Madagascar, albeit with less success than in Europe. In some countries BAs have been founded already by the 1960s in line with independence (for instance the Uganda Manufacturing Association). After an era of decline and stagnation due to political and social turmoil many associations have been (re-)established or revitalized by the 1990s. With processes of political democratization BAs increase their access to state bureaucracy and political decision-makers. Today, African BAs seem to fill a gap of governmental services to businesses, like the information on policy environment and granting of access to policy makers. African BAs are perceived as foundations for future progress in democratizing governance (Lucas, 1997). Therefore foreign aid sponsors promote these as agencies not only of business interests, but also of ‘‘social capital,’’ fostering trusted social relations in the wider civil society. In Latin America BAs have been largely shaped by the state following the independence in the nineteenth century (Schneider, 2004). Either the state helped in founding BAs to gain support for its policies or to channel business preferences, or BAs were founded to oppose specific state policies, but even then they gradually shifted and became dependent on the state for resources and access. Countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Chile have strong encompassing business associations, unlike for instance, Brazil and Argentina. Interest representations in the former advance economic performance, and evidence leans toward a positive influence on democracy, even if there are some negative examples. In China BAs have been seen as instruments of the state to retain control during economic decentralization. Nevertheless these associations seem to have gained some autonomy to voice the interests of its members and open up some space for societal initiative.
Future Directions Research in the field of business and employers’ associations is still underdeveloped in many areas; hence many issues still need to be further investigated to get a more systematic understanding of the many facets of business interest organization. The differences in the functioning and organization of BAs in developing and developed countries seem to be a crucial starting point for comparative research. In regard to civil society there seem
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to be quite different roles that BAs play in both groups. In developing countries, BAs might be important agencies in building market institutions, but also fostering democratic development, while in the OECD world BAs seem to challenge democratic institutions and developed welfare states, pushing towards liberal market reforms. The question of negative or positive impacts on democratic governance is still a matter of debate in need of more empirical research. Processes of internationalization have especially been studied for the European Union; given its unique institutional set up, these efforts cannot be projected on other international activities. The global economic players such as the USA, the EU and Japan, but also nonOECD economies all face the processes of fast economic globalization and slow political internationalization. Whether this will strengthen or weaken business interests at home and worldwide remains an open question.
Cross-References
▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Collective Action ▶ Corporatism ▶ Interest and Pressure Groups ▶ Interest Politics ▶ Labor Movements/ Labor Unions ▶ Lobbying ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ OECD
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References/Further Readings Crouch, C. (1993). Industrial Relations and European State Traditions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Duvanova, D. (2007). Bureaucratic corruption and collective action Business associations in the postcommunist transition. Comparative Politics, 39(4), 441–461. Fung, A. (2003). Associations and democracy: Between theories, hopes, and realities. Annual Review of Sociology, 29, 515–539. Greenwood, J. (Eds.). (2002). The effectiveness of EU business associations. Houndsmills: Palgrave. Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage. New York: Oxford University Press. Lucas, J. (1997). The politics of business associations in the developing world. Journal of the Developing Areas, 32(1), 71–96. Maxfield, S., & Schneider, B. R. (Eds.). (1997). Business and the state in developing countries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Offe, C., & Wiesenthal, H. (1980). Two logics of collective action: Theoretical notes on social class and organisational form. Political Power and Social Theory, 1, 67–115. Sadowski, D., & Jacobi, O. (Eds.). (1991). Employers’ associations in Europe: Policy and organisation. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Schneider, B. R. (2004). Business politics and the state in twentieth-century latin America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Streeck, W., et al. (Eds.). (2006). Governing interests. Business associations facing internationalization. London: Routledge. Streeck, W., & Schmitter, P. C. (Eds.). (1985). Private interest government. Beyond market and state. London: Sage. Traxler, F. (1995). Two logics of collective action in industrial relations? In C. Crouch & F. Traxler (Eds.), Organized industrial relations in Europe: What future? (pp. 23–44). Aldershot: Avebury. Traxler, F., Blaschke, S., & Kittel, B. (2001). National labour relations in internationalized markets: A comparative study of institutions, change, and performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation RAQUEL CAMPOS FRANCO
inaugurated in 1969 in a park of 7 ha which include the Museum that houses Calouste Gulbenkian’s art collection, a large auditorium with 1,200 places, spaces for temporary exhibitions, a congress area, an Art Library, and a Modern Art Center (opened in 1983). The Instituto Gulbenkian de Cieˆncia, a scientific research institute currently focused on biomedicine, is situated in Oeiras. The Foundation has a delegation in the United Kingdom (UK branch), a cultural centre in Paris (the Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre) and activities in more that 60 countries.
Mission Address of Organization Av. de Berna, 45A 1067-001 Lisboa Portugal www.gulbenkian.pt
Introduction The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is a Portuguese private institution of public benefit whose statutory aims are in the fields of charity, arts, education, and science. It is one of the largest European foundations, with assets of approximately €3 billion.
Brief History The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was created as a perpetual institution by a clause in the will of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, and its statutes were approved in 1956. Born in 1869 in Istanbul, Calouste would prove to be a visionary investor, having played a crucial role in the shaping of the early oil industry in the Middle East. Having followed a family practice of patronage of the arts and welfare work, he also managed to create a vast collection of pieces of art comprising 5,000 years of art history. During the Second World War he decided to emigrate to the United States, but the journey included a stop in Lisbon, a city he fell in love with and where he would live the 13 final years of his life. By his will Calouste Gulbenkian created an international foundation that would bear his name. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation started operations immediately in 1956 and its headquarters were
According to its statutes the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation must accomplish four aims – ‘‘charitable, artistic, educational and scientific.’’ With no mission defined, to these purposes is also added that ‘‘the action will be developed, not only in Portugal, but also in any other country that its managers will judge as convenient.’’ Currently, the Foundation operates in Portugal, Europe, Portuguesespeaking countries, worldwide Armenian communities, and internationally.
Activities The Foundation pursues its statutory aims in Portugal and abroad through direct activities and grants supporting projects and programs. It has an orchestra and a choir with performances throughout the year; organizes solo and collective exhibitions of Portuguese and foreign artists; organizes conferences, meetings, and courses; and is actively involved in publishing. The Foundation awards subsidies and scholarships for special studies in Portugal and abroad, and gives support to programs and projects in the fields established in the statutes. It also promotes the Portuguese culture abroad and supports the Armenian Diaspora worldwide in order to preserve its culture and language. The Foundation attempts to be a centre of rationality and excellence for the dissemination of knowledge with new areas of intervention emerging, from the environment to social inclusion.
Structure and Governance The Foundation is managed by a Board of Trustees that can include between three to nine directors. The
H. Anheier, S. Toepler (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-93996-4, # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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members’ mandates are for renewable 5-year periods and vacancies are filled by appointments approved by vote of all members. There is no limit in the number of mandates, but the age limit for appointment is currently 70. Any direct descendant of the founder holds a lifelong position as member of the Board. The Foundation published in 2007 its Code of Conduct, with the purpose of establishing the general rules and principles of professional ethics and conduct of its workers, and a specific set of principles for the members of the Board of Trustees.
Funding The funding derives mostly from the investment portfolio, from the stocks held in oil and gas interests and, in the late years, also in renewable energy projects. In 2007 the Foundation’s total assets reached €3,142 million and the total net costs €106 million (annual report, 2007). In the last years, the distribution of costs by the statutory purposes privileged the arts, followed by education, science, and charitable purposes. Considering the activity in Portugal and abroad, the division of costs was, in 2006 and 2007, 82% and 18% respectively.
Major Accomplishments The accomplishments of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation throughout its 50 years history are such as to deserve the following statement: ‘‘It is not even possible to imagine the country without Gulbenkian’’ (Barreto, 2007). From the research and projects that would not otherwise have been developed, to the scholarships given in a time where no other institution in Portugal could have given them, to the books that were and are too expensive for others to produce, the itinerant and fixed libraries that served 50 million readers when such services did not exist, to the debate generated in the conferences with the most knowledgeable persons in the world, to the financing of equipment in hospitals, to projects as the recognition of the qualifications of immigrant doctors, to the programs recently created to face pressing issues in the world in the present, as the Gulbenkian Program for the Environment, and so on, the contribution of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to the Portuguese society and the world is undeniable. The Foundation is also investing growingly in its participation in international networks, being present in shared projects in several domains (global health, migrations, intercultural dialogue).
Cross-References
▶ European Foundation Centre ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Operating
▶ Gulbenkian, Calouste Sarkis ▶ Philanthropy in Europe
References/Further Readings Barreto, A. (cood.) (2007). Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian – cinquenta anos, 1956.2006 (Vols. I e II). Lisbon: Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian. Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian. (2008). Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian 1956–2006 Factos e Nu´meros. Lisbon: Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian. MacDonald, N., & Tayart de Borms, L. (Eds.) (2008). Philanthropy in Europe – A rich past, a promising future. London: Alliance Publishing Trust. Tosto˜es, A. (2008). Gulbenkian, arquitecture and landscape. Portugal: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Vilar, E. R. (2006). Speech given by the president of the board of trustees. The solemn commemorative session of the fifty years of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Lisbon: Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian.
CARE LILI WANG
Address of Organization International Secretariat Chemin de Balexert 7-9 1219 Chatelaine Geneva Switzerland www.care-international.org/ CARE USA 151 Ellis Street, NE Atlanta, GA 30303 USA www.care.org/
Introduction CARE is one of the world’s largest international humanitarian organizations fighting global poverty. It not only feeds the hungry, but also tackles underlying causes of poverty to help people become self-sufficient. Recognizing that women and children suffer disproportionately from poverty, CARE places special emphasis on working with poor women and empowering them to create permanent social change. CARE also provides emergency aid to survivors of natural disasters and war, and helps people rebuild their lives.
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Brief History CARE was founded in 1945, when 22 American organizations came together to distribute lifesaving food packages to survivors of World War II in Europe. In May 1946, the first 20,000 ‘‘CARE packages’’ reached the port of Le Havre, France. Over the following 2 decades, some 100 million more packages reached people in need, first in Europe and later in Asian and other parts of the developing world. In the 1950s, CARE expanded into emerging nations and used US surplus food to feed the hungry. In the 1960s, CARE started primary heath care programs. In the 1970s, CARE responded to massive famines in Africa with both emergency relief and longterm agroforestry projects. The first CARE package distributed were US Army surplus ‘‘10-in-1’’ food parcels intended to supply ten soldiers with one meal. Later CARE Packages included food for different culture diet and nonfood items, such as tools, blankets, and medicines. Although the CARE Package program had been phased out decades ago, it remained a powerful symbol for the organization. The organization has always been known by the acronym ‘‘CARE,’’ but the meaning behind the letters has evolved with the organization. Originally, CARE stood for ‘‘Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe.’’ Today, CARE stands for ‘‘Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, Inc.’’
Mission CARE has expanded the scope of its mission considerably since it was founded in 1945. Today, CARE’s mission is ‘‘to serve individuals and families in the poorest communities in the world.’’ Drawing strength from its ‘‘global diversity, resources and experience,’’ CARE promotes ‘‘innovative solutions’’ and advocates for global responsibilities. It facilitates lasting social change by ‘‘strengthening capacity for self-help, providing economic opportunity, delivering relief in emergencies, influencing policy decisions at all levels, and addressing discrimination in all its forms.’’
Activities CARE tackles underlying causes of poverty so that people can become self-sufficient. Its programmatic strategy for the 5 years beginning fiscal year 2002 was to focus on three key factors affecting poor communities: education, HIV/AIDS, and emergency relief and preparedness. By helping children gain the knowledge and skills to succeed, CARE lays foundations for healthier, more productive families, communities, and society. By providing information and tools of protection to people in poverty, CARE helps promote grassroots efforts to mitigate the effects of HIV/AIDS in poor
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communities. Women are at the center of CARE’s community-based effort to improve basic education, prevent the spread of HIV, increase access to clean water and sanitation, expand economic opportunity and protect natural resources.
Structure and Governance CARE International (CI) is a global confederation of 12 national member organizations in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each member is registered as a nonprofit charitable organization according to the laws of its own country and is an autonomous organization in its own right that carries out a range of project-related, advocacy, fundraising, and communications activities in support of CARE’s relief and development programs worldwide. The CARE Country Director leads the projects and programs in the country it operates. The CI Secretariat is an international foundation, registered under Swiss law. CI’s governance rests with the General Assembly (GS) and its executive board. The GS consists of two representatives from each of the 12 national members. It meets once a year and appoints the Chairperson, the two viceChairpersons and the Treasure. The CI Board of Directors consists of one representative of each national member and the Chairperson of CI. The different parts of CARE coordinate regularly through a series of staff working groups, whose primary role is to inform the Secretary General on the progress of the CARE Strategic Plan.
Funding CARE obtains funding and commodities from the United States governmental agencies, the European Union and the United Nations. In addition, CARE receives donations and grants from hundreds of thousands of individuals and dozens of US corporations, foundations, and other organizations. More than 90% of its expenditure goes to poverty-fighting projects worldwide and less than 10% goes towards administrative and fundraising costs. Among the national member organizations, CARE USA’s income and expenditure represents the largest share of CI. In fiscal year 2007, CARE USA received more than $591 million contributions, 57% of which comes from government contribution, and its program expenses exceeded $545 million.
Accomplishments CARE implemented more than 1,000 projects in over 70 countries and improved the lives of more than 65 million people in 2007. In 2001, CARE operated agriculture and natural resources projects in 42 countries and worked
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with more than 2.6 million farmers to increase their crop and livestock yields through activities such as planting new seed varieties, animal husbandry, home gardening and irrigation. In the same year, CARE’s emergency projects directly assisted more than 7 million people in 26 countries. Currently, CARE has 131 small economic activity development projects in 39 countries assisting about 800,000 people, 90% of them women.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society History VI: Early and Mid 20th Century ▶ INGOs ▶ NGOs and Humanitarian Assistance ▶ NGOs and International Relations, UN
References/Further Readings Lindenberg, M., & Bryant, C. (2001). Going global: Transforming relief and development NGOs. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Quelch, J. A., & Laidler-Kylander, N. (2006). Communicating brand meaning: CARE USA. In J. A. Quelch & N. Laidler-Kylander, The new global brands: Managing non-government organizations in the 21st century. Mason, WI: South-West.
Caritas Internationalis PAURIC O’ROURKE
Address of Organization Palazzo San Calisto 00120 Vatican City Rome Italy www.caritas.org
Introduction Within the spectrum of civil society organizations Caritas stands out as being unique and distinctive in its origin and history as well as in the breadth of its goals and activities. The name stems from the Latin word for charity or virtue, it represents 162 Catholic organizations in the field of international relief aid and social and human development and remains a pioneer in the promotion of humanitarian and equalitarian causes.
History Caritas was founded by a German priest Lorenz Werthmann in Freiburg, in 1897 and quickly spread to other countries
with establishment in Switzerland in 1901 and the United States in 1910. Central to its global spread was Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. Elevating it to international status in 1954, Montini enabled Caritas to form an international platform and it became officially known as Caritas Internationalis in 1957. Today it has national member organizations from 137 countries divided into seven regions: Europe, Africa, Middle East and North Africa, Asia, North America, Latin America and Oceania and so has achieved a highly visible global presence.
Mission Its prime mission is to tackle all sources of world poverty, social inequality and exclusion and to make the world a better place. Since its foundation, Caritas has provided developmental support, relief and social services for the poor in over 200 countries worldwide. Caritas interprets its mission broadly and has always sought to remain current and relevant and is now vocal on the issue of climate change, especially its impact on the developing world. Since 1987, it has also worked tirelessly to impede the spread of HIV through its efforts in some 107 countries. It has become a truly global movement, working towards international solidarity, equality and social and economic justice. It highlights the plight of the world’s neediest people and uniquely acts within the ethos of the Christian faith and Catholic social teaching.
Activities Caritas addresses a wide diversity of activities by acting as an umbrella agency for over 160 Catholic groups who share similar humanitarian goals. It effectively co-coordinates their resources and optimizes their efforts for maximum effect on the ground. As an international and well recognized nonprofit organization, Caritas plays numerous roles within the voluntary sector focusing on three main areas: emergencies, sustainable development and peace and reconciliation building. This includes campaigning for global human and economic rights, promotion of universal access to education, care for the elderly and more recently, protection of the environment and HIV prevention. It is also among the first to respond to natural disasters and humanitarian crises throughout the world and has become synonymous with such timely and first on the scene response. Caritas volunteers work at the grassroots level in order to promote peace and reconciliation and address local social and cultural issues such as sexual inequality and discrimination.
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Structure and Governance The organizational structure and governance of Caritas has strong ecclesiastical overtones and Vatican connections, being granted canonical legal status by the Pope in 2004. Headed by a Secretary General, currently, Lesley-Anne Knight, it is supported by an Executive Committee, Bureau and Secretariat. Every 4 years its holds a General Assembly in the Vatican City attended by representatives from each of its 162 members and its seven geographical regions at which its elects the Executive Committee, the President, the Secretary General, the Treasurer and seven Regional Presidents. All of the latter plus observers forms the Bureau which serves as an oversight committee on governance while the Executive Committee manage the agency’s operational activities. It agreed a new 5-year strategic plain in 2005 and has a global operational plan covering 2007–2011.
Funding The finances of Caritas are managed by a Finance Director and overseen by a Finance Commission which is chaired by the elected Treasurer. According to Caritas’s 2003–2007 Activities Report, annual statutory fees from the 162 members account for 65% of Caritas’s budget with the remaining 35% coming from external funding such a voluntary contributions from existing members and others. Administrative costs account for 28% of the annual budget. In 2007, Caritas organizations had a combined turnover of over US$5.5 billion and a workforce of 40,000 paid staff and 125,000 volunteers.
Major Accomplishments In 2007, Caritas responded to 40 humanitarian crises across the globe. Twenty-four million people a year in 200 different countries and territories benefit from the work of Caritas. Caritas is a major contributor and supporter of the Millennium Development Goals in bringing an end to Third World poverty.
Cross-References
▶ INGOs ▶ NGOs and Humanitarian Assistance ▶ Social Justice
References/Further Readings Caritas Annual Report and other Caritas Publications, from http://www. caritas.org/resources/publications/index.html. Jedin, H., Adria´nyi, G., Dolan, J., & Repgen, K. (1981). History of the church (Vol. 10, Chap. 14). London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Murphy, C. M. (2007, June). Charity, not justice, as constitutive of the church’s mission. Theological Studies, 68(2), 274–286. Schmidhalt, M. (2005). The history of Caritas Internationalis. Rome: Caritas.
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Carnegie, Andrew BETH BREEZE
C Basic Biographical Information Born in 1835 in Dunfermline, Scotland, Andrew Carnegie rose from inauspicious origins, as the son of a poor weaver, to become an industrial tycoon, the richest man in the world, and arguably the most famous philanthropist of all time. At the age of 13, Carnegie’s destitute family immigrated to the United States to join relatives settled in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Although he began work as a humble bobbin boy, Carnegie educated himself at Colonel Anderson’s free library, and soon impressed his employers and gained patrons. He rose quickly within the telegraph industry, then on the railroads before making his fortune in iron and steel production and through associated investments. He realized his fortune in 1901 by selling his businesses for $480 million to his main rival John Pierpoint Morgan. Although his philanthropy began in 1873 with a gift of $25,000 to build public baths in his native home town, Carnegie became a full-time philanthropist after retirement, aiming (albeit unsuccessfully) to give away all his wealth before his death, which occurred at Lenox, Massachusetts in 1919, an aim consistent with his oft-quoted philosophy that ‘‘he who dies rich, dies disgraced.’’
Major Contributions Carnegie is known as a founding father of modern philanthropy whose writing and actions continue to influence contemporary philanthropists, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Sir Tom Hunter. Whilst still immersed in wealth creation, he argued that the rich have a duty to give away their surplus through properly administered philanthropy. These views were set out in two articles published in the North American Review in 1889: ‘‘The Best Fields for Philanthropy’’ and ‘‘Wealth,’’ later republished as ‘‘The Gospel of Wealth.’’ Carnegie proposed seven causes, ranked in order of merit, as suitable recipients of philanthropic funding: universities, free libraries, health care and research, public parks, music halls, public baths, and churches. In keeping with these published opinions, Carnegie gave away almost all his wealth, largely to those seven causes. In line with another expressed view, that naming rights are an appropriate tribute to donors, his ubiquitous presence lives on in libraries, museums, music halls, universities, and other facilities across the United States, the United Kingdom
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and many other countries. The most widely recognized aspect of his legacy, the 2,509 Carnegie libraries built across the English-speaking world, derive from the recognition of his own lack of formal education and appreciation of free access to books during his formative years. Carnegie’s institutional legacy lives on in a variety of organizations that he founded, including The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
Cross-References
▶ Buffett, Warren Edward ▶ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Family ▶ Foundations, Grant-making ▶ Gates, William H.
References/Further Readings Carnegie, A. (1920). Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Krass, P. (2002). Carnegie. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Nasaw, D. (2007). Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Brief History On November 25, 1910, Andrew Carnegie, an US industrialist and philanthropist of Scottish origin, founded the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. The internationalist Carnegie was convinced, that peace could be reached through the strengthening of international law and organizations. Influenced by the philosopher and later Nobel Prize laureate Nicholas Murray Butler, he wanted to make a contribution to international peace by funding the endowment. During its almost 100 years of existence, the Endowment was an inherent part of the US foreign policy establishment.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas CEIP’s focus is the broader area of international relations, with an emphasis on conflict research and prevention. Since the launch of the Moscow center in 1993, ‘‘Carnegie aims to transform itself from a think tank on international issues to the first truly multinational – ultimately global – think tank.’’
Activities The Endowment currently runs programs focusing on the following topics and geographic areas: China, Russia, and Eurasia; Democracy and Rule of Law; South Asia; Energy and Climate; Trade, Equity, and Development; Middle East; Non Proliferation; as well as the US Role in the World. These programs include research, various publications and conferences. The Endowment also publishes the bimonthly ‘‘Foreign Policy,’’ one of the leading publications concerned with International Relations issues.
JAN KU¨NZL
Structure and Governance Address of Organization 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20036-2103 USA www.carnegieendowment.org
Introduction The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), one of the oldest foreign policy think tanks of the USA, describes itself as: ‘‘a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States.’’ Besides its headquarters in Washington DC, the Endowment has offices in Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, and Brussels.
The Endowment is subdivided in four regional offices, which are relatively independent from the headquarters in Washington DC. The Staff of the regional offices is mainly recruited in the region. The current president of CEIP is Jessica T. Mathews.
Funding CEIP draws financial support of various public and private donors, like Shell International, The Open Society Institute and various Ministries.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions CEIP was a pioneer among foreign policy think tanks and has served as a role model for other such organizations. In the late 1990s, the Endowment established itself as one of
Catholic Charities USA
the world’s leading research institutions on globalization through the creation of the interdisciplinary Global Policy Program. With the expansion of its activities on an international level CEIP is again at the cutting edge of the evolution of foreign policy think tanks.
Cross-References ▶ Carnegie, Andrew ▶ Think Tanks
References/Further Readings Abelson, D. E. (2006). A capitol idea: think tanks and US foreign policy. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queens University Press. Parmar, I. (2000). Engineering consent: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the mobilization of American public opinion 1939–1945. Review of International Studies, 26, 35–48.
Catholic Charities USA CHRIS GOVEKAR
Address of Organization 66 Canal Center Place Suite 600 Alexandria, VA 22314 USA www.catholiccharitiesusa.org
Introduction Catholic Charities USA is a network of local and national relief groups united around a common mission.
Brief History Catholic Charities was founded in 1910 on the campus of Catholic University in Washington DC as the National Conference of Catholic Charities. It was designed to promote and encourage the creation of individual diocesan Catholic Charities offices to encourage professional social work practice. Today, it serves as the national voice for the Catholic Charities network and the people it helps.
Mission Catholic Charities exists as a network of affiliated charitable organizations in order to accomplish the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ mission of relieving suffering and encouraging advocacy on behalf of the nation’s
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poorest people. In addition, the national organization exists to assist member organizations in their mission of service and advocacy at the local level.
Activities As a national organization, Catholic Charities USA assists its member and affiliate organizations with fundraising, program organization and volunteer training in order to increase their efficacy in carrying out their individual missions. In addition, it pursues programs designed to educate individuals on key social justice issues as well as lobbying legislators on issues of importance to its membership and the mission of the Catholic Church as a whole. The national organization also acts as the primary coordinating agency for the Roman Catholic Church’s response to natural or man made disasters and assists in directing the efforts of local Catholic charitable organizations in response to those disasters. Training programs are offered for its member and affiliate organizations so that they are better able to use their limited resources to relieve suffering.
Structure and Governance While the individual member organizations are responsible to their local parish and diocesan councils, they do not report to the national organization in any formal manner. The national organization reports to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops through a board of directors appointed by the USCCB.
Funding Catholic Charities’ work is financed both by the church as a whole and by individual donations to either member organizations or through mass appeals to congregants. In addition, the individual organizations also accept corporate donations from groups in accord with their mission and objectives. The organization reports that approximately 89% of all donations goes directly to charitable work, with the remaining 11% is reserved for administration costs and legislative activities.
Major Accomplishments In 2007, Catholic Charities: 1. Provided assistance to more than 7.5 million individuals 2. Provided food service to more than 6.5 million people 3. Provided family assistance to more than 1.1 million people 4. Worked with nearly 3.5 million individuals in programs to build communities
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Cross-References
▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Social Justice ▶ Umbrella Organizations
Catholic Relief Services CHRIS GOVEKAR
Address of Organization 228 West Lexington Street Baltimore, MD 21201-3413 USA www.crs.org
Introduction Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the US Catholic community. It exists to alleviate suffering and provide assistance to people in need without regard to race, religion, or nationality.
Brief History In 1943, during World War II, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) first began its work focused on the resettlement of war refugees in Europe. The Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States established CRS to help war-torn Europe and its refugees recover from this great conflict. Even today, more than 60 years later, its mission continues to focus on the poor overseas, using the gospel of Jesus Christ as its mandate. CRS seeks to help those most in need, providing assistance on the basis of need, without regard to race, creed, or nationality. In the 1950s, CRS reacted to the increasing stability in Europe by looking to other parts of the world for people who could benefit from the support of US Catholics. This led to the opening of CRS offices in Africa, Asia and Latin America. During this time, the organization also began to work on finding ways for people in the developing world to break the cycle of poverty through ‘‘community-based, sustainable development initiatives.’’ Their work continues throughout more than 100 countries today with more than 5,000 full-time employees and relief workers.
Mission Catholic Relief Services assists the Bishops of the United States in fulfilling their commitment to assist the poor and vulnerable overseas through programs that:
1. Promote human development by responding to major emergencies, fighting disease and poverty, and nurturing peaceful and just societies and 2. Serve Catholics in the United States as they live their faith in solidarity with their brothers and sisters around the world
Activities All programming for the agency is evaluated using an established set of criteria called the ‘‘Justice Lens’’ to ensure it is compatible with Catholic Social Justice Teaching. This focus on social justice came about as a result of the organization’s reflection following the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and remains the standard today. Overseas work is done in partnership with local church agencies, other faith-based partners, nongovernmental organizations and local governments. CRS emphasizes the empowerment of partners and beneficiaries in programming decisions. The agency has also made engaging the US Catholic population a priority. CRS is seeking to help Catholics more actively live their faith and build global solidarity. One example of this commitment is ‘‘Operation Rice Bowl,’’ in which more than 12 million individual Catholics participate during the season of lent. The program emphasizes prayer, fasting, learning, and giving, with activities designed to encourage prayer for and learning about the developing world. The rice bowl itself is used to collect funds for those in need. Of those funds, 75% goes to projects in the developing world, while the remaining 25% supports local programs aimed at ending poverty and hunger.
Structure and Governance CRS reports directly to the board of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The board, made up of 22 individuals (13 bishops, 1 monsignor, and 8 lay persons), is appointed by the USCCB and monitors the activities of the executive leadership team.
Funding CRS’ work is funded both by donations from Catholic churches throughout the United States as well as from individual and corporate donations. Ninety-four cents of every dollar donated goes directly to programs and services, according to the organization.
Major Accomplishments In 2007, CRS earned a Gold Award from the Independent Film and Video Competition for the ‘‘Water for Life’’
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documentary video, which explores why more than one billion people do not have adequate access to clean water. Other awards include the Pakistan Star of Sacrifice, awarded by the government of Pakistan for efforts following the 2005 earthquake and the 2005 Caritas ‘‘Flame of Hope’’ award, given in recognition of CRS’ work to bring ‘‘the very core of Christianity’’ to those suffering around the world.
Cross-References
▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ INGOs ▶ NGOs and Humanitarian Assistance ▶ NGOs and Socioeconomic Development ▶ Social Justice
References/Further Readings Egan, E. (1988). Catholic Relief Services: The beginning years. New York: Catholic Relief Services. Egan, E. (1995). For whom there is no room: Scenes from the refugee world. New York: Paulist Press. USAID. (1994). Initial environmental examination for the Catholic Relief Service Food Transition Strategy Project in the Philippines. Washington, DC: USAID.
CDRA ▶ Community Development Resource Association (CDRA)
CEDAG ANAEL LABIGNE
Address of Organization Square Ambiorix 32, bte 47 B-1000 Bruxelles Belgium www.cedag-eu.org
Introduction CEDAG is a Brussels-based network-structuring organization that speaks for national and regional umbrella bodies. In doing so, CEDAG provides the voice for
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the nonprofit sector at European level, especially when it comes to issues that all nonprofit organizations and associations have in common.
Brief History Formally incorporated in 1996, the network was formed in 1989 in order to provide a voice for the nonprofit sector at European level. CEDAG is one of the founding members of Social Economy Europe (SEE), the European standing conference for cooperatives, mutual societies, associations, and foundations (www.socialeconomy.eu. org), and a member of the Social Platform (www.socialplatform.org).
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas According to its charter, CEDAG should strengthen the representation and defend the interests of associations that manage economic activities without profit and for the social welfare, and provide services to its members and users in order to create a better social and cultural environment. CEDAG’s aims are to create a strong European platform to represent the association’s views before the European Union; to bring together the most important national platforms working for the general interest in the countries of the European Union; to use the intersectoral competences of those platforms to elaborate joint statements; to build a pool of resources for the representative national platforms; to underline the good practice in relation to the civil dialogue; and to promote a European Charter as a framework for the relations between nongovernmental organizations and European institutions.
Activities CEDAG pursues these aims by sponsoring research, workshops and conferences on topics of interest to its membership, including, among others, fostering civil dialogue in Europe and valuing the economic value of nonprofit activities. It lobbies for the adoption of a European legal framework for nonprofit organizations that will facilitate transnational cooperation between associations. Furthermore, CEDAG has contributed to the enlargement process by developing links between associations from candidate countries to the European Union, and by encouraging the exchange of information and good practice. Through its newsletters, website, and publications, CEDAG keeps members informed about issues of interest at EU level and the current EU policy developments.
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Structure and Governance CEDAG’s members are regional and national umbrella bodies for the nonprofit sector. In 2009 its membership included 33 national umbrellas in 20 countries of the EU, which together represent over 50,000 nonprofit organizations with over nine million individual members. Members include the French UNIOPSS (Union Nationale Interfe´de´rale des Organismes Prive´s Sanitaires et Sociaux) and the British NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organizations). CEDAG has an office in Brussels and is governed by an international board consisting of a President, two Vice Presidents, a treasurer and several board members from all over Europe.
Funding CEDAG’s income consists of annual dues paid by members, income from CEDAG’s own activities, grants and contracts, including from the EU and government agencies, and income from invested capital.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions
Center for American Progress CHRISTOPHER S. BIGGERS
Address of Organization 1333 H Street NW 10th Floor Washington, DC 20005 USA www.americanprogress.org
Introduction The CAP is a think tank which seeks to promote the US progressive movement in the national discourse by challenging conservative political philosophy. With members whose subject matter expertise spans across disciplines, the CAP has published books and policy papers on diverse subjects such as biofuels and poverty to trade policy and war.
Brief History
By respecting the specific aptitudes of the different European networks in the social context, CEDAG works for more coordination and compliance between those. As the challenges are so big, all associations need to speak with one voice and that is where CEDAG is coming in. As a network of associations active at European level, CEDAG has consistently called for a dialogue with civil society organizations within the EU decision-making process – at the earliest possible stage of the process – and tried to influence the European legislation by doing so.
CAP is a recent addition to the Washington scene whose arrival in 2003 has been viewed as a counterweight to more conservative think tanks like the CATO institute and the Heritage Foundation. The political climate of 2002 created the impetus for the Center’s development as the Republican Party had a President at the helm and total control of both houses in the US congress. This was the first time since 1953 that the Republicans had monopolized both houses which led John Podesta, former Whitehouse Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton and Georgetown Law Professor, to found the CAP.
Cross-References
Mission
▶ Civil Society and the European Union ▶ National Council of Voluntary Organisations ▶ Umbrella Organizations ▶ UNIOPSS
References/Further Readings Weisbein, J. (2002). Le lobbying associatif a` Bruxelles: entre mobilisations unitaires et sectorielles. Revue Internationale de Politique Compare´e, 9(1), 79–98.
CEMEFI ▶ Centro Mexicano para la Filantropia, AC (CEMEFI)
CAP’s mission and objectives revolves around developing a vision for a progressive America by providing a forum to generate new ideas and policy proposals in order to respond effectively to conservative policy with clear alternatives. As a result, CAP has united with other think tanks to advocate for the progressive agenda inviting larger groups of Americans to participate in order to address issues requiring collective action. For the 44th presidency of the United States, CAP advocates five policy priorities: inclusive economic growth, universal healthcare, restructuring the US educational system, improving US leadership, and the development of a sustainable environment.
Activities CAP maintains several active projects promoting the progressive agenda in which citizens are invited to participate
Center for Women’s Global Leadership
in developing new ideas in further support of the progressive movement. Some of these projects include the thinkprogress.org blog, highlighting the pitfalls of conservative philosophy in the media, Campus Progress, seeking to open opportunities for young people to advocate issues of importance, as well as Reel Progress, a yearly film series connecting the arts with campaigns for social change. Additionally, CAP sustains a large group of research fellows who periodically publish policy ideas and analysis in order to influence the public debate.
Structure and Governance The governing structure of CAP includes a seven member executive committee headed by John Podesta as President and Chief Executive Officer. There are 15 subsidiary departments that deal with inner workings of the organization including four that only deal with policy specific areas of research. When questioned on the decision making process and the overall governance of the organization, CAP declined to answer.
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Center for Women’s Global Leadership PATSY KRAEGER
C Address of Organization Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 160 Ryders Lane New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8555 USA www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/globalcenter
Introduction The Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) describes itself as an organization which develops women leaders who advocates for women’s rights and social justice. CWGL engages in policy making and social justice activism throughout the globe. CWGL is not an NGO rather it is a program of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Funding The CAP is supported through financial contributions from the private sector and through the resources of its members. With an initial budget of $10 million in 2003, the CAP has more than doubled its contributions to $24 million in 5 short years. The more notable philanthropic contributors include, but are not limited to, those such as Herb and Marion Sandler, George Soros, Peter B. Lewis, and Hillary R. Clinton. The CAP receives no direct government funding.
Accomplishments
Brief History The Center for Women’s Global Leadership was founded as a project of Douglass College in 1989 and is a unit of the Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) – a consortium of seven women’s programs at Rutgers University created to study and promote how and why women lead, and to develop programs that prepare women of all ages to lead effectively.
Within less than one year of opening, the experts from CAP had already made more than 300 television appearances making them a formidable opponent in the think tank arena. CAP has been successful in campaigning for the Obama presidency by providing talking points as well as strong critiques of his opponents.
Mission
Cross-References
CWGL’s programs promote the leadership of women and advance feminist perspectives in policy-making processes in local, national, and international arenas. Since 1990, CWGL has fostered women’s leadership in the area of human rights through women’s global leadership institutes, strategic planning activities, international mobilization campaigns, UN monitoring, global education endeavors, publications, and a resource center. CWGL works from a human rights perspective with an emphasis on violence against women, sexual, and reproductive health and socioeconomic well-being. CWGL’s programs are in two broad areas of policy & advocacy and leadership development & women’s
▶ Advocacy ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in the US ▶ Heritage Foundation ▶ Political Organizations ▶ Soros, George ▶ Think Tanks
References/Further Readings Gizzi, J. (2007). Center for American progress: Think-tank on steroids. Organizational Ttrends. Washington DC: Capital Research Center. http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1185996377.pdf
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The Center for Women’s Global Leadership mission is to ‘‘develop and facilitate women’s leadership for women’s human rights and social justice worldwide.’’
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human rights education. CWGL’s signature program is ‘‘The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence’’ is an international campaign originating from the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute sponsored by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership in 1991.
Structure and Governance CWGL’s Founder and Executive Director, Charlotte Bunch is a Rutgers University tenured faculty member in the Department of Women and Gender studies. CWGL has a full-time staff of six members, three consultants, and three student staff members. The administrative/reporting relationship within Rutgers is to the Area Dean for International Programs and ultimately to the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.
Funding CWGL’s work is financed primarily through donations from Rutgers University, foundations such as the Asia Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Johnson & Johnson Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the MS Foundation and others as well as individuals. CWGL does receive government contributions for its work including The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of the Netherlands and CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency).
Major Accomplishments In 2008, CWGL sponsored events on violence against women, UN gender architecture, and women human rights defenders and participated in sessions on sexual rights, multigenerational leadership, violence, and conflict, among others in Cape Town, South Africa. Also in 2008, CWGL sponsored an International AIDS conference in Mexico City attended by 25,000 people.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Gender ▶ Human Rights ▶ Social Justice
References/Further Readings Clark, A. M., Friedman, E. J., & Hochstetler, K. (1998). The sovereign limits of global civil society: A comparison of NGO participation in UN World Conferences on the Environment, Human Rights, and Women. World Politics, 51(1), 1–35. Dekoven, M. (2001). Feminist locations: Global and local, theory and practice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Prygl, M., & Meyer, E. (Eds.) (1999). Gender politics in global governance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Centre Franc¸ais des Fondations ODILE BOUR
Address of Organization 40 avenue Hoche F-75008 Paris France www.centre-francais-fondations.org
Introduction The Centre Franc¸ais des Fondations (CFF – French Center for Foundations) is the umbrella organization of French foundations and acts as a platform for the exchange of experience and knowledge about foundations, advice on the creation and development of foundations, and representation to public bodies.
Brief History CFF was founded in 2002 under the legal form of an association (Law of 1901) on the initiative of seven French foundations: Fondation de France, Fondation Caisse d0 Epargne pour la Solidarite´, Fondation Hippocre`ne, Fondation Institut Pasteur, Fondation des Orphelins d0 Auteuil, Fondation Macif and Fondation pour la Recherche Me´dicale.
Mission With the primary goal to promote foundations and their development in France, the CFF represents French foundations’ interests vis-a`-vis public authorities and national, European, and international institutions and to enhance their international representation by improving the knowledge of their status and action, and by supporting their developing projects. It also provides information and services on foundations, advises individuals and corporations intending to create a foundation and engages in advocacy on matters relating to taxation and financial concerns.
Activities To pursue its mission, the CFF organizes workshops, seminars, and conferences on current issues relevant to foundations, facilitating connections among foundations, sharing, and exchange of ideas; assisting foundations in becoming more effective and innovative in their activities; cooperates with other European foundations and other associations of foundations. It also serves as an information pool in providing database, research results, studies, and directories on foundations.
Centro Mexicano para la Filantropia, AC (CEMEFI)
Structure and Governance As of February 2009, CCF is composed of 151 foundation members. Its board of directors counts 12 members, all trustees of French foundations active in different fields. It is a member of the European Foundation Center.
Funding CFF’s work is financed primarily through the membership fees of its members which contribute proportionally according to their annual operating expenditures.
Cross-References
▶ European Foundation Center ▶ Fondation de France ▶ Lobbying ▶ Umbrella Organizations
References/Further Readings Broca, B. (2009). La Fondation de France 1994–2008. Une aventure tre`s humaine. Paris: Perrin.
Centro Mexicano para la Filantropia, AC (CEMEFI) MARTIN HO¨LZ, REGINA LIST
Address of Organization Cda. de Salvador Alvarado 7 Col. Escando´n Del. Miguel Hidalgo 11800, Mexico City Mexico www.cemefi.org
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said to be ‘‘a visionary philanthropist’’ (Winder, 2007: 39). It emerged following the disastrous earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 and in the midst of a number of private initiatives that emerged to rebuild where the government failed to. Since then, CEMEFI has played a decisive role in highlighting the importance of civil society activities within Mexico.
Mission/Objectives Based on its 2007 strategic planning process, CEMEFI’s mission is to promote the philanthropic, committed, and socially responsible participation of citizens and their organizations in order to achieve a more equitable, solidaristic, and prosperous society. These aims are to be realized by way of a flourishing philanthropic sector and sustained corporate social responsibility.
Activities CEMEFI’s diverse activities go beyond that of a typical member-serving association. One of its focal points is promoting corporate social responsibility (CSR). In addition to organizing workshops and publishing guides relating to CSR, CEMEFI together with AliaRSE awards the Distintivo ESR (Socially Responsible Enterprise Distinction) every year to companies that meet the majority of 120 indicators relating to ethics, working conditions, community relations, and environmental impact. Through its ‘‘Hacesfalta’’ (‘‘you are missed’’) program, CEMEFI provides information and guides on volunteer management and an Internet-based platform for recruiting volunteers. CEMEFI also offers support for a number of affinity groups, including an expanding group of community foundations. In its support for the civil society sector more broadly, CEMEFI organizes an annual congress on third sector research in Mexico.
Structure/Governance
The Centro Mexicano para la Filantropı´a (CEMEFI) is a private, nonprofit membership association based in Mexico City that seeks to promote a culture of philanthropy and social responsibility in Mexico.
CEMEFI is governed by several bodies, including the general assembly of members, the board of directors, led by Jacqueline Butcher de Rivas, and the executive committee, led by Jorge Villalobos Grzybowicz as executive president. As of December 2008, CEMEFI’s membership included 210 active members (associations, foundations, companies, and individuals) and 480 affiliated institutions and individuals.
Brief History
Funding
CEMEFI was founded in December 1988 by Manuel Arango, previously part owner of a large general retailing business and now chair of a real estate company, who is
In 2007, CEMEFI’s expenditures amounted to approximately 30 million pesos. The majority of its expenditures are covered by donations as well as member dues. In fact,
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CEMEFI claims to be the only organization in Latin America with its financial sustainability ensured mainly by member contributions, which represent more than 50% of its income.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Over its 20 years of existence, CEMEFI has developed and adapted approaches that have been critical to promoting philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and volunteerism in Mexico. As a key actor, it has helped to clarify and deepen understanding of these areas of civil society development. In addition, CEMEFI has played a ‘‘critical role in convening dialogues around an enabling legal and tax environment for nonprofit organizations including foundations’’ (Winder, 2007: 39).
Cross-References
▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Philanthropy in Latin America
References/Further Readings Arango, M. (2002). Philanthropy in Mexico. ReVista Harvard review of Latin America, Spring 2002 (Ed. Giving and volunteering in the Americas: From charity to solidarity), from http://www.drclas. harvard.edu/revista/articles/view/12. CEMEFI. (2008). Informe Anual 2007. Mexico City: CEMEFI. Winder, D. (2007). Mexico. In H. K. Anheier, A. Simmons, & D. Winder (Eds.), Innovation in strategic philanthropy. Local and global perspectives (pp. 37–55). New York: Springer.
NCVO) to encourage effective giving to the charitable sector in the United Kingdom. CAF’s key role is to support the sustainability of the nonprofit and voluntary sector by encouraging social investment and philanthropic donations. CAF provides financial services to the charitable sector such as low-cost banking and investment management, as well as it assists corporate and individual donors in tax-effective giving. Likewise, CAF runs a company advisory service that helps businesses in designing and implementing programs of strategic grantmaking.
Brief History CAF origins trace back to a Charities Department set up by the NCVO aimed at increasing donations and stimulating new donors in the United Kingdom. Due to its success, indicated by the fact that it started to administer Deeds of Covenant (the first way available to charities to receive untaxed donations), the Charities Department became independent from the NCVO. CAF, as an autonomous organization, was formally constituted by a Declaration of Trust dated on October 2, 1974. The Charities Aid Foundation has specialized in creating financial and fundraising strategies suitable for the not-for profit sector and lobbying for a legal and fiscal regulation that may encourage philanthropic giving. Currently, CAF operates through an international network of offices in the following countries to strengthen social investment worldwide: Australia, Brazil (in partnership with the Institute for the Development of Social Investment, IDIS), Bulgaria, India, Russia, Southern Africa and the United States.
Mission
Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) CARLOS CORDOURIER REAL
Address of Organization 25 Kings Hill Avenue Kings Hill West Malling Kent ME19 4TA UK www.cafonline.org
Introduction The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) is a British registered charity founded by the National Council of Social Service (afterwards National Council for Voluntary Organizations,
CAF’s mission is to be ‘‘[a]n integrated customer-focused organisation for donors and charities that stimulates giving, social investment and the effective use of funds.’’ In order to carry out its stated mission, CAF works with individuals, companies, and nonprofit organizations, through the provision of financial services and counseling to increase the impact of charitable giving and social investment.
Activities For individual donors, CAF provides information about the charitable sector and offers schemes of tax-effective donations; for corporate donors, CAF advises to implement successful community investment programs; and for charities, CAF offers low-costing banking as well as investment and fundraising strategies. CAF also develops research and up-to-date analysis on the characteristics of charitable giving. The survey UK Giving carried out
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annually jointly with the NCVO is an important source of information about the trends of donations amongst the British public. Moreover, CAF has fostered international surveys to identify the features of charitable donations in the fast growing developing economies of BRIC (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
KERRY O’HALLORAN Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Structure and Governance
Introduction
CAF is governed by the Declaration of Trust that constituted it as a registered charity in 1974. Its Board of Trustees, which directs the Executive Management Group, includes the Chairman of the NCVO, two trustees elected by the Executive committee of the NCVO, and at least six other members appointed by the existing trustees. The structure of governance also comprises the following bodies: Advisory Council; Audit, Risk, and Compliance Committee, Investment Advisory Committee; and the Nominations and Remuneration Committee.
Funding CAF finances its activities through the provision of a wide range of services. According to its Annual Report for the fiscal year ended 30 April 2008, the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) administered a total of £2.5 billion of funds of charities and donors. CAF’s income for that year amounted £409 million, whilst expenditure was £316 (mainly donations to charities).
Major Contributions The Charities Aid Foundation has contributed to the sustainability of the charitable sector through the development of specialized services and relevant know-how on effective financial strategies for the social sector. CAF has also played an important role in promoting a legal environment that promotes philanthropic giving of both individual and corporate donors.
Cross-References
▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Fundraising ▶ National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) ▶ Planned Giving
Charity and Religion
Religion and charity have been inextricably entangled throughout their long history. The foundations of the three main religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – are each bedded down on doctrines that require their members to do good for others mainly by caring for the ill or destitute and giving to those otherwise in need. The earliest manifestations of civil society grew from that context in the form of associations or guilds (confraternities in the Catholic Church) dedicated to the pursuit of religious aims through various forms of community activity. Perhaps the earliest threats to civil society, as manifested in the Crusades, were similarly generated. Arguably, religion and charity continue to simultaneously sustain and erode the basis for civil society. ‘‘Charity,’’ as it is known to those nations belonging to the common-law tradition, is defined by law rather than religion. In that respect, it is quite different from its counterpart zakat and sadaqa in Islamic culture and from tzedakah in Judaism. It differs also from its equivalent in other Christian but civil law jurisdictions, where the law has accreted in codified form rather than been shaped by principles formulated in the Court of Equity as has occurred in the common-law nations. Charity, in a common-law context, has its origin in the ‘‘pious use’’ employed to facilitate gifts made by landowners to religious bodies in return for masses being said for the salvation of their souls. In the developing nations, charity and religion, particularly in an Islamic context, continue to be very much bound together and in theocratic Muslim states that symbiotic relationship has a prominent political salience. Indeed, the growing difference in perception between Islam and Christianity, regarding the role to be played by religion/charity on a domestic and international basis, is not without global political implications. Consideration of such matters, however, lies outside the scope of this entry.
References/Further Readings Clegg, S. (2008). UK giving 2008: An overview of charitable giving in the UK in 2007/08. London: Charities Aid Foundation/NCVO. Russell, L., & Scott, D. (2007). Social enterprise in practice: Developmental stories from the voluntary and community sectors. London: Charities Aid Foundation.
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Definition ‘‘Charity,’’ as a legal concept, is confined to and defined by the common law. It is usually considered to date from the Statute of Charitable Uses 1601 in England & Wales,
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which laid the legislative foundations for the development of modern charity law. The preamble to that statute defined charity in terms of the following charitable purposes: "
Releife of aged impotent and poore people, some for Maintenance of sicke and maymed Souldiers and Marriners, Schooles of Learninge, Free Schooles and Schollers in Universities, some for Repaire of Bridges Portes Havens Causwaies Churches Seabankes and Highwaies, some for Educacion and prefermente of Orphans, some for or towardes Reliefe Stocke or Maintenance of Howses of Correccion, some for Mariages of poore Maides, some for Supportacion Ayde and Helpe of younge tradesmen Handicraftesmen and persons decayed, and others for reliefe or redemption of Prisoners or Captives, and for aide or ease of any poore Inhabitantes concerninge paymente of Fifteenes, setting out of Souldiers and other Taxes.
Therefore, neither government nor court would regard a purpose as charitable unless it appeared on that list or could be defined as coming within ‘‘the spirit and intendment’’ of the preamble which required proof that the new purpose approximated an established charitable purpose and could be viewed as an extension of it or as analogous to it; a rule that has underpinned the development of charity law, giving the judiciary some discretion to adjust the law to fit contemporary social circumstances. Religion was defined in Keren Kayemeth Le Jisroel v. Inland Revenue Commissioners (1931) 48 TLR 459 as ‘‘the promotion of spiritual teaching in a wide sense, and the maintenance of the doctrines on which it rests, and the observances that serve to promote and manifest it.’’ It was not mentioned as a charitable purpose in the 1601 Act, probably for reasons to do with the equivocal role of the Church in English society in the years following the Reformation, but there was never any doubt as to the legal inseparableness of charity and religion. This was confirmed in the landmark decision The Commissioners for Special Purposes of the Income Tax v. Pemsel [1879] AC 531 when Macnaghten LJ ruled that ‘‘the advancement of religion’’ was a charitable purpose. Subsequently, the judiciary added that for it to do so two conditions must be met: the gift must contribute to the advancement of ‘‘religion,’’ as interpreted by the courts and it must promote the religious instruction or education of the public. A body of case law precedents and related principles largely shared among the 60 or so nations that subscribe to the common-law tradition, now determines when religion, religious organizations and their activities meet the legal definition of ‘‘charity.’’ In some nations, such as
Ireland, they attract preferential treatment through statutory endorsement of the rule that gifts to and the activities of religious organizations are for the public benefit and are therefore de facto charitable. In others, such as Canada and the United States, this rule applies despite not being embodied in statutory form. Only in England & Wales has this rule been statutorily repealed, by Sect. 3 of the Charities Act 2006, to require religious organizations to be as subject to the public benefit test as any other organization. For the purposes of charity law in all the common-law nations, ‘‘religion’’ has for the most part been tied to a belief in god which, until relatively recently, was most usually interpreted to mean a Christian deity; although, in the United States, the IRS took an early and clear view that charitable trusts could not be restricted to those that declared their belief in one ‘‘Supreme Being.’’ Any suggestion that the legal definition of religion could be satisfied by a system of belief not involving faith in a god was explicitly rejected by Dillon J in Re South Place Ethical Society, Barralet v. Attorney General [1980] 1 WLR 1565 where it was stressed that the ‘‘two essential attributes of religion are faith and worship: faith in a god and worship of that god.’’ Further, the law holds that all religions are to be treated equally. As explained in Thornton v. Howe (1862) 31 Beav 14, the law will not inquire into the inherent validity of any particular religion nor will it examine the relative merits of different religions. Although judicial interpretation of ‘‘religion’’ has not differed greatly, there has been considerable jurisdictional variation in relation to the range of activities held to merit charitable status. For example, the lead taken in England & Wales with the decision in Gilmour v. Coats [1949] AC 426 which denied charitable status to closed contemplative religious orders, as opposed to those actively engaged in good works in the community, has been followed in Canada and Northern Ireland but not in Ireland where the opposite view of the Court of Appeal in O’Hanlon v. Logue [1906] IR 247 has since prevailed. It is now no longer followed in Australia, where section 5 of the Extension of Charitable Purposes Act 2004 declares such activities to be charitable. Another exception has been in regard to the charitable status of activities dedicated to the dead. In Ireland, gifts for the saying of masses for the dead and for the upkeep of graves have always been regarded as charitable but this is not necessarily the case elsewhere (masses for the dead being viewed for centuries as ‘‘superstitious uses’’ in England & Wales and are currently so regarded in Singapore). Controversy over what constitutes a religion is illustrated by the varying judicial approaches to the Church of Scientology, which was refused charitable
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status in England & Wales because its core practices of training and auditing (counseling) did not constitute worship of a ‘‘Supreme Being,’’ even though it had been deemed charitable in Australia and the United States. In the latter jurisdiction, where the principle of preventing opportunities for Church/State entanglement is well established, the IRS exercises extreme caution with regard to the definition of ‘‘church’’ as is evident in the 14-part test for determining whether or not an organization qualifies as such (‘‘Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations’’). This approach has been sharpened since the introduction of the USA Patriot Act 2001 (as reauthorized in 2005) with its focus on tracking funds including those of religious and other charitable entities.
Historical Background ‘‘Charity,’’ as a social construct, predates its legal definition and has its origins in the doctrine common to all religions that only by doing good works in this life can eternal salvation be assured in the next. Indeed, to subscribe to the Christian faith entails obeying the duty to love one’s neighbor, an inescapable requirement for salvation of the soul. Christianity is not, of course, unique in this respect: Buddhism teaches the love of mankind as the highest form of righteousness; Islam requires a tithe of one-tenth of income to be given to those in need; and the Jewish religion urges its followers to assist the poor and practice charity. In its initial religious context, charity was thus ‘‘more a means to the salvation of the soul of the benefactor than an endeavor to diagnose and alleviate the needs of the beneficiary’’ as succinctly explained in the Report of the Committee on the Law and Practice relating to Charitable Trusts (Charitable Trusts Committee, 1952, at para 36). Collective organizations, in the form of guilds or confraternities dedicated to such purposes, were in existence centuries before the 1601 statute. In The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval England (Westlake, 1919), for example, mention is made of ‘‘the gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the parish church of St. Botolph at Boston, founded in 1260, which gave a yearly distribution of bread and herrings to the poor in alms for the souls of its benefactors.’’ Confraternities, as Flack explains, ‘‘were established for a variety of purposes but fundamentally they were about laymen and women joining a voluntary association to receive mutual encouragement to live pious lives’’ (Flack, 2008). He adds that they may have existed in both the Eastern and Holy Roman Empires even before the sack of Rome in AD 410. Some had charitable purposes such as one with a special devotion to the sick and deceased, which flourished in Constantinople in 336 and others in the West which looked after abandoned children as early as AD 400. The
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earliest Catholic lay confraternities were probably formed in Italy as early as the third century, but were certainly well established by the mid-twentieth century. In medieval England, many schools and hospitals were founded by religious organizations and they in turn received powerful support from the State. King Edward’s code promulgated at Andover in 963, for example, proclaimed that ‘‘God’s churches are entitled to their rights,’’ required taxes to be paid to the Church and imposed severe penalties for nonpayment. The instilling of Christian beliefs, accompanied by charitable provision for the disadvantaged, was of common interest to Church and State and provided an early conceptual test bed for establishing civil society. Historically and currently, the contribution of religious organizations to total charitable activity, to the work of the wider voluntary sector and to statutory services provision in all common-law jurisdictions is inestimable. They have been most obviously prominent in activities which serve to advance religion, sometimes with contentious outcomes, but have also often been engaged in putting in place social infrastructure both in common-law countries and in developing nations. Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, are much indebted to the religious organizations which laid the foundations for their present health and education systems and often provided the staff and resources for their functioning and maintenance. Faith-based educational facilities and hospitals continue to play a role in these countries, though are now largely redirected towards developmental projects in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific region. However, the contribution of religious organizations has been at a price. In the developed nations at the dawn of the twenty-first century, resonances of social upheaval, generated by earlier failings of religion and charity, are now triggering an acute political awareness of their strategic role in civil society. The post-9/11 era and the ongoing turmoil in Iraq and the Middle East brings a salutary reminder, a lesson that stretches back to the Crusades, of the dangers of cultural polarization and of religion’s capacity for accentuating divisiveness. In societies characterized by religious division, as in India, Malaysia, and Singapore, the tendency for religious charities to be both very active and very partisan has served to emphasize differences, increase social polarization, and raise tensions. In such societies, it is seldom acceptable for a charity of one religious denomination to use its resources for the benefit of members of another, or to do so for the purpose of building conciliatory bridges of communication between rival religious groups. Throughout the centuries, religion has demonstrated its latent capacity to cause social divisions and provoke violent confrontations. Most recently, this
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occurred in Northern Ireland resulting in several thousand deaths from clashes between Protestant and Catholic communities and damage to civil society that may take generations to repair. Poverty, and the mass migration of economic refugees into the northern hemisphere, has awakened folk memories of the social dislocation that followed industrialization within the nations of that hemisphere. The impact of so many disparate ethnic groups on the social infrastructure and cultural cohesion of the receiving nations is considerable. The challenge of accommodating their needs and responding sensitively to their cultural affiliations is depleting resources and imposing real pressures on the multicultural policies of those nations. The root causes of poverty and disease, currently affecting countries in Africa and parts of Asia, are connected to the inequitable aid and trade policies pursued by the developed nations and are reminiscent of domestic exploitive practices during the industrialization era. In both eras, charity has proved equally ineffectual in addressing the causes of poverty. As the developed nations move closer to economic recession, the threat of a more general social destabilization, as a consequence of failure to adequately meet this particular challenge, is a pressing cause for concern. Again, in the recent spread of faith-based schools in the United States and the United Kingdom, there are uncomfortable echoes of an earlier role of Churchcontrolled residential educational facilities in Canada, Australia, and Ireland. Religious organizations were then guilty of colonizing the educational system for purposes of proselytism, being used as agents of the State to advance policies that separated out and accentuated the marginalization of minority groups and of setting standards of care that allowed the victimization of some children. Now, governments are again facilitating the rise of faith-based organizations as providers of publicly funded services. In the United States, for example, through the Charitable Choice clause in the Welfare Reform Act 1996 (known as the PWRORA), the federal government has reached out to such organizations so that they may assist in the welfare reform effort. If these bodies are to avoid similar charges in the future then an appropriate regulatory system will need to be put in place.
Key Issues The role of religion and charity in modern society has given rise to considerable controversy, usually centered on their capacity, separately and jointly, to promote pluralism rather than simply defend sectional interests.
Religious or faith-based organizations tend to be politically conservative. On the one hand, because of their institutional nature and longevity, such charitable entities can reinforce and sustain established social norms and may exercise a reactionary influence when faced with the prospect of political change, as occurred in some South American countries in the last half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, their pastoral concerns, established over generations of close engagement with vulnerable communities can, as in Poland, prompt them to be at the forefront of such change when religion itself is being politically suppressed. Religion, charity, and charitable religious organizations share an approach of acceptance toward the challenge of circumstances which can be problematic in some social contexts, such as the use of contraceptives to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa and to lift communities out of poverty by controlling population growth. The political value of religion and the charitable activities of religious organizations lie in their undoubted capacity to generate social capital (Putnam, 2000). However, there are those who take the view that this is essentially of a member-benefit nature which, while cementing relationships between those of the same religion, preferences and sharply differentiates that religion from all others: the ‘‘bonding’’ form of social capital provided by religion is at the price of the ‘‘bridging’’ form; as illustrated by the experience of jurisdictions such as Northern Ireland. The latter, with its population divided on religious grounds, is a society where most charitable activity has always been associated with religious bodies but where the net charitable impact has arguably been divisive: polarizing communities and hindering the consolidation of a pluralist civil society. The ‘‘gift relationship’’ (Titmus, R., 1970) held to underpin charity, is for some a questionable means of addressing social need. It is suggested that charity’s contribution to the alleviation of the effects of poverty is achieved at the cost of ignoring its causes, conceding compliant deference to the benefactor and instilling in individuals, institutions, and society, an acceptance of things as they are. Instead, it is argued, a more effective strategy would be to equip the individual, community, or nation with the means to achieve self-sufficiency by investing in the aid/trade/skill development programs necessary to ensure their independence and ability to compete in the ‘‘open market.’’ There is also the fact that increased secularization of the social infrastructure in contemporary developed nations has allowed, if not stimulated, mounting skepticism as to the benefits inherent in the role of religion,
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while an ever-expanding raft of national and international legislation underpinning entitlements to human rights, equity, equality, and nondiscrimination has cast doubt on the relative usefulness of charity. The belief or acceptance that religion and charity were destined to complement each other in perpetuity, saving lives in this world in order to save souls in the next, is for most, in the more developed nations, succumbing to a contemporary attitude of quiet disinterest in both.
International Perspectives The common-law jurisdictions largely share the same pool of judicial precedents, adhere to much the same body of domestic legislation dealing with equity, equality, and nondiscriminatory practice and subscribe to the same international Conventions, treaties, and instruments (or their domestic equivalents) governing matters such as human rights. Some have also recently completed, or are in the process of completing, charity law reform processes. While this facilitates a congruity of approach toward charity and religion, it also permits identification of some areas of jurisdictional difference. The right of an individual to choose and practice a religion is firmly established by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950 and has been endorsed in the domestic legislation of common-law countries. The Convention requires that any interpretation of ‘‘religion’’ be applied objectively, have reasonable justification and be nondiscriminatory; any differential treatment must comply with strict standards. This legal benchmark for nondiscrimination in matters of religion is underpinned by Article 14 and supported by Article 9 (the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion). It has the effect of requiring governments and other public bodies to give parity of recognition to Christian and non-Christian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Two important decisions of the European Court of Human Rights have recently raised the profile of Article 9: Kokkinakis v. Greece (A/260-A) (1994) 17 EHRR 397 and Manoussakis v. Greece (18748/91) (1996) 21 EHRR CD3. In the Kokkinakis case, the court recognized the right to proselytize when it is exercised with respect for freedom of the religion of others, and held the right to be protected by Article 9. Moreover, as Justice Pettiti then stated: ‘‘[R]eligion is one of the foundations of a democratic society within the meaning of the Convention and the pluralism that cannot be disassociated from a democratic society depends on religious freedom.’’ In the Manoussakis case, the court found that ‘‘the right to freedom of religion . . . excludes any discretion on the part of the State to
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determine whether religious beliefs or the means used to express such beliefs are legitimate.’’ These cases affirm the significance of freedom of religion for modern democratic states. In the United States, the Constitution, its Bill of Rights, together with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, may be considered to provide a body of provisions equivalent to the European Convention on Human Rights with nationwide application. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause draws a line between Church and State by prohibiting undue government involvement with religion; reflecting, perhaps, the deep distrust of the ‘‘founding fathers’’ with the collusive nature of that relationship and its propensity in ‘‘old’’ Europe to trigger social disruption. Case law in that jurisdiction (e.g., Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York, 397 US 664 [1970]) illustrates the vigilance with which the IRS and the courts carefully police any possible entanglement of Church and State interests. In Australia, the recent decision in Commissioner of Taxation v. Word Investments Limited [2007] FCAFC 171 is likely to have implications for religious organizations elsewhere in the common-law world. The charitable status of Word Investments Ltd. was challenged because it raised its funds through various activities such as investing money borrowed at noncommercial rates from supporters, offering financial planning for a fee, and a funeral business. The court noted that with the decline of the welfare state, charitable organizations are expected to do more with the same resources and reliance on donations in many cases will be insufficient. They further noted that many charitable organizations have established business ventures to generate the income necessary to support their activities. The purpose of the organization was deemed to be charitable. The charity law reviews in England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland have concluded (or are concluding) with – and in New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore have concluded without – a change to the legal definition of ‘‘charity.’’ Other nations, including the United States and Canada, are still engaged in that process. The definitional changes expand the meaning of ‘‘charity’’ into the areas of health and social care service provision, civil society consolidation, and the promotion of human rights, which will undoubtedly generate case law with international implications.
Future Directions For the common-law nations, the future role of charitable religious organizations is likely to be shaped by domestic opportunities resulting from the contraction of
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government services and, on an international basis, by the growth in entrepreneurial philanthropy and the constraints imposed by the war against terrorism. In both domestic and international contexts, the essentially Christian ethos of religion and charity in those nations will have to adjust to meet the challenges presented by a sustained influx of migrants, the necessity to engage with and accommodate the needs of those from other cultures, and the mounting pressure to address the grievances of a resurgent Islam. The contraction of government service provision, resulting from inexorable demographic trends that include falling fertility rates and an age imbalance, is now well advanced in all modern, developed nations and is likely to gather momentum in future decades. As government retreats, it is negotiating the terms on which charities will assume increased responsibility for service provision. In England & Wales, the Charity Commission decision in Applications for registration of (i) Trafford Community Leisure Trust and (ii) Wigan Leisure and Culture Trust [2004] granted charitable status to entities established by government to provide what until then had been local authority public services, with almost total government funding. This was a significant indicator of government intent to increase the transfer of responsibility to its partner. In Australia, the same was true of the decision in Central Bayside Division of General Practice Ltd v. Commissioner of State Revenue [2005] VSCA 168/. Then, an independent association of general medical practitioners, almost wholly funded by a federal government department, established to deliver a government health care scheme within a small geographic area in accordance with the government’s national plan, was found to be charitable. The Charities Act 2006, and similar legislation in other UK jurisdictions and in Ireland, has laid the foundations for further charity encroachment into the heartland of government public service provision. By identifying as charitable purposes a range of what would otherwise be assumed to be government responsibilities, the new legislation, emerging from a range of national charity law review processes, has opened wide the doors for future and more extensive government/ charity partnership arrangements. The growth prospects for charity have to be set against the constraints emanating from the new international security imperative. The current ‘‘global war against terrorism’’ and the accompanying raft of antiterrorism laws, in conjunction with the minefield of international trade, will undoubtedly combine to restrict the overseas activity of many charities. Government pursuit of terrorists, and maintenance of subsidies for domestic produce, can result
in charities being regarded with some suspicion. This is particularly the case in relation to those charities associated with countries and religions that fall within the scrutiny of government foreign policy. As governments increase their regulatory powers of surveillance, and improve the capacity to track international flows of finance, charities now run the risk of being viewed as the weak link in the war against terrorism. Philanthropy, anchored to a new and decidedly more secular entrepreneurial spirit – dedicated to vanquishing AIDS, malaria, and to ‘‘making poverty history’’ – is, arguably, gradually moving into the space traditionally occupied by religion and charity to address issues of poverty, disease, and social inclusion. New and independent hybrid legal structures, combined with the financial resources and business expertise of entities such as the Bill Gates Foundation, are positioning themselves to make a greater impact upon these perennial problems than ever before achieved by government, charity, or religion.
Cross-References
▶ Charity, Defined ▶ Charity Law ▶ Charity, History of ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Common Law and Civil Society ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Gift Relationship ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Christianity ▶ Religious Organization ▶ Social Capital, definition of ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Bothwell, J. (1997). Indicators of a healthy civil society. In Burbridge (Ed.), Beyond prince and merchant: Citizen participation and the rise of civil society. Brussels: Institute of Cultural Affairs International. Brady, J. (1975). Religion and the law of charities in Ireland. Belfast: Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly. Bromley, K. (2001). The definition of religion in charity law in the age of fundamental human rights. London: Charity Law & Practice Review, 7(1), 39–91. Charitable Trusts Committee, ‘Report of the Committee on the Law and Practice relating to Charitable Trusts’ (the ‘‘Nathan Report’’), Cmd 8710 (1952-53), HMSO, London. Flack, T. (2008). Insights into the origins of organised charity from the Catholic tradition of confraternities. Brisbane: Occasional paper for Australian Centre of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, Queensland University of Technology. Luxton, P. (2001). The law of charities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Charity Bank Mitchell, C., & Moody, S. (2000). Foundations of charity. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Picarda, H. (1999). The law and practice relating to charities (3rd ed.). London: Butterworths. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone. New York: Simon & Schuster. Titmus, R. (1970). The gift relationship: From human blood to social policy. London: Allen & Unwin. Westlake, H. F. (1919). The parish gilds of mediaeval England. London: Macmillan.
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ever Charity ISA, the only tax free savings account where 100% of the proceeds go for charitable purposes.
Mission Charity Bank’s mission is ‘‘to tackle marginalisation, social injustice and exclusion, and facilitate social change through investment.’’ Charity Bank seeks to change the perceptions of how personal and corporate wealth can provide finance for the benefit of society.’’
Activities
Charity Bank PATSY KRAEGER
Address of Organization 194 High Street Tonbridge Kent TN9 1BE UK www.charitybank.org
Introduction Charity Bank describes itself as similar to a development bank financing projects and organizations that the bank believes are viable even when the project may not be typically commercial bankable. Charity Bank suggests that at least 3 million people in the United Kingdom have been affected by the organizations that they support. Charity Bank, based outside of London has opened a second regional office in North England to foster its programs in sustaining the charitable sector.
Brief History In 1992, Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), a registered British charity, commissioned research into a bank for charity and in 1993 a loans services unit was established. In 1995, Investors in Society set up a pilot loan with in CAF and a guaranteed fund of £500,000. In 1996, the first loan was made and in 1997 regulatory discussions developed to lead toward the establishment of a charity bank. In 2002, Charity Bank registered as charity became authorized as a bank from the Financial Services Authority and received approval from Inland Revenue with an opening balance of £6.4 million. In 2003, the bank became a member of the Community Development Finance Association and was the fist bank to deliver the community investment tax credit. In 2006, loan inquiries exceeded £100 million. In 2008, the bank issued the first
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Charity Bank is the only regulated bank in the United Kingdom that is also a charity. The bank uses depositor’s savings to support charities and social profit organizations that address societal needs. Depositors who bank with Charity Bank receive a modest interest to protect their capitol. Significantly, depositors earn a social return by depositing in the bank by allowing their savings to be used as a pool of funds which are in turn lent to organizations serving social needs. Charity Bank provided financial guidance as well as loan assistance and each organization are assessed to see if they are a match for Charity Bank’s loans. Funds are solely dispersed within the United Kingdom. Charity Bank has supported many organizations and the following are reflective of the types of organizations that this social venture bank supports. In social care, Charity Bank supported Salterhill, a nonprofit who provided homes to adults with learning disabilities. The City of Oxford charities, support for almshouses in Oxford to help with immediate needs. In their faith based initiatives, Charity Bank loaned money to the Tom Roberts Adventure Center to provide a faith based program activity center initially for youth from Christian churches. The Kadampa Buddhist Meditation Center which provides mediation sessions, retreats, study, and classes also was funded. In community services, Charity Bank supported the Colchester and Tendering Women’s refuge to provide services to women who are victims of domestic violence. Internationally, Charity Bank loaned money to Valid Nutrition in Malawi who makes and markets highly-fortified nutritional pastes, called ‘‘ready-to-use foods’’ or RUF, to treat and prevent malnutrition.
Structure and Governance Charity Bank is unique in that it is registered as a charitable organization and subject to banking regulations. ‘‘As a bank, we are regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and are, like other financial service providers, required to undertake regular training, reporting, and selfor external assessment processes. We are also a registered
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charity, which means that we are required to comply with the Charity Commission’s guidance.’’ Daily bank management is invested in an executive management team led by a chair, who was previously the Director of Community Finance at Charities Aid Foundation. The bank also has a Board of Trustees.
Funding Charity Bank is able to issue share capitol and the shares are held by Charities Aid Foundation, the National Council for Voluntary Organizations, 15 charitable trusts and foundations, and Barclays Bank, but in trust for charity. There are three classes of shareholders, ordinary, and two preferred shareholder categories. Charity bank as a registered charity also accepts donations from government, foundations, and individuals.
Major Accomplishments Charity Bank has committed £72,748,831 to charities and other socially driven organizations since its launch in 2002.
Cross-References
▶ Charities Aid Foundation ▶ National Council of Voluntary Organisations ▶ Social Investment
References/Further Readings Kingston, J., & Bolton, M. (2004). Opinion piece: New approaches to funding not-for-profit organizations. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 9(2), 112–121. Mulgan, G., & Landry, C. (1995). The other invisible hand: Remaking charity for the 21st century. London: Demos.
Charity, History of GABRIELE LINGELBACH Albert-Ludwigs Universita¨t Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Introduction Today’s research on charity is heavily focused on the present: sociologists, political scientists, economists, and researchers representing other disciplines are occupied with the causes, forms, and consequences of charitable giving in the present. In contrast, the history of charity is less discussed in research and is mostly rather concerned with selected individual aspects. The history of charity or philanthropy does not yet constitute its own research area
with its own networks, historical peer-reviewed journal, academic society with its own conferences, or established reference works. Though there are some monographs presenting surveys (Bremner, 1994), of which the majority remain within national frameworks (Friedman, 2003; Marais, 1999; Owen, 1964), historical analysis is still in its beginning stages for many areas. Furthermore, the concepts with which historians of charity analyze their object are still in flux, and, in international comparison, the problem exists that many of the key categories of analysis are difficult to translate: The terms philanthropy, foundation, donation, alms, gift, third sector, etc. have very different meanings in the various languages. In addition, the very different developments of philanthropic traditions and landscapes in cross-national comparison hinders historians specializing in charity from coming to an international agreement since historical research too often takes as its point of departure the researcher’s own contemporary, national experience.
Definition In the following, charity should be understood as an act on the part of a giver, a ‘‘benefactor’’: It is not the recipient of charitable gifts, but the one who gives the gift that is the focus of analysis. A rather broadly applied definition of charity encompasses thus a broad spectrum of activity, which can be differentiated at various levels. For one, such activities can be differentiated according to the purpose of the gift: Benefactors can be active in religious matters through the financing of church building or of Masses, an area that has had a fundamental significance for centuries. Other purposes include support for the arts, culture, education, or research, for example, the establishment of a chair at a university, the donation of a work of art from one’s private collection to a museum, or membership in a supporting organization for an orchestra. This form of private, civic engagement for public purposes has grown in importance primarily since the nineteenth century. A third area is the support of social purposes, that is, support for socially disadvantaged individuals or groups of people – be they the poor, the sick, the invalid, the disabled, widows, or orphans – with which the donor has no personal relationship. This type of purpose was also of great importance inasmuch as donations ‘‘for the poor’’ in Europe played a significant role already in the Middle Ages, later then in the private financing of urban poor relief in early modern history, or in civic foundations in support of hospitals or orphanages during the ‘‘long’’ nineteenth century. More recently, by contrast, the protection of nature, animals, and the environment has become a major target. A narrower
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concept of charity, like that used in this article, refers primarily to the third type, the social purpose, whereas the term philanthropy is also often applied to a broader definition of charity that includes the other targets mentioned. Regarding the purpose of gifts, a distinction must also be made between those that were given directly to the needy, e.g., alms to beggars in the European Middle Age cities, and those given to some type of intermediary institution, which then allocated the resources. Notably, since the early modern age, donations to intermediaries have increasingly displaced direct donations in the form of alms. These intermediaries have evolved and diversified over time: In ancient Egypt, for example, temples were the primary intermediaries, whereas in the Middle Ages religious institutions, such as cloisters and church parishes as well as religious orders such as the mendicant, hospital, and knightly orders dominated. Later, the distribution of charitable donations became increasingly secular: Since the ‘‘high’’ Middle Ages, charitable gifts were also given to city poor funds; in the late eighteenth civic associations emerged to take on this task; in the twentieth century welfare federations were established; and over the last few decades internationally active organizations such as UNICEF or Oxfam have arisen to distribute charitable donations to groups in need of assistance. A second level at which one can differentiate types of charity is the nature of the gift given: A particularly frequent form was the giving of money, but goods such as food or clothing also were made available for charitable purposes. Furthermore, and third, people also gave of their time, often providing their expertise, i.e., volunteering. Historical research has primarily focused on monetary charity and has distinguished four forms: endowments or trusts, donations, membership fees paid to a philanthropic association, and, more seldom, purchases of stocks of charitable enterprises. Endowments generally were composed of large sums of money or real estate, which income (interest or earned income) would finance the charitable purpose. For example, if a patron in the nineteenth century created a scholarship fund to benefit a university, it meant that the money would be invested, and the scholarships would be financed out of the interest income. Since in many cases large sums were made available in the creation of an endowment, the gift was usually well thought through and legally safeguarded. Donors generally came from the wealthier classes of the population. In contrast to endowment gifts, donations were not invested, but rather were applied directly to the donation’s purpose, for example, when one gave money as part of a collection for the victims of an earthquake
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catastrophe. For the most part, such donations were rather modest sums; often they ranged below a certain threshold such that a donation could also be part of the everyday activities of the less wealthy social strata and frequently occurred without a long period of consideration. An example would be collections during religious services that had taken place since the second and third centuries AD. A third form of giving was the payment of membership fees to a charitable association: In this case, regular contributions would be made available so that the association could finance charitable purposes as set out in its bylaws. This involved a collective act, in contrast to the creation of an endowment, which was carried out mostly on an individual basis. Finally, one can distinguish between those forms of charity for which one receives no explicit material or immaterial service in return and a gift that implies some sort of quid pro quo or service in return. Thus, for example, already in the fifteenth century there existed charitable lotteries, through which one received a chance of winning in exchange for a donation, or later also charity galas, during which one expected to be entertained in return for the money given. However, with such types of activity, the money donated had to be of significantly higher value than that of the service received in return so that the gift could still be considered charitable. In light of this definition, it also becomes clear which topics are not dealt with in the history of charity: For example, it does not involve help in the context of friendship networks, nor the lending of an interest-free loan to a business colleague, nor the giving of a sum of money to a family member in case of an emergency. Furthermore, this concept of charity excludes sponsoring, since there exists the hope that the donation will ‘‘pay off ’’ through the accompanying advertising effect. In consequence, the investigation of the history of charity covers all those activities in the past, which from the benefactor’s perspective should serve to help those individuals or social groups who find themselves in a significantly worse situation and to remedy or alleviate this distress – be it physical, spiritual, psychological, or economic.
Key Issues A key question for historical research is certainly how the motivations for social engagement have changed over time (Cavallo, 1991). Somewhat oversimplified, two traditions regarding the motivations for charitable activities can be differentiated, presented here as ideal types: euergetism and alms giving. They differ in the aims pursued and the motives behind the giving. The
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phenomenon of euergetism is connected to the GrecoRoman cultural sphere and was intensively studied by the French historian Paul Veyne (Veyne, 1976), who analyzed how wealthy citizens of the Greek and Roman cities donated large sums of money for a variety of public purposes, for example, alleviation of a famine or improvement of the city infrastructure in the form of roads and public baths, as well as for the amusement of the citizens by financing circuses or theaters or to nurture patriotic sentiment by creating monuments, and so forth. The motives that drove euergetists to contribute intensively to the public good did not include help for others per se; the aim was rather to promote the donor’s political career, to build his reputation, public esteem, and admiration, to build up social capital and networks in form of clientele, or, in the case of a donation in the form of a bequest, a legacy the donor hoped would be remembered by the citizens. The second tradition of giving money or goods for the public good goes back to the Oriental and Jewish traditions and was adopted in the Christian cultural sphere (Bolkestein, 1939). In this connection, alms played a crucial role. The motives for alms giving differed very much from those for euergetism: since they were rooted in religious beliefs, it was a much more internalized, value-driven behavioral pattern. Giving alms to the poor and starving was thought to be pleasing in the eyes of God. The donor hoped to be rewarded by God with a happy life before death, and that her or his soul would be saved in the afterlife (Geremek, 1994; Schubert, 1992). This was assured by the fact that the receiver had to pray for the soul of the donor. Through secularization, the spectrum of previously internalized motives for charitable activities expanded to the humanitarian and ideological (e.g., in the form of international socialist assistance or in the form of ‘‘patriotic’’ donations for the families of soldiers killed in action, etc.). For most charitable activities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both types of motivation can be detected, but generally in varying proportions. The charitable activities of those of higher class status tended most often to take on euergetic characteristics: frequently the creation of an endowment for hospitals or orphanages had as much to do with seeking recognition within one’s own class, social advancement, or social boundary setting (inclusion within or exclusion from the local elite) as with helping the needy and serving society (Schulz, 1998). Charitable acts could serve the purpose of accumulating social and symbolic capital, which in turn would be converted also into economic capital or could legitimate demands for political participation or dominance. For
example, Thomas Adam examined selected American, Canadian, and European cities to determine to what extent newer groups within the bourgeoisie (i.e., families that became wealthy through industrialization) sought – with the help of social and cultural foundations – to build social capital and enter the circles of the already established elite during the second half of the nineteenth century (Adam, 2009). At the same time, social networks could also be sealed off against newcomers through philanthropic organizations such as charitable associations, in order to protect the social exclusivity of the elite. Philanthropy could also be used to underpin a political claim to leadership alongside a social or cultural claim (Adam & Retallack, 2001). Here the question also arises whether social discipline objectives were also being pursued through charitable engagement, for example, to bring middle and upper-class models of behavior closer to the lower classes during times of rising social conflicts accompanying the industrial age (Schulz, 1998). Charitable engagement can be interpreted as an attempt to accommodate relatively deprived social groups in order to relieve social tensions and stave off threatening social-revolutionary developments. Thus the in early modern times frequently made distinction between the worthy poor (which should be supported) and the unworthy poor can be interpreted as a call to control the behavior of the deprived popular classes. At the same time, the social agency of the poor can also be pointed to: The recipients of help often used the gifts received in thoroughly stubborn ways and not always according to the directives of the givers. When one examines charity via the categories of social and political power, the question generally arises to what extent it also implies a hierarchical relationship between giver and recipient and thereby leads to the confirmation and perpetuation of social structures and/or political inequality. In other acts of charitable activities, euergetic motivations and those related to social relationships either within one’s own social class or toward those of other classes were not as important; instead, convictions – religious or secular – came to the fore. Unfortunately the analysis of these motives for charitable activities in earlier times will often have its limits: While founders and large donors have in many cases left documents behind in which they discuss the reasons they made money available for social purposes, the everyday giving of smaller sums on the part of the average person produced fewer written sources. Historians exploring the motivations for charitable activities are regularly confronted with the generally lacking empirical basis. Another question pursued by historians is the influence of state activities on the charitable engagement of
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citizens. Two opposing hypotheses exist: Some historians assume that the expansion of the state’s sphere of activity has led to a retreat of private engagement (crowding out), while others argue to the contrary that crowding out has not occurred at all (McCarthy, 2003: 3). For example, the development of university financing in the United States, in comparison with France or Germany, speaks for the thesis of crowding out. In the United States during the nineteenth century, public agencies contributed to the financing of higher education only to a limited extent and left room for private support in the areas of, for example, scholarships, professorial chairs, buildings, and even athletics. In Europe, by contrast, the state took on the financing of higher education to a much greater extent; private grants or endowments for universities were much less frequent. This difference gives evidence for a crowding out effect. Against the assumption that state activities always crowd out private engagement another example can be put forward: citizen engagement for social concerns in Germany reached its first peak at the same time as the Bismarckian social welfare state was introduced and then extended (Sachße & Tennstedt, 1980; Hein, 1997). Furthermore, it must be considered that many projects and institutions in the social assistance area were established in the form of a public/private partnership in which private and public funds flowed together. From the perspective of historians, some doubts can be raised against the general assumption that the expansion of the social welfare state always and everywhere led to a crowding out of private engagement for social purposes. State intervention also plays a role for historians of charity in another sense, for example, whether tax policy favored charitable giving to a greater or lesser extent. Public entities also affect the field of private charity through lawmaking as well, insofar as, especially in the twentieth century, they enacted the legal framework for social engagement, for example, laws related to foundations, associations, and fundraising, which had clear impact on charitable activities (Liermann, 1963). This is clearly seen in the example of West Germany after World War II: In the FRG a ban on public fundraising by private individuals and most organizations stemming from a 1934 law was in effect until the early 1960s. With only few exceptions, charitable initiatives did not receive governmental approval to approach citizens to seek donations. Since only a handful of organizations received this permission, public agencies regulated charitable contributions according to their own agenda. As soon as that law was replaced in the early 1960s with a broadly liberal one, the donations ‘‘market’’ in Germany ‘‘exploded’’, and
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a multitude of organizations were established that competed for citizens’ donations and offered a significantly broader spectrum of purposes to be supported than previously. The change took place once the state reduced its regulatory measures (Lingelbach, 2007). The role of the state regarding charitable activities leads to the question of how the framework for charity took shape under dictatorships. Historians have analyzed how the National Socialist regime exploited the charitable activities of the population for its own purposes and introduced collection activities for propaganda purposes (Vorla¨nder, 1986). For East Germany (the former GDR), a case study on donation collections for third world countries determined that the population continued to make significant donations, but at the same time, the government intensively monitored and influenced the campaigns. The regime also exploited the fundraising campaigns, on the one hand, domestically insofar as it sought to strengthen the population’s identification with the socialist system, and, on the other hand, for its foreign policy goals since the fundraising campaigns were used to achieve diplomatic recognition of the second German state on the part of newly established states in the process of decolonization (Witkowski, 2009). Another substantial research area for the history of charity relates to the development of intermediaries. As already mentioned, donations in particular were most often not given directly to the needy in the form of alms, but rather to institutions that redistributed these gifts. So, for example, the donations of the American population for the suffering people in Europe after World War II were given to intermediaries such as the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE), which then handed out food packages to the beneficiaries. The growing significance and differentiation of the intermediary institutions over time resulted in a clear influence of their interests and motivations over the charitable process. This can be retraced using the example of the medieval church-related institutions as well as by way of the communal poor funds in early modernity or the big welfare federations of the twentieth century. The intermediaries followed their own ideals (one thinks of the missionary institutions that were financed through donations) or also tangible (social-) political goals at the same time as they had an interest in their own institutional survival. They were in the position to direct the currents of giving in specific directions, to allow the money to flow to the purposes or target groups of their choosing, thereby taking on a society-shaping function. Historians of charity also investigate which social groups were most intensively engaged. As an example,
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the charitable activities of women are more closely examined. In the age of foundations and charitable associations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it can be asked, to what extent women became involved in charitable activities to achieve social influence and to play a more decisive role in public life, or to build ‘‘parallel power structures’’ (McCarthy, 1990; Quataert, 2001). Since charitable engagement remained within the framework of gender-defined stereotypes of women as caring and sacrificing, middle- and upper-class women were able to seize and define a sphere of influence outside of the home long before the introduction of female suffrage, without in the process endangering the gender roles assigned to them. Since women as a marginalized group sought to achieve social impact through charity, the engagement of ethnic minorities can also be considered from this vantage point. The above average engagement of Jewish citizens in the German Empire can be interpreted in this direction; charity offered the possibility to free oneself from one’s marginal status at least partially; at the same time, Jewish philanthropic activity could also serve to create Jewish identity or to prevent and defend against anti-Semitic prejudices or treatment (Liedtke, 1999; Penslar, 1993). Similarly, African-Americans became involved in charitable organizations in order to improve the social situation of blacks in the United States, for example, during the civil rights era (Clegg III, 2003).
Future Directions From this brief presentation of research conducted to date, it becomes clear which topics and questions could be of interest for future research. Included here surely is international comparison: with few exceptions, most studies on the history of charity are of local, regional, or national nature, whereas a comparative approach could help to draw out the specifics of the developments and the causes for the differences between the paths charitable giving took. Various traditions of charitable activities have developed in a path-dependent way so that, in the different regions of the world, charity is practiced differently even today and has taken on a variety of meanings. Differing practices of social distinction have similarly led to diverse forms of philanthropic expression; different religious orientations and different legal frameworks have led up to now to variations in the ways people become engaged with the help of foundations or donations for others, etc. In this case, comparative analyses offer an as yet unexploited potential for enhanced knowledge. Historical research related to charity can also achieve greater significance in the framework of transnational
history. In the age of globalization, assistance provided to people in need beyond one’s own local, regional, or national frame of reference gains ever more importance. In a media-dominated world in which pictures of starving people or victims of natural catastrophes reach every affluent household, giving on behalf of distant ‘‘others’’ gains more weight. Even if well into the twentieth century charity focused on the local needy (Hein, 1997), and later also one the needy of one’s own nation, still there were also earlier signs of an international solidarity that are worth examining. In doing so, the development of media must be incorporated into the discussion and, in particular, one must consider that charity often conformed to the functional logic of the media: International aid organizations increasingly needed the attention of the media in order to bring their concerns to the potential donors, which also meant that they had to adapt their range of actions and their approaches to the interests of newspapers, magazines, and television in order to be heard (Benthall, 1993). Furthermore, charity research offers a prominent field for interdisciplinary research, for example, in the area of motivation research. Anthropologists, psychologists, social scientists, and specialists in religious studies could work together with historians to examine the changing motivations for charitable activities over time. However, the closing of these and other research gaps calls for an historically based determination of the key analytical categories and concepts to lead international and interdisciplinary research activities to fruitful results.
Cross-References
▶ CARE ▶ Charity and religion ▶ Charity Law ▶ Donor/Donor Intent ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Gift/Giving ▶ Gift Relationship ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Definition and History of ▶ Philanthropy, Definitions ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Christianity ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Judaism
References/Further Readings Adam, T. (2009, forthcoming). Buying respectability: Philanthropy and urban society in transnational perspective, 1840s to 1930s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Adam, T., & Retallack. J. (2001). Philanthropy und politische Macht in deutschen Kommunen. In T. Adam & J. Retallack (Eds.), Zwischen Markt und Staat: Stifter und Stiftungen im internationalen Vergleich (pp. 106–138). Leipzig: Leipziger Universita¨ts-Verlag. Benthall, J. (1993). Disasters, relief and the media. London: Tauris.
Charity Law Bolkestein, H. (1939). Wohlta¨tigkeit und Armenpflege im vorchristlichen Altertum. Ein Beitrag zum Problem, Moral und Gesellschaft. Utrecht: Oosthoek. Bremner, R. H. (1996). Giving: Charity and philanthropy in history. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Cavallo, S. (1991). The motivation of benefactors. An overview of approaches to the study of charity. In J. Barry (Ed.), Medicine and charity before the welfare state (pp. 46–62). London: Routledge. Clegg, C. A. (2003). Philanthropy, the civil rights movement, and the politics of racial reform. In L. J. Friedman & M. D. McGarvie (Eds.), Charity, philanthropy, and civility in American history (pp. 341–361). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, S. (1996). Philanthropy as a virtue in late antiquity and the middle ages. In J. B. Schneewind (Ed.), Giving: Western ideas of philanthropy (pp. 1–23). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Friedman, L. J., & McGarvie, M. D. (Eds.) (2003). Charity, philanthropy, and civility in American history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geremek, B. (1994). Poverty: A history. Oxford: Blackwell. Hands, A. R. (1968). Charities and social aid in Greece and Rome. London: Thames & Hudson. Hein, D. (1997). Das Stiftungswesen als Instrument bu¨rgerlichen Handelns im 19. Jahrhundert. In B. Kirchga¨ssner & H.-P. Becht (Eds.), Stadt und Ma¨zenatentum (pp. 75–92). Sigmaringen: Thorbecke. Liedtke, R. (1999). Integration and separation: Jewish welfare in Hamburg and Manchester in the nineteenth century. In M. Brenner, R. Liedtke, & D. Rechter (Eds.), Two nations. British and German Jews in comparative perspective (pp. 247–271). Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck. Liermann, H. (1963). Handbuch des Stiftungsrechts, Band 1: Geschichte des Stiftungsrechts. Tu¨bingen: Mohr. Lingelbach, G. (2007). Die Entwicklung des Spendenmarktes in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von der staatlichen Regulierung zur medialen Lenkung. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 33, 127–157. Marais, J. -L. (1999). Histoire du don en France de 1800 a` 1939. Dons et legs charitables, pieux et philanthropiques. Rennes: Presse Universitaire de Rennes. McCarthy, K. (2003). American creed. Philanthropy and the rise of civil society 1700–1865. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McCarthy, K. D. (1990). Parallel power structures: Women and the voluntary sphere. In K. D. McCarthy (Ed.), Lady bountiful revisited: Women, philanthropy, and power (pp. 1–31). New York: Rutgers University Press. Owen, D. (1964). English philanthropy, 1660–1960. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Penslar, D. J. (1993). Philanthropy, the ‘‘Social Question’’ and Jewish identity in imperial Germany. Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 38, 51–73. Quataert, J. H. (2001). Staging philanthropy: Patriotic women and the national imagination in dynastic Germany 1813–1916. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Roberts, S. (1996). Contexts of charity in the middle ages. In J. B. Schneewind (Ed.), Giving: Western ideas of philanthropy (pp. 24–53). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sachße, C., & Tennstedt, F. (1980). Geschichte der Armenfu¨rsorge in Deutschland. Bd.1: Vom Spa¨tmittelalter bis zum 1. Weltkrieg. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schubert, E. (1992). Gestalt und Gestaltwandel des Almosens im Mittelalter. Jahrbuch fu¨r fra¨nkische Landesforschung, 52, 241–262. Schulz, A. (1998). Ma¨zenatentum und Wohlta¨tigkeit – Ausdrucksformen bu¨rgerlichen Gemeinsinns in der Neuzeit. In J. Kocka & M. Frey
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(Eds.), Bu¨rgerkultur und Ma¨zenatentum im 19. Jahrhundert (pp. 240–262). Berlin: Bostelmann & Siebenhaar Edition Fannei & Walz. Veyne, P. (1976). Le pain et le cirque. Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Vorla¨nder, H. (1986). NS-Volkswohlfahrt und Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes. Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, 34, 341–380. Witkowski, G. R. (2009, forthcoming). ‘‘Unser Tisch ist besser gedeckt’’: Ostdeutsche Philanthropie und Wohlta¨tigkeit von 1959 bis 1989. In T. Adam, S. La¨ssig, & G. Lingelbach (Eds.), Stifter, Spender und Ma¨zene: USA und Deutschland im historischen Vergleich. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Charity Law MYLES MCGREGOR-LOWNDES, KERRY O’HALLORAN Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Introduction Charity law is traditionally regarded as having emerged from the English law of equity. Equitable principles permitted a charitable trust to be established which departed from the usual trust principles of requiring identifiable beneficiaries and having a duration falling within a set period of time. Charitable trusts are able to exist in perpetuity and be for purposes, rather than for specific persons. However, the legal definition of charity restricts such trusts to certain purposes and requires them to be for the public benefit. Charity law’s modern roots lie in seventeenth century England. Thereafter it was imposed by default in most of the British colonies including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Hong Kong. The law has developed through judicial precedent with most of the 60 or so common law jurisdictions having varying degrees of reference back to developing English precedents. Only since the turn of this century has there been significant proposed and actual statutory intervention in the United Kingdom and some former colonies apart from the United States (USA). On independence the United States quickly broke from traditional ties to English charity law developing a preference for corporations rather than trusts and a statutory definition of charity for taxation purposes. Since the quincentennial in 2001 of the modern English origins of the definition of charitable purposes there have been significant legal reform proposals to largely transfer the determination of core common law concepts from a judicial
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to a statutory basis by legislating for a new definition of what constitutes charitable purposes and public benefit in the United Kingdom and some of its former colonies. This has been accompanied by reforms to the regulatory framework governing those organizations (now wider than the equitable trust form) which have adopted charitable purposes (refer charitable organizations).
Definition The word charity in a legal context differs from popular usage in its widest sense which can range from ‘‘the good affections between persons’’ to its restricted sense of ‘‘relief of the poor’’ – often the deserving poor. It is also distinguished legally from ‘‘benevolent’’ and ‘‘philanthropic’’ purposes which are regarded as having meanings which are narrower or broader than that permitted in law by charitable purposes. At the root of the legal definition of charity is the Preamble to the English Charitable Uses Act 1601 (also referred to as the Statute of Elizabeth I) which listed activities which permitted charitable activities and judicial interpretations of such items as classified in Pemsel’s case (Income Tax Special Purposes Commrs. v Pemsel [1981] AC 531). The Pemsel classification includes trusts for the relief of poverty; the advancement of religion; the advancement of education; and for any other purposes beneficial to the community falling under any of the preceding heads. Any purpose must also be for the ‘‘public benefit’’ and be available to sufficient members of the public. Subsequent judicial decisions, administrative rulings, and statutory instruments have modified the Pemsel classification across jurisdictions with an English legal heritage. Such modifications have included requirements that for an organization to be charitable its purposes must be confined exclusively to charitable purposes, without profit or gain accruing to its members, and such purposes must not be primarily devoted to advocating or opposing changes in law or public policy. For the United States, the tax code definition of ‘‘charitable organization’’ is found in Section 501(c)(3) of The Internal Revenue Code of 1968, being organizations ‘‘organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes’’ and is broader than the English legal conception.
Historical Background As stated above, the usual starting point for the history of English charity law is the seventeenth century Charitable Uses Act 1601 known commonly as ‘‘the Statute of Elizabeth I’’ (the Preamble). Others have traced the origin
of the laws of charity back to Judaeo-Christian traditions molded by the arrangements of the Catholic Church and its fraternities and reconfigured by Protestant theology as exemplified by a fourteenth century poem The Vision of Piers Plowman which closely resembles the Statute of Elizabeth I. There are intriguing similarities to the Hindu math and instances of returning crusaders establishing institutions which were later regarded as charitable that incorporated notions from the Islamic waqf, but in the common law jurisdictions it is the Preamble that is the lawyer’s compass. The Preamble contained a list of charitable purposes: "
Releife of aged impotent and poore people, some for Maintenance of sicke and maymed Souldiers and Marriners, Schooles of Learninge, Free Schooles and Schollers in Universities, some for Repaire of Bridges Portes Havens Causwaies Churches Seabankes and Highwaies, some for Educacion and prefermente of Orphans, some for or towardes Reliefe Stocke or Maintenance of Howses of Correccion, some for Mariages of poore Maides, some for Supportacion Ayde and Helpe of younge tradesmen Handicraftesmen and persons decayed, and others for reliefe or redemption of Prisoners or Captives, and for aide or ease of any poore Inhabitantes concerninge paymente of Fifteenes, setting out of Souldiers and other Taxes.
An English court would not regard a purpose as charitable unless it appeared on that list or could be defined as coming within ‘‘the spirit and intendment’’ of the Preamble and disclosed an element of ‘‘public benefit.’’ In 1891 Lord MacNaghten classified charitable purposes for legal purposes into four principal heads being: the relief of poverty, the advancement of education, the advancement of religion, and other purposes beneficial to the community falling under any of the preceding heads. All such purposes must also be directed to the public benefit with the exception of purposes to relieve poverty among a limited class of beneficiaries (often referred to as the ‘‘poor relatives’’ exception). Within this framework the English courts have created case precedents refining and sometimes confusing the charity definition. Over the last century, as the traditional roles of judiciary and Attorney General have faded, the Charity Commission for England and Wales has been given increasing administrative and quasi-judicial powers over charitable bodies which has also influenced the definition of charity. After years of various inquiries rejecting a statutory definitional reform of the definition of charity, in 2002 a UK Cabinet Office Strategy Unit Report known as Private Action, Public Benefit. A Review of charities and the
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wider not-for-profit sector recommended wide ranging definitional and regulatory reform for the law of charities. These recommendations included a modernization and restatement of charitable purposes, reform of the Charity Commission and the establishment of a Charity Tribunal. The Charities Act 2006 was passed by Parliament in November 2006, came into force partially on 7 November 2007 but mostly took effect in early 2008. Under Section 2 of the Charities Act 2006, the four common law heads of charitable purposes are increased to thirteen statutory heads. Thus a ‘‘charitable purpose’’ is one that is for either "
‘‘(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)
(i) (j)
(k) (l)
(m)
the prevention or relief of poverty; the advancement of education; the advancement of religion; the advancement of health or the saving of lives; the advancement of citizenship or community development; the advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science; the advancement of amateur sport; the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity; the advancement of environmental protection or improvement; the relief of those in need by reason of youth, age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage; the advancement of animal welfare; the promotion of the efficiency of the armed forces of the Crown, or of the efficiency of the police, fire and rescue services or ambulance services; and other purposes that are currently recognized as charitable or are in the spirit of any purposes currently recognized as charitable.’’
The law had previously presumed that charities with the purposes of relief of poverty, or the advancement of education or of religion, were for the public benefit. The Charities Act 2006 removed this presumption, so for the first time the law requires every charity to explicitly demonstrate that their purposes are for the public benefit. The Act declares that ‘‘charity means an institution established for charitable purposes only’’ but it does not contain any new definition of public benefit or suggest how charities should meet that requirement. It does give the Charity Commission the new objective of promoting awareness and understanding of the operation of the public benefit requirement, and requires the Commission to consult on any guidance on public benefit it produces,
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to which charity trustees are required to have regard when running their charity.
Key Issues The boundaries of what is regarded as charitable in law and its fit with the social environment is the fundamental issue which is wrestled with by lawyers, regulators, policy makers and civil society participants. The expansion and contraction of the boundaries is a contested space and the means by which the movement takes place and the rate of change is always productive of controversy. England and her colonies until recently have relied upon judicial precedent to set these boundaries in the main, although the Charity Commission of England and Wales has, over the last 2 decades, played a more activist role in attempting to move the definitional boundaries by administrative fiat and quasi-judicial mechanisms. The lack of judicial opportunity through contested cases combined with increasing reluctance of courts to be adventurous where there are significant taxation concessions at stake have slowed the progress of judicial advancement in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The growing pressure for statutory intervention since 2001 in all closely aligned English jurisdictions is working its way through each of the jurisdictions at different rates of progress. The final practical outcomes of the new legislative interventions will only be discerned in the coming years. However, replacing common law concepts with statutory definitions does inevitably signify a break with tradition. In future the legal definition of what constitutes ‘‘charity’’ will be much less amenable to judicial influence and more vulnerable to direct political control through government use of statutory amendment. Moreover, as each jurisdiction in turn legislates for a slightly different definition of charitable purpose, charity law is being nationalised and prised away from the pool of common law precedents that has allowed a shared jurisprudence to shape the development of philanthropy across many of the world’s most developed countries. As judicial involvement in the setting and maintaining of the charity law boundaries wanes and administrative and quasi-judicial measures are used more frequently, it is probable that charity law will become subject to a greater and more frequent level of political intervention as legislation is used by government to effect and manage change in the third sector. Finally, whether the legal boundary of charity will remain legally significant in the future is under threat from the adoption by lawyers, regulators, policy makers, politicians, and the public, of broader ideas of a third sector and civil society organizations, and the growth of
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hybrid organizations which span business and government sectors.
whereas in England and Wales, the issue is whether a particular charitable purpose is for the public benefit.
International Perspectives
Ireland
Scotland
Revenue law is applied uniformly across the United Kingdom so for taxation purposes Scotland shared the legal definition of ‘‘charity.’’ However, in the general law of Scotland the term ‘‘charity’’ and ‘‘charitable’’ did not acquire a technical meaning and so in this respect diverged from the situation in England and Wales. Recent reforms have largely brought this divergence to an end. In May 2001 the Scottish Charity Law Review Commission published its report (the McFadden Report) making 114 recommendations for the reform of charity law and regulation in Scotland. As a result the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005 (the CTI(S) Act 2005) was introduced. The new legislation transfers responsibility for charitable status in Scotland from HM Revenue and Customs to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR). OSCR has further regulatory responsibilities which include maintaining the Scottish Charity Register. Section 7(2) of the CTI(S) Act 2005 sets out 15 different charitable purposes and a sixteenth category, being any other purpose that may reasonably be regarded as analogous to any of those 15 purposes. These are: the advancement of health (including the prevention or relief of sickness, disease, or human suffering); the saving of lives; the advancement of citizenship or community development (including rural or urban regeneration and the promotion of civic responsibility, volunteering, the voluntary sector or the effectiveness or efficiency of charities); the advancement of the arts, heritage, culture, or science; the advancement of public participation in sport (‘‘sport’’ means sport which involves physical skill and exertion) and the provision of certain types of recreational facilities, or the organization of recreational activities, with the object of improving the conditions of life for the persons for whom the facilities or activities are primarily intended; the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation; the promotion of religious or racial harmony; the promotion of equality and diversity; the advancement of environmental protection or improvement; the relief of those in need by reason of age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage (including relief given by the provision of accommodation or care); and the advancement of animal welfare. The listed charitable purposes are similar to the English reforms but are not identical. In Scotland, public benefit is assessed on the basis of how a body exercises its functions;
Charity law in Ireland is rooted in the common law and based on the Statute of Pious Uses 1634 which is not dissimilar to the English Statute of Charitable Uses 1601 noted above. The English classification of charitable purposes was accepted in Ireland and their judicial interpretation has developed along much the same lines. The legislative framework consisting of the Charities Acts of 1961 and 1973 as amended by the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2002 are closely modeled on the provisions of the English Charities Act 1960. The lead regulatory agency was the Revenue Commissioners and was most influential in charity registration approval, with the Commissioners of Charitable Donations and Bequests (an antiquated forerunner to the present English Charity Commission) in a monitoring and support role. Although the Irish reform process was first mooted in 1996, it was not launched until 2002. By 2007, the Irish Charities Bill 2007 had been introduced to modernise the law and definition of charities and the Charities Act (NI) 2008 is expected shortly. The Charities Regulatory Authority, replacing the Commissioners for Charitable Donations and Bequests, will be responsible for the establishment and maintenance of a register of charities and will oversee the reporting regimes applicable to registered charities. A Charity Appeals Tribunal is to be established to provide an alternative to the courts system for the review of regulatory decisions. ‘‘Charitable purposes,’’ under the new legislation, will retain but extend the common law definition interpreted by the judiciary over many years. In addition to enlarging the first head to allow for the ‘‘prevention’’ as well as the relief of poverty, the statute will restate the fourth head ‘‘other purposes beneficial to the community,’’ but add that this is to ‘‘include’’ a further eleven specific new charitable purposes. This will expressly recognize the charitable nature of: advancing the community welfare of young, old, and disabled people; supporting community development; protecting the natural environment; promoting health; advancing art, science, culture, and heritage; and integrating disadvantaged individuals more fully into society. It will also recognize as ‘‘charitable’’ a body lending assistance to other charities in fulfilling their charitable purpose in an efficient or effective manner. The legislation will omit any reference to amateur sport or to human rights in its definition of ‘‘charitable purpose.’’ Irish legislation will require proof of public benefit before a purpose can be declared charitable. The new
Charity Law
statutory test for public benefit, applicable to all nonreligious purposes, will require proof of three facts: (a) that the purpose in question is intended to benefit the public or a section thereof; (b) that any private benefit flowing from the purpose is ancillary and necessary for the achievement of the primary charitable purpose; and (c) that any donor-imposed limitations on the class entitled to benefit or any charges imposed in the provision of the charitable purpose are justified and reasonable and will not limit unduly the number of persons or classes of person who will benefit. Canada
Despite the English-speaking parts of Canada not adopting English statutory law at the time of colonization, much of the charity law in Canada reflects the English common law of charitable trusts. Various provinces, including Quebec, have their own definitions of what constitutes a charitable purpose. Whilst under the federated constitution the responsibility for the supervision of charities rests with the provinces, under the Income Tax Act 1985 the Canadian Revenue Authority (CRA) has effectively become the gatekeeper to charitable status. Charity law reform has been underway in Canada for over a decade with the Ontario Law Reform Commission issuing a report in 1996 and from 2002 a series of roundtables and joint government/sector working groups. However, little substantive reform has resulted from the various recommendations. Expansive interpretations by the Canadian courts have occurred from time to time. In Re Vancouver Regional Free Net Association and Minister of National Revenue [1996] 137 DLR (4th) 206 (Federal Court of Appeal, 8 July 1996), an organization established to provide free community access to the Internet was regarded as charitable as the service could be viewed as a contemporary equivalent to the ‘‘highways’’ declared charitable in the English Preamble. In Everywoman’s Health Centre Society (1988) v. Minister of National Revenue [1992] 2 FC 52 (Federal Court of Appeal, 26 November 1991), the court also awarded charitable status to a society established to provide ‘‘necessary medical services for women for the benefit of the community as a whole’’ and carrying on ‘‘educational activities incidental to the above.’’ The society ran a free-standing abortion clinic. In 2007, the ultimate Canadian appeal court in A.Y.S.A. Amateur Youth Soccer Association v. Canada (Revenue Agency) 2007 SCC 42; [2008] 287 DLR (4th) 4 (Supreme Court of Canada, 5 October 2007), decided that the court should only vary the definition of charity at the margins, leaving any other developments to the legislature.
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Singapore
Charity law in this jurisdiction is derived primarily from English law, but since attaining independence in 1965, Singapore has begun actively to develop its own body of law. Section 2(1) of the Charities Act 1994 defines ‘‘charity’’ as any institution, corporate or not, that is established for charitable purposes and is under the jurisdiction of the High Court with respect to charities while ‘‘charitable purposes’’ is defined as purposes that are exclusively charitable according to the law of Singapore. To interpret the meaning of these terms the courts rely on the common law, as established largely through English precedents. One of the departures from English law in Singapore was the establishment a subset of charities known as Institutions of a Public Character (IPCs) which have authorization to receive tax-deductible donations from the public. IPCs bear a similarity to Australia’s Public Benevolent Institutions. In October 2005, following the considerable media exposure given to scandals involving the National Kidney Foundation and other organizations which highlighted problems of governance in the sector, the Inter-Ministry Committee on the Regulation of Charities and Institutions of Public Character was established with a remit to examine the regulation of charitable organizations and IPCs. The result was a series of administrative and procedural reforms, but no alteration to the definition of charity. The separation of the office of Charity Commissioner from the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore may result in the Commissioner having a greater degree of autonomy in determining charitable status. Australia
Australia was stamped at its colonial birth with the imprimatur of English laws and followed the English common law of charities. In the 1920s case of Chesterman v. Federal Commissioner of Taxation the Australian High Court decided that the meaning of ‘‘charity’’ in a federal taxing statute was the popular narrow meaning of the word, rather than the wider English legal meaning. The decision was overturned on appeal to the English Privy Council which replaced it with the orthodox English formula. The federal government responded with the new legislative concept of ‘‘public benevolent institution’’ (PBI), a restricted subset of charity which is still the main gateway to donation deductibility, rather than charity status. As in other common law nations, such as Canada, the primary regulatory authority in Australia is by default at federal level in the government revenue agency, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) which applies the provisions of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to regulate the
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fiscal environment including charities. It follows established English precedents on definitional matters, deploys a generally conservative and defensive interpretation of Pemsel and the ‘‘spirit and intendment’’ rule. Unlike the English Charity Commission, the ATO has neither the remit nor the resources to undertake a strategic program for the development of charitable purposes. States have the responsibility for the definition and regulation of charities outside the federal taxing statutes, but generally follow federal definitions, and state Attorneys–General who have regulatory oversight of charities are largely inactive. The Inquiry into the Definition of Charities and Related Organisations was launched by the Federal Government and in 2001 provided recommendations for new heads of charity and other reforms including a charity commission type body, all of which were remarkably similar to later charity reforms in England and Wales. However, the translation of such recommendations to a draft bill was regarded by many as flawed and subsequent legislative reform was contained to three relatively minor matters. The Tax Laws Amendment (2005 Measures No. 3) Act 2005, provided that ‘‘the provision of child care services on a nonprofit basis’’ is a charitable purpose; provision was made for self-help groups to acquire charitable status provided that they are ‘‘open and non-discriminatory’’; and closed or contemplative religious orders were also determined to be charitable. New Zealand
New Zealand also took the hallmarks of English charity law until the introduction of the Charities Act 2005. Prior to that legislation a definition of ‘‘charity’’ and ‘‘charitable purpose’’ required a referral to s 2 of the Charitable Trusts Act 1957 which provided that charitable purpose meant ‘‘every purpose which in accordance with the law of New Zealand is charitable.’’ Subject to some minor adjustments, the common law will continue under the 2005 Act. There has been an obvious and longstanding fundamental difficulty in fitting the charity law framework to Maori needs due to the fact that Maori communities are organised around blood relationships. Section 5 (2)(a) of the Charities Act 2005 says that the purpose of an organization may still be charitable and may satisfy the public benefit requirement, even if the beneficiaries or members are related by blood. The Inland Revenue Department has transferred to the newly established Charities Commission the power to grant an organization ‘‘charitable status’’ for income tax purposes only if that organization satisfies four requirements:
● It must be carried on exclusively for charitable purposes. ● It must not be carried on for the private pecuniary profit of any individual. ● It must have a provision in its rules requiring the assets of the organization to be transferred to another entity with charitable purposes if the organization ceases to exist. ● It must not have the power to amend its rules in such a way as to alter the exclusively charitable nature of the organization. United States of America
The American constitution leaves the definition and regulation of charity to the states, but it is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that is the dominant influence in what is regarded as ‘‘charitable.’’ The repeal of English legislation at the time of the Revolution was thought to extend to the Statute of Charitable Uses, thereby rendering all charities established in the newly founded states null and void. The Internal Revenue Code of 1986 in Section 501 lists two major sets of nonprofit organizations that are tax preferenced. There are what are commonly called ‘‘charitable’’ organizations being organizations ‘‘organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes’’ (Section 501(c)(3)) and a residuary group of ‘‘non-charities’’ such as social clubs, veterans’ organizations, unions, chambers of commerce and other private member organizations. While all Section 501(c) organizations are exempt from income tax, Section 501(c)(3) organization donors may be eligible for income tax deductions as a result of the gift. Within 501(c)(3) the law divides organizations into private foundations and public charities. The intent of the law is to separate donor-controlled or closely held organizations from operating charities with broad based donor or beneficiary constituencies so that stricter controls could be placed upon private foundations. State courts tend to look at broader definitions of ‘‘notfor-profit purposes’’ for determination of whether a corporation is an organization that deserves to be recognized as a charity or other beneficial non-business organization. State courts also must decide whether provisions of charitable trusts will be enforced. In recent years the Senate Finance Committee has been holding hearings about reforms of the tax rules for the nonprofit sector generally. In the June 2004 hearings the Committee requested the Independent Sector (IS) to convene what became known as the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector. The focus of the Senate Committee was on
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
issues related to accountability and transparency and ultimately governance rather than on definitional issues.
Future Directions The impending raft of reforms to the law and regulation of charity led by England and Wales and spreading through former British colonies is too recent to confidently predict the further development of charity law. The expansion of the heads of charitable purpose by legislation coupled with revamped, quasi-judicial mechanisms for the interpretation of charitable purposes through tribunals or administrative fiat will relieve some of the worst artificial confinement of the legal definition of charity. The stripping away of the public benefit presumptions from the law of charity and its replacement with various assessments and metrics will cause ongoing confrontation between organisations and regulators and governments as a new balance is struck. It is yet to be seen in our fast changing social context whether the additions to Pemsel will continue to adapt at a satisfactory pace with societal needs and beliefs, or whether government, emboldened by its legislative engineering of the definition of charitable purposes will further politicise charitable purposes to its own ends. If charitable purpose is to serve as the threshold to legal dispensations and fiscal concessions to the exclusion of other civil society organisations, then this contest will increasingly be prosecuted. However, those countries which are part of Europe will be under pressure to integrate into the European notions of nonprofit and foundation law in cross border taxation exemptions and gift deductions as well as common corporate forms, fundraising regulation and accountability measures. The European civil law traditions are quite different from the underlying jurisprudence of English charity law. The United States largely has left behind the Pemsel list and developed its own jurisprudential understanding of charitable purposes through its revenue laws. All jurisdictions with charity law will be challenged by hybrid organisations which span the traditional sector boundaries either with business or government. The principles of public benefit do not fit with personal gain so critical to business motivations. Independence of control inherent in trust law is an issue when the government boundary is overlapped, with governments demanding some element of control for public accountability assurance. These issues point to the need for the development of a jurisprudence that can serve as a touchstone of legal principles for civil society organisations, not merely charities.
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Cross-References
▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Common Law and Civil Society ▶ Charity, History of ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations ▶ Public Benefit and Public Good
References/Further Readings Hopkins, Bruce, R. (2007). The law of tax-exempt organizations, 9th ed. New York: Wiley and Sons. Charles, M., & Susan, M. (Eds.) (2000). Foundations of charity, Oxford: Hart Publishing, p. 111. Dal Pont, G. (2000). Charity Law in Australia and New Zealand. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Great Britain, Home Office. (2003). Charities and not-for-profits: A modern legal framework – The government’s response to ‘‘private action, public benefit’’ London: Home Office. Jim, P., Bruce, C., & David, S. (Eds.) (2001). Between state and market: Essays on charity law and policy in Canada. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, p. 457. Jones, G. (1969). History of the Law of Charity, 1532–1827, Holmes Beach, Fla: WW Gaunt. Luxton, P. (2001). The Law of Charities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ontario Law Reform Commission (1996). Report on the law of charities, Government of Ontario. O’Halloran, K., McGregor-Lowndes, M., & Simon, K. (2008). Charity law and social policy. Enschede, The Netherlands: Springer. Picarda, H. (1999). The law and practice relating to charities (3rd ed.). London: Butterworths. Warburton, J., Morris, D., & Riddle, N. F. (2003). Tudor on Charities. London: Sweet & Maxwell.
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization Mott Foundation Building 503 S. Saginaw Street, Suite 1200 Flint, MI 48502-1851 USA www.mott.org
Introduction Located in southeastern Michigan, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation is a private foundation providing grant support for programs throughout the United States and internationally. With approximately 85 staff members in its offices in Flint and Detroit (Michigan, USA),
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Johannesburg (South Africa), and London (United Kingdom), the Foundation awarded 558 grants totaling more than $110.4 million is 2008.
Brief History Former mayor of Flint, Michigan and pioneer of General Motors, Charles Stewart Mott established the C.S. Mott Foundation in 1926 by endowing it with 2,000 shares of General Motors stock valued at $320,000. Partnering with the Flint Community Schools in its early years, the Foundation became a major benefactor in the life of the city through school-based educational and recreational activities. This partnership ultimately developed into a nationwide community education movement.
Mission/Objective/Focus Area Through its programs of Civil Society, Environment, Flint Area, and Pathways Out of Poverty, and the more specific focus areas of these programs, the Foundation seeks to fulfill its mission of supporting efforts that promote a just, equitable and sustainable society.
Activities Through the foundation’s Civil Society program, nongovernmental organizations are funded in three major geographic areas: The United States, Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, and South Africa. In addition to its four program areas, the foundation also funds Exploratory and Special Projects (XSP). XSP grants support unusual or unique opportunities to address significant national and international problems. Under this program, the foundation makes a limited number of small grants for projects falling outside its regular grantmaking programs, including a longtime emphasis on supporting Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Proposals for XSP grants are by invitation only; unsolicited proposals are discouraged. The Mott Foundation maintains an extensive Web site, www.mott.org, which is designed to share insights into the Foundation’s grantmaking and the work of its grantees. The Web site includes general information and addresses topics related to any of the Foundation’s 14 issue areas, which include: Afterschool, Citizen Participation, Community Foundations, Community Organizing, Flint Area, Freshwater Ecosystems, Income Security, Michigan, Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector, Race and Reconciliation, Sustainable Development, Transitional Justice, Vulnerable Youth, and Workforce Development. The Foundation also
produces a limited number of publications that are available free of charge by request.
Structure and Governance The 13 members of the Board of Trustees comprise its Audit, Executive, and Investment Committees. Of the 13 trustees, five are Mott family members. The Mott Foundation is unusual when compared with other large, international foundations that have been in existence for more than 75 years because of its continuity of leadership through the years. Also, its top leadership position is still held by a family member. The current president, William S. White, is only the third person to serve in that role. He follows in the footsteps of Harding Mott, who was the founder’s son and also Mr. White’s father-in-law. Adhering to principles of transparency and accountability are two of several standards listed in the Foundation’s Code of Ethics. In 1970, Mott was one of the nation’s first large foundations to print an annual report that detailed the type and amount of each grant made that year. The Foundation has continued to do so every year since then. Mott’s grantmaking is also guided by a stated set of values. Among others, they include: ‘‘Building strong communities through collaboration to provide a basis for positive change; Promoting the social, economic and political empowerment of all individuals and communities to preserve fundamental democratic principles and rights; and Respecting the diversity of life to maintain a sustainable human and physical environment.’’
Funding The Foundation, with year-end assets of approximately $1.96 billion, made 558 grants totaling almost $110.4 million in 2008. As a private foundation, Mott does not receive government funds. The Foundation’s grantmaking is supported by investment returns generated on the endowment left by Mott’s founder.
Accomplishments Mott’s afterschool grantmaking, funded through the Pathways Out of Poverty (POP) Program has been the model for afterschool programs throughout the United States and around the world. Additionally, the Foundation has been recognized as a leader in its support of microenterprise programs and workforce investment through the POP program.
Charta 77 Foundation
Through its Civil Society program, Mott has been a longtime supporter and promoter of the community foundation concept in the United States and globally. Additionally, Mott’s Environment grantmaking has been nationally recognized for its support of efforts to preserve and restore the Great Lakes water resources as the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem. The Foundation also supports nonprofit groups working nationally and internationally to change policies and practices of international trade and financial institutions so the environment is protected and people’s standard of living is not adversely affected by projects supported by these institutions.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Mott, C.S. ▶ Philanthropy in North America
References/Further Readings Gordon, T., & Morgan-Witts, M. (1979). The day the bubble burst: A social history of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Young, C., & Quinn, W. (1963). Foundation for living: The story of Charles Stewart Mott & Flint. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Brief History Charta 77 Foundation was established in 1978 in Stockholm by a group of young activists around the Folket i Bild magazine (represented by Peter Larsson a Peter Gavelin) and by Charta 77 signatory Jirˇı´ Pallas. Its mission was to support the aims of Charta 77 and to provide help for people persecuted by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was established with the money from the Monismanien Prize for freedom of speech, which Charta 77 was awarded for its brave defense of human rights. With the approval of the spokespersons of Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia, the foundation then went on to receive the other prizes that Charta 77 was awarded in the following years as well as numerous gifts from individuals and organizations around the world. In 1981 the foundation won generous support from George Soros that enabled it not only to intensify its help for Czechoslovak dissidents but also to support unofficial culture and science in Czechoslovakia. By the end of the 1980s it worked from four offices in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and New York. As soon as the Czechoslovak communist regime collapsed in November 1989, the foundation moved to Prague and opened regional offices in Brno and Bratislava. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, the foundation split into the Czech Nadace Charty 77 and the Slovak Nada´cia Charty 77. Both continue their work to this day, but independently of each other and with differing missions.
Mission
Charta 77 Foundation MIROSLAV POSPI´SˇIL
Address of Organization Nadace Charty 77 Melantrichova 5 110 00 Praha 1 Czech Republic www.bariery.cz/nadace/
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From its original mission to draw attention to the fate of the opponents of the communist regime, to support the persecuted and imprisoned activists and their families and to support the development of free culture and thought, the mission of the post-1989 foundation had to be adapted to the new situation of transition to democracy and market economy. While continuing to work in the area of support for culture and science to this day, the Czech Ch77 Foundation has gradually expanded its mandate into the area of human services, the rights of minorities and the integration of minorities. The Slovak Ch77 Foundation, on the other hand, has narrowed its mission down to legal advisory services in the field of human rights.
Introduction
Activities
Charta 77 Foundation in the Czech Republic is one of two successor organizations to the original Charta 77 Foundation founded in Sweden in 1978. Since 1990, it has grown into one of the most important Czech supporters and funders of human rights causes.
To pursue its mission in the area of support for culture and science Charta 77 Foundation Czech Republic awards three annual prizes for outstanding achievement in humanities/social sciences, literature, and ecology and has a program of support for cultural projects. It also awards a
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prize for outstanding achievement if the fight for human rights and freedom. The best known and the largest program today, however, is the so-called Barriers Account, which supports projects that aim ‘‘to bring down barriers’’ between the majority and disadvantaged minorities of all descriptions. The ‘‘Barriers’’ program provides both direct support for disadvantaged individuals and groups as well as funding for nonprofit organizations that work for the integration of minorities.
References/Further Readings
Structure and Governance
CHRISTOPHER L. GRIFFIN, JR.
Charta 77 Foundation Czech Republic is a foundation in Czech law, registered with the regional court in Prague. It is governed by a Board of Trustees (eight members in 2006) and its activities and finances are monitored by a separate Supervisory Board (three members). The foundation is a member of the Czech Association of Foundations and adheres to its charter.
Funding Charta 77 Foundation has always been a grant-seeking foundation, both when it worked in Sweden and in the Czech Republic since 1989. It is financed primarily through individual contributions, special events and donations from corporations. It has also gradually built a small endowment of its own (CZK 76.6 million/$3.8 million in 2006), mainly with funding provided by the Czech state from the proceeds from the privatization of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s. In 2006 it reported total expenditures of CZK 47.2 million/$2.1 million, out of which CZK 34 million/$1.7 million were distributed as grants.
Hosˇt’a´lek, A., Jechova´, K., & Kantu˚rkova´, E. (1998). Nadace Charty 77: Dvacet let. [Charta 77 Foundation: Twenty Years]. Brno: Atlantis.
Child Trust Fund
Address of Organization Waterview Park Mandarin Way Washington NE38 8QG UK www.childtrustfund.gov.uk/
Introduction The Child Trust Fund (CTF) is an entitlement as well as a savings and investment account made available to all qualified children born in the United Kingdom on or after 2002. In practice, CTFs may take the form of: (1) traditional savings accounts; (2) stock market investments; or (3) ‘‘stakeholder accounts’’ with diversified portfolios regulated by the government to diminish risks from market fluctuations. Accounts may be opened either by the child’s parent(s) or the government if a parent fails to complete the stated requirements.
Brief History Accomplishments In November 1989, Charta 77 Foundation was one of only two foundations that were ready to start work in liberated Czechoslovakia without interruption and delay (the other being the Jan Hus Educational Foundation). It therefore holds a number of ‘‘firsts’’ that contributed significantly to the rapid renewal of the Czech foundation sector in the 1990s: it was the first foundation to launch a large-scale national appeal, the first to organize a charity concert or a charity auction, or the first to introduce regular payroll deduction as a way of donating to charity.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Grant-seeking ▶ Human Rights ▶ Soros, George
Gavin Kelly and Rachel Lissauer of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published ‘‘Ownership for All’’ in 2000, the document which first recommended establishing CTFs. Kelly and Lissauer suggested creating a universal ‘‘Opportunity Fund’’ that would provide an endowment of £1,000 to each UK citizen, payable at birth or at age eighteen. After the report’s release, the IPPR coordinated a seminar in September 2000 at the Prime Minister’s office bringing together government officials and experts on asset-based welfare schemes. This meeting launched the political campaign to introduce CTFs. After soliciting consultation through two April 2001 reports, ‘‘Saving and Assets for All’’ and ‘‘Delivering Saving and Assets,’’ Parliament enacted legislation in May 2004 establishing the CTF as a birthright for all children born on or after September 1, 2002 and residing in the
Child Trust Fund
United Kingdom. Even though the first accounts were activated in April 2005, children born between 2002 and 2005 still had access to CTFs. Then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown amended the scheme in March 2006 so that all children who qualify for the CTF would receive an additional payment of £250 at age seven, whereas that children from households with incomes less than a fixed threshold (£15,575 in 2008) would receive £500 at the same time.
Mission As stated in the Explanatory Notes accompanying the Child Trust Funds Act, the policy objectives of the CTF are ‘‘[to] help people understand the benefits of saving and investing; [to] encourage parents and children to develop the saving habit and engage with financial institutions; [to] ensure that in [the] future all children have a financial asset at the start of adult life; [to] and build on financial education to help people make better financial choices throughout their lives.’’
Activities Between September 2002 and April 2007, almost 3.2 million CTF accounts were opened. In the 2006–2007 fiscal year, the average contribution to parent-opened accounts was about £260; the average level rose to £280 for the 2007– 2008 fiscal year. About one third of these parent-opened accounts received an additional nongovernment contribution. Regional government offices have made almost identical average donations to CTFs, although the average share of accounts with such investments was about 25%. The government remains involved in refining CTF design and coverage. For example, a consultation period initiated in 2007 sought to determine whether dropping the requirement that parents physically transfer payment vouchers to account providers (e.g., commercial banks, building societies, and investment managers) would increase efficiency and coverage. When parents fail to remit the initial voucher after twelve months, the government still establishes a Revenue Allocated Account (RAA) on the child’s behalf. Empirical evidence suggests that RAAs receive lower average parental contributions; thus, waiving the remittal requirement might increase parental participation and overall saving. Suggestions that the government make additional payments upon enrollment in secondary school have been raised but not enacted.
Structure and Governance Unlike many other forms of social security in the industrialized world, the CTF involves minimal government
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oversight and participation. The UK government sends the initial £250 voucher to a child’s ‘‘benefit claimant,’’ most often a parent. The claimant then activates a CTF account on the child’s behalf through a chosen financial services provider. Anyone may make payments to the child’s account as long as total contributions do not exceed £1,200 per year. The CTF account holder may not manage his or her funds until age 16, and only upon turning 18 may the child withdraw assets (although exceptions exist for terminally ill or deceased persons). CTF balances, for which all income and gains are taxexempt, may be used at the discretion of the account holder upon withdrawal.
Funding As noted in the history and structure of the CTF, initial funding for the fund comes from the government, and subsequent investments may come from the government or the child’s family and friends. The Exchequer projects that government costs associated with maintaining staff, information technology infrastructure, and legal expenses will reach £360 million in 2010 and £510 million by 2012.
Major Accomplishments In addition to the rising parental contribution statistics cited above, the CTF’s marketing campaign has achieved significant strides in educating the British public. As of April 2008, 97% of eligible parents surveyed were aware of the CTF, and 88% knew that interest earned on the accounts would be tax-free. The government also has strengthened efforts to ensure that ‘‘looked after children’’ (those in the custody of local authorities and foster families) have accounts opened and managed while separated from their parents.
Cross-References ▶ Stakeholder Society
References/Further Readings Ackerman, B., & Alstott, A. (1999). The stakeholder society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Finlayson, A. (2007). Characterizing new labour: The case of the Child Trust Fund. Public Administration, 86(1), 95–110. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2007). Encouraging savings through tax-preferred accounts. Paris: OECD Publishing. Sherraden, M. (2003). Individual accounts in social security: Can they be progressive? International Journal of Social Welfare, 12(2), 97–107.
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Child Welfare League of America
Child Welfare League of America ROBBIE WATERS ROBICHAU
Address of Organization 2345 Crystal Drive, Suite 250 Arlington, VA 22202 USA www.cwla.org/
Introduction The Child Welfare League of America’s (CWLA) primary objective is ‘‘making children a national priority.’’ In order to achieve this goal, the organization desires to have all Americans and their communities involved in promoting and protecting children’s welfare. The League has championed for children for over 80 years, making it one of America’s ‘‘oldest and largest membership-based child welfare organizations’’ with over 800 public and private child-serving agencies that reach approximately nine million children every year.
Brief History In 1915, a voluntary union of 37 agencies came together as the Bureau for Exchange of Information. As the number of organizations grew within the Bureau, CWLA became officially incorporated in 1920 with a total of 65 charter members. The purpose of the voluntary federation of agencies was to set the nation’s first standard of practice for child welfare services. The League’s first executive, C.C. Carstens, believed that CWLA had an important role to serve by helping agencies engage in their work more effectively and determining proper standards for higher quality child services. This began one of the League’s primary objectives: to develop, review, and improve standards in service provision to children.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas The CWLA’s vision is that all children can ‘‘grow up in a safe, loving, and stable family’’; therefore, the organization focuses on children and youth who may not live in this type of environment as well as the individuals that provide for and support these youth. CWLA states that its mission is to ‘‘lead the nation in building public will to ensure safety, permanence, and well-being of children, youth, and their families by advancing public policy, defining and promoting practice excellence and delivering superior membership services.’’
Activities Believing that collaboration and partnership is paramount, the CWLA provides direct support to its member agencies who are involved in service provisions to children and families. The League also engages in various advocacy, research, publications, training programs, consultations, and conferences; moreover, CWLA works in many child welfare practice areas such as adoption, child care and development, domestic violence, parenting, youth services and positive youth development. CWLA produces a National Data Analysis System, Children’s Voice Magazine, Child Welfare Journal, and reports on its numerous practice areas. Some of the League’s most recent initiatives have been Creating Parenting-Rich Communities, Children’s Memorial Flag project, Child Welfare Standards of Excellence, and Youth Ambassador Program.
Structure and Governance The League contains a diverse group of public and private agencies that provide social services to children in some form. With over 800 different organizations in the League, these affiliates have a common interest in supporting and protecting children. The CWLA unites these agencies through its various programs, educational resources, and advocacy on child policy issues. CWLA’s influence is nationwide with offices across the country in Washington, DC (headquarters), Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles.
Funding The CWLA receives funding from state and federal grants and contracts, membership and consulting fees, publication sales, corporation and foundation grants, and individual donations. The League has earned an A + from the Best in America Seal of Excellence from Independent Charities of America for demonstrating and documenting public accountability and program and cost effectiveness. Their annual report in 2006 stated that the League received over $12 million in total support and revenue. According to their 990 form in 2007, CWLA’s total assets were worth over $7 million.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions The CWLA has made tremendous contributions to child welfare services across the nation. One of the primary ways they have impacted society has been through setting, evaluating, and revising CWLA Standards for child welfare services in both public and private organizations. CWLA has united, supported,
Churches and Denominations
and advocated on the behalf of children, their families, and memberships agencies. Their advocacy has also influenced the adoption of national legislation and programs such as the Fostering Connections and Increasing Adoptions Act, Family Preservation and Support Act, and Independent Living, Postlegal Adoption, and Section 8 Family Unification Programs. According to the CWLA, they are the ‘‘world’s largest publisher of child welfare materials.’’
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Federations, Nonprofit
References/Further Readings CWLA. (2006). 2006 Annual report. Arlington, VA: CWLA. Accessed from http://www.cwla.org/whowhat/2006annual.pdf; 1/12/2008 CWLA. (2000). Making children a national priority: CWLA strategic plan for 2000–2010. Washington, DC: CWLA. Morgan, L. J., & Martin, T. K. (2004). Making children a national priority: A framework for community action: Community implementation guide. Washington, DC: CWLA.
Churches and Denominations ANTONIUS LIEDHEGENER Friedrich-Schiller-Universita¨t Jena, Jena, Germany
Introduction The universe of organized religion in modern society is abound. This article is related to the Christian tradition of organized religion and its role within civil society as indicated by the two key words ‘‘churches’’ and ‘‘denominations.’’ Sociologically, churches and denominations, the multitude of their more or less integrated Christian congregations, and related Christian organizations form an integral and important part of civil society in many countries. As larger organizational bodies, churches, and denominations are also apt to act as collective actors in emerging transnational contexts of civic engagement. Churches and denominations spur religious as well as civic engagement by virtue of their values and their teaching and by providing various structures of opportunity to get involved with a congregation, other religious organizations, and the larger community. Being an active member of a church or congregation is frequently related with a wide array of attitudes and behaviors commonly attributed to a healthy civil society.
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Definitions and Historical Background Historically, the church (Latin: ‘‘ecclesia’’) became the essential self descriptive term of the followers of Jesus Christ in the ancient world. Early Christianity depicted itself theologically as a unified body of believers united by a common creed and the succession of local bishops including the bishop of Rome, the pope. During the course of history and especially during the Reformation period, the unity of the church dissolved, creating a complex situation of various Christian traditions and numerous churches in Europe, then in the Americas, and later with considerable variations in other parts of the world. Today, the Roman Catholic Church, (national) Protestant churches of Lutheran or Calvinist tradition, and various orthodox churches dominate the religious landscape in most European countries from an institutional point of view. However, industrialization, urbanization, migration, and to a lesser extent missionary activities led to the dominant modern pluralistic situation of civil societies in Western societies, including some nonreligious parts among its populations. Although secularization is a controversial concept in social science today, the emergence of the modern civil society as an independent sphere between state and market corresponds with a (nonlinear) process of secularization on an institutional level at the least. The human right of religious freedom and the idea of separating state and religion are at the center of this process of fundamental institutional change. In the course of modern history, churches had to, and did adjust to this process of modernization. Thus, Christianity and religion in general have ‘‘shown a surprising capacity (from the perspective of the Enlightenment critique of religion and secularization theory) to adapt to changing social conditions.’’ (Herbert, 2003: 291) In fact, churches have become an important segment of civil society. Compared with the notion ‘‘church,’’ ‘‘denomination’’ is a much younger term. Denomination is mainly used and in everyday language understood only in the English speaking world. Especially in the United States, denomination is a term pregnant with meaning. It is related to the self-understanding of America as a pluralistic civil society and to the positioning of religious entities within the larger societal context: Religion is free but separated from the sphere of democratic government. Religious truth is thus not a matter of political decisions of majorities. And religion exists legitimately in a variety of religious bodies related to the general Judeo-Christian tradition. As distinct organizations these bodies are called denomination. They constitute the dominant translocal aspect of organized religion (Ammerman, 2005: 362).
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However, as Tocqueville emphasized in his famous book Democracy in America, this does not mean that religion is not part of the larger political community as such. On the contrary, Tocqueville named denominational religious institutions – explicitly including the Roman Catholic Church in the United States – as one of the most basic democratic institutions in the United States. During the nineteenth century the US situation contrasted sharply with the role of churches in European polities. Confronted with the many disastrous events and outcomes of the French Revolution, churches in Europe opposed democratic ideas for about another 100 years for political and theological reasons. Yet, at the same time they became involved in the various trends of modernization themselves. Especially after World War II, European churches became more and more supportive of the democratic rule of government. This is true for the Protestant as well the as the Catholic tradition. For several reasons, the various orthodox churches in eastern Europe started this process of accommodating to democracy only recently, but while they reflected their role in ending Communist rule they started to develop new versions of Christian social teaching, too. Although churches and denominations see themselves as having a religious mission extending far beyond the sphere of inner worldly civil society (Bane et al., 2005), from a social science perspective ‘‘denominationalism’’ can be taken and observed as the dominant mode of organized religion in contemporary (Western) societies. Thus, from a social science point of view a clear terminological line between church and denomination can hardly be drawn today. How do churches and denominations then contribute to civil society?
Christiantiy and Civic Engagement: General Trends and National Variations In the US religion is a key aspect of the latest debates on civil society and social capital as well as their decline or resurgence in contemporary America (Putnam, 2000; Wuthnow, 1999). In his widely absorbed writings, Robert Putnam highlighted the importance of religion within the sphere of associational life in America. ‘‘Religious affiliation is by far the most common associational membership among Americans’’ (Putnam, 1995: 68–69). Putnam’s work helped to raise new interest in the role of religion in social science. Much of the recent research on religion in the United States shows that the local congregation is at the heart of American religion today (Ammerman, 2005: 357). This bears important consequences for volunteering and civic engagement. According to recent polls, about 38% of all Americans claim to volunteer within the framework of a religious organization. This is by far the largest
proportion among the various forms of volunteering. Especially local congregations provide ample opportunities to get involved in the religious community and larger society. Americans invest significant portions of their time, talent, and money in religious contexts. Members of religious communities serve in their congregation as ushers, choir singers and musicians, volunteers in religious education and religious youth meetings and members of church boards. They also direct their energies at the wider community by working with soup kitchens, home shelters, programs for children, civil rights and social justice activities, housing and repair, day care, elderly housing, political training, and other activities sponsored by their congregation. Many surveys do not show much variation in the level of engagement among different Christian traditions on the individual level. Some surveys see mainline Protestants as more civically engaged than their Evangelical counterparts with Catholics falling somewhere in between. But the most significant differences are usually observed between those who are involved in their congregation’s life and those who are nonattenders or nonreligious. In addition, it is important to look not only at individual behavior. Recent research has shown that the institutional or organizational level adds important information in illustrating the role of churches and denominations in American civil society. Social services are a vital segment of congregations’ civic activities. According to the National Congregations Study, 57% of American congregations report at least one kind of activity in this area. The most typical forms are food programs (32%), shelters (18%), children and youth programs (16%), and clothing (11%). Forty-two percent of congregations report political activities like informing its members about public policy, delivering voter guides, or organizing grass root activities. Taken by the numbers, it is worth noting that social services are less prominent on the list of civic activities than music and arts. There are also significant differences in the extent, scope, and sort of civic activities between congregations of the various Christian traditions. Although Catholics, for example, are no more civically involved than members of other denominations, Catholic parishes as institutions show a very strong commitment particularly to social and political activities and programs. Compared to other denominations they are clearly overrepresented in these segments. This higher level of institutional activity corresponds with the on average larger size of Catholic parishes and indicates some effects of economy of scale on the institutional level (Davis & Liedhegener, 2007: 146–154).
Churches and Denominations
Compared to the wealth of American research on denominations and civic engagement, research on religion and civic engagement in European countries is still scarce. However, from existing studies on civic engagement it is clear that Christianity is far from being insignificant for civil society in Europe today (Anheier & Toepler, 2000; Ruiter & de Graaf, 2006). In Germany, the Freiwilligensurvey 2004 allows for some instructive observations. It reports that 36% of the German population are involved in some form of nonpaid voluntary work involving some sort of responsible activities beyond an active membership in an organization. In contrast to the United States, sports and not religion is the most prominent field of civic engagement (Gensicke et al., 2006: 60). Among all questioned 11% do some type of voluntary work in the context of sporting activities. In the field of religion 6% are involved as volunteers. Interestingly, among general active membership religion ranks sixth, but among volunteer work it ranks third. Since most Germans either belong to a Protestant church or the Roman Catholic Church, this means that these churches bring about volunteers in higher rates than other segments of civil society in Germany. Currently, it is not clear whether there is a significant difference between Catholics, Protestants, and other believers and nonbelievers with respect to civic engagement. In Switzerland the Freiwilligen-Monitor Schweiz 2007 reports a total of about 26% in civic engagement. Here Protestants (30%) are more active than Catholics and persons without a religious belonging (25% each) (Stadelmann-Steffen et al., 2007: 72). In Australia the National Church Life Survey reports a different pattern. ‘‘Attenders most influenced by Anglo-Catholic or liberal Protestant traditions are more likely to be involved’’ (Kaldor et al., 1999: 71).
Beyond the Religious Context: Churches and Denominations as a Resource of Civil Society The activities of church members within and through their congregations, the forms and structures of these activities, and the (quantitative) significance of this kind of engagement have been reported so far. The following section concentrates on major topics and debates that examine civic engagement by religious people and institutions in societal context. The interest is thus in correlations and explanations between churches and denominations and civil society. Civic Engagement
Civic engagement of religious people is not confined to their own flocks. It clearly extends into the larger civil
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society. Data from the World Value Survey (WVS) for 80 countries around the world show that religiously involved persons are more likely to be civically engaged in general. Controlling for other variables the WVS data confirm ‘‘that the social networks and personal communications derived from regular churchgoing play an important role, not just in promoting activism within religious-related organizations, but also in strengthening community associations more generally’’ (Norris & Inglehart, 2004: 1991). This general pattern of a positive correlation seems true for individual countries as well (Ruiter & de Graaf, 2006). Civic Skills
Churches and denominations generate civic skills like organizing events, directing group meetings, and making one’s own views vocal. Evidence from the US context shows that congregations as promoters of civic skills are especially important for those who are not well integrated in the working force (Verba et al., 1995). This is of high political relevance: ‘‘[C]ivic skills learned in one place do leak out into the political process, especially to activities beyond voting. And because people of all economic and educational levels belong nearly equally to congregations (whereas other voluntary organizations are disproportionately middle and upper class), congregations are the single most widespread and egalitarian providers of civic opportunity’’ (Ammerman, 2005: 360). Again, we do not have this kind of dense evidence for most other countries. ‘‘Social Capital’’
The notion of social capital became very prominent among scholars of social science recently, although no consensus has been reached on its definition. One reason for its salience is the implied promise to move from correlations to explanations. Social capital, understood as the norms and networks of voluntary cooperation and social trust and their distribution in society, is seen as making civil society and democracy work (Putnam, 2002). A high level of social capital prevents modern societies from apathy, social misbehavior and deteriorating political conditions. Apparently, what has been reported on churches and denominations so far is relevant for social capital as well (Smidt, 1999). Denominations and local religious communities promote norms of civic behavior, provide many opportunities for voluntary engagement and allow for experiences to develop mutual trust in face to face relations which in turn can lead to generalized social trust. One of the valuable distinctions arising from this concept is the distinction between bonding and bridging social capital. The former describes
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networks of cooperation among group members such as church members which exclude nongroup members. The latter bridges differences between various groups horizontally (identity bridging) or vertically (status bridging) and is seen as especially important for generating generalized trust (Wuthnow, 2002). In the United States much of religion’s social capital seems to be bonding social capital. Congregations and their activists tend to experience problems with overcoming social differences (Lichterman, 2006). On the other hand, active church members are more likely to get into contact with persons in key positions such as entrepreneurs or elected officials (Wuthnow, 2002). Yet, beyond a metaphoric use, the implied causal model of social capital producing a healthy society and stable political institutions is still to be elaborated and tested. Welfare Provisions and Education
Charity has been an integral part of Christianity since its early days. Across Europe charitable institutions were first developed in connection with churches and monasteries. The same is true for education. Although the emerging territorial nation states took over some of these activities and gradually developed into a form of modern welfare state, the role of churches remained strong in many European states (Fix & Fix, 2005). Many forms of social services and educational institutions remained organized along religious lines, especially in countries with a religiously diverse population and/or a dominant cleavage between a secular labor movement and Catholic subculture such as Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, or Switzerland. This frequently led to a system of state–church separation which is characterized by religious freedom combined with a high level of institutionalized cooperation between religious service providers and state authorities. Interestingly enough, the recent trend of deregulating the welfare state led to the growing importance of religious providers, most notably seen in the new United States policy to support faith-based initiatives with federal money. Empirical research across various nations indicates that churches and denominations do not provide social services independently. They run their programs mostly in collaboration with para church organizations, secular social service providers, and governmental authorities. One of the major resources churches provide to the larger public is the channeling of large numbers of volunteers to the social service sector. Democracy and Democratization
Contrary to the traditional secularization thesis, religion in general and Christianity in particular have proved to be
a major force in public debates and politics (Casanova, 1994). Churches and denominations are vocal politically and thus play a prominent role in providing democratic political systems with means of political articulation and support. In general, comparative international research indicates that the measurable correlation between the civicness of individuals and the performance and stability of democracy is low (Gabriel et al., 2002). But with respect to religion there seems to be a correlation between church attendance and important institutional features like trust in democratic institutions (Gabriel, 1999). Finally, the fact that churches and denominations are resources of politics can clearly be seen in the case of the transition from a dictatorial regime to democracy. Many of the countries which became democracies in the so called third and fourth wave of democratization saw church activists working for (re-)establishing a civil society to overcome communist regimes or conservative dictatorships. The post-Vatican II Catholic church took the lead in many of these countries with large portions of Catholics (Huntington, 1991: 75). This is most evident in the case of Poland where the Polish born Pope John Paul II. contributed to the success of the free worker movement Solidarnosc. The new civic engagement in the context of churches and denominations in Eastern Europe laid the foundation to end communist rule and to overcome the block confrontation. This history is generally seen as one of the major roots of the new interest in civil society in general. Although churches contributed to liberalization and democratization, for many churches and denominations the period of consolidation proved to be a peculiar one. Many had difficulties in adjusting to their new role as public religions in a democratic system and a pluralistic society (Spieker, 2003). A growing new field of research follows these kind of questions with respect to non-European countries (Lienemann-Perrin & Lienemann, 2006). In a globalizing world the possibilities and chances of churches and denominations as actors in emerging transnational networks of civic engagement certainly deserve closer attention. From a civil society perspective Christian organizations are means for channeling ideas, personnel, skills, and material resources across the globe. The international web of religious cooperation and development aid is a pillar of the twenty-first century civil society.
Perspectives Current research shows churches and denominations mainly in a positive light with respect to their role in and contribution to civil society. This is mainly due to the fact that most Christian denominations have taken a
Churches and Denominations
constructive view on modern society and its democratic institutions. Looking back especially to the dark sides of Christian history in Europe and taking the continuous temptation of a fundamentalist retreat from democratic politics seriously, finally we have to point to the importance of the question of what makes Christianity civil (Wuthnow, 1996: 41 ff.). Of course, there are important traditions within the Christian tradition that give support and credibility to constitutional democracies. The dignity of each human person as an image of God, the Golden Rule as a means to impartial judgment on the interests of all concerned, the norm of compassion to friends and foes, the idea of the inner worldly time as an unrepeatable test to improve one’s faith as well as the conditions of this world – all of this was a cultural precondition for developing an ethos of human rights and democratic institutions. Yet to make Christianity a supportive force of civil society, churches, and denominations themselves had to undergo considerable change. Churches and denominations – as well as other religions – had (and continuously have) to ‘‘integrate ideas of human freedom, representative government, human rights, and human flourishing’’ into their message (Farina, 2007: 24). This leads to a task still to be undertaken by humanities and social science. The connection between civic engagement by churches and denominations and regime change in favor of democracy is far from being understood. It seems to be helpful to ask under which circumstances and under which internal religious and intellectual conditions churches and denominations are capable of developing and nurturing role models of citizenship and political participation. Finally, taking the fact into account that churches and denominations are important resources of today’s civil society, more comparative empirical research is needed to better understand their crucial role in contemporary societies. This will pose multilevel and multiarena problems of analyses, and it involves serious measurement problems in order to correctly chart the cultural variations within the reality of civil society (Andolina & Jenkins, 2005: 76–78; Liedhegener, 2007). Comparative empirical research also implies a move from simple correlations between organized Christian religion and civic engagement to explicit explanations and model building. A better understanding of the complexity of mutual interactions, inherent connections, and more or less causal relationships is crucial for the success and societal relevance of this research. Studying churches and denominations will thus contribute much to the ongoing and growing public interest in better understanding the social and cultural foundations of modern democracies and civil society.
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Cross-References
▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Christianity ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Christianity ▶ Religious Orders ▶ Religious Organization ▶ Social Capital, Definition ▶ Volunteers
References/Further Readings Ammerman, N. T. (2005). Denominationalism/congregationalism. In H. R. Ebaugh, (Ed.), Handbook of religion and social institutions (pp. 353–371). New York: Springer. Andolina, M. W., & Jenkins, C. (2005). Citizen engagement measurement. In S. J. Best, & B. Radcliff, (Ed.), Polling America. An encyclopedia of public opinion (Vol. 1, pp. 74–81). Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press. Anheier, H. K., & Toepler, S. (2002). Bu¨rgerschaftliches Engagement in ¨ berblick und gesellschaftspolitische Einordnung. Aus Europa. U Poliltik und Zeitgeschichte, B(9), 31–38. Bane, M. J., Coffin, B., & Higgins, R. (2005). Introduction: Taking faith seriously. In M. J. Bane, B. Coffin, & R. Higgins (Eds.), Taking faith seriously (pp. 1–17). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Casanova, J. (1994). Public religions in the modern world. Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press. Chaves, M. (2004). Congregations in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davis, M., & Liedhegener, A. (2007). Catholic civic engagement at the local level. The parish and beyond. In A. Liedhegener & W. Kremp (Eds.), Civil society, civic engagement and catholicism in the US (pp. 241–255). Trier: WVT. Fix, B., & Fix, E. (2005). Kirche und Wohlfahrtsstaat. Soziale Arbeit kirchlicher Wohlfahrtsorganisationen im westeuropa¨ischen Vergleich. Freiburg i.Br.: Lambertus. Gabriel, O. W. (1999). Sozialkapital und Institutionenvertrauen in ¨ sterreich und Deutschland. In F. Plasser (Hgg.), Wahlen und politische O ¨ sterreich (pp. 147–189). Frankfurt Einstellungen in Deutschland und O a.M.: Lang. Gabriel, O. W. et al. (2002). Sozialkapital und Demokratie. Zivilgesellschaftliche Ressourcen im Vergleich. Wien: WUV. Gensicke, T., Picot, S., & Geiss, S. (2006). Freiwilliges Engagement in Deutschland 1999–2004. Ergebnisse der repra¨sentativen Trenderhebung zu Ehrenamt, Freiwilligenarbeit und bu¨rgerschaftlichem Engagement, in Auftrag gegeben und ed. vom Bundesministerium fu¨r Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend, vorgelegt von TNS Infratest Sozialforschung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Herbert, D. (2003). Religion and civil society. Rethinking public religion in the contemporary world. Aldershot: Ashgate. Huntington, S. P. (1991). The third wave. Democratization in the late twentieth century. Norman/London: University of Oklahoma Press. Kaldor, P., Dixon, R., & Powell, R. (1999). Taking stock. A profile of Australian church attenders. Adelaide: Openbook Publishers. Lichterman, P. (2006). Elusive togetherness: Church groups trying to bridge America’s divisions. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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Liedhegener, A. (2007). Civic engagement by religion. American civil society and the catholic case in prespective. An introduction. In A. Liedhegener & W. Kremp (Eds.), Civil society, civic engagement and catholicism in the US (pp. 3–15), Trier: WVT. ¨ ffenLienemann-Perrin, C., & Lienemann, W. (Eds.) (2006). Kirche und O tlichkeit in Transformationsgesellschaften. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular. Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 64–78. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone. The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R. D. (Ed.) (2002). Democracies in flux. The evolution of social capital in contemporary society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruiter, S., & de Graaf, N. D. (2006). National context, religiotiy, and volunteering: Results from 53 countries. American Sociological Review, 71, 191–210. Smidt, C. (Ed.) (2003). Religion as social capital. Producing the common good. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Stadelmann-Steffen, I., Freitag, M., & Bu¨hlmann, M. (2007). FreiwilligenMonitor Schweiz 2007. Zu¨rich: Seismo Verlag. Spieker, M. (Ed.) (2003). Katholische Kirche und Zivilgesellschaft in Osteuropa. Postkommunistische Transformationsprozesse in Polen, Tschechien, der Slowakei und Litauen. Paderborn: Scho¨ningh. Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Henry, E. B. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wuthnow, R. (1999). Mobilizing civic engagement: The changing impact of religious involvement. In T. Skocpol & M. P. Fiorina (Eds.), Civic engagement in American democracy (pp. 331–363). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Wuthnow, R. (2002). Religious involvement and status-bridging social capital. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41, 669–684.
CIRIEC FRANCISCO MARTINEZ
Address of Organization Baˆtiment B33 – boıˆte 6 BE-4000 Lie`ge Belgium www.ciriec.ulg.ac.be
Introduction The Centre International de Recherches et d’Information sur l’Economie Publique, Sociale et Coope´rative (CIRIEC – International Center of Research and Information on the Public, Social, and Cooperative Economy) is an international, nongovernmental scientific organization focused on the social economy and the public sector. CIRIEC develops its own research and publications and organizes
several events to strengthen the international community of researchers, managers, and interested people.
Brief History In 1908 Edgard Milhaud, a french economics Professor at the University of Geneva, founded the journal Annals of Collective Economy. In order to ensure the continuity of the journal, the ‘‘International Centre of Research and Information on the Collective Economy’’ was founded by Milhaud in 1947. After 10 years of activity, financially endorsed by Swiss benefactors, the headquarters of the association was transferred to the University of Lı`ege in Belgium, where it has operated until present time. During the last decades the international presence of CIRIEC was strengthened through the foundation of national sections in 12 countries (Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey). A membership system was designed for organizations and institutions from countries where no official section exists.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas The main objective of the organization is to collect and publish information and scientific research on the topics of ‘‘economic sectors and activities oriented towards the service of the general and collective interest.’’ Although not exclusively, mainly three sectors fall into the scope of investigation: the State and the regional public authorities in regards to their economic policy and regulations capacity; the public and mixed enterprises across the national, regional, and municipal levels; and the social economy sector. Through its activities, CIRIEC seeks to provide useful information and opportunities not only for researchers, but for managers as well.
Activities CIRIEC still edits the Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, which is published since 1995 by Blackwell Publishing at Oxford, United Kingdom. The journal is published on a quarterly basis and features ‘‘high quality theoretical and empirical articles providing information of interest to both academics and practitioners, in the following fields: enterprises with public participation, new economy of regulation, networks economics, public utilities worker participation, nonprofit organizations, cooperatives, social economy, and related topics.’’ The complete journal in a printed format can be accessed at CIRIEC main offices and an online version is available from 1925 onwards at the Blackwell Publishing website. In addition, a large amount of working papers and reports
Citizens Coalition for Economic Justice
are available for public access on the institution website and a new series of publications called the ‘‘Social Economy & Public Economy Series’’ was announced in 2008. CIRIEC also organizes events periodically to gather the research and managerial community. An international research conference is held every 2 years (odd years) and a biennial international congress (even years) is organized to gather a broader audience which includes both researchers, managers, and participants related to the social economy sector.
Structure and Governance The general administration body is structured in several instances: an executive committee called the Praesidium; the Board of Directors, composed by delegates of the national sections of the organization; the biennial General Assembly which meets on occasion of the international Congresses; and the International Secretariat who provides the daily management. The research activities are coordinated by the International Scientific Council.
Cross-References
▶ Cooperatives and Employee Ownership ▶ Social Economy
References/Further Readings Fecher, F., & Le´vesque, B. (2008). The public sector and the social economsy in reply to: The annals (1975, 2007): Towards a new paradigm. Annals of Public & Cooperative Economics, 79(3/4), 679–727. Geerkens, E. (2008). From the annales de la re´gie directe. Annals of Public & Cooperative Economics, 79(3/4), 417–460.
Citizens Coalition for Economic Justice SANG PEEL PARK
Address of Organization 50-2 Dongsoong-dong, Jongro-gu 110-809 Seoul South Korea www.ccej.or.kr
Introduction/Brief History Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice (CCEJ) was founded in 1989 by 500 persons representing various walks of life, such as economics professors, lawyers, housewives, students, business people, etc., in response
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to the extremely unjust structure of Korean economic life. The main founder of CCEJ was Kyungsuk Suh, who was a conservative minister. In Korea, rapid economic development over the last 30 years has brought wealth to the giant ‘‘chaebol’’ business groups singled out by the government, and has raised the per capita GNP to more than $10,000. In this process, however, equitable distribution has been forgotten, environment gravely damaged, and democratic development postponed. The priority on industrialization and urbanization has alienated large groups and areas and created wide structural gaps, even risking collapse of the economic system. Before CCEJ came into being, there were few organizations to point out the structural problems of Korean economy and to engage citizens in the economic reform movement. Therefore, the appearance of CCEJ significantly drew the attention of the Korean people to economic justice.
Mission/Objectives CCEJ’s mission is to achieve economic justice through citizens’ power with the belief that the deep-rooted economic injustice cannot be cured by government alone, but ultimately must be solved by the organized power of citizens; the fruits of economic development should be shared by all the common people, not just the small group of ‘‘haves.’’
Activities Its major activities are in the areas of economic policy research, economic justice campaign, urban reform, anticorruption vigilance, local self-government, and reunification of Korea, international solidarity, etc. It publishes the monthly magazine Civil Society, written in English.
Structure and Governance CCEJ is structured in the general assembly as the highest legislative organ, co-representative, steering committee, executive committee, and secretary general. Under the secretary general, there are six departments, which are composed of executive committee members. CCEJ has also around 30 branches across the nation. It pursues civil action led by ordinary citizens, using legal and nonviolent methods, seeking workable alternatives, speaking for the interests of all people, regardless of economic standing, and overcoming greed and egoism in order to build a sharing society.
Funding As of 2008, CCEJ has approximately 20,000 members and 60 full-time paid staff members. Membership dues cover around 50% of the total budget. Other funds are
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filled up by donations, various projects, bazaar, and so forth. The annual budget of the year 2008 is US$1.2 million.
Major Accomplishments From the beginning of 1989, CCEJ has campaigned for solving the housing problem of the urban poor. By initiating campaigns to prohibit speculative real estate business, to expand the quantity of leased houses, and to secure the right of renters, CCEJ urged the government to make practicable plans and stable housing policies. As a result, a housing lessee protection law was revised. With this, it accomplished many economic reforms, such as independence of the Korean Bank, introduction of a real-name system for all financial transactions, fair taxation, and activation of local self-government.
Cross-References ▶ Social Justice
References/Further Readings Park, S. (2005). The introduction to NGO studies. Seoul: Arche (Korean).
Citizenship DIETER GOSEWINKEL Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, Germany
Introduction Citizenship has become one of the most influential concepts of social science as well as political debate after World War II. It is used by sociologists and anthropologists, legal experts, as well as historians. The topic of citizenship is linked to a broad variety of issues. Citizenship and citizenship rights are a major theme in debates over the development of the welfare state. They also serve as political concepts for the mobilization and participation of citizens. Citizenship is a central legal institution to ascribe voting rights and the duty of conscription. In political as well as scientific debates on migration, national identity, and its limits all over the world, the idea of citizenship has come to play an increasingly important role. In attempts for transnational and supranational community building the institution of citizenship, in particular European citizenship, is an increasingly important issue both in politics and scientific literature. In general, the fundamental theoretical categories for the analysis of
any society or community, inclusion and exclusion are perfectly well exemplified by the institutional structure and practical working of citizenship. The political and practical relevance of citizenship thus goes far beyond the scientific context. It is deeply rooted in the history of the concept. Like many political concepts citizenship has developed from a political claim to a concept of legitimation. From its very beginning it has been closely linked to individual claims for autonomy, for the recognition of individual rights, as well as for equality against status differences. The use of the concept of citizenship ranges from the particular national level to a universal global meaning. As a principle of political order, citizenship always refers both to the state as well as to society. It thus represents a fundamental precondition for the existence of civil society and shapes its practice.
Definition In political theory, one can broadly differentiate between three conceptualizations of citizenship. According to Giesen and Eder (2001) an individualist, a political, and a collective identity paradigm can be distinguished. While the individualist paradigm based on individual liberties and welfare entitlements is realized in petitions of rights, the political paradigm interprets citizenship as a pattern of civic duties and obligations which are mainly practiced in a strong public sphere. Finally, the collective identity paradigm leaves the individual level and starts from the assumption of a predominantly cultural set of common values and traditions converging in a common sense of belonging. These conceptualizations, based on a wide range of historical variations of citizenship, can be reduced to two core meanings which apply to all of the historical phases that the formation of citizenship as subject and concept has undergone. Citizenship means membership in a political community as well as a form of active behavior toward the community which constitutes the good and responsible citizen. These two meanings constitute the general definition of citizenship. Like membership, citizenship can – but does not need to – be based on a common set and belief of belonging which gives a common ground and internal stability to the community. It always confers, however, the status of equality among all citizens with respect to the rights and duties that the status implies. The form of membership varies between merely cultural and political types of belonging, especially in ancient societies, and legal forms of membership which have increasingly developed in the modern state. Citizenship as modern legal membership
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in a state or community has to be differentiated according to two meanings. First, as a mere formal, legal status of membership, citizenship is equivalent to nationality as a legal institution. It designates the status of being the national of a state or member of a local community. Citizenship in a material sense means a set of individual rights which in general are attached to the formal status of membership in a political community. This type of material legal citizenship has found its classical formulation in the work of Thomas H. Marshall, who analyzed citizenship as a set of rights according to three main categories: civil, political, and social rights (Marshall, 1950/1992: 8). Marshall’s evolutionary interpretation of citizenship as a sequential development of these three types of rights became the point of departure for the theory and definition of citizenship after World War II. The second meaning of citizenship as good civic behavior completes the membership status. It derives from the model of the ancient Greek city-state citizenship that was ideally and practically linked to democracy by the civic virtues of an active ‘‘citizen,’’ which permitted him to ‘‘share in the polis,’’ a politically active and autonomous community. Citizenship in the meaning of good civic behavior is linked to both the political and the collective identity paradigm of citizenship. The obligation of active engagement in the polity and the more passive commitment to commonly shared values and convictions are interpreted as an essential prerequisite both of citizenship and of civil society (Giesen & Eder, 2001: 6).
History The historical origin of citizenship is European. While every human group has developed institutions by which to define its members and procedures for making new members, the Greeks were the first society to combine the legal provisions of membership with a political theory of membership virtues and institutions in order to perpetuate their idea of citizenship. The legal status of citizenship established equality among Athenian citizens in terms of their rights and obligations. The status of equal membership marked privilege vis-a`-vis nonmembers. Apart from the legal framework, the concept of Athenian citizenship included a set of citizen values, behaviors, and communal attitudes. Roman citizenship – more complex, expansive, and legalistic than its Greek counterpart – revealed the development of citizenship from an instrument for defining the city-state community to one for the legal integration of an extensive world empire. With the loss of a central, universal legal structure at the end of the Roman Empire, citizenship became obsolete as a political concept.
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Christianity rejected the model of political order to which ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle and Cicero, had contributed. It developed a complete and alternative system of social and moral values that helped establish a new institutional political order. A system of multifaceted loyalty replaced the citizen’s concentrated loyalty to the state. The lack of a centralizing and nationalizing state power in parts of medieval Europe left room for the growth of a strong, urban citizenship, particularly in the city-states of northern and central Italy (Heater, 1990: 23). The theory and political order of state sovereignty in European absolutism, with its concentration of central state power and its unambiguous claim to loyalty, prepared the ground for a national rather than local concept of modern citizenship. The personal and territorial delimitation of sovereign states and the ordering of their international relations increased the necessity to define membership in and allegiance to the state. The call for individual rights of religious freedom and selfgovernment, strengthened by religious opponents of the state, and revolutionary efforts to found governments upon popular sovereignty, for example in England, were the predecessors to active citizenship. The eighteenth century brought a breakthrough in the defining of citizenship, with political theory and institutions at its core. In the American and French Revolutions the word ‘‘citizen’’ – and its French equivalent, citoyen – became a key concept in the legitimation of the political struggle against the feudal ancien re´gime, as well as in the struggle for equality before the law, freedom from religious discrimination and arbitrary arrest, the extension of political rights, and popular democracy. From this point onward, citizen, citizenship, and citoyennete´ became core terms of a state order based on democracy and constitutionalism. The key concept of citizenship (citoyennete´) in the French Revolution combined four traits that were to become essential for the development of citizenship throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: an egalitarian, anti-feudal impetus; confirmation as a key concept of the legal constitution; an association with extensive individual rights; and finally, nationalization. The modern concept of citizenship arose together with the concept of the nation-state and became one of its central legal institutions. The age of revolution and constitutionalism in the Western world was also an age of an increasing delimitation of national citizenries. Extended citizenship law came to define membership in the nation-state as well as the rules of naturalization policies. Citizenship and citizenship law (in the sense of nationality
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law to define formal membership in a nation-state) became key instruments for defining national identity (Gosewinkel, 2003) and controlling migration in a modern world characterized by increasing transnational mobility (Brubaker, 1992). The central function of citizenship in defining membership in the sense of nationality was supplemented by a second main function, i.e., conferring upon the citizen individual rights vis-a`-vis the state. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Western constitutional states extended the range of civil, political, and, increasingly, social rights that were reserved mainly for their own citizens. The nationalization of citizenship as a membership status corresponded to a nationalization of citizens’ rights. Citizenship became an institution for distributing ‘‘life opportunities’’ in a world of nation-states. As the importance of citizenship as a legal entitlement increased, its extension to new members became more and more contested within the national citizenry. The struggle for inclusion, in European as well as in American constitutional law, dominates the history of citizenship to this day. The gradual extension of equal civil rights to groups resident on the nation-state’s soil who had been denied citizenship rights and were subjected to discrimination on the basis of ethnic or national origin, religious beliefs, social status, or gender, determined the direction that citizenship was to take. The claims of discriminated groups to equality became the motor for full inclusion in the community defined by citizenship. With the decline of liberal democracy, the rise of radical nationalism, racism, and totalitarian dictatorship in the constitutional states of Europe and Asia, the period between the two world wars represented an interruption in the development of modern citizenship. The dominance of ascriptive national, ethnic, or racial criteria in admission to citizenship, the splintering of the citizenry through hierarchical classes of rights, the withdrawal of civil rights and massive expatriation of millions destroyed the core of equality within the concept of citizenship. The rise of an army of stateless people deprived of rights and protection revealed how dependent citizenship was on the liberal legal structures of the nation-state. To summarize, the historical development of citizenship from its beginning in the Greek city-states has been characterized by a multiple process of expansion. Citizenship as a historical concept developed in Europe. It expanded from a membership status in a local community to a central membership in the territorial nation-state. Citizenship as entitlement to individual rights was transferred from the level of the nation-state to that of supranational communities. From its inception in the
Greek city-communities, the concept and ideal of citizenship has spread beyond Europe all over the world to states based on the principle of constitutional democracy. The substantive program of citizenship as a set of individual rights has expanded from political and civil to encompass social and economic rights, and ultimately, cultural and environmental rights as well.
Key Issues While the relevance of citizenship as an institution of modern society as well as an instrument of social analysis is commonly recognized, its conceptualization is under debate. This is mainly due to the increasing practical importance of citizenship as a membership status, as a set of rights and obligations as well as a standard of legitimizing – particular – feelings of identity and modes of civic action. To the degree that citizenship became an institution of inclusion into the (welfare) state or national citizenry and an instrument of struggles for recognition (Fraser & Honneth, 2003), the academic debate over its function, reach, and limits assumed an increasingly political impact. Conceptualization Under Debate
Thomas Marshall’s concept of citizenship, which had been developed in the immediate post-World War II period and in the heyday of the Western welfare state, was thus subject to criticism from various perspectives. The most important lines of criticism particularly focus on historical, social, and territorial ‘‘frontiers’’ (Vogel & Moran, 1991: xii). Marshall’s analysis of the development of citizenship as a sequence of civil, political, and social rights is deeply rooted in the social and economic history of England as the starting point and pattern of worldwide industrialization. Its Anglocentric orientation differs sharply from the generalized, sometimes even universalistic language of the analysis not only in Marshall’s account but even more in its wide reception by social science. Marshall’s abstract language of ‘‘the universal status of citizenship’’ in its connection with ‘‘basic human inequality’’ (Marshall, 1950/1992: 6, 44) invites generalization despite the temporal and geographical contingency of its context. There is a wide range of critique. First, predominantly agricultural or culturally different societies – in Europe or beyond – which were not marked by centralized industrial modernization like England did not offer the same structural opportunities for the development of the idea and practice of individualism, equality, and rights. Second, Marshall’s analysis, with its inherent idea of expanding rights, is linked to the Western welfare state in the heyday
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of its development after World War II. It loses explanatory force in times of decline of public welfare institutions and state power in general due to processes of liberalization and deregulation in Western industrial societies since the 1970s. Third, the Marshallian model of a sequential development of civil, political, and social rights does not fit into every Western, or even Western European state. In Germany, for example, the development of a system of social insurance rights at the end of the nineteenth century became a widely accepted model in the industrial world. It preceded, however, the implementation of equal political rights which could not be established durably before the end of World War II. In France, moreover, civil and social rights for women were recognized far earlier in the course of the first half of the twentieth century than political rights which were implemented only after World War II. Fourth, the focus on social, particularly on class struggles, to explain the inherent force of citizenship development faces objections of two kinds. On the one hand, the concept of ‘‘social’’ in Marshall’s analysis is criticized as being far too narrow. Gender, for example, as a social category and an argument for hierarchical discrimination and withholding rights, was not only a contingent aspect but a fundamental structure of modern citizenship from its very beginning (Vogel, 1991a: 58–85; Siim, 2000: 13). On the other hand, the particular focus on social struggles to explain the upsurge and persisting relevance of citizenship is criticized and enlarged by a broader conception of struggles for recognition which end up with the codification of rights. The recognition of cultural difference (Fraser & Honneth, 2003) as an argument for the implementation of rights paves the way for a new category of cultural rights which are based on claims for cultural identity. These claims may be oriented toward the recognition of individual rights, e.g., sexual rights, as well as collective rights, e.g. ethnic group rights (Isin & Wood, 1999). What these lines of critique have in common is that they do not want to give up the Marshallian model, but they want to modify and adapt it to new contexts in order to enlarge it and to include even more types of rights. Nationalization – Internationalization
Citizenship as a membership status refers to a personal relationship between an individual (or a group) and an institution. From its origin, however, this relationship always included a territorial aspect. Citizenship as a status of full membership could only be realized within the territorial frame of a state, nation-state, city, etc. In the age of the nation-state the interrelation between the territorial reach of (nation-)state power and the status of
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membership became particularly close. The nationalization of citizenship meant that the right to hold and exercise most of the rights of a citizen was derived from birth or stay in the territory of a nation-state. Increasingly, systematic controls of the territorial boundaries of nationstates regulated the right to residence as a precondition for naturalization and citizenship. Citizenship as a status of nationality became the precondition for most of the elementary rights conferred or protected by the state. The line between inclusion and exclusion was sharply drawn by the status of citizenship within a territory. This model of inclusion and exclusion underlies the Marshallian model of citizenship without being mentioned explicitly. This is criticized by recent literature which demonstrates another – territorial – ‘‘frontier of citizenship’’ (Vogel & Moran, 1991: xiii). Its point of departure is the change and partial decline of the territorial bindings of citizenship. One basic reason is the eminent upsurge of cross-national migration after World War II due to fundamental political and economic changes: the postwar economic boom, decolonization, the opening of the communist systems in Europe and Asia, as well as an unprecedented phase of globalization in world economy. This new quality of mobilizing citizens all over the world to move and work abroad has changed the basic assumptions of national citizenship regimes (Castles & Davidson, 2000). The discrepancy between the place of birth and the place of permanent residence, increasing intermarriage and a growing need for the social integration of longterm residents with foreign citizenship led to changes in the legal regulation of membership. The national regulation of citizenship and nationality, encouraged by new developments in international law, is now gradually admitting multiple nationalities. Citizenship regulations are negotiated between nation-states in bilateral or multilateral agreements. Territorial residence and personhood – instead of ethnic descent – more and more legitimize the exercise of individual rights which had hitherto been reserved to members of the nation-state (Soysal, 1994). The denationalization of citizenship can also lead to alternative forms of territorialization. This becomes evident in supranational institutions like the European Union (EU). EU law is developing a particular kind of supranational membership status, European citizenship, which is designed to confer specific ‘‘European’’ rights upon citizens from EU countries. Apart from this still rudimentary form of supranational citizenship there is a wide range of specific rights and entitlements particularly in the social and economic domain recognized by EU jurisdiction. These rights are detached from national
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citizenship and the territory of the nation-state (Weiler, 1999). They are, however, connected to a new territoriality: the European Union. Citizenship and Civil Society
Citizenship and civil society can be interpreted as interdependent. The degree of interrelatedness depends on the concept of civil society: Civil society can either be conceptualized as a specific quality of ‘‘civil’’ interaction (Gosewinkel & Rucht, 2003: 49) or as an intermediary sphere of action between the state, the economy, and the private sphere where associations organize and act publicly and in self-determination. If one follows an ‘‘associational’’ concept of civil society (Walzer, 1995: 153), a common ground of civil society and citizenship consists in a specific legal framework. Both the exercise of citizenship rights and the activities of civil society actors are based on the codification and judicial enforcement of individual rights, particularly civil and political rights, e.g., the freedom of speech and association and the right to vote. Historically, this junction goes back to the Age of Enlightenment. The renaissance of civil society theory during the second half of the eighteenth century was closely linked to the idea of natural law and often resulted in the claim for individual, constitutional rights. Theoretically, the link between citizenship and civil society can be conceptualized in the following ways: First, citizenship as a political institution serves as an ‘‘interface’’ between the organization and the individual relating state and civil society, government, and the people (Giesen & Eder, 2001: 4; Janoski, 1999: 12). Second, citizenship rights are an instrument of participation in the public sphere as the genuine sphere of civil society (Cohen & Arato, 1992). Thus, changes in the concept and practice of citizenship rights, e.g., the shift from national to transnational rights, contribute to the redefinition of the sphere of civil society (Soysal, 2001: 160, 172). Third, according to a communitarian perspective, civil society as an associational network serves as a school for the values and virtues of a good (democratic) citizen. While this perspective is disputed by liberal theory (Kymlicka & Norman, 1995: 294, 296) there is consensus about the interrelation of the two concepts: Civil society has come to need citizenship as the codification and practice of rights and values; in turn, citizenship presupposes civil society as a space for organizing and practicing individual and diverse concepts of freedom.
Future Directions Developments after World War II, in Europe and beyond, were characterized by a dual tendency. On the one
hand, the restoration of liberal democracy, particularly in Western Europe, saw a reconstruction of citizenship. This was reinforced and extended to the global arena after 1989 with the end of ideological-block confrontations and the adoption of democratic and constitutional patterns by most of the formerly communist states. On the other hand, there is also evidence of a tendency toward some ‘‘devaluation’’ and weakening of citizenship. (Fahrmeir, 2007) The weakening of nation-state structures, the trend toward transnational political unions, global standards, and guarantees of civil rights as human rights have all diminished the importance of (national) citizenship for the conferral of individual rights. While formal citizenship is still crucial on the level of the right to full participation in the political arena, this no longer applies to economic and social rights. Citizenship as national membership status is of decreasing importance for the exercise of these increasingly relevant rights (Soysal, 1994: 136). This trend for the devaluation of citizenship is joined by the expansion and possibly overstretching of the concept. Historically, citizenship’s efficacy as a claim for rights was always based on political sovereignty – be it monarchical or popular. This was a prerequisite both for addressing individual claims and enforcing the corresponding civil duties. With the pluralist expansion of citizenship rights to new kinds of conflict-ridden, often controversial claims for identity in a situation of declining nation-state sovereignty the answer to the question ‘‘Who guarantees and enforces claims for citizenship?’’ becomes less clear.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society, Definitions of and Approaches ▶ Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Walzer ▶ Civility ▶ Communitarianism ▶ Human Rights ▶ Identity ▶ Marshall, Thomas H. ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Brubaker, R. (1992). Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Castles, S., & Davidson, A. (2000). Citizenship and migration. Globalization and the politics of belonging. London: Macmillan Press. Cohen, J., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Civic Action Fahrmeir, A. (2007). Citizenship. The rise and fall of a modern concept. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or recognition: A politicalphilosophical exchange. London: Verso. Giesen, B., & Eder, K. (2001). European citizenship: An avenue for the social integration of Europe. In K. Eder & B. Giesen (Eds.), European citizenship between national legacies and postnational projects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gosewinkel, D. (2003). Einbu¨rgern und ausschließen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangeho¨rigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2nd ed.). Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gosewinkel, D., & Rucht, D. (2003). History meets sociology. Zivilgesellschaft als Prozess. In D. Gosewinkel (Eds.), Zivilgesellschaft – national und transnational (pp. 29–60). Berlin: Edition Sigma. Heater, D. (1990). Citizenship. The civic ideal in world history. Politics and education. London: Longman. Isin, E., & Wood, P. (1999). Citizenship and identity. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Janoski, T. (1999). Citizenship and civil society. A framework of rights and obligations in liberal, traditional, and social democratic regimes. Cambridge: University Press. Kymlicka, W., & Norman, W. (1995). Return of the citizen: A survey of recent work on citizenship theory. In R. Beiner (Ed.), Theorizing citizenship. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Marshall, T. (1950/1992). Citizenship and social class. London: Pluto (Reprint 1992). Siim, B. (2000). Gender and citizenship. Politics and agency in France, Britain and Denmark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soysal, Y. (1994). Limits of citizenship. migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago, IL: Chicago Press. Soysal, Y. (2001). Changing boundaries of participation in European public spheres: Reflections on citizenship and civil society. In K. Eder & B. Giesen (Eds.), European citizenship between national legacies and postnational projects (pp. 159–179). Oxford: University Press. Vogel, U., & Moran, M. (Eds.) (1991). The frontiers of citizenship. London: Macmillan. Vogel, U. (1991a). Is citizenship gender-specific? In U. Vogel & M. Moran (Eds.), The frontiers of citizenship (pp. 58–85). London: Macmillan. Walzer, M. (Ed.) (1995). Toward a global civil society. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books. Weiler, J. (1999). The constitution of Europe. Do the new clothes have an emperor? And other essays on European integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Civic Action GIOVANNI MORO FONDACA, Active Citizenship Foundation, Rome, Italy
Introduction Though widely diffused the concept of civic action is not clearly defined, nor has it a well-established meaning. For example, civic action is referred to enabling people to
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make sure legislators hear their voices; to building knowledge on important issues and take action through campaigns to change the behavior of public and private institutions; to citizens becoming more active members in their community; up to a military force operating in favor of civilians including dental, engineering, medical, veterinarian activities. Civic action neither has a precise placing in scientific community. References to this concept can indeed be found in the literature on collective action and social movements, on participatory democracy, on advocacy, on political participation, on community organizing, on social networks, on social capital, on direct democracy, on volunteerism, on stakeholder theory, etc. (cf. Andriof, 2002; Della Porta & Diani, 2006; Rubin & Rubin, 1992). In this situation, therefore, what has to be done is not to choose the most updated, comprehensive, and precise definition of the concept, but rather to identify the kind of reality the concept would refer to. Starting from this concern, it can be noticed that, in the civil society discourse, what distinguishes this concept from close others is the focus on the practices that the citizenry carry out in order to fulfill general or common interest goals, rather than on forms, motivations, kind of actors, etc. Starting from this essential element a definition and a more precise content of the concept can be fixed.
Definition Civic action can be defined as a form of citizenship practice consisting in mainly collective initiatives aimed at implementing rights, taking care of common goods or empowering citizens. It can be addressed both to governmental or private interlocutors as well as to the general public. It implies the exercise of powers and the use of specific tools on the citizens’ side. The general distinguishing elements of this definition of civic action can be summarized as follows: ● It is related to the participatory component of citizenship, but going beyond the exercise of the right to vote. ● Also in case it addresses the political establishment, it is an autonomous practice of the citizenry, well distinguished by the traditional political participation through parties. ● It is about the fact that citizens engage themselves in common or general interest activities, rather than about issues like the fields of engagement, the organizational structures or the operational patterns (e.g., advocacy or service delivery); in other words, it is about the way citizens act rather than the way they get together.
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● It requires some degree of organization to be really effective and is therefore based on the ability of citizens engaged in common problems to gather and collectively act. ● It implies the exercise of citizens’ powers in the public realm, such as the powers to produce information and knowledge, to change the common awareness, to give the ‘‘social license to operate’’, to constrain public institutions to effectively work, to change material conditions, etc. ● Despite civic action being a widespread phenomenon, which does not depend on the political regimes, it is related to a constitutional role that citizens’ activities acquire in the evolution of democracies, often defined in terms of horizontal subsidiarity.
Historical Background It can be stated that civic action came into the fore together with a double process affecting contemporary societies, and especially democracies, starting from the 1960s. On one side, a weakening of the effectiveness of State structures and operations, due to a number of factors (localism, increased power of private companies, financial crisis of welfare systems, etc.), while on the other side a growing autonomous political subjectivity and an enriched and more concrete meaning of citizenship emerged in civil societies. In relation to this process, citizens’ initiatives from the local to the global levels expanded and increased their impact in the public realm, influencing a number of relevant policies and the public policy making styles and habits themselves. In particular, the public significance of non-state actors’ practices devoted to the general interest definitely spread. The growing diffusion and importance of civic action can be accounted as a part of this broad phenomenon (cf. Pierre & Guy Peters, 2000).
Key Issues Enabling Factors
A number of factors can favor the implementation of civic action. Four of them can be distinguished. There are, first of all, material conditions, in this case of the utmost importance since civic action requires an amount of energy definitely bigger than voting. Verba et al. (1993) identify three of them. A first category of material conditions is the availability of resources such as time; money and other goods to be mobilized; and civic skills, i.e., organizational and communicational abilities like the one of speaking in public or organizing a meeting.
Another kind of condition regards motivations, that is, a good cause to be involved in. A last kind of condition is the existence of recruiting structures, that meaning that the presence of a preexistent organization can make easier to take civic action. Secondly, social capital can be considered as an enabling condition for civic action. Social capital can be defined as the links of reciprocity, cooperation, and trust that connect individuals in society (Putnam, 1993). More the social capital, more civic action is likely to take place. A third enabling condition for civic action is the civic culture, intended as the set of norms and habits, visions, symbols, behavioral models characterizing individuals as members of a democratic society (Donolo, 1992). For example, if among the patterns of the civic culture there is the responsibility of citizens to take care of their neighborhood, civic action is favored. A last condition enabling civic action can be defined as civic dimension, meaning the attitude of a society as a whole to consider the engagement of citizens in public affairs as a worthy resource or as an ordinary habit. If a strong civic dimension exists, the taking place of civic action is facilitated (Moro, 2005). Summarizing, it can be stated that, when a texture of social capital, a strong civic dimension, a rich individual civic culture and some material conditions (time, resources, and civic skills; strong motivations and recruiting structures) do exist, civic action is more likely to take place. Repertoires of Civic Action ‘‘Technologies’’
What are the main tools of civic action? Taking what worked out by Charles Tilly on social movements (cf. Traugott, 1995), there can be identified repertoires of civic action tools, intended as sets of routines that are learned, shared, and acted out according to specific situations, needs, and goals. These tools can be considered as technologies, meaning with this term systems of operational rules based on a specific knowledge. Starting from these assumptions, there can be identified four repertoires of civic action technologies, that can be illustrated using some examples coming mainly from European experience (Table 1). Technologies of Direct Action
In this category tools that citizens can activate by themselves, without the consent or the involvement of other actors, are included. The Charters of rights are documents that specify how rights established in laws and regulations in a general way and therefore often not implemented, should be
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Civic Action. Table 1 Repertoires of civic action technologies Repertoires
Examples of technologies ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Charters of rights Advice and counseling structures Monitoring and production of data and information Symbolic actions Information and awakening actions Proximity information Conflict management Establishment of services
Mobilization of resources
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Recruiting Fund raising Mobilization of technical resources Gathering of signatures and support Boycott Gathering and diffusion of good practices Education and training Use of information technologies Use of media
Interlocution
● ● ● ●
Roundtables Agreements Participatory planning, budgeting, etc. Partnerships
Public institutions’ activation
● ● ● ●
Claims and complaints Implementation of bodies and procedures provided by laws Lobbying Legal (civil) actions
Direct action
Source: Adapted from Moro (2005)
protected (with regard, for example, to patients, children, immigrants, etc.). They are used also at the end of favoring the recognition and promotion of new rights. Advice and counseling structures are services enabling citizens to get information, expert knowledge and support in case their rights or common goods are at risk. The technology of monitoring and production of data and information refers to the, usually but not necessarily recurring, gathering of data and information regarding a concerning situation or functioning of a service. Its outputs are often reports. Symbolic actions are initiatives with a high degree of visibility aimed at stimulating a reaction of interlocutors and involving the public in an unsolved or unrecognized question, creating a strong pressure and catalyzing public attention. Information and awakening actions are devoted to increase the citizens’ awareness of a problem or an opportunity related to a public interest through meetings, advertisements, publications, etc. Proximity information consists in the activation of people trusted by the citizens affected by a problem and able to give them direct and reliable
information and answers on relevant questions. Conflict management includes those activities aimed at prevent or minimize damages coming from tensions and clashing interests between individuals or groups in a number of issues, from service delivery to interethnic relations. Establishment of services refers to the creation and delivery of services that answer to needs or rights not proteted adequately or not protected at all by public institutions. Technologies of Mobilization of Resources
This category includes those technologies of civic action that are aimed at raising people, means, and money needed for the achievement of the planned goals. Recruiting consists in the involvement of people in a project, a campaign or a long-term or permanent initiative, on the base of their link with a problem, commitment with the mission of the organization, abilities related to the goal of the action, and so on. Fund raising is the collection of financial resources for the fulfillment of the goal of the action. Mobilization of technical resources regards the gathering of those means that are needed for
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the civic action, usually through donations or on loan. Gathering of signatures and support can go from complex initiatives as a referendum proposals to more simple ones such as petitions. Boycott is a tool aimed at damaging the reputation of public or private bodies, whose behavior is against citizens’ rights or common goods, making the continuing of this behavior counterproductive. Gathering and diffusion of good practices refers to the share – through catalogs or databases, for example – of good practices in the management of public issues, e.g., practices aimed at improving the efficiency or the quality of utilities or the attitude to listen to the citizenry. The aim of this tool is to trigger an emulation chain. Education and training refers to all the actions aimed at facilitating the increase of knowledge and abilities of citizens in protecting rights and taking care of common goods, thus empowering them. The use of information technologies refers to the internet tools available for campaigning, informing, protesting, promoting petitions, etc. The use of the media refers to those activities – press releases, press conferences, dossiers, and reports, letters to the editor, newsletters – able to activate the media in support of a citizens’ cause. Technologies of Interlocution
In this cluster are grouped tools of civic action that favor and make as much effective as possible citizens’ relation with public institutions and with private actors – whatever of dialogue, confrontation, or conflict. Roundtables consist in convening representatives of bodies engaged in a relevant issue in order to discuss the situation and how to address it, often in the presence of the whole concerned citizenry. With the agreements, that can have various forms, actors engaged in a issue of citizens’ concern publicly undertake to develop programs, activities, and behaviors to face the problem and put them in a common agenda. Participatory planning, budgeting, etc. is the involvement of the affected citizens in planning and taking binding decisions on relevant issues such as urban planning or welfare spending. Though usually coming from public administrations, in case it is promoted and lead by the citizenry it can be considered a tool of civic action. Partnership refers to projects and programs promoted and implemented by a group of citizens together with one or more public or private actor, sharing objectives, resources, and risks, and in which the results have an added value. Technologies of Public Institutions’ Activation
This category refers to those civic actions that are aimed at pushing or forcing public institutions to implement laws
and regulations that contain principles, bodies, and procedures related to the protection of citizens’ rights or the care for common goods. The common starting point of these tools is that citizens’ engagement is necessary to make those institutions and procedures effectively work. Claims and complaints are reports, requests, or call for intervention that citizens (also as individuals) can address to public institutions in relation to a problem or a need, that activate a check, an answer and consequent actions on the institutions’ side. Implementation of bodies and procedures provided by laws refers to law instruments that can be effectively implemented thanks to citizens’ intervention. Varying on the base of national (or EU) legislation, they can regard for example the access to information, the quality standards of services, the ombudsman, etc. Lobbying is a well known tool consisting in pressing political and administrative authorities to change laws, regulations, and public budgets in favor of a right or a common cause, with reference to a specific decision-making process. Legal action is the use of jurisdictional resources by citizens as individuals and/or as organizations. According to the various national judicial systems, opportunities to use criminal, civil, or administrative action to protect a citizens’ right, to constrain the judicial system to fill gaps and clarify ambiguities in laws and regulations, to shed light to concerning but not known situations, to force powerful actors to change their behaviors are available. Challenges
Due to its growing relevance in contemporary societies, civic action is challenged by some questions of the utmost importance. Three of them can be mentioned and summarized as follows. Civic Competence
People engaged in civic actions require a growing amount of knowledge and expertise in order to effectively face the problems they are dealing with. But this competence is not taken for granted. On one side, in general there are several information asymmetries that affect all the actors of the public realm, including citizens. On the other side, the ability of citizens to have an adequate expertise is often questioned. This lack of ability is supposed concerning three different elements (Dahl, 1998): the moral competence (the knowledge of what is good and what is bad for public interest); the virtue (the agency needed to pursue the common good); the technical competence (the knowhow needed to make effective that virtue). On the contrary, it can be argued that citizens engaged in public problems that directly affect them are able both to develop a specific knowledge of situations on their
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own, and to use the advice of experts to get into the ‘‘black box.’’ Moreover, the task of protecting rights and caring for common goods is related to a moral competence, i.e., a perception of the general interest related to specific situations, and a commitment, or an agency, to the general interest as well (Caddy, 2004; Moro, 2004). In addition, according to Aaron Wildavsky (1993), when citizens’ participation is intended not as a general, holistic (and therefore unworkable) attitude, but as a policy-centered one, it is possible to satisfy the basic conditions for citizens’ participation: understanding what is at stake, distinguishing between big and small changes (so that perceiving the utility of participation), and being continually involved, thus learning from experience. In public policies, citizens – acting as ‘‘analysts’’ – are indeed able to choose an issue, to collect and accumulate information and to use it acting together with other citizens, influencing the course of them. Representation and Representativeness
In spite of the idea that direct citizens’ action is the opposite of representation, it is a matter of fact that citizens engaged in civic actions, especially as organized entities, do exercise representative functions. These functions involve both the meanings of the concept of representation: ‘‘to speak for’’ and ‘‘to act for’’ someone or something else. Among the ‘‘speak for’’ phenomena, there can be mentioned several civic actions that are carried on with the aim to give voice to weak or marginal people (e.g., illegal immigrants or prisoners), or even to the whole society (for instance, in consumer issues) when not to subjects not yet living (the future generations in environmental actions). Among the ‘‘act for’’ phenomena there can be mentioned agreements and memoranda of understanding signed by citizens’ groups with public or private actors, implying that measures are effective for the whole concerned people. A number of problems, though, raise: overrepresentation of the stronger and wealthier parts of population, living room to the ‘‘extreme voices’’ rather than to the average citizen, lack of accountability of those that take action, priority given to the leaders to the detriment of the targets, and so on (Skocpol & Fiorina, 1999). These problems would be addressed clarifying the standards and requirements that make a civic action representative of the affected people. On the other side, focusing on the actions rather than on the subjects carrying them out, it could be noticed that what is really important is not the representativeness, but rather the relevance of the action undertaken to face a specific problem or situation.
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Definition of Civic Action Standards
In the last years civic action has become more and more diffused, recurrent, and influential in public life at local, national, regional, and global levels. As a consequence, it has affected governments’ core operations much more directly and continuously than in the past. This circumstance has given place to negative or suspicious attitudes towards civic action, often considered as a threat or an obstacle for the functioning of public institutions and the activity of the representative democracy actors. On this regard, the need for the definition of a set of standards of civic action especially when it interacts or interferes with public institutions, has emerged. For example, the European Charter of Active Citizenship, promoted in 2006 by Active Citizenship Network (ACN, FONDACA, 2006), establishes a set of rights to civic action vis-a`-vis public institutions. The most relevant is the right to intervention: ‘‘Whenever citizens’ rights and general interests are at stake, autonomous citizens’ organizations (ACOs) have the right to intervene with opinions and actions, as well as publicly disclosing the actions and/or omissions which may have an effect on such rights and general interests.’’ Other relevant rights included in the Charter are: the right to carry out prevention activities, to consultation, to access, to evaluate, to a qualified interlocution, to respect of time, to trust and equal dignity, to facilitation and support measures. These rights, or others set up in similar documents, can be considered as starting points for defining standards for civic action in the public realm.
International Perspectives The major difference in civic action, as it results from the international debate and consolidated knowledge, is the one between American and European perspectives (cf. Tocqueville, 1969; Putnam, 1993, 2000). It can be summarized as follows: while civic action is a constitutive element of American democracy as relevant part of the attitude of citizens to get together and set up associations, in Europe it is a more recent phenomenon, coming from the weakening of traditional political and social forces, such as political parties and trade unions. The main differential factor is the role of the State in facing public problems and in legitimizing non-state actors, which is much more relevant in Europe rather in the United States. As a consequence, in Europe civic action still tends to be considered at the same time as a resource and a threat for the sake of public institutions (Active Citizenship Network, 2004).
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Future Directions Future directions in research on civic action involve mainly a reinforcement of the concept and a more in-depth analysis of the phenomenon. This development can be expected, because of the growing attention towards the role of autonomous citizens’ initiatives in the public sphere, with emphasis given to practices rather than to forms. In this framework, various topics could be dealt with. One is the meaning of civic action, going from the constitutional (horizontal subsidiarity) to the operational one (participatory governance). Another concerns the relationships with interlocutors of civic action, focusing on the conflict-cooperation continuum. A last one regards impacts and knock-on effects of civic action.
Pierre, J., & Guy Peters, B. (2000). Governance, politics and the state. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work. Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone. The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (1992). Community organizing and development. New York: Macmillan. Skocpol, T., & Fiorina, M. P. (Eds.) (1999). Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Traugott, M. (Ed.) (1995). Repertoires and cycles of collective action. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Tocqueville, A. (1969). Democracy in America. New York: Anchor Books. Verba, S., Lehman Schlozmann, K., & Brady, H. E. (1993). Voice and equality. Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wildavsky, A. (1993). Speaking truth to power. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Citizenship ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Collective Action ▶ Lobbying ▶ Participation ▶ Social Audits ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Subsidiarity
References/Further Readings Active Citizenship Network (ACN). (2004). Public institutions interacting with citizens’ organizations. A survey on public policies on civic activism in Europe, from http://www.fondaca.org/misc/Download/ Rapporti%20di%20ricerca/%20organisations%20-%20A%20survey %20on%20public%20policies%20regarding%20civic%20activism %20in%20Europe.pdf; 11/25/2008. ACN, FONDACA. (2006). European charter of active citizenship, from http://www.fondaca.org/misc/Download/Documenti/EuropeanCharter ofActiveCitizenship%20FINAL.pdf; 11/25/2008 Andriof, J. et al. (Eds.)(2002). Unfolding stakeholder thinking: Theory, responsibility and engagement. Sheffield: Greenleaf. Caddy, J. (Ed.) (2004). Evaluating public participation in policy making. Paris: OECD. Dahl, R. (1988). Democracy and its critics. Yale: Yale University Press. Della Porta, D., & Diani, M. (2006). Social movements. An introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Donolo, C. (1992). Il sogno del buon governo. Apologia del regime democratico. Milano: Anabasi [The Dream of Good Governance. Apology of Democratic Regime]. Moro, G. (2004). Citizens’ evaluation of public participation. In J. Caddy (Ed.), Evaluating public participation in policy making (pp. 109–126). Paris: OCED Moro, G. (2005). Azione civica. Conoscere e gestire le organizzazioni di cittadinanza attiva. Roma: Carocci [Civic Action. Knowing and Managing Active Citizenship Organizations].
Civic Agency ALAN FOWLER University of KwaZulu Natal, Western Cape, South Africa
Introduction The term ‘‘civic agency’’ enjoins two concepts with lineages stemming, respectively, from ancient Mediterranean politics of governing an (urbanizing) community and from modern sociology. Their coupled history is associated with the emergence in the seventeenth century of nationstates and their subsequent conflicted (internal) consolidation and colonial imposition as sovereign geopolitical units on the world stage. This process set in play an association of ‘‘civic’’ with an uneven, and as yet incomplete, evolution in identity of the world’s polity as citizens. However, the advent and content of citizenship as a distinctive feature of a polity is itself problematic. Difficulties in definition and interpretation stem largely from modernization of societies driven by the private accumulation of capital and (collectivized) reactions to it at different times and places. These processes emerge as systemic ‘‘political projects’’ that contend for recognition and supremacy in terms of beliefs about what society should be and what is at stake for whom in attaining this future condition (Dagnino, 2008: 27). In so doing, political projects ‘‘frame’’ identities of actors – such as citizens – and label problems to be solved in ways that are codetermined by power divisions and relations within and between societies. Against this backdrop, contemporary understandings of citizenship place civic agency as a value-based mode of
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sociopolitical expression which is increasingly allied to rights-based perspectives on the relationship between polity and state. In other words, today, civic agency is located within normative debates about a desired form and quality of governance, with democratization as a pivotal feature of discussion. One consequence is that civic agency cannot be properly understood outside of contested meanings. Nor can it ignore different scales of the historical geographies in which meanings play out. In other words, ascription of civic agency is mediated by power over signification or labeling (Moncrieffe & Eyben, 2007). This phenomenon occurs within ever-changing contextual conditions that connect from individual to global order. These observations signal that definition and comprehension of civic agency are not straightforward. The approach to doing so is therefore iterative. It begins with a working definition. Thereafter, a sequential discussion of ‘‘agency’’ and ‘‘civic’’ provides the grounding for examining interpretations about their linkage.
Definition Civic agency connects political theory with purposeful sociopolitical action by persons who enjoy a minimal condition of meaningful citizenship, i.e., there is at least respect for the ‘‘right to have rights’’ (Dagnino, 2005: 5). Environments with a minimum respect for the right of all to have their say and be socially engaged are a precondition for civic agency. Where this precondition is not fulfilled, notions of a public realm and civic agency remain a theoretical potential but cannot operate in a practical sense. Civic agency is a predisposition toward, and a capability for, leading life together with others in a society and being concerned for the whole. Agency which is considered civic incorporates a basic principle of an equitable, democratic society. Agency
In a comprehensive treatment of the topic, Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 963) argue that agency has not been adequately addressed as an analytic category in its own right. This shortcoming is attributed to theorists’ preoccupation to demonstrate and explain the interpenetration of structure and agency. Their analysis to redress this lacuna posits an iterative, temporal process of reflection through which people gain and apply a responsive capacity to (problematic) situations as they arise (ibid: 970). In this view, agency is an interplay between (1) past routine, experience, and learning, energized by (2) images of a desired future situation, which is then (3)
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situationally judged for achievability and risk, from which action may or may not be taken. In this reflexive sense, inaction is also an action. Results of (in)action feed into capabilities and future decision processes leading to a constantly self-developing and updated condition of capability, appraisal, and decision choice. At a given moment, any one of the three elements determining agency dominate, but all are present in agentic processes. For these authors, therefore, agency is defined as "
the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments – the temporal-relational contexts of action – which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment both reproduces and transforms these structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. (Ibid: 970)
Thus, agency is one category in a total repertoire of human behavior. It is co-defined by orientation of personal or group action toward the stabilizing, enabling, and constraining forces of social norms and values embedded in institutions (Walker & Ostrom, 2007). Agency can thus be interpreted as an investment in a future that people care about. It is precisely the nature, breadth, and depth of caring that ‘‘civicness’’ is concerned about. Agency is a pathway for a continual updating of self as a conscious identity. This condition is part-attained through relationships with others from which reputation and social capital are built and maintained. The reflexive experience of agency is an important factor codetermining what is perceived (not) to be in one’s interest. More critically, agency is a mechanism through which meanings are communicated, preferences are expressed, and correspondence or divergence with others is found. The latter are typically labeled in a normative way, for example, as antagonistic or irrelevant or indeterminant. Agentic action can therefore be understood as a ‘‘project’’ to be undertaken alone or in collaboration or in conflict with others. Human agency is ‘‘projected’’ toward a preferred future whose image is to be realized through practical action. One critique of this analytic lens is that there is inadequate attention to layering of scales of agency and evolution in terms of human processes of becoming, learning, and associating. Agency of early childhood is, initially, more conditioned by affinities of family, community, and physical proximity. Wider sources of influence are filtered and transmitted through these intermediaries until selfawareness and self-reflection gain an upper hand. The range or circle of a persons’ agency expands over time toward identification of self in a structural context. This evolution produces values and attitudes toward others as well as identification of affinities, such as citizenship, and of
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life experience, for example a shared livelihood, role, or profession. In this sense, formative worldviews generated by early socialization are insufficiently delineated as axiomatic self-referents influencing agency in later life. For purposes here, it is sufficient to note that temporal trajectories are intergenerational. Limits to a distance in the past or imaginings of future along which agency plays out are indeterminate. Moreover, human values are malleable. Consequently, identities associated with intergenerational processes and the forces that give meaning to life experiences are critical for addressing a normative approach to agency. The authors do not attempt this task. Values – such as good or bad agency – cannot be derived from their definition. The concepts of civic, civicness, civility, and citizenship introduce such a normative directionality. Civic
In Heater’s account (2004) the earliest references to ‘‘civic’’ are allied to the concept of citizenship associated with a sociopolitical status accorded within Spartan communities and the governance of Athens as a citystate. The corresponding tasks, authority, and accountability of citizenship were accorded to selected individuals – propertied elites exhibiting valor, virtue, and commanding influence. Women, slaves, laborers, and craftsmen were excluded from this rank. Exclusion was the norm. Citizens were recognized as political beings with rights to wield the power required to protect and ‘‘justly’’ oversee and govern the affairs of rural communities and of urban city-states. There was stringent attention to citizens properly discharging their mutual duties which called for particular ‘‘civil’’ behavior in terms of constrained self-interest for the overall good. That which emerged as ‘‘civic’’ – a normative property of citizenship – included responsibility for the proper servicing and management of public areas and of investments and resources derived from the functioning of the whole populace. Historical analysis shows citizenship transforming from exclusive power with normative prescriptions of virtue and probity toward a legal status for those ruled under the Roman Empire. The granting of citizenship to those within the Roman realm was seen as a prudent measure – a sort of compelled quid pro quo – to ameliorate resistance to taxation. In return for state protection a citizen’s required behavior was loyalty, allegiance, and obedience toward Rome and its edicts. Citizenship thus evolved into a judicial status allocated by the state as a single political authority. These ancient principles underpinning citizenship – as a morally virtuous, public caring, or as a deferential and
compliant behavior – continue to resonate in contemporary perspectives on civic agency within the context of statehood. Sovereign statehood as the unit of geopolitical organization established a precondition from which arose a formalized link between citizenship and rights (codified by the United Nations in 1948). "
And so we come to citizenship. This defines the relationship between an individual not to another individual (as is the case with feudal, monarchical and tyrannical systems) or a group (as with nationhood), but essentially to the idea of the state. The civic identity is enshrined in the rights conveyed by the state and the duties performed by individual citizens, who are all autonomous persons, equal in status. Good citizens are those who feel allegiance to the state and have a sense of responsibility in discharging their duties. As a consequence they need the skills appropriate for this civic participation. (Heater, 2004: 1)
The works of T. H. Marshall (1950, 1964) are oft-cited landmarks in defining three key elements of citizenship in the modern era. Drawing on a somewhat narrow history of Britain, he argues for a historical sequence in the content of citizenship, beginning with attaining rights associated with individual liberties of speech, thought, faith, and equality before the law. Thereafter arose a political element expressed in the franchise to both define (as an elected member) and take part (as a voter) in the political system. Though not mutually exclusive, Marshall’s third, social, element has been variously interpreted. One approach relies on attaining social or socioeconomic rights in terms of access to public welfare. Another perspective gives primacy to the psychosocial dimensions of rights. This perspective hinges on a self-realization of a civic identity within complex mosaics or layers of identity, meaning, attitudes, and driving energies toward social issues and choices of preferred futures. The latter interpretation is more attuned to the concept of agency as previously described. Civic Agency
Agency is the decision process and capability to pursue individual or collective action – that is, practical investments to bring about a desired future society. Associated with the rights of citizenship, civicness introduces normative behaviors for applying agency as a right and a duty. A first condition is that agentic action is directed at change which consciously takes into account concerns of the whole rather than of a narrow self. Second, an imperative for moral virtues would rely on the selfwilled responsibility of people to act in ways that are
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civil. Volunteering would be viewed as such behavior. A loyalty imperative would treat civility as compliance and conformity – behaving as a state requires and expects. In either case, what would civility entail? One line of argument links civility to political culture: that is, citizens’ perceptions of political engagement, legitimacy, and traditions. Here, a positive interplay is conceived between a ‘‘natural’’ emergence and dominance of civic values leading to democratic forms of governance, a form of politics which is more cost-effective for society than (authoritarian) coercion (Almond & Verba, 1963). More recent arguments concentrate on the content of civicness itself, through the lens of civility. There are "
three elements that together constitute civility. The first element is respect for others, ‘‘Civility is basically respect for the dignity and the desire for dignity of other persons.’’ The second element is civility in public behaviour towards strangers, ‘‘[C]ivility equips us for everyday life with strangers . . . we need neither to love them nor to hate them in order to be civil towards them’’. . . . The third element is self-regulation in the sense that civility requires empathy, putting one’s own immediate self-interest in the context of the larger common good and acting accordingly. (Anheier, 2007: 46)
The first element, dignity, is implicit to equality in human interaction and a basic principle of human rights informing citizenship in theory if not in consistent national practices. Stemming from recognition of common humanity, the second element calls for a worldview and relational stance that is inclusive and tolerant of difference. Such a principle is manifest, for example, in the African concept of ubuntu, a moral philosophy of identity as a collective self (Louw, 1999) and in the premodern roots of philanthropy. The third element embodies a ‘‘social duty of assistance’’ that is argued to be intrinsic to human nature (Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991: 23). It also defines a prescriptive rule for agency as ‘‘projection into the future.’’ Akin to the second element, in psychological terms it equates to adequate ‘‘projection of self ’’ into the life world of others, leading to willing self-restraint. The associated principle is found in the enjoinder ‘‘only do unto others as you would have done to yourself.’’ Incivility would exhibit the opposite characteristics: behaviors are disrespectful, exclude, and denigrate ‘‘the other,’’ and pursue selfish exploitation. Marshall’s three elements of citizenship and the above normative specificity give theoretical and practical substance to the definition of civic agency. But they obscure issues stemming from theoretical biases and contemporary political contentions about language and social futures that are themselves embedded in a global
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hegemonic discourse. A concluding critical framing of civic agency is therefore still required.
Key Issues and International Perspectives Contemporary debates impacting on civic agency revolve around two issues. Both have international dimensions. These are the problem of theoretical disjuncture and mislocation of civic agency, a process allied to the elision of language and meaning in ways that systemically distort citizenship discourse. Second is to critically review the link between civic agency and the politics of democracy and (re)democratization. Mislocating Civic Agency
Much enquiry into civic agency exhibits a logical inconsistency. It does so by ‘‘locating’’ civic agency primarily within, and as a distinctive attribute of civil society. This location is often understood as a Habermasian public space for communication, information, debate, and exchange bounded by state, market, and family. However, as sociopolitical categories, citizenship and civic agency are not amenable to reframing in terms of location within a particular institutional ‘‘sector’’ or ‘‘space.’’ Such analytic simplification can be useful for some purposes, but not in this case. Sectoral differentiation within a society distorts the essence of what citizenship and civicness are about. It does so in ways that recast their ontology toward a particular political project associated with liberal capitalism. Disembodied from the enduring rights and duties of citizenship and fixated on civil society organizations, placing civic agency in institutional category introduces a potentially narrowed and apolitical separation from roots of politics and rights. Aside from a Western bias and common lack of attention to asymmetries in power, one reason for questioning a sectoral analysis is the potential to understate or ignore the degree of market and state penetration into the Third Sector – as civil society is also (mis)labeled. An increasing infiltration of market principles and state oversight of civil society is influencing ‘‘civic’’ in terms of its selfunderstanding and its projects. Though highly variable across the world, the resource base and functions of civil society – as a (nonprofit) sector – are heavily influenced by commodification and reliant on surpluses derived from market transactions directly or via redistribution through taxation. And, increasingly, access to taxation is premised on the provision of services where citizens as claimants become needy beneficiaries and the victims of poverty requiring charity. Citizenship is recast from a legitimate claiming of rights toward integration in society as compliant consumer or producer of public goods.
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In the process, poverty, inequality, and exclusion are transformed from issues of justice and equality attendant to rights-based citizenship to technical problems of public management, charity, and philanthropy to ensure minimum survival. As Dagnino demonstrates, unless such processes are properly labeled and markets are ‘‘civilized,’’ the substance and meaning of citizenship, and hence civic agency, will be subordinated to logic of unbounded personal wealth. A further argument against sectoralization of civic agency stems from the deeper ‘‘securitization’’ of territory as a signal feature of statehood. Reflecting Foucault, modern governing has an imperative toward controlling a future filled with unknown events. State responses to recent events of terrorism highlight uncivil potentials and practices as well as ambivalence toward civil society as a location for (un)civil agency. As identified by Sidel (2004), states regard civil society both as a source of uncertainty and insecurity as well as a remedy for instability through promotion of inclusion and outreach to the marginalized. Civil society is coming under scrutiny and state influence to a pressing degree. An alternative consistent with the definition and arguments provided so far is to recognize and name the necessity for agency that is civic in all walks of life. Put another way, citizens functioning within states, markets, families, and civil society can all act in civil or uncivil ways as they define and act to create an imagined future. It is precisely the fact that agency is within ‘‘everyone, everywhere,’’ so to speak, that applying ‘‘civic’’ norms to business can lead to the notion of ethical markets and corporate citizenship (Zadek, 2001). It can produce unlikely champions of ‘‘civilized’’ capitalism such as George Soros. Similarly, civic norms often underpin reforms of public management such that agency of government employees is really ‘‘civil’’ by volition and commitment, as opposed to deploying a ‘‘govern-mentality’’ toward citizens and change. And, as feminist analysis strongly shows, family and patriarchy are also systems and sources of (un)civil behavior that can affect the whole today as well as carry into the future by shaping the experiential worldviews, imaginations, civility, and agency of subsequent generations. The challenge, therefore, is not to permit a discourse on civic agency which allows responsibility for the whole to be passed off, sectoralized, or located into a civic arena such that the rest of a society’s institutions at any sociopolitical level are able to go about uncivic business as usual. What then of civic agency and civil society? Does an allocational error mean that civil society is simply on a par with other locations within society in terms of civic agency? One view is that (transnational) civil society actors have a greater potential and necessary obligation to deploy their
‘‘pre-emptive’’ civility in service of conflict prevention and resolution (Ezzat & Kaldor, cited in Anheier, 2007: 48). The mechanism involved is one of fostering mutual respect and providing pathways for communication and dialogue. This aptitude was ‘‘naturally selected’’ because it helped reduce transaction costs and attenuate instabilities arising from conflicts of interest as capitalism evolved. A different, contemporary analysis spans a wider geography. In this view, civil society continues to generate and harbor factional identities and their public actions. Contestation between faiths is but one example. With enhanced communication and network effects, civil society actors are more ready and capable for disruptive assertion as much around fine-grained local issues and disputes as around incidents commanding international attention. Positive cases of civil society promoting civicness are notable, but over-cited because they are relatively rare and gain media hype. They cannot gather the power to successfully tackle deep structural dysfunctions of international governance and markets. Moreover, reflecting Anheier’s contemporary concern and as a historical trait or not, civility within civil society is being undermined by identity politics, insidious marketing, branded memberships, alienation, and unbounded inequality. These processes are allied to political manipulations that stress differences over commonalities, feeding anxieties that reinforce a state’s right to shrink civic space and citizen’s freedoms. In sum, there are contradictory interpretations that do not allow an uncontested conclusion about the ‘‘civilizing’’ potential for civil society on society as a whole. Civic Agency and Democratization as a Political Project
Accompanying the issue of understanding or defining civic agency from a sector perspective is a critical area of politics with local to global dimensions. This terrain can be understood in terms of a polity defining a state project toward an imagined better society. Civic agency presumes and requires the right of all citizens to influence the commanding image and ways of getting there. However, it need not and does not necessarily follow that this can only to be achieved via a party-based, electoral-process mandating representative. Indeed, there is accumulating evidence – such as decline in voting – to suggest that relying on this method may have reached its historical limits (Marquand, 2004). An analysis stemming from, but not limited to, the United States identifies factors that conspire to work against civic agency as a force in politics. "
We live in a hyper-regulated world that constrains agency on every side, a world of hidden manipulations, standardized programs, mass mobilizations, and bureaucratic
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interventions. In a memorable turn of phrase, the South African writer Xolela Mangcu has termed the invisible virus spreading through modern societies that erodes agency ‘‘technocratic creep.’’ (Boyte, 2008)
It is argued that solutions are not to be found by improving mass mobilization through political parties (Michels et al., 1999). These processes are oft-proven to be sites of manipulation and control by elites over future image and shared identity. Nor is it likely to be found by enhancing ‘‘participation.’’ Too seldom are the associated rules of the game and the nature of participants subject to unconditioned co-definition and symmetry in power over outcomes. An alternative future perspective is called for.
Future Directions A remedy to mislocation of civic agency and apolitical labeling can be sought in enhancing capacity for civic agency as a self-reflective source of energy. Such a capability entails insightful readings of power and discerning of ‘‘truth.’’ The latter involves understanding the contending uses of language, recognizing ways in which reality is (re)constructed by mass media and by other sources of information that co-define the discourses in play. Such a capability is necessary for pursuing the politics of small things (Goldfarb, 2006). This means attention to the politics of everyday life by applying the values and principles of civic agency to situations and problems as and when they arise wherever one may be – in family, in business, in civic association, in government. The application of civic agency to a multiplicity of micro-settings, relations, and transactions gives generative power for directing how societies change. It is beyond the scope of this entry to elaborate on practical methods. The forwardlooking point is to employ the notion of civic agency to reinvigorate political engagement in a deep sense of active citizenship.
Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civility ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Identity ▶ Interest Politics ▶ Political Society ▶ Uncivil Society
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References/Further Readings Almond, G., & Verba, S. (1963). The civic culture. Boston, MA: Little Brown. Anheier, H. (2007). Bringing civility back in – Reflections on global civil society. Development Dialogue, October. Burchell, G., Gordon, C., & Miller, P. (Eds.) (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. Dagnino, E. (2005). Meanings of citizenship in Latin America. Working Paper 258, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton: University of Sussex. Dagnino, E. (2008). Civic driven change and political projects. In A. Fowler & K. Biekart (Eds.), Civic driven change: Citizen’s imagination in action (pp. 27–49). The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency?. The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4): 962–1023, from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2782934 Goldfarb, J. (2006). The politics of small things: The power of the powerless in dark times, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heater, D. (2004). A brief history of citizenship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Klein, N. (2000). No logo. London: Flamingo. Louw, D. (1999). Ubuntu: An African assessment of the religious other, from http:/www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Afri/AfriLouw.htm Marshall, T. (1950). Citizenship, social class and other essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, T. (1964). Class, citizenship and social development. New York: Doubleday. Michels, R., Lipset, S., & Paul, E. (1999). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. Moncrieffe, J., & Eyben, R. (2007). The power of labelling: How people are categorized and why it matters. London: Earthscan. Sidel, M. (2004). More secure, less free. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Walker, J., & Ostrom, E. (2007). Trust and reciprocity as foundations for cooperation: Individuals, institutions, and context. Paper presented at the Capstone Meeting of the RSF Trust Initiative at the Russell Sage Foundation, May.
Civic Culture LOEK HALMAN Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Introduction The issue of civic culture has become popular again recently. Robert Putnam’s (1993) study on why democracy works, the idea that culture is an important determinant in contemporary society, the rise of political apathy among voters in advanced industrial democracies, the widespread decline of political trust among mass publics,
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the difficulties of (re)establishing civic society in Eastern European countries, the assumed growing levels of intolerance, the assumed weakening of norms of civility, and the supposed decline of good citizenship have all fueled the debates about the good society, good governance, and the future of democracy. It is generally accepted that the latter cannot exist if citizens are indifferent, uncommitted, not engaged, and not involved, and are lacking the attitudes and behaviors that are supportive to democracy and democratic processes. The civic culture was a hot and much discussed topic in the 1960s, not in the last place because of Almond and Verba’s (1965) groundbreaking study on political involvement in democratic states. Their study originated in the postwar period when democracy was challenged severely. The authors were ‘‘concerned with the question of why some democracies survive while others collapse’’ (Verba, 1980: 407), not only because social and political scientists at that time were still looking for explanations of why democratic regimes were replaced by totalitarian ones, but also because of the insecurity of the recently established democracies in Germany and Italy, and because it was doubted whether the French Fifth Republic would be democratic at all. Further, the developments in Asia and Africa demonstrated that the requirements for stable democracies were apparently not fulfilled. One of the requirements is that all ‘‘citizens be involved and active in politics, and that their participation be informed, analytic, and rational’’ (Almond, 1980: 16). The current renewed interest in civic culture arises from strong concerns about the survival of democracy and democratic institutions. Although it seems that the principle of democracy as an ideal form of government is overwhelmingly supported all over the world, citizens, particularly in the more advanced industrialized societies, appear to have become much more critical toward their governments and political institutions. There seems to be a ‘‘growing tension between ideals and reality’’ which ‘‘may have produced the emergence of more ‘‘critical citizens’’ or perhaps ‘disenchanted democrats’’’ (Norris, 1999: 27). The current interest also stems from the idea that publics appear to become less and less engaged and involved in society. Leading scholars like Putnam, Fukuyama, and Etzioni warn of the disastrous consequences of these declining levels of civic engagement for society, the social order, and the democratic process. Their worries have been labeled as, for example, the ‘‘shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft’’ or the ‘‘waning of social capital,’’ and have been concisely denoted as the ‘‘decline-of-community thesis’’ (Paxton, 1999: 88). There is a strong belief that engagement and active participation are indispensable in
a democratic polity and essential for the well-functioning of any decent society (Bellah et al., 1992: 6). Etzioni (2001) argues that we need to be not merely a civil but also a good society, one that nurtures the good virtues. Civic engagement, political support, and involvement in politics are regarded to have ‘‘direct policy relevance in areas such as health, crime, welfare, economic growth, the performance of political institutions, and the development of effective and democratic governance’’ (Maloney et al., 2000: 213). Influenced by such scholarly works, in their turn, many politicians and society watchers claim that a growing number of citizens are indifferent and skeptical about politics, and too narrowly focused on pure self-interest. This is considered a severe threat to the respect for human rights and human dignity, liberty, equality, and solidarity. In their view, the ‘‘good’’ civic values have declined or have even vanished, while the wrong, ‘‘bad’’ non-civic values triumph in today’s highly individualized society. No wonder that sociology and political science focus on the extent of people’s involvement in society, their engagement with communities, their interests and activities in politics, and other kinds of pro-social behaviors and attitudes.
Definition The term civic culture was coined by Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba in their seminal study on political cultures. In that study they argued that a stable and effective democratic government depends upon people’s orientations that must be favorable to the political democratic process. They concluded that a mixture of participant (active) orientations and the others (passive orientations) would be the ideal combination for a stable democracy. What seems crucial to sustain the political democratic processes in a society is a vibrant civic culture which was defined as ‘‘a balanced political culture in which political activity, involvement, and rationality exist but are balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment to parochial values’’ (Almond & Verba, 1965: 30). Thus, democratic systems require political cultures that encourage citizens’ societal engagement, involvement, and participation. Civic culture refers to a number of virtues of citizens such as responsibility, cooperation, commitment, loyalty, tolerance, solidarity, law abiding, involvement, activism, and engagement. Their ideas were based on the character qualities of the democrat that Harold Laswell had identified, and they were inspired by Charles Merriam’s innovative work ‘‘The making of citizens’’ (see Almond, 1996). The main feature of civic culture is that citizens are active and engaged in society, and as such that idea is far from new. They were, though in different wordings, already stressed
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by Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and virtually all political thinkers (see Almond, 1980), and although there seem to be ‘‘as many definitions of civic culture as there are scholars writing about the subject,’’ all seem to ‘‘stress attitudes such as public spiritedness, participation and tolerance’’ (Janmaat, 2006: 366).
Historical Background ‘‘The civic culture’’ was one of the first empirical studies using the then recently developed research technology ‘‘of sample surveys, which led to a much sharper specification and elaboration of the subjective dimensions of stable democratic politics’’ (Almond, 1980: 22). The study was not innovative theoretically, as ‘‘the theories and hypotheses which it tested were well discussed in the historical and social science literature’’ (Almond, 1996: 3), but their study was groundbreaking because for the first time in history it was possible to ‘‘establish whether there were indeed distinctive nation ‘marks’ and national characters; whether and in what respects and degrees nations were divided into distinctive subcultures; whether social class, functional groups, and specific elites had distinctive orientations toward politics and public policy, and what role was played by what socialization agents in the development of these orientations’’ (Almond, 1980: 15). Almond and Verba’s study took place in a period of a more general ascension of the idea that culture is a prominent explanatory power in the social sciences and history. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, interest in culture as determining factor declined, for one part because culture appeared difficult to measure empirically, and for another part because rational choice theories became dominant. Following the logics of economics, social phenomena were explained as the result of the rational calculations made by self-interested individuals who aim at maximizing their own individual utility. In more recent years, interest in the cultural factor and civic culture rose again, not in the last place because rational choice models appeared to have limited explanatory power, for example, to understand collective action or to understand the survival of social norms such as altruism, reciprocity, and trust. In particular, Putnam’s Italian study (1993) in which he demonstrated that government performance was linked with citizens public engagement and involvement, and Fukuyama’s (1996) claim that a society’s socioeconomic development could be attributed to levels of trust among its citizens fueled the interest in the civic culture. Such studies demonstrated that mutual trust, informal social connectedness, and formal civic engagement are at least as vital as physical, financial, and human capital for the well-being of
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individuals and broader for the society at large because they are conducive to collective actions and feelings of happiness, but also to the better performance of not only democracies but also economies (see, e.g., Beugelsdijk & van Schaik, 2003; Knack & Keefer, 1997).
Key Issues The growing interest in the civic culture was encouraged by a growing preoccupation with the decline of values, in particular those values that make us good citizens and make society and human life good. ‘‘Widespread feelings of social mistrust, citizens turning away from prime institutions and political authorities, and engaging less in informal interactions are seen as indicators of the decline of the traditional civic ethic’’ (Ester et al., 2006: 17; Bellah et al., 1992; Dekker & van den Broek, 1996; Etzioni, 1996, 2001; Fukuyama, 2000; Putnam, 2000, 2002). In the current, sometimes heated, debate, the discussion is not so much on the decline of values as such, but more on the decline of decent, (pro-)social behavior and moral decline. Many politicians and society watchers claim that a growing number of citizens are too narrowly focused on pure self-interest and not anymore committed to others and the community. It is argued that in contemporary, highly individualized, secular, and globalized order, the significance of traditional structures and ties, such as religion, family, class, has receded, enlarging the individual’s freedom and autonomy in shaping personal life. People have gradually become self-decisive and self-reliant, no longer forced to accept the traditional authorities as taken for granted. The absoluteness of any kind of external authority, be it religious or secular, has eroded. Authority becomes internalized and deference to authority pervasively declines (Inglehart, 1999). The unrestrained striving to realize personal desires and aspirations, giving priority to individual freedom, personal autonomy, and private need fulfillment are assumed to have made people mainly interested in their own lucrative careers and devoting their lives to conspicuous consumption, immediate gratification, personal happiness, success, and achievement. The growing emphasis on the individual has eroded interest and participation in public life. As Sennett (1977) wrote, we are witnessing the Fall of Public Man. Evidence of such a development is found in increasing crime rates, marital breakdown, drug abuse, suicide, tax evasion, and other deviant behaviors and practices, and the increasing disconnection from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, such as the church, recreation clubs, political parties, and even bowling leagues (Putnam, 2000). Because civic virtues, such as trust, social engagement, and
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solidarity are on the decline, and since these virtues are considered basic requirement for democracy to survive or to work properly (Putnam, 1993), contemporary society suffers a democratic deficit. Democracy is endangered because people are less and less inclined to engage in civic actions and are no longer willing to be committed to and engaged in society.
International Perspectives In The Civic Culture, Almond and Verba predicted an increasing support for democratic values, but as followup studies revealed, ‘‘such a tendency toward more widely held ‘civic’ attitudes has not been borne out’’ (Verba, 1980: 399). It appeared that people’s attitudes are strongly affected by the particular political issues which nations face and that each nation has to cope with specific crises and problems. Hence, nations follow their own trajectories and thus a much more differentiated pattern of development will be found. The authors of The Civic Culture did not, for instance, anticipate the declining resources many governments nowadays are confronted with and the rising demands from citizens; nor did they anticipate the development of modern welfare states, the modernization and individualization processes, the fast technological advancements, the integration of European states, and the recent influx of foreigners in many countries. All such developments are assumed to have severe consequences for the virtues of the civic culture and in the end for democracy. The erosion of confidence in the government is linked with the idea that contemporary democracies have become ‘‘overloaded by more and more insistent demands from an ever-expanding array of participants’’ (Putnam et al., 2000: 3; Dalton, 2004; Norris, 1999). Many contemporary democracies face a performance deficit because the state does not respond adequately to citizens’ demands (Thomassen, 1995). Contemporary citizens are more critical and demanding than before and the expansion of the welfare state created demands and expectations that governments could not meet ‘‘given the globalization of the economy, problems of government overload, and hence the ‘crisis of the state’’’ (Norris, 1999: 22). Political trust relies on the concrete policy measures taken by a government to solve these discrepancies but also by the images of politicians. The recent declines in political support in some countries, has been attributed to the personal scandals and abuses of power by political elites. It is obvious that the tendency of the mass media to report such scandals and abuses of power is conducive to increasing cynicism about politicians and politics (see also Dalton, 2004).
The current debate on the future of citizenship and civil society is directed strongly toward the negative effects of modernization and individualization processes and the severe consequences for society in general and democracy in particular. Individualization is regarded not to be very beneficial to civil society and to social solidarity because of the decline of social responsibilities and because individual citizens are less embedded in associative relations. A process of deinstitutionalization has occurred appearing as weaker societal bonds and (feelings of) detachment in society and a calculative orientation among citizens seems to prevail in the modern welfare state. It is argued that ongoing individualization will result ultimately in a society in which values, beliefs, and ideas are no longer commonly shared. Such a society is threatened by disintegration and the individual is threatened by anomie, radical individualism, and ethical relativism. Therefore communitarians argue that in order to solve the problem of individualistic, modern society a firm moral order in society should be established by (re)creating a strong ‘‘we’’ feeling and the (re) establishment of a ‘‘spirit of community’’ (Etzioni, 1996, 2001). The question is if it is realistic to assume that that can be achieved, for if one thing is clear in contemporary individualized society, such a spirit of community cannot be imposed from any authority because one of the key characteristics of individualism is that people are not inclined to accept any interference with their personal life (Inglehart 1997). The opening of Central and Eastern Europe and the democratization process that started there in the 1990s were not accompanied by economic growth and expanding welfare. As a result many Eastern Europeans became more cynical about politics in general and the fortunes of democracy in particular. The European project recently seems to have awakened nationalistic sentiments and movements from their slumber and massive migration waves into Europe seem to have triggered exclusionist reactions toward new cultural and ethnic minorities and increased intercultural and interethnic conflict (Touraine, 1994; Blokker, 2005). European unification along economic and political lines has been successful; it has brought peace and economic prosperity to its members over the past decades, but the European project is likely to fail if it remains defined along economic and political lines. The European project can only be successful if the people begin to feel and act as Europeans, and particularly become engaged Europeans. A European civic society has to develop, otherwise mutual trust, honesty, and morality will weaken and mistrust in
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European institutions and political authorities will rise (e.g., Dekker et al., 2003; Putnam, 2000, 2002). However, Europe is a complex continent; dynamic and diverse, full of histories and subtle nuances. Being a European is therefore not a simple or an obvious matter as it is to being a Frenchman or an Italian. Despite that ‘‘political institutions’’ were established and a monetary union built, a truly European society in the sense of a European community and European group identity (see also Glasius et al., 2006: 26–27) has not developed. Civil societies that exist at national and regional levels are suffocated in the process of economic and administrative harmonization and equalization. Increasingly, people perceive Europe as a threat instead of the cradle of their traditions and culture (Van de Donk quoted in Halman et al., 2005: 23). Both are rooted in civil society, and a flourishing civil society is regarded a medicine toward this ‘‘threat.’’ The creation of a European civil society will not be easy, but it is essential; the alternative is cynicism and a victory of the calculating citizen. There are other factors that erode people’s societal engagement, and their interest and participation in public life. According to Putnam, our civic engagement is endangered first of all by an increased pressure of time and money. People are simply so occupied with their work that they are unable to get civilly engaged, e.g., in voluntary activities. Secondly, people are increasingly mobile in the sense that they move so often that it is difficult for them to get acquainted with their neighbors and to engage in voluntary activities. Finally, people are increasingly watching TV, reducing the need for direct personal contact. The TV programs people watch are increasingly associated with civic disengagement: entertainment as distinct from news (Putnam, 2000: 246). Thus, increased mobility, time pressure, and the impact of technology (TV, in particular) decrease the likelihood of people being active in voluntary activities and thus have negative impact on our civic culture. However, at least the consequences of modern technology can be debated. For example, television can also be seen as an agent of socialization and creator of positive images of politics and the political system and thus be conducive to group attachment and social and political commitment (see also McBride, 1998). As Norris noted, the evidence that television is to be blamed for our political ills is not very convincing and the sources of the cynical and disenchanted publics need to be found elsewhere (Norris, 2000: 249–250). The same can be said about the use of other modern communication means such as the Internet. It has been demonstrated that the Internet
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‘‘meets citizen demand for political information’’ (Tolbert & McNeal, 2003: 184), and as such produces more politically informed, socially engaged, and interested people who are more likely to vote in elections (Gibson et al., 2000; Kavanaugh & Patterson, 2001; Karakaya Porat, 2005). Finally, the recent influx of migrant minorities and the multicultural society that is developing have provoked in many European countries an open debate on the consequences of value diversity and what exactly comprises the cultural entity and identity of nation-states. According to Kymlicka and Norman (2000: 5), multiculturalism has put a considerable strain on the norms of civility and good citizenship. An increase of minority groups and thus the rise of minority rights are issues that are considered to have severe consequences for the feelings of citizenship, cooperation, tolerance, solidarity, public involvement, and social engagement. Minorities may not be willing or able to identify with and participate in the society, while the majority may not be willing or able to recognize cultural minorities and to allow them to become full members of the society. This may very well result in, or be a consequence of, feelings of competition, mutual mistrust, and antagonism between the minorities and majority and as such feelings of citizenship, willingness to participate, and civic involvement and engagement are endangered.
Future Directions It seems likely that important issues to be addressed in future studies on the civic culture will have to focus first of all on the declining levels of political trust and increasing cynicism among mass publics and the consequences for political support. Second, attention has to be paid to the question as to how civil society and democracy will survive in a further individualizing and modernizing society. A third topic to deal with is the creation of a civil society across borders. This will be essential not only for the further advancement and proper working of the European Union, but will also be important for North America and its recently established trade agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Can such projects be successful if civil society does not develop? Further, the consequences of modern communication means, television, and the Internet have to be further explored for the results thus far are ambiguous, confusing, and not consistent. Finally, the consequences of migration for feelings of citizenship, societal participation, and civic engagement have to be studied carefully.
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Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Communitarianism ▶ Etzioni, A. ▶ Identity ▶ Participation ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Cohesion ▶ Social Trust ▶ Solidarity ▶ Uncivil Society ▶ Values ▶ Volunteers ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (1965). The civic culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (Eds.) (1980). The civic culture revisited. Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown & Company. Almond, G. A. (1996). The civic culture: Prehistory, retrospect, and prospect. Paper presented at the Center for the Study of Democracy and the Department of Politics and Society, University of California, Irvine, November 1995, from http://repositories.cdlib. org/csd/96–01 Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1992). The good society. New York: Vintage Books. Beugelsdijk, S., & Van Schaik, T. (2003). Participation in civil society and European regional economic growth. In W. Arts, J. Hagenaars, & L. Halman (Eds.), The cultural diversity of European unity (pp. 119–146). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Blokker, P. (2005). Populist nationalism, anti-Europeanism, postnationalism, and the East-West distinction. German Law Journal, 6, 371–389. Castiglione, D., Van Deth, J. W., & Wolleb, G. (Eds.) (2008). The handbook of social capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalton, R. (2004). Democratic challenges. Democratic choices. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dekker, P., Ester, P., & Vinken, H. (2003). Civil society, social trust and democratic involvement. In W. Arts, J. Hagenaars, & L. Halman (Eds.), The cultural diversity of European unity (pp. 217–254). Leiden/Boston: Brill. Dekker, P., & Uslaner, E. (Eds.) (2001). Social capital and participation in everyday life. London: Routledge. Dekker, P., & van den Broek, A. (1996). Volunteering and politics: Involvement in voluntary associations from a ‘‘civic culture’’ perspective. In L. Halman & N. Nevitte (Eds.), Political value change in Western democracies (pp. 125–152). Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Ester, P., Mohler, P., & Vinken, H. (2006). Values and the social sciences: A global world of global values? In P. Ester, M. Braun, & P. Mohler
(Eds.), Globalization, value change, and generations (pp. 3–29). Leiden, Boston: Brill. Etzioni, A. (1996). The new golden rule. Community and morality in a democratic society. New York: Basic Books. Etzioni, A. (2001). The monochrome society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Fukuyama, F. (2000). The great disruption. New York: Touchstone. Gibson, R. K., Howard, P. E. N., & Ward, S. (2000). Social capital, Internet connectedness & political participation: A four country study. Paper prepared for the 2000 International Political Science Association, Quebec, Canada. Glasius, M., Kaldor, M., & Anheier, H. (2006). Introduction. In M. Glasius, M. Kaldor, & H. Anheier (Eds.), Global civil society 2005/6 (pp. 1–34). London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Halman, L., Luijkx, R., & Van Zundert, M. (2005). The atlas of European values. Leiden: Brill. Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, R. (1999). Postmodernization erodes respect for authority, but increases support for democracy. In P. Norris (Ed.), Critical citizens (pp. 236–256). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janmaat, J. G. (2006). Civic culture in Western and Eastern Europe. European Journal of Sociology, 47: 363–393. Kavanaugh, A. L., & Patterson, S. J. (2001). The impact of community computer networks on social capital and community involvement. American Behavioral Scientist, 45: 496–509. Karakaya Polat, R. (2005). The Internet and political participation. European Journal of Communication, 20: 435–459. Knack, S., & Keefer, P. (1997). Does social capital have an economic payoff? A cross-country investigation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 62: 1251–1288. Kymlicka, W., & Norman, W. (Eds.) (2000). Citizenship in diverse societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maloney, W. A., Smith, G., & Stoker, G. (2000). Social capital and associational life. In S. Baron, J. Field, & T. Schuller (Eds.), Social capital. Critical perspectives (pp. 212–225). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McBride, A. (1998). Television, individualism, and social capital. Political Science & Politics, 31: 542–552. Norris, P. (Eds.) (1999). Critical citizens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norris, P. (2000). The impact of television on civic malaise. In S. J. Pharr & R. D. Putnam (Eds.), Disaffected democracies (pp. 231–251). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Norris, P. (2003). Democratic phoenix. Reinventing political activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paxton, P. (1999). Is social capital declining in the United States? A multiple indicator assessment. American Journal of Sociology, 105: 88–127. Pharr, S. J., & Putnam, R. D. (Eds.) (2000). Disaffected democracies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone. New York: Simon & Schuster Putnam, R. (Ed.) (2002). Democracies in flux. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Putnam, D., Pharr, S. J., & Dalton, R. J. (2000). Introduction: What’s troubling the trilateral democracies. In S. J. Pharr & R. D. Putnam (Eds.), Disaffected democracies (pp. 3–27). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sennett, R. (1977). The fall of public man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Civic Participation Skocpol, T. (2004). Diminished democracy: From membership to management in American civic life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Thomassen, J. (1995). Support for democratic values. In H. D. Klingemann & D. Fuchs (Eds.), Citizens and the state (pp. 383–416). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tolbert, C. J., & McNeal, R. S. (2003). Unraveling the effects of the Internet on political participation. Political Research Quarterly, 56: 175–185. Touraine, A. (1994). European countries In a post-national era. In C. Rootes & H. Davis (Eds.), Social change and political transformation (pp. 13–26). London: UCL Press. Van Deth, J. W., Maraffi, M., Newton, K., & Whiteley, P. (Eds.) (1999). Social capital and European democracy. London: Routledge. Van Deth, J. W., Ramo´n Montero, J., & Westholm, A. (Eds.) (2006). Citizenship and involvement in European democracies. London: Routledge. Verba, S. (1980). On revisiting the civic culture: A personal postscript. In G. A. Almond & S. Verba (Eds.), The civic culture revisited (pp. 394– 410). Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown & Company.
Civic Participation ROD DACOMBE King’s College, London, London, UK
Introduction Participation in civic life has long been considered a core element of democracy and a fundamental expression of civil society. In recent years, a range of different forms of civic participation have taken on a growing prominence in public policy debates, with governments and scholars variously promoting these activities as vehicles for citizen choice, as counters to the decline of ‘‘community,’’ and more recently, as core expressions of modern citizenship. Indeed, the involvement of people in the business of civic life is often seen as a central element of political, as well as social, life in many countries. In this context, there has been an increasing concern over the perceived decline of civic participation, with social, economic, and cultural shifts damaging the ‘‘civicness’’ of communities. Although this is by no means a matter of complete consensus, many writers have traced the decline of individual and collective participation in a diverse range of activities which they believe are partly responsible for a range of intractable social problems including persistent forms of exclusion and poverty, rising crime, and declining social trust. Questions around the level and efficacy of civic participation have therefore become highly visible in public and academic discourse.
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Definition Defining civic participation can be a complex and demanding task, and different commentators have developed myriad definitions and understandings. Indeed, most definitions are drawn from a distinct social and cultural context and are usually country-specific, making broader application problematic. As a starting point, however, one can draw on the bulk of the literature and understand participation as some form of engagement, either individually or collectively, of people in the decisions that shape their lives. From this, within much of the literature, it is possible to distinguish between forms of participation that are overtly ‘‘political,’’ which have an obvious effect on public decisions, and other, more ‘‘private’’ forms of civic participation, such as volunteering, whose effects are perhaps less tangible. At its most general, ‘‘political’’ activity might include something along the lines of the approach taken by Parry et al. (1992), who suggest that it is ‘‘taking part in the processes of formulation, passage and implementation of public policies’’ (p. 16); in other words, activity directly connected to public decisions. Conversely, Robert Putnam (1993, 2000) is perhaps the most prominent theorist discussing the ‘‘private’’ forms of civic activity. He suggests that participation in associations and social life has, in and of itself, a beneficial effect on the functioning of democratic institutions. The divide between these two forms of activity is unclear, and has traditionally been made almost arbitrarily. Within the literature it is possible to trace a great number of divisions made between, for example, political and nonpolitical activity, formal and informal participation, and secular and religious activity. Although civic participation can (and increasingly does) occur at national and supranational levels, it is commonly a local concern. Beyond the focus of the activity, Putnam (2000) distinguishes between ‘‘collaborative’’ activities, where organized group action results in civic value, and expressive action, which focuses on the individual and might include any number of activities, such as writing a letter to a public official, contacting the media, or attending a public meeting, that people can undertake of their own accord. In fact, in many countries, participation of any weight or consequence tends to be collective – indeed, for many people engagement in organized collective activity is the sole method of political participation outside of formal elections. There are, however, problems with taking too rigid an approach to defining civic participation. First, it is important to understand that indicators of civic activity (such as those sketched above) do not necessarily translate into effective participation. Second, each of these forms of participation are well-established aspects of social life in
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many countries – any definition that emphasizes these forms of participation does so at the expense of other, less mainstream action, and new and emerging forms, such as those based on the Internet. For this reason, it is necessary to include a broad range of activities within conceptions of civic participation which do not sit on a linear scale that begins with ‘‘political’’ activities and ends with ‘‘volunteering.’’
Historical Background The idea of civic participation as playing a central part in political life is nothing new. Some of the classic treatises of democratic thought have placed an emphasis on the idea of the engagement of citizens as being essential to a healthy social and political life. As such, social theorists have long drawn parallels between modern democratic practice and the participatory aspects of, say, the Greek city-state, and the New England town meeting. However, modern thinking on civic participation owes a great debt to John Dewey (1927) who was one of the first scholars to link participation in civic life with the resolution of social problems. Like many subsequent commentators, however, Dewey was despondent at the inability (as he saw it) of the state to encourage, and respond to, the information provided by civic engagement on specific social issues. Dewey echoes the concern of J. S. Mill (1861), when identifying the ‘‘problem’’ of the public’s involvement in civic affairs – that the public, to participate effectively in civic life, has to have the knowledge and capacity to engage in a meaningful way.
Key Issues Why is it that People Participate in Civic Action?
A number of approaches to explaining the participation in civic activity have been put forward. Some commentators have directly applied rational choice models to civic behavior (e.g., Downs, 1957). Effectively, this focuses on the trade-off between the costs of participation (usually time) and the benefits (such as political power and influence). These discussions are generally based around the idea of economically rational civic actors maximizing the benefits of participation while minimizing costs, and therefore suggest that engagement is likely to occur where the costs of engagement are low and the potential benefits of action are high. Elsewhere, in his classic study of group behavior, Mancur Olson (1971) differentiates between collective and selective benefits associated with participation, where collective benefits are available universally, but selective benefits are restricted to participants. More recent literature suggests that incentives to encourage collective civic activity might arise from the indirect
benefits to interaction, such as personal satisfaction and strong group attachment. Conversely, Almond and Verba (1963) focused on the context of participation, identifying a range of indicators of ‘‘civicness’’ in their study of civic life in five different countries, based on the prevailing attitudes held by citizens of their relation to government. These indicators were used to categorize civic culture into the (1) parochial, where citizens are largely disconnected from government; (2) subject, where citizens are largely passive, despite higher levels of political awareness and interest; and (3) participant, where strong relationships between citizen and government decision making are exhibited. In reality, a mixture of these characteristics is likely to be exhibited in a country. Ronald Inglehart (1990) agrees that cultural factors are also significant in setting the scene for civic participation, suggesting that particular sets of attitudes and norms of behavior are important in fostering a participatory society. Away from these arguments, it is possible to trace a strong role for the state in promoting participation. J. S. Mill (1861) thought that local government played an essential role in providing ‘‘education for citizenship,’’ stimulating the ‘‘energy’’ of local people to engage in civic life. More recently, many commentators have developed this basic idea, suggesting that civic participation has a role to play in enhancing the political ‘‘literacy’’ of society. Different governments have taken the theme of civic participation as important in the success of their social programs, adopting a range of policies that promote participation. Neoliberal administrations, such as the Conservative governments of the late 1980s in the United Kingdom, tended to frame participation largely in terms of its ability to illustrate citizen preferences and encourage competition in public services through expressions of choice. This had a knock-on effect in the kinds of participatory structures encouraged by the state, and underpinned a rise in consumer-oriented methods of participation, such as complaints and suggestion schemes and customer satisfaction questionnaires. These approaches remain influential in many countries, although successive Third Way governments across the Western world have tended to develop policies that are based on a far broader role for participation and recognize the social benefits of association. More recently, the idea of civic participation underpinning the duties expected of citizens has gained currency, with the virtues of ‘‘active’’ citizenship espoused. Who Participates?
It is possible to identify a range of theoretical approaches to understanding the likelihood of civic participation in an individual. These include ideas based on
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socioeconomic status, the level of social capital, and the prevailing institutional setting. An abundance of literature exists that identifies clear distinctions between the likelihood of different social groups participating in civic activity. Most obviously, the socioeconomic status of citizens has long been held to show a strong correlation with the level of civic participation displayed. This has generally been conceived of in terms of the resources held by people: meaning that the higher levels of education, leisure time, and ‘‘civic skill’’ have an effect on the ability of people to participate in civic life (Brady et al., 1995). Recent evidence in a number of countries has brought these ideas into sharp focus, with general trends highlighting a correlation between low household annual incomes and civic disengagement. Longitudinal data suggests that these problems are becoming more acute, with interest in politics, particularly for the lowest socioeconomic groups, declining significantly, and the gap between the highest and lowest social classes, in particular, dramatically widening in the last decades. Further work suggests that the likelihood of participation in civic activity is strongly associated with social connections and association. In recent years, the networks of trust and reciprocal activity in local areas – social capital – have been increasingly linked to civic participation across the literature. Broadly, arguments around the importance of social capital to civic participation hinge on the correlation of a number of indicators of social connectedness and civic activity. Putnam (1993) found that where civic participation was strongest, dense networks of social connections and association existed in local communities. This has demonstrable beneficial effects: statistical analysis has shown an association between participation in voluntary action and economic regeneration (Casey, 2004). Equally, Richardson and Mumford (2002) show that voluntary group involvement can change social attitudes and behavior in a local area to reduce social exclusion. Arguments around the importance of social capital to civic participation tend to focus their analysis on the importance of association to various forms of social, political, and economic activity. However important, this focus tends to neglect the significance of the institutions of the state in shaping the context in which social interaction takes place. An emerging literature is developing away from the more established material dealing with socioeconomic status and the importance of social connections and capital that suggests the relatively underresearched area of institutional design is emerging as an important conceptual tool in understanding civic participation.
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In essence, these arguments suggest that the formal institutional structures, informal practices, and prevailing ‘‘tone’’ of participation in a particular setting, all have roles to play in deciding the likelihood of participation. Variables such as language, dress, the roles assigned to participants (whether formally and informally), and who controls the topics for discussion, are emerging in research in the area as increasingly important (Lowndes et al., 2006). How ‘‘Useful’’ is Civic Participation?
The issues traced above form the basis of a number of objections raised by commentators to approaches to civic participation that emphasize its usefulness in dealing with the disengagement of citizens from public institutions, and in tackling social problems. Some of these are rooted in concerns that participation might be an inadequate mechanism for engaging citizens in public life. In particular, a number of commentators base their concerns on the assumption that the shape of modern governance and its accompanying social problems have rendered civic action impotent. In other words, that the size and complexity of modern public institutions, together with the persistence of intractable, ‘‘wicked’’ social problems, are beyond the grasp of most citizens, who lack the wherewithal and the expertise to engage effectively. Further problems have been identified around the setting and efficacy of civic participation. As outlined above, the difficulties of engaging the voices of minority groups, the less educated, and less well-connected are well-established. This immediately raises concerns over the likelihood of the marginalization of these groups in favor of the privileged and confident. At the same time, the lack of social capital traced in deprived areas by many commentators suggests acute problems with the ‘‘civicness’’ of those living in such conditions. Each of these issues and the resulting parochialism and imbalances of power, are major concerns of those who espouse civic action as a salve to some of the problems of modern governance. However, a number of commentators disagree with these critiques. Archon Fung (2003, 2004) suggests that civic action can be promoted successfully through radical participatory structures, highlighting a range of institutional reforms that have promoted effective civic engagement in a range of different countries. Sherry Arnstein is the most well-known of many commentators who have attempted to typologize the conditions where participation is most successful. She closely identified participation with the redistribution of power, with those normally excluded allowed a voice in decision making. She imagined a Ladder of Participation (1963) ranging
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from ‘‘non-participation,’’ where those enjoying power imposed themselves on participants, through ‘‘tokenism,’’ where participants are allowed a voice, but there is no guarantee of resulting action, to ‘‘citizen power,’’ where participants are empowered in decision-making processes. This concept became highly influential, particularly within urban planning, and has been extended and developed in a number of areas, including the developing world and specific fields such as resource management.
Future Directions There is a clear research agenda emerging, prompted largely by the ways in which civic participation has been embraced by the state in recent years. Core to this is establishing a greater understanding of the kinds of social groups likely to participate in different forms of civic activity, the terms of their engagement, the consequences for public policy and the legitimacy of current approaches to encouraging civic participation. In particular, questions around how far people have a responsibility to participate, and the consequences of exit, or nonparticipation, would seem to be particularly pressing, given the inclusion of civic activity in many modern conceptions of citizenship. Beyond this, the impact on participation of new technology and the Internet is not yet fully understood (Castells, 1999). Websites are now run by a great number of public agencies that directly encourage the views and input of citizens in the planning and delivery of public services. More significantly, the Internet has established a range of possibilities for new forms of connection, association, and participation that were previously not possible. These can serve as forums for sharing information and ideas, opinions and empowerment (and control) that do not sit within national boundaries, and hold the capability to generate new movements that impinge on the political and public arenas, but do not move through established institutional channels.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Action ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society Theory: Dewey ▶ Citizenship ▶ Information Technology/Internet ▶ Olson, Mancur ▶ Participation ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of
References/Further Readings Almond, G., & Verba, S. (1963). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Arnstein, S. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. American Institute of Planning Journal, July, 216–224. Brady, H. (1995). Beyond SES: A resource model of political participation. American Political Science Review, 89(2), 271–294. Casey, J. (2004). Third sector participation in the policy process: a framework for comparative analysis. Politics & Policy, 32(2), 241–257 Castells, M. (1999). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. Cambsridge: Addison-Wesley. Fung, A. (2003). Deepening democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered governance. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Fung, A. (2004). Empowered participation: Reinventing urban democracy. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, R. (1990). Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lowndes, V. (2006). Local political participation: The impact of rules-inuse. Public Administration, 84(3), 539–561 Mill, J. S. (1861). Considerations on representative government. London: Dent. Olson, M. (1971). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Parry, G. (1992). Political participation and democracy in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Chichester: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Richardson, E., & Mumford, K. (2002). Community, neighbourhood and social infrastructure. Understanding social exclusion. In J. Hills et al. (Eds.), Understanding social exclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
CIVICUS ELIZABETH LEVI
Address of Organization CIVICUS House 24 Gwigwi Mrwebi Street (former Pim) corner Quinn Street Newtown Johannesburg 2001 South Africa www.civicus.org
Introduction CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation is a membership organization made up of 450 institutional and individual members in over 110 countries, who
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join as advocates to give voice to people and creative energies in the civil society sector. CIVICUS convenes annual World Assemblies that bring together leaders and activists engaged in global civil society and scholarship. CIVICUS describes itself as ‘‘an influential network of organisations at the local, national, regional, and international levels, and span the spectrum of civil society including: civil society networks and organisations; trade unions; faith-based networks; professional associations; NGO capacity development organisations; philanthropic foundations and other funding bodies; businesses; and social responsibility programs.’’
Brief History In 1991, an international group of 20 civil society leaders convened to explore how to support citizen participation with the aim of promoting civil society around the world. This process culminated in mid-1993, in Washington, DC, when a founding board comprised of 18 distinguished civil society leaders from six continents established CIVICUS, from the Latin term meaning ‘‘of the community’’. CIVICUS global headquarters is now located to Johannesburg, South Africa from which it has expanded its activities and network of organizations and individuals to strengthen citizen action and civil society. CIVICUS focuses on regions where participatory democracy and freedom of association are at risk. CIVICUS continues to be guided by its core beliefs that the health of societies are directly proportional to the degree of balance between state, the private sector, and civil society rendering CIVICUS as a focal point for knowledge-sharing, common interest representation, global institution-building and engagement among these disparate sectors.
Mission On its website, CIVICUS describes itself as ‘‘an international alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world,’’ driven by a vision of a ‘‘worldwide community of informed, inspired, committed citizens engaged in confronting the challenges facing humanity.’’ The activities of CIVICUS are dedicated to amplifying the voices of all citizens and to promoting their full participation through freedom of association, enabling them to engage in all sectors of society. CIVICUS counts among its central values: Justice and Equality, where all people are free to exercise their rights as citizens as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Reciprocity and Respect; Knowledge; Vision; and Principled Courage, through which CIVICUS strives to promote civil justice and conducts its activities in a manner that honors the values of democratic civil society.
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Activities CIVICUS is engaged in the following spheres of activity in the service of its mission: the annual World Assembly is a major international conference; in 2008 over 900 participants convened in Glasgow from around the globe to share information and focus on emerging issues. The Civil Society Index is a regularly updated participatory needs assessment and action planning resource in the form of an accessible database for scholars and activists in the field. The Civil Society Networks Program convenes international advocacy and nongovernmental organizations to work collaboratively, with an emphasis on policy and accountability. Civil Society Watch strives to respond to emergent threats to the fundamental rights of citizens. The Participatory Governance Program emphasizes civil society organizations in the South, promoting participatory leadership and governance. The Legitimacy, Transparency, and Accountability Program aims to strengthen the individual and collective governance of Civil Society Organizations. Among the Special Projects conducted by CIVICUS are initiatives focused on civic participation and volunteerism.
Structure and Governance CIVICUS is led by Ingrid Srinath, who became Secretary General in May, 2008. The work of CIVICUS is conducted by 42 officers and professionals at the hub in South Africa; in the Washington, DC office; and staff posted to Geneva, New York and the United Nations, Europe and Canada. The governing body of CIVICUS is an International Board of 12 distinguished leaders from nine countries.
Funding Revenue to support the operations of CIVICUS is derived from multiple sources, including institutional funders, individual contributions, membership fees, publications sales, and registration fees for the CIVICUS World Assembly. The annual budget for the year ending 2007 was $2.9 million, with the majority funding support from over 30 institutional funders, including the Ford Foundation, Oxfam, UN Development Program and Millennium Development Campaign, World Bank and World Vision International.
Major Accomplishments Since it formal establishment in 1993, CIVICUS has built successively on its formative activities. The Civil Society Index (CSI) is a widely recognized research-action tool to which civil society organizations can turn to build knowledge and capacity. The CSI has engaged over 7,000
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stakeholders, providing a basis for learning and information exchange across the 50 countries that are involved. Through CIVICUS’ commitment to knowledge development and dissemination, expanded electronic news and regularly updated informational resources enhance CIVICUS’ extensive roster of print publications that are noted in the field for increasing understanding and contributing to building the resource base of the civil society sector. In 2005, CIVICUS established the Nelson Mandela Graca Machel Innovation Awards to recognize leading achievements of grassroots civil society organizations (CSOs). In 2009, four CSOs from Africa and one from Venezuela were each recognized with a cash award of $5,000 for innovative local projects addressing HIV/AIDS.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Citizenship ▶ Civil Society Indicators and Indexes ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Freedom of Association ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Legitimacy ▶ Participation ▶ Transparency
References/Further Readings Anheier, Helmut K. (2004). Civil society: Measurement, evaluation, policy. London: Earthscan. The Commonwealth Fund. (1999). Citizens and governance: Civil society in the new millenium. London: The Commonwealth Foundation. Heinrich, V. F. (2005). Studying civil society across the world: Exploring the thorny issues of conceptualization and measurement. Journal of Civil Society, 1(3), 211–228.
Civil Law and Civil Society LEON E. IRISH International Center for Civil Society Law, Crownsville, MD, USA
Introduction The relationship between civil law and civil society is not perspicuous. It exists, however, and the discussion of the two together yields interesting points.
Definition Civil law is the dominant legal tradition in most of Europe, all of Central and South America, parts of Asia and Africa, and even some discrete areas of the commonlaw world (e.g., Louisiana, Quebec, and Puerto Rico). Public international law and the law of the European Community are in large part the product of persons trained in the civil-law tradition. Civil law is older, more widely distributed, and in many ways more influential than the common law, the other principal legal tradition and the one that prevails in England, the United States, most of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries of the British Commonwealth. Civil law has its roots in Roman law, Canon law (i.e., Catholic law) and the Enlightenment, alongside influences from other religious laws such as Islamic law. The legal systems in many civil-law countries are based around one or several codes of law, which set out principal provisions of the law. The most famous example is perhaps the French Civil Code, promulgated by Napoleon in 1804, although the German Bu¨rgerliches Gesetzbuch (or BGB) of 1900 and the Swiss Civil Code are also landmark events in the history of civil law. The civil-law systems of Scotland, the Scandinavian countries, and South Africa are uncodified. So-called Socialist law is often considered to be a particular case of the Romano-Germanic civil law, though in the past it was sometimes classified as a separate legal system. As generalizations, it is often said that the common law follows an ‘‘adversarial’’ model while civil law is more ‘‘inquisitorial’’ Civil law is ‘‘code-based’’: civil-law judges do not interpret the law but instead follow predetermined legal rules, whereas common law judges derive legal rules from prior precedential court decisions. In fact, much of the common law has been codified and many civil-law judges are guided by prior judicial decisions. Civil Society. There are myriad definitions of civil society in the postmodern sense. The London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society’s working definition is illustrative: ‘‘Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes, and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family, and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family, and market are often complex, blurred, and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors, and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy, and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development nongovernmental organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations,
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professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions, and advocacy groups.’’
Historical Background Roman Law
The history of civil law, which is often called ‘‘‘continental’ law,’’ is a history of two periods, that of Roman law and that of modern civil law, beginning with the rediscovery of roman law in the eleventh century AD. The beginnings of civil law are often identified as the promulgation in 450 BC of the Twelve Tablets, which set out elementary principles for resolving disputes. When a dispute arose, a nobleman or patrician was assigned to act as iudex (judge) and hear the case. Corruption became endemic and one of the two annually elected praetors, also drawn from the patricians, was authorized to appoint a iudex and instruct him on how to handle the case. Upon election, the praetor would issue an edict stating the remedies he was prepared to supervise the adjudication of. The Edict became particularly important for the development of the equity law of Rome, the jus gentium, which applied to those persons who could not be classified as indigenous Romans. In any given case, the iudex had to investigate to determine what the relevant facts were, and appeals were created to correct errors by the iudex. To assist the praetor the College of Pontiffs (priests) was authorized to interpret the law, and these interpretations were written down and bound into volume (codex) form. The priests who interpreted the law – and developed it into an increasingly detailed and elaborate codex – were subsequently known as ‘‘jurisconsults.’’ The short-term, nonprofessional character of the Roman judiciary and its method of case disposal produced another result, important for the later development of civil-law systems: the lack of regard for the value of decisions in individual cases. Since the praetor was appointed for only 1 year and played a limited role in the resolution of cases, his decisions and rulings in particular cases were not accorded any particular weight or significance. Likewise, there was little respect accorded the decisions of the iudex. The iudex was appointed to decide only a particular case. There was no continuity in litigation, and no chance for the development of legal principles among the various cases presented for resolution. A judicial decision – involving actions by two separate judicial officials – resolved an individual case, and that was the end of the matter. Thus judicial decisions were never accorded any importance in the Roman legal
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system. The resulting derogation of the value of individual decisions in the judicial process elevated the importance of the jurists and their written opinions. The practice of the praetor in issuing the annual Edict at the beginning of his 1-year term evolved into merely a reissuance of the one issued by the previous office holder, with such changes and additions as were desired by the newly elected praetor. The result was an ever-lengthening document of uneven texture and content. This practice ended during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (117–138 AD), causing the jurists to turn to a new form of legal writing: the treatise, which covered specific aspects of Roman law. Another practice that helped elevate the role of jurists was Caesar Augustus’s practice of ‘‘patenting’’ jurists, by which certain jurists were singled out for recognition. By such recognition the opinions of the patented jurists were accorded special significance and weight. Patented jurists eventually acquired the power of rule making, and their opinions were binding even on the emperor because they had the ‘‘force of law.’’ In the sixth century, the Emperor Justinian ordered the preparation of an even more comprehensive manuscript covering all aspects of Roman law. The Corpus Juris Civilis included not only a refinement of Gaius’s Institutes, but the Digest (writings of classical jurists), the Code (early imperial legislation), and the Novels (Justinian’s legislation). The Corpus Juris Civilis provided a rich store of legal ideas for contemporary and later students and scholars of the law. It brought together legal treatises and principles of law reflecting diverse viewpoints and arguments. As will be seen later in this discussion, the Corpus Juris Civilis, particularly the refined Institutes, became the essential building block for the system of law known popularly as the civil-law system, supplying many of its substantive provisions. Modern Developments
In the ‘‘first renaissance’’ – the tumultuous eleventh to thirteenth centuries – the separation between church and state was established and universities were established, focused on law and theology. Two developments occurred in the medieval period that greatly affected the content of the substantive law of the civil-law systems: (1) the creation of a comprehensive canon or ecclesiastical law by the Roman Catholic Church, and (2) the maturing of a law merchant, or law covering commercial transactions, as the result of the growth of commercial classes and expansion of commercial activities in European cities and regions. The practice of relying on various written forms of law, including scholarly commentaries, doctrinal treatises, and glosses on compilations of legal principles, for the
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creation of a legal system was well established throughout Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The formal, comprehensive codification of an entire body of law of the type characteristic of modern civil-law systems began primarily in France and Germany. Before discussing the codification process, however, it is necessary to examine briefly the influence of three intellectual movements of the period: ‘‘humanism,’’ which grew out of the Renaissance; the ‘‘natural law’’ school, which followed humanism; and finally, the Enlightenment. Humanism was an intellectual movement that had its origins in sixteenth century France, a time and place of great upheaval. There was a ferment of ideas, politics, culture, religion, and commerce. In politics and religion the decline in the secular influence of the Roman Catholic Church and the waning of the power and authority of the Holy Roman Empire were accompanied by the birth of the concept of the nation-state and an emphasis on strong, central governments. These developments culminated in the creation of the modern European system of states by the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War and, with it, the Holy Roman Empire. With its emphasis on rational thought and the potential for individual achievement, humanism was inspired by the culture of antiquity – primarily Greece, and to a lesser extent Rome. It encouraged scholarly examination of law, particularly the nature and function of law, and in the process the science of jurisprudence was founded. The school of natural law was an outgrowth of humanism. The origins of natural law are several, but the writings of Hugo de Groot (better known as Grotius) stand out as the real starting point in the development of natural law thinking. The similarity of approach of the natural law scholars led to the conclusion in one history of law that ‘‘codification in the sense of a rationally organized statement of the whole field of law (or of all private law) was only possible after the work of the natural lawyers.’’ Of course these scholars had much legal tradition with which to work, including Justinian’s Institutes, the glosses of the thirteenth century Italian glossators, the commentaries of the post-glossator period, the collections of ecclesiastical principles that became canon law, and the compilation of commercial customs, rules, and regulations into various manifestations of the law merchant. The intellectual and social turmoil of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries culminated in the eighteenth century in what has come to be known as the Enlightenment. This intellectual movement included the French Revolution and contained the near origins of the modern European codes as well as the key concepts that underlie civil society. The Enlightenment was based
on a belief in the fundamental importance of reason as a liberating force in intellectual life and in how society was organized, a belief that grew out of the precepts of the natural law school. In Europe the effects and influence of the Enlightenment provided the final stimulation for the creation of the modern comprehensive codes of the different European states. Emergence of Civil Society
The modern conception of natural law was seen as implying natural rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property. John Locke, arguably the most important natural law theorist of modern times, and the works of the eighteenth century Philosophes, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argued that certain rights self-evidently pertain to individuals as human beings. As these rights were elaborated over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, they came to include the right to freedom of belief, the right to freedom of expression, the right to religious freedom, the right of peaceful assembly, the right to freedom of association, the right to information, and the right to participate in government. Collectively these rights became the rights of citizens, and civil society became the fullest expression of them. After World War II they became enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. It is these rights of citizens that permit the full range of activities of civil society organizations in modern liberal democracies.
Key Issues With the growth and increasing complexity of the state, the law has grown commensurately. Indigenous legal traditions have largely been eliminated. Religion and religious morality have their place, but not in public life. There are now not only civil codes, there are penal codes, commercial codes, urban codes, codes of administration, of forestry, of taxation, and even of sport. Each has its implementing regulations. As secular civil law has expanded, its language has changed. This has something to do with humanism and humanist rationality. There are still many different forms of expression of civil law, however. The French civil code is relatively untechnical. Its language is not far from everyday life; its structure not complex. It was drafted largely by practitioners with a sense of the literary. With its combination of simplicity and beauty of language with conceptual reach, it has been widely emulated in the world. The German civil code came a century later and is probably the most technical and abstract of the civil codes. It has been viciously parodied within Germany, but
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it, too, has its attractions and virtues and has been emulated, notably outside the civil-law world and in the United States. The Centrality of the Person and the Growth of Rights. Prior to the late eighteenth century, Europe was a place of gross social inequality. Some people did most of the work and for the advantage of a few. Law perpetuated this situation. It was relational and obligational. People were stuck in their existing relations to one another, often hierarchical, and that is where the law said they had to stay. Judges were corrupt. Roman law, modernized in the civil law, allowed individuals to move from status to rights. Rights, of course, are not absolute, and the law controls the conditions and manner of their exercise. They are, however, a powerful instrument for bringing about basic conditions of human dignity. Once rights exist, and everyone has them without regard to birth or race or wealth, then there is also a notion of social equality. And, since people have the power, in rights, to resist oppression, there is also a guarantee of human liberty. At the base is the centrality of the person. The religious rationalists, such as Descartes, Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke, developed the foundations for human law which were lacking in traditional indigenous law. So law comes to be recognized as having a human goal, a human instrumentality. There had to be rights and there had to be codes to ensure their respect. What did it mean to be rational in law? The lawyers of the enlightenment harked back to the Greek and Roman traditions of natural law. Deductive thought, the hallmark of the civillaw tradition, followed from this form of logic. Given a point of departure, you can reach further conclusions which are derivable from or entailed by it. Using law as the instrument of reason, you can also construct a modern state, which is essentially created out of formal, written law, though resting on a transnational legal tradition supporting its existence in multiple, national forms. Law is inextricably linked with the modern state; it created the state; it depends on it for its enforcement; it guarantees, as best it can, its continuing efficacy and integrity. As states develop, and develop into democratic institutions, functions of legislation and execution develop, and separate themselves from the more rudimentary form of government, which is dispute settlement. So we now have the separation of the state from the church, the separation of distinct powers within the state, and the recognition and protection of the rights of citizens, which enable civil society. If everyone has predefined rights, then their violation may exist prior to judgment, and the judicial function is largely one of verification of
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claims to violation of preexisting rights and remedying the violations.
International Perspectives In 1800 Napoleon appointed four senior practitioners of law to develop a comprehensive legal code. These four practitioners were experienced jurists who had studied Grotius, Pufendorf, and the other great writers of the natural law school. The basic structure of the code reflects the influence of Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis, while the overall design also conforms to the Declaration of the Rights of Man produced during the French Revolution. The language is simple and clear, since it was designed to be understood by every citizen. It does not deal with procedure, commercial law, or criminal law; those three areas were covered by codes developed later and separately. The civil codes, based as they are on the Corpus Juris Civilis, emphasize form, structure, and the enumeration of both abstract and concrete principles of law within a unified whole. The reasoning process from code provisions is deductive – one arrives at conclusions about specific situations from general principles. The function of the jurists within and for the civil-law system is to analyze the basic codes and legislation for the formulation of general theories and extract, enumerate, and expound on the principles of law contained in and to be derived from them. As the legal systems of Europe developed, the evolution of the role of jurists in the different countries diverged. In particular, the German model became distinctly different from the French one. In Germany the status of jurists and juridical doctrine, in the manner of Rome, was enhanced, while in France it was diminished. One of the reasons for the elevation of the role of jurists in Germany was the condition of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century German courts, staffed by lay judges untrained and unsophisticated in the law. The untrained lay judges required impartial advice, and this situation, in the manner of the judices in Rome, led to the practice of the German judges, seeking advice from the law faculties of the universities. In France the role and influence of jurists was lessened. The monarchy encouraged legally trained men into the judiciary. The result was that the formally trained judges were not compelled to seek outside legal advice in the manner of their German counterparts. Consequently, French legal scholars and law professors were never able to achieve the standing and power accorded their colleagues in Germany.
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Future Directions The civil-law tradition is associated with dominance. The Romans dominated, then the national civilians dominated, then the world became a zone of influence of civil laws, primarily through colonization, but also through admiration and emulation. The European law that is developing so fast today is principally civilian in nature. Many common law jurisdictions have taken on civilian structures and approaches, so perhaps a world law is developing that is fundamentally civilian in nature. And, the universalization of human rights gives global commonality to the concept of civil society.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History ▶ Business and Employers’ Associations ▶ Charity Law ▶ Civic Action ▶ Civic Agency ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Common Law and Civil Society ▶ Freedom of Association ▶ Human Rights ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations
References/Further Readings Bellomo, M. (1995). The common legal past of Europe 1000–1800. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Bergel, J. L. (1988). Principal features and methods of codification. Louisiana Law Review, 48, 1073. Berman, H. (1983). Law and revolution: The formation of the Western legal tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dawson, J. P. (1968). Oracles of the law. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Edwards, M. (2004). Civil society. Cambridge/England: Polity Press. Glendon, M. A., Gordon, M. W., & Osakwe, C. (1994). Comparative legal traditions. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, Pt. II (‘‘The Civil Law Tradition’’). Glenn, H. P. (2007). Legal traditions of the world (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Honore, A. M. (1974). The background to Justinian’s codification. Tulane Law Review, 48, 859. Jolowicz, H. F. (1972). Historical introduction to the study of Roman law (3rd ed., rev. by P. Stein). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langbein, J. (1985). The German advantage in civil procedure. University of Chicago Law Review, 52, 825. Lawson, F. H. (1953). A common lawyer looks at the civil law. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lewis, A., & Ibbetson, D. (1994). The Roman law tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lupoi, M. (2000). The origins of the European legal order (A. Belton, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Merryman, J. H. (1985). The civil law tradition (2nd ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Merryman, J. H., Clark, D., & Haley, J. (1994). The civil law tradition: Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Charlottesville, VA: The Michie Co. O’Connell, B. (1999). Civil society: The underpinnings of American democracy. Medford, MA: Tufts University Press. Perlas, N. Shaping globalization – civil society, cultural power and threefolding. ISBN 0-95838858X. Pollock, G. (March 2001). Civil society theory and Euro-nationalism. Studies in Social & Political Thought (4), 31–56. Stein, P. (1999). Roman law in European history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steiner, J. J., Alston, P., & Goodman, R. (2008). International human rights in context (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuck, R. (1979). Natural rights theories: Their origin and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vinogradoff, P. (1968). Roman law in medieval Europe. New York: Barnes & Noble. von Mehren, A. T., & Gordley, J. R. (1977). The civil law system (2nd ed.). Boston: Little, Brown. Watson, A. (1981). The making of the civil law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zimmermann, R. (2001). Roman law, European law: The civilian tradition today. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Civil Society and Civic Education DIRK LANGE University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
Introduction In classical civic education, ‘‘citizens’’ were conceived of in a narrower sense as citizens of the state. The consequence of this was that content was focused on the institutions and processes of the state. In modern society, the political realm can no longer be considered as interchangeable with the state. The discourse and regulation of public concerns has become a function of civil society. The historical transformation of the conception of the state means that civic education can no longer educate citizens exclusively in their relation to the state. It has to educate learners as actors in civil society, who then must also have the necessary skills to orient themselves and participate in non-state arenas. The basic concepts and interpretive skills of learners constitute the beginning and end point of civic education. They are transformed during the learning process. This situation renders it necessary to reflect on the academic modeling of citizenship awareness in civic education.
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For this article, the question to be focused on is what interpretive skills are necessary for citizens for them to have the ability to effectively exercise judgment and take action in civil society. In seeking to answer this question, I will make the case that civic education – by educating responsible citizens – first creates the preconditions for a functioning civil society (see Milner, 2002). First, the challenges facing a civil society will be depicted, in which an expanded and modified political understanding is discussed. Following that, it will be shown what interpretive skills must be developed within citizenship awareness in order for the citizen to act effectively in civil society.
Definition Civic education organizes learning processes with the aim of improving the ability of citizens to politically orient themselves and take action. The function of this type of education is to legitimize, anchor, and reproduce democratic rule. Civic education emphasizes the importance of the competence and skills necessary for political selfdetermination, while it conceives of the autonomy and responsibility of democratic authority as the beginning point and basis of the education process. Civic education does not simply aim at maintaining the democratic status quo. Rather, it seeks to develop citizens’ skills to judge and act, enabling them to thus create, change, and maintain a political system in such a way that a space continually remains open for self-determination to occur. The pedagogical focus of civic education is ‘‘citizenship awareness.’’ ‘‘Citizenship awareness’’ is that aspect of (civic) consciousness where an individual forms the cognitive skills that allow him or her to interpret and actively influence political and social realities. Within citizenship awareness, the contents and structures of subjective meaning constructs of politics and society are expanded upon and altered. In civic education, of interest are the meaning constructs and formation of meaning that learners use to explain political–social reality. This subjective meaning allows one to see, judge, and act in a political way (see Lange, 2008).
Historical Background The understanding of politics and civic education has changed over the course of time. The frame of reference for civic education has changed depending on what the conception of the state or political system has been. In the following, the historical changes in political understanding will be depicted. These changes that have consequences for the conception of civic education are closely connected to the development of the conceptions of
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civil society, whereby the concept Zivilgesellschaft (civil society) is often used synonymously for Bu¨rgergesellschaft (bourgeois society) (see Arenho¨vel, 2000). The understanding of politics from which traditional civic education took its lead is based on a narrow understanding of the state. It figures in the philosophical tradition of Hegel, who understood bourgeois society (Bu¨rgergesellschaft) as the ‘‘difference entering into the space between the family and state’’ (Schulze, 1991: 127, see Hegel, 1974: 472ff). In the older understanding of civil society, this difference did not yet exist. Those men or even those groups could feel they belonged to civil society if they participated in one way or another in the formation of rule. An independent economic realm separate from the family was not recognized. With the separation of the state and society, the citizen is represented in a twofold way. He simultaneously dwells in a politically relevant sphere and in an apolitical sphere. As a ‘‘citoyen,’’ he moves in the arena of the political-administrative system and participates in this realm in the institutions of representative democracy. The state and its institutions are for him the field of the political. The other part of the citizen, the ‘‘bourgeois,’’ on the other hand, lives in the economic, social system, where he is only subjected to the practical restraints that require no political legitimation. By understanding the state as the ‘‘reality of the ethical idea’’ and society as the ‘‘system of needs,’’ G. Hegel justifies the primacy of the state over society, which forms the basis of the German theory of constitutional law. Liberal theories of the state stand in contrast to the latter, as they emphasize the primacy of society over the state by viewing the social contract as subordinate to the state of nature. He moves in the area of the nonpolitical. Traditional civic education was thus based on an understanding of politics that located the center of the political in the state.
Key Issues The concepts of civil society have, in the meantime, overcome the strict division between state and society. Accordingly, the civil state not only refers to the state in the narrow sense, but also includes a plurality of social practices. A broader understanding of the state thus can be expressed in the formula ‘‘state = political society + civil society’’ (Gramsci, 1992: 783). At the basis of this model is a decentralized concept of the state that comprises the interrelations between the political and civil society. The society as a ‘‘system of private needs’’ was identified with the economic spheres in the tradition of Hegel. But since the societal aspects of communication, the
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public or solidarity are not mediated by the state or the economy, Habermas (1961) considers it necessary to conceive of the civil society as constituting a third sphere. Accordingly, in civil society, communicative public spheres form a sensory system that does not have any primary political function, but which nevertheless influences the general regulation requirements of a society through the perception and rationalization of societal moods and problematic areas. This deliberative form of democratic participation can no longer be conceptually accounted for by the state in the narrower sense. In a broader sense, it must also comprise the politically relevant aspects of civil society (see Habermas, 1992: 364; Schmalz-Bruns, 1995: 257ff.). The modern state thus does not have a monopoly on the potential to shape political reality. Regulatory changes are increasingly called for by the social arena, so that the state loses in its power to decide and steer. In a broader understanding of the state, it must be assumed that the development described cannot be equated with a loss in the autonomy of political action. An ‘‘end to politics’’ would then only be established if the concept of politics were to remain limited by the institutionalized political system. According to Beck, the actual potential for generating and implementing general commitments is not fundamentally lost, but is rather moved into a ‘‘sub-political system’’ (1986: 305). Thus, it is not politics in itself, but rather the place of politics that becomes blurred. Instead of parliamentary debates and decisions by politicians, the contours of another society become visible in the developments of the technical-economic system. Through this development, ‘‘the political’’ tends to become ‘‘unpolitical’’ and ‘‘the unpolitical, political’’ (Beck, 1986: 305). For a broadened concept of the state, see also Esser (1995: 738 ff.). From a democratic perspective, this development gives rise to the problem that the ‘‘sub-political’’ arising in the social system reduces the claims of parliamentary authority and legitimation. The generation of generally binding rules can no longer be guaranteed by the traditional institutions of the state. The new forms of politics are subjected to a pressure to justify themselves against the nonparliamentary initiatives and social movements. Through this process, the state tends to become disempowered relative to a growing politicization of society, which takes on state functions (see Beck, 1986: 300–374). Using the model of the delimitation of the state, some of the aporia are resolved concerning the concept of the political that is centered on the state. In the end however, the ‘‘battle for the limits between the political and the
non-political arena’’ (Hennies, 1973: 61) does not render obsolete the conceptual separation of the citizen concept into ‘‘citoyen’’ and ‘‘bourgeois.’’ To some extent, another figure is added. A kind of ‘‘bouryen’’ arises as a hybrid figure who moves in the social sphere but maintains the potential for political change. Implicitly, this leads to the reproduction of a state-related concept of the political, since the connection of the political with state action is not eliminated, but rather the understanding of the state is expanded. The citizen in this conception initially remains acted upon by politics. He or she is the object of the shaping power of the political will of an expanded state. Nevertheless, arising in the form of media publics, citizen initiatives and protest movements are ‘‘intermediary forms of reciprocal controls that avoid parliamentary centralism and create comparable justification restraints’’ (Beck, 1986: 368). In yet another civil society concept, Greven proposes abolishing the dichotomy between state and society, which is the basis of the state-centered concept of the political, in favor of the concept of the ‘‘political society’’ (Greven, 1990). In doing so, he tries to grasp the new political problem areas that come into view. The concept is justified by two types of development tendencies. Alongside a ‘‘politicization ‘from below’ through social praxis,’’ modern societies are characterized by a ‘‘politicization by state action ‘from above’’’ (ibid 1994a: 290). Here, he understands the theoretical possibility that all areas can become political through the dissemination of state regulation technologies in modern societies. In the political society ‘‘no societal relation, no social spheres, no institution and none of the social processes of societal reproduction are protected from potential access by state regulation’’ (ibid). In Greven’s political society ‘‘we are all politicians’’ (Greven, 1994b: 243) and participate in the creation of political reality through our action and forbearance: ‘‘It is not structural developments that determine our future, but rather the complicated, to some extent composite results of the social and political praxis of the diverse political forces and groups that now determine our everyday life’’ (Greven, 1994b: 252). Dahrendorf (1999) has developed a concept of civil society in which ‘‘freedom rests on three pillars’’ (ibid, 91). These consist of political democracy, the free market as well as civil society. The latter is the decisive bonding factor of the three pillars. Civil society in turn is based on the diversity of different non-state organizations and institutions, the freedom of association for citizens and their willingness to do
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so outside of state intervention as well as an active participation in civil society. The peaceful, tolerant, and solidaritybased interaction necessary for civil society is called civicmindedness. Concerning the newer concepts of civil society and their conception of the separation of state and society, see Himmelmann (Himmelmann, 2001a: 171ff.; ibid 2001b.) The concepts of civil society assume that the forms and processes with which generally binding rules are constructed are potentially found in all areas of society. In this understanding of politics, areas of social reality and of everyday life that have been excluded until now have become completely relevant categories for civic education. Civic education has the task of enabling and activating the actors of civil society to participate. The sovereignty of the modern state takes shape in its competence to judge, criticize, and act in all areas of society. Citizens act in civil society. In the following, I will sketch what necessary skills for this should be imparted by civic education. Citizenship Awareness and Civic Education
Citizenship awareness (see Lange, 2008) refers to the entirety of the mental ideas about political-social reality. It serves to orient individuals in politics, economy, and society and produces the meaning that enables people to judge and actively influence preexisting phenomenon. The meaning constructions in citizenship awareness are didactically so relevant because they influence learning processes and change in learning processes. The transformation of citizenship awareness is not only an educationally induced process, but rather a component of the political everyday life of the learner. Didactically relevant here are not only issues concerning the transfer of scientific knowledge into lifeworld knowledge, but rather the lifeworld construction of meaning in citizenship awareness. On the one hand, citizenship awareness provides schema that organize and refract reality. On the other hand, it provides a structure allowing for an intended engagement with reality. A person needs and uses these models to explain and change the world. Citizenship awareness is the mental area that civic education must activate in order to educate responsible citizens. Citizens require specific skills in order to be able to act adequately in civil society. Didactically, these skills can be structured through the meaning constructs in citizenship awareness. Concerning the categorical permeation of citizenship awareness, it can be assumed that each person has five basic meaning constructs: ‘‘socialization,’’ ‘‘value justification,’’ ‘‘satisfaction of needs,’’ ‘‘social change,’’ and ‘‘legitimation of rule.’’ The meaning constructs here refer to
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mental figures by means of which a person constructs expertise. This expertise can be reconstructed in the lifeworld and science and is thus independent of the degree of scientification. The characterizations needed for depicting the meaning constructs vary from individual to individual and can contradict the scientific conceptual understanding. For each meaning construct, the five heuristics are given, which have a search function for the empirical study of the meaning construct. They serve in the discovery of subjective concepts in citizenship awareness. In the meaning construct ‘‘socialization,’’ the citizenship awareness structures ideas about how individuals integrate in society. Learners have an idea about the relation between the individual and society. They experience the social heterogeneity, which they organize and group subjectively. In citizenship awareness, they develop statements and justifications about the meaning of social differences in light of gender, ethnicity, origins, social inequality, lifestyle, or other categorizations. Concepts of plurality must be developed in order to explain how social cohabitation functions despite social diversity. The process of socialization is rendered explainable through concepts of the individual and the mechanisms of his or her inclusion or exclusion. To answer the question as to how society holds together despite diversity, ideas in citizenship awareness are also present concerning the forms of interaction and communication between members of society. With the representation ‘‘how do individuals integrate in society,’’ recourse is taken to the concepts of ‘‘individual,’’ ‘‘heterogeneity,’’ ‘‘society,’’ ‘‘integration,’’ and ‘‘the public.’’ In the meaning construct ‘‘value justification,’’ citizenship awareness structures ideas about what generally valid principles guide social cohabitation. Each learner has ideas about values and norms that are expressed in political conflicts, social debates or economic undertakings. The meaning constructs in citizenship awareness allow for a political-moral formation of judgment on the basis of generally valid principles. In doing so, each person has schema he or she uses to judge questions concerning social justice, the political equality of different people, the peaceableness in cohabitation, the recognition of difference or individual freedom. For the meaning construct ‘‘which principles guide social cohabitation?,’’ the following concepts are used: ‘‘justice,’’ ‘‘equality,’’ ‘‘peace,’’ ‘‘recognition,’’ and ‘‘freedom.’’ In the meaning construct ‘‘satisfaction of needs,’’ citizenship awareness structures ideas about how needs are satisfied by goods. Learners have their own ideas about the important structures and processes of economic life and they can designate these functions of the economic system
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subjectively. In doing so, they use models about the emergence of needs, they describe processes of the production of goods and the possibilities of their distribution (market concepts, for instance). In the representation ‘‘satisfaction of needs,’’ concepts such as work and consumption as well as distribution of labor and business are used. In order to explain ‘‘how needs are satisfied by goods,’’ citizenship awareness takes preliminary recourse to the following concepts: ‘‘need,’’ ‘‘production,’’ ‘‘value,’’ ‘‘distribution,’’ and ‘‘consumption.’’ In the meaning construct ‘‘social transformation,’’ citizenship awareness structures ideas about how social transformation takes place. Learners discover that the political-social reality is not stable, but rather changes over time. They have constructed their own concepts to render these transformations explainable. Crucial to this is the memory of the past, the expectation for the future and an idea of temporality that connects the past, today, and tomorrow. For the characterization of social transformation tendencies – whether it be globalization, individualization, democratization, progress, or history in general – citizenship awareness takes recourse to continuity and development. Thus for the mental construction of the representation, ‘‘how does social transformation occur?,’’ five concepts are assumed: ‘‘continuity,’’ ‘‘development,’’ ‘‘temporality,’’ ‘‘the past,’’ and ‘‘future’’. In the meaning construct ‘‘the legitimation of rule,’’ citizenship awareness structures ideas about how partial interests are transformed into generally binding rules. Learners can describe and justify how power is exercised in society in order to assert interests. They know processes of conflict resolution and can say in what ways the individual can participate in the political process. In citizenship awareness, ideas about state structures and institutions as well as concepts of power and rule are formed. Depending on the size of the group, problem, and context, learners have different models of democracy and autocracy at their disposal. Additionally, they are in a position to justify and criticize power relations. For the representation ‘‘how do partial interests become generally binding?,’’ the following five concepts can be seen as essential: ‘‘interests,’’ ‘‘conflict,’’ ‘‘participation,’’ ‘‘statehood,’’ and ‘‘rule.’’ These five meaning constructs play a central role for the individual understanding and subjective explanation of civil society. Crucial are the mental models that are also fundamental for the didactics of civic education. They arise and change in processes of social, political-moral, economic, historical-political, and political learning. Far too little is still known didactically about which concepts, terminology, and symbols learners use to characterize the meaning constructs of citizenship awareness. The least
likely case is the language of science. The concepts characterized as essential for meaning constructs can thus only serve as preliminary heuristics. See here also the fundamental concepts in civic educations (see Sander, 2007; Weißeno, 2008: 152–258). These also continue to follow the logic of related disciplines, but could also serve in the analysis of civic consciousness as a search instrument. One of the challenges in didactics is to subjectively reconstruct the meaning constructs and concepts of citizenship awareness. This is due to the fact that the knowledge of the citizenship awareness of learners is a prerequisite enabling the normative aim of civic education – responsible citizens and their entitlement to fair social participation – to be reached not only in relation to the state but also to civil society. To that extent, not only the actual, but the desired citizenship awareness is of interest for the didactics of civic education. The didactics of civic education poses the question: What social science ideas can motivate individuals to conceive of responsibility and autonomy as valuable and in this sense to think about them critically in terms of politics, society, and economy in everyday life? Civic Education as Civil Society Skill
Which didactic methods can be used to address the necessary skills for civil society participation within the meaning constructs of citizenship awareness? Alongside the orientation on democratic principles, the principles of everyday, action, and problem orientation are included among the basic orientations of civic education. In the framework of the everyday orientation, civic education looks closely at both the micropolitics of everyday life as well as the everyday relations of ‘‘larger politics.’’ Through action orientation, learner activating and self-guided learning processes find entrance into civic education. This gives the learners the opportunity to act politically. In the research and simulation as well as in the intervention in political-social reality, innovative, and creative methods are now being used (see Lange, 2007). The principle of problem orientation guarantees that civic education is not reduced to drilling content into the learner, but rather stimulates independent political formation of meaning and thinking. Here, civic education processes use a controversy or question that is dealt with by the learners.
International Perspectives In some schools in Germany, students with a migration background comprise the majority of the student body. This topic is therefore of particular importance and relevance within this social, political, and national
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context. What is the relevance of citizenship and citizenship education for native born Germans, and those originally from other countries? What differences and similarities can be identified, and how can they be perceived and applied for the greater good, both domestically and internationally? The international research tasks to be carried out as part of citizenship education can be divided into four areas. The purpose of citizenship education as a field of science is to analyze the level of political awareness of learners by adopting empirical, normative, reflective, and application-oriented methods. Empirical Assignment
The empirical assignment to be completed in citizenship education comprises an analysis of current levels of political awareness. Efforts in this field will focus on the conceptions which male and female pupils have of political subject matters. To make sure that not only data on attitudes and knowledge of learners are gathered but sense-building capabilities are also taken into account, the quantitative and qualitative methods applied in social research are also used in a didactical analysis of citizenship education. Traditionally, citizenship education was focused on legitimizing teaching contents and on the teaching methods applied in delivering this knowledge. To achieve this goal, the individual qualifications of learners and the learning process itself were negligible. In the future, the ability to analyze capabilities of pupils will be more important in citizenship education. As part of this analytical process the conceptions which pupils bring into the learning process may not be interpreted as mental dysfunctions. These conceptions are rather subjective theories which help pupils to cope with everyday situations. Political learning processes must proceed from existing conceptions, and they should be learning occasions for pupils which can be modified and further differentiated. Hence, the empirical task to be performed as part of citizenship education is to record and analyze the ‘‘current status’’ of civic educational processes: ● Analyses of learners’ conceptions of subject-specific matters (political awareness from an empirical perspective) ● Studies on the efficiency of learning ● Observations of classroom instruction Normative Assignment
The normative research assignment to be completed in citizenship education is legitimizing a desired level of
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political awareness. The efforts undertaken by the government to influence the political conceptions of citizens through deliberate learning processes provided in class requires justification. What is at issue here is the substantiality of political learning objectives. Didactics of civic education explores which political conceptions a given society ought to acquire on a mandatory basis. It is one of the consensus goals of citizenship education that political learning processes are designed to promote democratic sense-building capabilities. The values delivered as part of citizenship education are consistent with the notion of a democracy. However, how a democracy ought to work and how concrete social problems are to be resolved in a democratic manner are still controversial issues, not only in society, but also among the scientific community. The normative research task of citizenship education is to develop learning objectives and purposes for citizenship education. This task field closely links the didactics of civic education with the normative theory of democracy. On the basis of the guiding principle of responsibility, the qualities and capabilities citizens living in a democracy should have are explored in the didactics of citizenship education. Normative research carried out as part of the didactics of citizenship education serves as the justification of learning objectives, educational standards and conceptional designs of citizenship education: ● A democracy-centered justification for the delivery of skills which ‘‘responsible citizens’’ need ● Criticism of educational objectives in political subjects ● Developing curricula for schools Reflective Assignment
Reflective research carried out as part of citizenship education is about exploring the potential level of political awareness. In the process, learning materials are analyzed for their educational potential. Not only the learners’ experienced world but also subject-related disciplines are explored for the educational potential they hold. The assumption underlying this study is that teaching and learning material for citizenship education cannot be derived linearly from existing structures. Rather, subject matters for teaching require didactical reconstruction. On the one hand, the experienced world of male and female pupils must be analyzed with respect to their potential for promoting the development of political conceptions. On the other hand, subject-specific science is increasingly becoming a subject matter of didactics in civic
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education. This discipline draws on the specialized knowledge gained in the social sciences and explores which learning materials advance the political conceptions of pupils and in which manner this occurs. Hence the reflective task to be carried out as part of research in citizenship education is to identify potential political opportunities for learning in the experienced world of the learners and in research. Reflective research carried out as part of citizenship education is about identifying the potential for civic education in the learner’s experienced world, in research and in educational media. ● Didactical reflection of subject-specific scientific material ● Subject-specific analysis of everyday objects ● Analysis of educational media; out-of-school learning locations Application-Oriented Assignment
Application-oriented research to be carried out as part of citizenship education comprises structuring of civic educational processes. To achieve this, the findings obtained from empirical, normative, and reflective studies will be used and related to each other in a meaningful manner. The goal to be achieved is to develop guidelines for planning, implementing, and reflecting teaching units in citizenship education on the basis of a didactical analysis. Application-oriented research to be carried out as part of citizenship education is to structure civic educational processes. The findings obtained will be condensed into opportunities for learning. The teaching principles applied and the educational material used for teaching will themselves be the objects of acceptance and efficiency studies. Application-oriented research carried out as part of citizenship education helps to structure civic educational processes and serves three functions: ● Developing teaching guidelines. ● Designing teaching and learning opportunities. ● Developing educational media.
Future Directions The normative research on citizenship awareness relies on general theories of democracy and society. Guided by the idea of responsibility, the didactics of civic education reflects the qualities and skills citizens should have in a civil society. Future research will have to continue to provide continually refined definitions of these attributes in order to achieve an ever clearer view of the topic, both
from a scientific point of view, as well as from a sociopolitical perspective. The movement of political power into non-state institutionalized arenas of society has created new challenges for civic education. For a civil society to support and stabilize a democratic system, civic education must not only educate citizens to be responsible citizens of the state but also capable participants in civil society. This is because a functioning civil society is based on a strong citizenship, which is able to act in the different political-social skill fields. These skill fields can be didactically addressed through the meaning constructs in civil consciousness. As a consequence, civic education focuses increasingly on empirical investigations of the meaning constructs in citizenship awareness in order to refine in a step by step way the methodological access to democratic-participative oriented development of meaning constructs. We look forward to future research in this area, and eagerly anticipate the outcomes and progress that result from it.
Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society Theory: Dahrendorf ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci ▶ Political Society
References/Further Readings Arenho¨vel, M. (2000). Zivilgesellschaft/Bu¨rgergesellschaft. Wochenschau fu¨r politische Erziehung, Sozial- und Gemeinschaftskunde, 2, 55–94. Beck, U. (1986). Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, Frankfurt am Main. Dahrendorf, R. (1999). Die Bu¨rgergesellschaft. In A. Pongs (Hrsg.): In welcher Gesellschaft leben wir eigentlich? Bd. 1, Mu¨nchen. Esser, J. (1995). Staatstheorie. In D. Nohlen (Hrsg.): Wo¨rterbuch Staat und Politik, Bonn, S. 733–743. Gramsci, A. (1992) Gefa¨ngnishefte. Bd. 2, Hefte 6–7, Hamburg ff. Greven, M. Th. (1990). Die politische Gesellschaft als Gegenstand der Politikwissenschaft. In: Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 2, S. 223–228 u. 255–261. Greven, M. Th. (1994a). Die Allgegenwart des Politischen und die Randsta¨ndigkeit der Politikwissenschaft. In C. Leggewie (Hrsg.): ¨ ber das Neue in der Politik, Darmstadt. Wozu Politikwissenschaft. U S. 285–296. Greven, M. Th. (1994b). Kritische Theorie und historische Politik: theoriegeschichtliche Beitra¨ge zur gegenwa¨rtigen Gesellschaft, Opladen. Habermas, J. (1961). Reflexionen u¨ber den Begriff der politischen Beteiligung. In Ders. u. a. (Hrsg.): Student und Politik: eine soziologische Untersuchung zum politischen Bewusstsein Frankfurter Studenten, Neuwied am Rhein.
Civil Society and Cultural Organizations Habermas, J. (1992). Faktizita¨t und Geltung: Beitra¨ge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, Frankfurt am Main. Hegel G. W. F. (1974). Vorlesungen u¨ber Rechtsphilosophie 1818–1831, Bd. 4, Philosophie des Rechts, n. d. Vorlesungsschrift v. K.G. v. Griesheim 1824/25, Edition und Kommentar v. Karl-Heinz Ilting, Stuttgart. Hennies, W. (1973). Demokratisierung. Zur Problematik eines Begriffs. In M. Greiffenhagen (Hrsg.): Demokratisierung in Staat und Gesellschaft, Mu¨nchen/Zu¨rich. 47–70. Himmelmann, G. (2001a). Demokratie Lernen als Lebens-, Gesellschaftsund Herrschaftsform. Ein Lehr- und Studienbuch, Schwalbach/Ts. Himmelmann, G. (2001b). Was bedeutet der Staat fu¨r den Bu¨rger und der Bu¨rger fu¨r den Staat?, in: PolBil, Jg. 34, H. 3, 57–71. Lange, D. (2007). Methoden Politischer Bildung, Basiswissen Politische Bildung Bd.2 (hrsg. v. D. Lange u. V. Reinhardt), Baltmannsweiler. Lange, D. (2008). Kernkonzepte des Bu¨rgerbewusstseins. Grundzu¨ge einer Lerntheorie der Politischen Bildung. In G. Weißeno (Hrsg.): Politikkompetenz. Was Unterricht zu leisten hat, Bonn. Milner, H. (2002). Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work, Hanover N.H. Sander, W. (Hrsg.) (2007). Handbuch politischer Bildung, Bonn. Schmalz-Bruns, R. (1995). Reflexive Demokratie: die demokratische Transformation moderner Politik, Baden-Baden. Schulze, W. (1991). Einfu¨hrung in die neuere Geschichte. 2. verbesserte Auflage, Stuttgart. Weißeno, G. (Hrsg.) (2008). Politikkompetenz. Was Unterricht zu leisten hat, Bonn.
Civil Society and Cultural Organizations YUDHISHTHIR RAJ ISAR The American University of Paris, Paris, France
Introduction and Definition The binomial ‘‘civil society and cultural organizations’’ could be read in several ways (just like the relationships between civil society and ‘‘culture,’’ cf. Civil Society and Culture). The term is understood here as the interface between the ways cultural organizations of a governmental nature envisage the contribution of civil society to cultural policy objectives and conversely, the ways in which entities that identify themselves as belonging to civil society envision their role with regard to cultural policy. Some might want to focus their attention on civil society organizations that have a specifically cultural remit, but there would be limited analytical purchase in such a reading. ‘‘Cultural policy’’ here means both the common sense usage, i.e., what any authority (but principally governmental ones) envisions and enacts in terms of support to and regulation of cultural affairs, and the more
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academy-driven notion of ‘‘the politics of culture in the most general sense. . . the clash of ideas, institutional struggles and power relations in the production and circulation of symbolic meanings.’’ (McGuigan, 1996: 1). Several key aspects of the interface between civil society and official organizations can be usefully examined. Some confusion may arise because of the fact that many civil society entities are ‘‘cultural organizations’’ as well; therefore, the defining trait for our purposes cannot be their organizational nature but their civil society characteristics. As regards culture, the ‘‘arts and heritage’’ meaning is emphasized (Williams, 1988: 90), except that the broader rubric of ‘‘cultural expression’’ makes it possible to encompass many collective forms of artistic work that may not be defined as ‘‘art.’’ It should be noted, however, that today the arts and heritage understanding of culture is increasingly elided with the broader ways of life meanings: defense of or support to cultural expression is increasingly justified not for the intrinsic value of the latter, as sheer human creativity and/or ground for delectation, but as a means of shoring up distinct ways of life against the perceived forces and trends of cultural homogenization. It should also be mentioned that the interface between cultural organizations and civil society has been subjected only to limited scholarly inquiry. The analyst has little literature upon which to draw, instead she can observe and dissect a set of discursive formations regarding cultural organizations and civil society. This set of discourses has evolved both through the activism and institutional position-taking of civil society entities themselves and through deliberate outreach to this sector on the part of governmental bodies and the world of business. One can extrapolate from these discourses and the practices that result from them. Hence this entry will first discuss two emblematic cases and then explore the socioeconomic and cultural causes of these emergent interactions between cultural policy-making and civil society.
International Perspectives A good illustration of the interface at the international level is provided by the manner in which the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sees the role of civil society in the ‘‘protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions.’’ This role has actually been articulated by state actors, in other words governmental delegates working together on an Intergovernmental Committee established to oversee the implementation of the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Article 11 of that international treaty states that ‘‘Parties acknowledge the fundamental
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role of civil society in protecting and promoting the diversity of cultural expressions. Parties shall encourage the active participation of civil society in their efforts to achieve the objectives of this Convention.’’ The Intergovernmental Committee’s task is to flesh out such provisions and make them operational. In a document proposing a set of ‘‘operational guidelines on the role and participation of civil society’’ in the implementation of the Convention, the Committee (Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection and the Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 2008) takes the position that as regards the diversity of cultural expressions, civil society entities can fulfill the sorts of generic roles set out by Anheier (2007), namely bringing citizens’ concerns to governments, monitoring policy and program implementation, serving as a warning mechanism, value-guardian, and innovator as well as contributing to the achievement of greater transparency and accountability in governance. In that light, pursues the document, governments should encourage civil society to perform such functions by creating an ‘‘enabling environment’’ consisting, inter alia, of a legal and regulatory framework; the provision of spaces and mechanisms that make it possible to involve civil society in consultations on cultural policy-making, and in systems for accessing public information relating to the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions. By the same token it recommends to governments that ‘‘civil society should be encouraged and advised to act as an awareness-raiser and cultural service provider, in particular by offering specific expertise, contributing to capacity building and carrying out data collection in the field of the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions.’’ The document goes on to underline civil society’s potential to act as an innovator and cultural change agent in this field, hence advises governments to encourage civil society to bring new ideas and approaches to the formulation of cultural policies, as well as to the development of innovative cultural processes, practices, or programs that could help achieve the objectives of the Convention. It recognizes the role civil society plays in defending specific cultural values by giving voice to social groups such as minorities, indigenous peoples, women, etc., and states that ‘‘civil society organizations should endeavor to assist Parties in ensuring that all stakeholders’ interests are taken into account when formulating cultural policies.’’ On the international level, civil society organizations should be proactive in the area of cooperation for development, by initiating, creating, and participating in innovative partnerships with the public and private sectors. A specific North–South dimension is built in here, as
the document urges that ‘‘it is essential that, in addition to being encouraged by Parties, civil society in developing countries receive support and assistance from its counterparts in developed countries, in terms of expertise and organizational, technical and financial support.’’ The general openness demonstrated by governmental organizations towards civil society today is a mix of pragmatism and rhetoric, some of it linked to a genuine recognition of the sector’s role, both demonstrated and potential, some of it stemming from the recognized inadequacy of state institutions to solve all societal problems (Anheier, 2007). In the case of UNESCO and cultural diversity, this posture perhaps also reflects the important role bodies such as the International Network for Cultural Diversity (INCD) played in the elaboration of the Convention and in the initial stages of its implementation. The INCD was established originally at the instigation and with the financial support of the Canadian government, desirous of having a civil society partner in its efforts to advance the ‘‘cultural exception’’ agenda internationally, but was also funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. This development was significant in itself, as a demonstration of how one polity, the Canadian, can deliberately choose to highlight and stimulate civil society participation and input to serve its own ends (in contrast, for example, to the statist paradigm under which the French government operates, allowing non-state actors to play but a minor role). The INCD describes itself as ‘‘a worldwide network working to counter the adverse affects of globalization on world cultures.’’ It has members in all regions of the world: cultural organizations, artists, and cultural producers from every media, academics, heritage institutions and others. In point of fact, it was called upon at every turn by Canadian cultural diplomacy to support, refine, or relay its international strategic positions (and even correct them in some instances), reflecting Zemans’ notion (2004: 6) that ‘‘civil society provides legitimacy for governments seeking new international understandings of the role of nations in controlling their own cultural policies.’’ While the INCD has never gone beyond the stance of being advisory to governments, its role in the elaboration of the Convention has embodied a new kind of dialectic of between state and civil society representatives. Substantively, it appears to have pushed the envelope beyond questions of national cultural sovereignty alone, also grounding a ‘‘discourse of rights and responsibilities as being crucial’’ (Zemans, 2004: 6). It has contributed to broadening understanding of the need for a new global trade regime as regards cultural goods and services; it has, with the help of the new technologies deployed a judicious mix of information, symbolic, and
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leverage politics (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Khagram et al., 2002) in order to build awareness of this particular reading of cultural diversity in the public realm of many countries that otherwise would not have such awareness emerge. The institutions of the European Union, notably the European Parliament and the European Commission, are also increasingly mindful of the role of civil society in the still fledgling cultural arena of EU policy-making. This stance provides another instructive case. In 1992, the European institutions encouraged and supported the creation of the European Forum for the Arts and Heritage (EFAH), a body set up by and for cultural sector activists who were eager to give a voice to and for European ‘‘cultural civil society’’ at the precise moment when for the first time, in the Treaty of Maastricht, cultural activities were given legal status at the EU level. As a result, the European Commission acquired a cultural mandate, albeit a limited and constrained one, because of the primacy of the ‘‘subsidiarity’’ principle. Thus the Commission became de facto a cultural organization in addition to its existing economic and political nature. EFAH was the platform of cultural networks and organizations active at the pan-European level which could serve as a leading interlocutor for the European institutions. Rebranded ‘‘Culture Action Europe’’ in 2008, the platform today has some 90 member organizations that in turn represent over 6,000 organizations across the 27 EU Member States and beyond, active in all cultural domains, ranging from orchestras to writers’ associations, national theatres to international cultural networks, conservatoires to choirs and festivals to foundations. It has had recognized success in developing policy positions for the cultural sector and presenting them to European Union institutions, through one-to-one contacts with Members of the European Parliament and the European Commission, expressing its views and influencing the work of policy-setting committees at the European Parliament, as well as with other nongovernmental groups campaigning for a democratic, participatory Europe. It serves also a source of information for its members, monitoring European Union legislation and policy in cultural affairs, giving members the information they need to take advantage of funding opportunities and to anticipate emerging trends in funding priorities. The degree to which it’s views have been heeded is illustrated by the content of a key recent policy document issued by the European Commission ‘‘on a European agenda for a globalizing world,’’ which refers frequently to the role of civil society in achieving innovative purposes in this field (Commission of the European Communities, 2007).
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The Emergence of the Civil Society Turn
The cooperation between cultural organizations and civil society illustrated by these two cases is emblematic of the way in which civil society involvement is increasingly taken for granted by states or organizations exercising state agency in the cultural realm. The examples are international and regional respectively; yet national examples could readily be cited as well. Involving civil society is the reigning common sense, its emergence is relatively recent however; it has unfolded over the past half century, interconnected with a series of significant economic, political, social, and cultural changes. It is advocated and practiced by cultural organizations at many different levels, not only on pragmatic, dollars, and cents, grounds but for reasons of a less instrumental kind, based on ethics, symbols, and values. This reasoning has been driven by various contemporary trends of concept and of context in the cultural field. A first key trend of concept has been the shift from strictly aesthetic criteria to broader humanistic or cultural ones, from a paradigm of aesthetics to a paradigm of representation. Aesthetic or historical criteria for cultural valuation now take a back seat to issues of group identity, self-awareness, and power. In other words, cultural value is closely associated with the politics of difference and identity. In urban and regional planning frameworks, for example, the question of culture is no longer limited to embellishment and beautification. Today it extends to more operational definitions of how people use, relate to, celebrate, or desecrate their living environments. A second conceptual factor is the growing awareness that whilst expenditure on culture and cultural conservation can and should be justified on economic grounds, culture ought not to be reduced to a purely instrumental role. To be sure, cultural methods are often very effective in achieving noncultural objectives, ranging from health promotion or education to employment. As culture has come to be recognized more fully as part of the broader ecology of human settlements, investment in heritage preservation, for example, has increased commercial activity and raised property values, leading to a virtuous circle of economic growth, as has been shown in hundreds of heritage districts, ranging from the ‘‘Main Street’’ programs of North America, to the Marais in Paris or the abandoned docklands of Bilbao. Conservation works tend to stimulate quality employment and training, they also develop premises for the community, which can have a significant social value. In increasingly impoverished and insecure inner cities, cultural activities are helping keep disadvantaged youths off the city streets, reduce poverty, combat social exclusion and foster equity and citizenship, as we can observe in the
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urban slums of Brazil (Ramos, 2007), the Medina of Fez or the Ilha do Mocambique. Climbing onto this particular bandwagon has its risks, however. Doing so means playing by a new set of rules, rules that are set by considerations other than those of the integrity of the cultural heritage. Playing by these rules means accepting to lose when another sector with a higher economic or social impact can make more robust claims. Hence Amartya Sen would ask whether economic growth is to be valued for its own sake, or whether it is only an instrument with less claim to a foundational role than other aspects of human life, including the cultural. Thus the World Commission on Culture and Development, in its report entitled Our Creative Diversity (1996) refused to limit culture to a subsidiary position as a mere promoter of economic growth. It must also be seen as an end in itself, said the Commission, as the social basis of the ends themselves. Once we shift our attention from the purely instrumental view of culture to awarding it a constructive, constitutive, and creative role, we have to see development in terms that in terms that include cultural growth. The two conceptual shifts have together resulted in the major trend of content, which is the exponential growth – in sheer quantity as well as in sheer diversity – of cultural awareness in all world societies. This has had several qualitative implications. A huge range of different kinds of cultural action, from the preservation or ancient archaeological remains to the promotion of front-edge digital art, is now expected to be undertaken on behalf of a wide array of different communities. The criteria of selection, access, custodianship, and control regarding all such activities have had to change, with important implications for funding, service delivery and overall policy purview. It is not merely a question of giving more to particular groups but of recognizing, promoting, and preserving the resources which count as cultural to these groups. This demand far outstrips the resources available, particularly in these times of shrinking public sector budgets and the inexorable trend towards privatization. Finally, three trends of context. First, the devolution of public sector expenditure – not just the decrease – as central governments seek to offload responsibilities to lower tiers of administration as well as to other sectors. The result is that cultural budgets are under ever increasing stress, despite the now vigorous cultural industry arguments that sees cultural expression and its creativity as valuable resources for investment (Anheier & Isar, 2008). This reasoning is valid as far as it goes, which is to say not as far as the kinds of cultural activity that require subsidy because they cannot be adequately generated and/or distributed under the aegis of market forces alone. Faced with declining budgets, central governments
everywhere are looking for ways to lighten their burdens as curators, impresarios, and suppliers of cultural infrastructure. The responsibility for cultural stewardship has to be spread more evenly over a broader set of shoulders. This trend has intersected with a second one, the cultural affirmation of the local. As people become increasingly aware of and swept up in the powerful forces of globalization, culture has been taken up in an extraordinary world wide dialectic of cultural self-awareness – of their own inherited way of life as a value and a political right. The world cultural system has generated a strong reaction in local cultural orders, thus the potential for an increasing diversity of cultures. This cultural assertion of the local has in turn contributed to reinforcing the third trend, which is the affirmation of local citizenship through the steadily advancing ethic of participation: the recognition that cultural, economic, and social policy-making priorities should emerge from the grassroots. This shift from ‘‘top-down’’ to ‘‘bottom-up’’ models of governance is also bound up with the commitment to cultural diversity, for only such a commitment will enable the voices and choices of a wide variety of cultural, ethnic, and other collectivities to be heard. Taken together, both participation and the celebration of diversity contribute to reducing the gap between ends and means, in generating energies and resources for cultural expression. Governments cannot or will no longer seek to meet that gap and market forces cannot be expected to do so (the realities of business sponsorship and corporate citizenship warrant no more than relatively limited add-on funding at the best of times. . .). Hence not-for-profit sector and voluntary work and service emerging from civil society are also being solicited and encouraged, and are themselves becoming increasingly proactive stakeholders.
Future Directions Yet because cultural identity and national sovereignty are so closely interlinked, will such stakeholdership be even more fully recognized by organizations charged with delivering cultural regulation and services on behalf of governments? The question is an open one. Is the ‘‘civil society turn’’ destined to be durable? It should be noted that this question does not apply to the two North American societies, the United States and Canada, whose cultural systems have been shaped chiefly by cooperation between market forces and civil society inputs and which for that reason would merit a differently worded entry as regards this topic. Elsewhere, however, while it is likely that we shall see a diversification of alliances between cultural organizations and civil society, the key question is whether their scale will transcend present
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levels. What will current and emerging economic, political, and social conditions do to transcend rhetoric on all sides and enable true intersectoral partnership to be developed? On the governmental side, how much voice and power do the authorities really wish to offer to civil society in questions of cultural governance and to what degree will civil society wish to retain its freedom to maneuver independently of governmental purposes?
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Civil Society and the European Union ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Cosmopolitanism ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Interest Politics ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Functions of ▶ Public Value ▶ Subsidiarity
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. K. (2007) Civil society and the convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions (2005). Paper prepared for the UNESCO Secretariat. Anheier, H. K., & Isar, Y. R. (Eds.) (2008). Introduction. The Cultural Economy. The Cultures and Globalization Series 2. London: Sage. Commission of the European Communities. (2007). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on a European agenda for culture in a globalizing world (document COM (2007) 242 final. Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. (2008). Operational guidelines on the role and participation of civil society (Art. 11 and related articles). UNESCO document CE/08/1.EXT.IGS/5. Keck, M., & Sikkink, K. (Eds.) (1998). Activists beyond borders. Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press. Khagram, S., Riker, J. V., Sikkink, K. (Eds.) (2002). Restructuring world politics. Transnational social movements, networks and norms. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. McGuigan, J. (1996). Culture and the public sphere. London/New York: Routledge. Ramos, S. (2007). The pedagogy of drums: Culture mediating conflict in the slums of Brazil. In H. K. Anheier & Y. R. Isar (Eds.), Conflicts and Tensions. The Cultures and Globalization Series, 1. London: Sage. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. UNESCO. (2005). Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, from http://portal.unesco.org/cul ture/en/ev.php-URL_ID = 11281&URL_DO = DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION = 201.html Williams, R. (1988). Keywords. London: Fontana Press. World Commission on Culture and Development (1996). Our Creative Diversity. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Zemans, J. (2004). Advancing Cultural Diversity Globally: The Role of Civil Society Movements. Unpublished discussion paper.
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Civil Society and Culture YUDHISHTHIR RAJ ISAR The American University of Paris, Paris, France
Introduction and Definitional Issues ‘‘Civil society’’ and ‘‘Culture’’ are both broad concepts, dauntingly polysemous, the former more than the latter. This makes their coupling problematic. When the two abstract categories are yoked together, as we do here, the difficulty is compounded. Several questions arise. First, what understandings of both of these abstractions should we use? Second, what is to be made of the conjunction ‘‘and’’? What sorts of relationships does it imply? The uses of civil society in the cause of culture, or the uses of culture by civil society? Recent developments suggest that it should be both. As regards the first definitional question, the notion of ‘‘civil society’’ is easier to circumscribe. We can take it to be ‘‘a sphere located between state and market – a buffer zone strong enough to keep both state and market in check, thereby preventing each from becoming too powerful and dominating’’ while noting that ‘‘civil society is not a singular, monolithic, separate entity, but a sphere constituted in relation to both state and market’’ (Anheier, 2007). Given its plurality and plasticity, however, to what degree can it be claimed that this particular societal sphere exercises a form of agency that is different or independent from agency in and of other sectors of society? Isn’t the relationship between culture and civil society the same thing as the relationship between culture and society tout court? In the case of the word culture, definition is an even more complicated matter. Do we have in mind, in terms of the classic Raymond Williams typology (1988), the original idea of a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development? Or are we concerned with particular ways of life or systems and structures of meaning? Or do we mean the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity, both past and present (including therefore ‘‘heritage’’)? The first sense, still dear to humanists, may not have a great deal of purchase as far as our notion of civil society is concerned. The second is highly salient in the contemporary zeitgeist, yet it flirts with over-extensivity. It takes breadth to the point of meaninglessness, for surely civil society is a part and manifestation of culture so envisioned, just as both state and market are ‘‘cultural’’ forms in this reading. The third meaning, arts and heritage, for which we choose to use the more encompassing term ‘‘cultural expression,’’ is more
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straightforward. Yet while it may well be more amenable to analytical precision, this understanding also poses a problem of tautology. Cultural expression and its consumption and enjoyment permeate entire societies, so what significance resides in the distinction between civil society production and/or consumption of cultural expression as opposed to market production – particularly at a time at which commodities have been so thoroughly aestheticized and the aesthetic so largely commodified? And the same question is relevant as regards government-sponsored forms (which remains culture despite the sources of patronage). A semiotic reading may help. We could take culture to be the social construction, articulation, and reception of meaning – encompassing both art and symbolic production in general, the commodified output of the cultural industries as well as the spontaneous or enacted, organized or unorganized expressions of everyday life, including social relations (Anheier and Isar, 2007: 9). Such a reading would be germane to what Stuart Hall (1997) sees as the constitutive position of culture in all aspects of social life. More precisely, its substantive centrality in economic and political terms, as the means of producing, circulating, and exchanging culture have been dramatically expanded through the new media technologies and the information revolution. Also its epistemological weight, i.e., culture’s position in relation to knowledge and concepts: how it is involved in understanding, explaining, and envisioning the world. Both in turn explain the force and intensity the concept has acquired at the service of the intensive practice of identity in our time. It is now central to the repertoires of discourses and strategies deployed by ‘‘imagined communities’’ at different levels and many of which have crystallized in the sphere of civil society, both within and across national boundaries. To this extent, ‘‘culture’’ has become an area of concern for civil society organizations that represent themselves as cultural, of a range of entities that describe themselves as belonging to and representing the realm of ‘‘cultural civil society’’; more broadly, civil society resistances to neoliberalism, particularly in Latin America, have opened up discourses and practices of struggle in which culture is a crucial dimension (Yu´dice, 2003). But this set of discourses has been little analyzed academically. As is the case with interactions between civil society and cultural organizations (see entry ‘‘Civil Society and Cultural Organizations’’), apart from a limited quantity of work emerging from Latin America, there is next to no research that focuses on the interface between civil society and cultural phenomena. Both have been studied separately, not together. Joining them up under a dedicated research
agenda has to the best of our knowledge not been attempted, no doubt because the two categories are so broad, diffuse, and protean in content. Yet there are a number of issues around which, clearly, there is scope for a specific focus and it is these that will be briefly discussed below.
Key Issues Culture, Power, Culturalism, and Citizenship
A first key issue is the interaction between culture and power, a topic broadly discussed in both anthropology and cultural studies. Appadurai, for example, famously characterized contemporary culturalism as ‘‘the conscious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or transnational politics’’ (1996: 15). Such a politics is indeed increasingly becoming one of the causes adhered to by CSOs. It should be noted in passing that the ways this ambient culturalism has cleaved to readings of culture as a principally national phenomenon, readings that are in direct descent from the Herderian notion of culture as the national Volksgeist, are often at variance with the visions of current cultural theory. Paul Gilroy (2004: 6) holds, for example, that the idea of culture ‘‘has been abused by being simplified, instrumentalized, or trivialized, and particularly though being coupled with notions of identity and belonging that are overly fixed or too easily naturalized as exclusively national phenomena.’’ In other words, it is freighted with ‘‘methodological nationalism,’’ the assumption that the nation-state is the only proper container for culture. Today, however, the nexus of culture and nation no longer holds sway. Culture is now appropriated by collectivities at narrower as well as broader levels, as well as by individuals who articulate claims to culture as members of civil society. Writing on agenda-setting for political and social policies in Latin America, George Yu´dice (2003; see also Alvarez et al., 1998) evokes the innovative role of civil society actors who ‘‘put a premium on culture, defined in myriad ways, a resource already targeted for exploitation by capital (e.g., in the media, consumerism, and tourism), and a foundation for resistance against the ravages of that very same economic system.’’ In all such self-conscious articulations of cultural ‘‘identity,’’ there is a growing awareness of the porosity of boundaries and the fluidity and multiplicity of identities that matches the unease of the social science disciplines with the fixity and stasis of the traditional view of cultures as bounded wholes and over the essentialization and reification that so often results from this view. Yet despite the problems with these readings of the culture
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concept itself, social scientists stay with it, if only, as Hannerz (1996: 43) puts it, ‘‘to retain the common ground it has created . . . and profit from the fact that the general public increasingly understands what we mean when we employ it.’’ Such pragmatism is of course inspired by the way in which civil society actors propagate ‘‘complex whole’’ readings of culture on behalf of the groups to which they belong and, concomitantly, a fixed vision of the corresponding ‘‘culture.’’ Civil society actors themselves perform the rituals that project complex wholes by way of specific dramaturgies that use ‘‘the intersubjective abilities – of culture – to build monolithic and truth-generating symbolic worlds’’ (Wicker, 1997: 42). Putting this predicament somewhat differently, Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson (2001: 3), the editors of the volume Culture and Rights, observe how ‘‘at the very moment in which anthropologists were engaged in an intense and wide-ranging critique especially of the more essentialist interpretations of the concept, to the point of querying its usefulness at all, they found themselves witnessing, often during fieldwork, the increasing prevalence of ‘culture’ as a rhetorical object – often in a highly essentialized form – in contemporary political talk.’’ Yet it would be wrong to conclude that as civil society engages in the shifting and contested process of constructing collective identities, its ideologues and leaders are unaware of such pitfalls. For civil society actors are also among the principal agents of the interconnected phenomena of transculturality, deterritorialization, hybridity, and creolization that are produced by ‘‘flows and crossovers between cultures, and the patterns of their intermingling that are produced by the movement of peoples and the restless cultural mixing that now characterizes developed cultural markets’’ (Bennett, 2001: 19). The phenomenon is often referred to as deterritorialization, as Garcı´a Canclini (1995: 261) puts it, the end of the ‘‘natural’’ relation of culture to geographical and social territories. In exploring various forms of cultural mobility and border-crossing between tradition and modernity, and between countryside and city in contemporary Latin America, he observes that ‘‘all cultures are border cultures.’’ CSOs are among the most active explorers of these emergent zones of culture in which old traditions survive and meld with contemporary novelty, just as many of them negotiate the processes known as creolization, ‘‘the recent confluence of separate and different traditions not themselves pure, bounded wholes, but identifiable as of different derivation at the moment, or period, of creolization’’ (Hannerz, 1996: 67). Another key feature is the way in which ideas of citizenship, with which the very notion of civil society is entangled, are now being modulated by the growing
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significance social movements attach to the cultural dimension. These movements are now articulating this awareness ever more forcefully and linking it to other domains of social and political life. The claims being articulated here relate centrally to the idea of ‘‘cultural’’ citizenship, which can be defined as recognition of the ways of life of different groups in ways that create an entitlement to equal opportunity for each individual to participate in all the practices that constitute the field of culture and at the same time to function effectively as a citizen without being required to change her/his cultural allegiances and affiliations (Bennett, 2001). Across the world today, many new social and cultural movements are focusing on the rights to recognition, preservation, and protection of the ways of life of all kinds of groups. These rights go beyond rights for welfare protection, political representation or civil justice, and focus on the recognition of a cultural identity or lifestyle as well as the right to preserve or reproduce it. Already in the 1960s, Williams suggested an alternative democratic framework for his own (British) society, where a radically decentralized communications system would be open to the ‘‘challenge and view’’ of a republic of voice. The idea was to represent the voices of ordinary people, artists, and radical critics so that they might engage with a wider public on issues of common concern. A society of actively engaged citizens requires both the protection offered by rights and opportunities to participate. This implies a diverse civic and popular culture. Cultural Expression
Phenomena such as those briefly evoked above play out increasingly as peoples – in other words civil societies – and not just nation-states, articulate multiple rhetorics and practices of cultural preservation and reaffirmation, in the attempt to find a place in the planetary culture whilst preserving their own distinctive specificities. In the global South, the challenge is to introduce modernization, i.e., the tools and methods of the global North, in their own terms, at their own pace, under their own control. While they do not want their identity to be absorbed into a single world culture, many of these societies are in fact building a new, hybrid synthesis: traditions on the one hand, and today’s cosmopolitan cultural repertoire on the other. At their best, these are not mere transfers, but real transformations. And we observe that the transformations contributing to the world repertoire can emerge from Bahia or Bombay just easily as from London or Paris. But there are many ‘‘combat zones’’ as well. There are the producers of culture (artists, ideologues, media producers, and entrepreneurs) educated and trained in the North, and, often in opposition to them, more
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introverted groups who see themselves as the rightful guardians of a cultural essence. There are the people who constitute the audiences of cultural production who are divided on more or less the same lines. There are political leaders who instrumentalize culture as a workable rhetoric to help shape the processes of nation-building and development, indulging thereby in what Beck terms ‘‘introverted nationalism’’ (2006). Amongst themselves these groups debate, often passionately, the question of which of the various forms and expressions of culture – new or old, local, or global – shall gain dominance and have the greatest influence. At issue, of course, is the question of which groups, and which values, will emerge possessing the authority and power to represent more general cultural consciousness and identity. A somewhat less contested terrain has emerged in the cities, towns, and villages of the global South, where different forms of cultural expression and heritage are being mobilized by a range of activist groups concerned with social change and development. These kinds of CSOs can muster up a dynamism and engagement that is more organically related to the needs articulated by local populations than either the performative rhetoric of official bodies or the logic of the marketplace. An increasing number of civil society networks now play a crucial role in facilitating both production and dissemination of a variety of cultural forms. It is in recognition of this that the Dutch NGO HIVOS (Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries) and the Open Society Institute (OSI), in cooperation with the Budapest-based Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) organized in December 2008 on the Bangalore campus of the information society giant INFOSYS, a conference on ‘‘Culture and Civil Society Development in Asia.’’ The conference announcement stated that ‘‘networks in the arts and culture sector have created platforms for the interaction of practitioners and mediated between the producer, market and the state.’’ (http://www.cscsarchive.org/cscs/ announcements_folder/announcements.2008–11–01.076 2716893/announcement.2008–11–01.1130677957). The organizers of the conference hoped to identify obstacles to the further development of such interplays as well as develop solutions for them. It is worth noting the way they recognized the very different starting points and trajectories of the respective national civil societies concerned: ‘‘Cultural practitioners from Central Asia struggle with the Soviet cultural inheritance and the contingencies of the post-Soviet independent states, with weak institutions, competing ideological projects, mass impoverishment and cultural isolation despite the penetration of global cultural products. The Indian
counterparts work in a parliamentary democracy with huge regional differences and deeply ingrained inequalities despite the postindustrial boom, the growing participation in a global economy and the emergence of a middle class. Cultural production in Sri Lanka is marked by a protracted civil war. In Indonesia, a fragile democratic order is being tested by enormous cultural differences, socioeconomic stratification and radical politics inspired by religion.’’ Civil Society Against Cultural ‘‘Bads’’
There is no doubt a special place for cultural civil society in situations of crisis and political repression. This goes beyond the image of the individual artist ‘‘speaking truth to power’’ and catalyzing popular energies that was made familiar during the fall of European Communist regimes, e.g., Vaclav Havel and Kurt Masur, and reincarnated more recently by the writer Arundhati Roy in her public positions against ecological destruction and the related ethnocide in contemporary India. Local associations and networks in the cultural field, whether local, national, or transnational, step in at a less exalted level at critical moments of social transformation, as observed recently by the Commonwealth Foundation in its reflections on culture and development: ‘‘with multiple paths available as possible outcomes, cultural practitioners can play an important role at critical junctures in shaping how citizens and political actors think about their reality and about which paths are viable’’ (2008: 47). The South African case is emblematic of such roles being filled both in resistance to oppression and the processes of healing and reconciliation. Civil society entities and networks deploy the powers and resources of cultural expression to pursue a series of goals in such contexts. These purposes are diverse and can include: strengthening group identity, social organization and community; generating social energy; overcoming feelings of inferiority and alienation; teaching and consciousness raising; promoting creativity and innovation as well as democratic discourse and social mediation; promoting pluralist visions in culturally diverse (and hence possibly conflict-prone) societies. Increasingly, as the reach of the marketplace broadens, such cultural CSOs are also facilitating the production and distribution of cultural goods and services (Kleymeyer, 1994). This kaleidoscope of activities is still somewhat under-researched however; the principal focus of cultural research has shifted to the workings of the cultural economy, under the rubrics ‘‘cultural industries’’ and/or ‘‘creative industries,’’ indeed also ‘‘creative economy.’’ The remainder retains its focus on governmental policymaking. How CSOs can or could interact with
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government and the marketplace is beginning to occupy a more prominent place on the research agenda, but the pickings are limited so far, for the scope of such inquiry is simply not yet holistic and transversal enough, as Pratt has observed (2005). No Global Epistemic Community
It is somewhat paradoxical to observe, therefore, that these local and national activities have spread only thinly to the transnational level. There is no real global epistemic community for either of the senses of culture we have used here, only a limited number of international cultural NGOs (most of which gravitate around UNESCO, such as the International Council of Museums or, the International Council on Monuments and Sites), a handful of transnational advocacy networks (see ‘‘Civil Society and Cultural Organizations’’) and no significant transnational cultural movements or coalitions (as defined by Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Khagram et al., 2002). To be sure, globally shared anxieties with regard to cultural homogenization and the erosion of local cultures are regularly voiced in global social and economic forums, notably in the context of antiglobalization movements, but these evocations are almost invariably secondary, residual, even ritualistic; they do not contest nation-state positions and on the contrary may well echo them, as is the case for example with the ‘‘cultural exception’’ arguments now subsumed under the rubric of ‘‘cultural diversity’’ and that inspired the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and the Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (cf. ‘‘Civil Society and Cultural Organizations’’). There is no worldwide cultural movement comparable, mutatis mutandis, to Greenpeace or to Amnesty International. This lacuna has been noted and regretted by some scholars such as Kleberg (1998) since the 1980s, the concern surfaces in the public pronouncements of platform organizations such as Culture Action Europe and has been the motivation behind a number of short-lived start ups using the notion of ‘‘World Culture Forum.’’ A militant cultural wing has yet to emerge in global civil society. The question is, can large-scale mobilization around cultural causes ever emerge? The fact that it has not yet done so despite overabundant rhetorical reiteration of the central importance of culture does not encourage a positive response.
Future Directions More specific inquiry needs to be directed at a number of questions. First, at the question of whether there are forms of culture (in diverse understandings of the term) that are emerging from civil society understood as a self-defined sector of society which is performing certain social roles.
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Second, the question of whether civil society discourses and practice regarding culture are different from the positions taken by governmental authorities and of the divergence or complementarity between the two positions. Third, the question of why there is not yet a ‘‘cultural civil society’’ at the global level and whether there are certain factors or processes are promoting the emergence of such a global formation.
Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civil Society and Cultural Organizations ▶ Civil Society and Ethnicity ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Cosmopolitanism ▶ Havel, Vaclav ▶ Hybridity ▶ Identity ▶ Public Value ▶ Values
References/Further Readings Alvarez, S., Dagnino, E., & Escobar, A. (Eds.) (1998). Cultures of politics, politics of cultures: Re-visioning Latin American social movements. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Anheier, H. K. (2007). Civil society and the convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions (2005). Paper prepared for the UNESCO Secretariat, Paris. Anheier, H. K., & Isar, Y. R. (Eds.) (2007). Conflicts and Tensions. Cultures and Globalization Series, 1. London: SAGE. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large. Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Beck, U. (2006). The cosmopolitan vision. Cambridge: Polity. Bennett, T. (2001). Differing diversities. Cultural policy and cultural diversity. Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe Publishing. Commonwealth Foundation (2008). Putting culture first. Commonwealth perspectives on culture and development. London: Commonwealth Foundation. Cowan, J. K., Dembour, M. B. Wilson, R. A. (Eds.) (2001). Cultural rights: Anthropological perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garcı´a Canclini, N. (1995). Hybrid cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gilroy, P. (2004). After empire. Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, S. (1997). The centrality of culture: Notes on the cultural revolutions of our time. In K. Thompson (Ed.), Media and cultural regulation. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational connections. Culture, people, places. London/New York: Routledge. Keck, M., & Sikkink, K. (Eds.) (1998). Activists beyond borders. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press. Khagram, S., Riker, J. V., & Sikkink, K. (Eds.) (2002). Restructuring world politics. Transnational social movements, networks and norms. Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press. Kleberg, C. J. (Ed.) (1998). Promoting cultural research for human development, report from three seminars. Stockholm: The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation & Gidlunds Fo¨rlag.
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Kleymeyer, C. (Ed.) (1994). Cultural expression and grassroots development. Cases from Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder, CO/ London: Lynne Riener. Pratt, A. (2005 March). Cultural industries and public policy. An oxymoron? The International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(1), 15–29. Wicker, H. R. (1997). From complex culture to cultural complexity. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.). Debating cultural hybridity. Multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism. London: Zed Books. Williams, R. (1988). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana. Yu´dice, G. (2003). The expediency of culture. Uses of culture in the global era. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press.
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of democratic consolidation, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) have provided a starting point for this broad perspective by distinguishing between five interacting and mutually reinforcing ‘‘arenas’’ of democratic consolidation: (1) civil society, (2) political society, (3) economic society, (4) the rule of law, and (5) state bureaucracy. The role of civil society is best understood when distinguished from the other arenas. Figure 1 presents an illustrated summary of these different arenas, and the interaction between them (drawn from Howard, 2003). In order to understand Fig. 1, several key points need to be made explicit. The first is the broad distinction between the public and private spheres, indicated by the solid line separating family and friendship networks, on the one hand, from civil society and the other four arenas, on the other. This distinction refers to the important difference between social activities that are within close
MARC MORJE´ HOWARD Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Introduction Several decades ago, ‘‘civil society’’ was an arcane concept in political theory. Today, it is a term that floods academic, journalistic, and everyday discourse. The concept of civil society was revitalized in the 1980s by the Polish opposition movement and the subsequent wave of democratization around the world. Civil society as an object of study has experienced a veritable explosion, and today, it is commonly applied to very different contexts and continents throughout the world. In the post-Cold War era, in which many countries have embarked on various forms of democratization, civil society has come to be seen as one of the main indicators of that process, as well as an appealing way to frame such research. A vibrant civil society is often seen as a key ingredient for the success of advanced Western countries, as well as a panacea for developing countries elsewhere in the world. Within the social sciences – even though trust, political participation, and democratization have been standard themes in comparative politics for decades – civil society has become an appealing way of framing such research, with applications throughout the Western and non-Western world.
Definition In order to understand the role of civil society, it is useful to start with a wider view of social relations in any given democratic or democratizing system. Within the context
Civil Society and Democracy. Fig. 1 The arenas of democratization
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and trusted circles, and those that go beyond them to involve interaction with other forms of social organization in society at large. The next distinction is between the two arenas that are above, and the three that are below, the dotted line in Fig. 1. The state bureaucracy and the rule of law are based first and foremost on legal-rational institutions and organizing principles, which provide the essential core of any modern democratic system. Political society, economic society, and civil society, in contrast, consist of concrete organizations and groups of people that shape and define the particular character of that democratic system. As indicated by the thick arrow connecting these two categories of arenas, they interact in a mutually reinforcing way. The relationship among the three arenas below the dotted line in Fig. 1, consisting of concrete organizations and groups of people, is more complex. Simply put, political society refers to elite politics, namely political leadership and the competition for political power and office. Economic society refers to the myriad business organizations in pursuit of economic profit in a capitalist system. Civil society refers to the realm of organizations, groups, and associations that are formally established, legally protected, autonomously run, and voluntarily joined by ordinary citizens. More explicitly, the conceptual and empirical feature that differentiates civil society from political society and economic society is the important distinction between the elite and the mass level. In civil society, individual members can effect or prevent change through or by virtue of their organization. In economic society and political society, however, individual elites still have the power to control economic or political policies even when they are not acting within, and on behalf of, an organization. In other words, political society and economic society are primarily composed of elite actors and institutions that are involved with the pursuit of power or profit, whereas civil society is the realm of ordinary citizens, who join and participate in groups and associations on the basis of their everyday interests, needs, and desires. Unlike the organizations of political and economic society, civil society organizations – although they often seek political influence, and they constantly need financial support – have neither power nor profit as their objective or rationale. The fact that there are crucial differences between these three concepts in abstract terms does not mean that there are always clear-cut conceptual or practical lines that separate them. On the contrary, there is small but significant overlap among all three of the arenas. As shown in Fig. 2, the three arenas constitute overlapping
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circles. The central elements of political society consist of the leadership groups of political parties, interparty alliances, and professional politicians and elites. Economic society – which, along with civil society, maintains a close connection with the private sphere, since its origins stem from the very concept of private property and personal and family entrepreneurship – includes most importantly businesses, financial institutions, and entrepreneurs and economic elites. Finally, civil society encompasses a wide array of groups, associations, and organizations, including community and local organizations; human rights, peace, and environmental groups; educational or cultural activities; churches or religious organizations; sports or recreational clubs; women’s, veterans’, youth, elderly, disabled, animal rights, health, and self-help groups; and many others. But this is not the end of the story. According to the above definitions of each of these three arenas, there must be groups and organizations that belong to more than one type of arena at the same time. For example, political interest groups and large-scale nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) usually have the explicit goal of influencing and changing political power structures, yet they also rely on participation and support from ordinary citizens for legitimation of their cause. The overlapping section between civil society and economic society includes labor unions, professional, employers, and producers associations, and economic interest groups and NGOs. All of these belong to economic society since they are concerned with influencing economic outcomes; yet their membership basis is voluntary, and they consist of large or small numbers of people who come together to discuss and act on their common interests. The overlap between political and economic society consists of an array of elite-based political-economic interest groups and NGOs, which are not at all based on citizen participation or support. This would also include the corporatist or quasi-corporatist arrangements between firms and unions, which in certain sectors operate separately from the input of their members. Finally, cutting across all three arenas, one could place the media, which plays an influential agenda-setting role within political and economic society, while also serving as the fundamental means of communication to, and among, ordinary citizens. Overall, this conception and delineation of civil society remains true to the theoretical origins of the concept and to contemporary discussions of democracy and democratization. It also shows how different types of groups and organizations from the real world actually fit into an otherwise theoretical conceptualization of civil society.
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Civil Society and Democracy. Fig. 2 The groups of political society, economic society, and civil society
Key Issues The Democratic Benefits of Civil Society
A common understanding of most scholars who write about civil society – however they define or operationalize it – is the assumption that it has a positive and beneficial influence. Indeed, for most people, the term immediately brings to mind a peaceful, moral, and idealistic image. But what exactly are the benefits of civil society? Larry Diamond (1996: xxiii, 227–240) presents a general account of the role of civil society, listing many ways
in which it can exert a positive influence on the process of democratic consolidation. According to Diamond, in addition to ‘‘checking and limiting the power of the state,’’ civil society ‘‘stimulates political participation, develops a democratic culture of tolerance and bargaining, creates additional channels for articulating and representing interests, generates cross-cutting cleavages, recruits and trains new political leaders, improves the functioning of democratic institutions, widens and enriches the flow of information to citizens, and produces supporting coalitions on behalf of economic reform,’’ all of which help to
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strengthen and legitimate a democratic state. While Diamond adds that a strong civil society in itself is no substitute for solid political and legal institutions, which are a sine qua non for a democratic system, he concludes that once these basic institutions are set in place, civil society can and indeed must develop in order to establish a more deeply rooted, legitimate, and effective democracy. Diamond’s account provides a useful summary of the potential virtues of civil society in a democratic system, but how does civil society actually cause or influence them? Skeptics remain unconvinced by wide-reaching generalizations about the beneficial effects of civil society – even those that seem logical or obvious – in the absence of concrete evidence about how the causal mechanism works empirically. In other words, could other factors, such as economic well-being, the effectiveness of democratic political institutions, or long-standing cultural factors, be more important for explaining the outcomes that Diamond attributes to civil society? The question is impossible to answer systematically and definitively, but there is certainly no shortage of skepticism (e.g., Berman, 1997; Edwards & Foley, 1998). While perhaps not as clear-cut as Diamond’s description of the benefits of civil society, most of the empirical research – whether qualitative or quantitative, contemporary or historical – on this topic has pointed to a strong positive relationship between civil society and democracy. That said, the skeptics correctly object to the hyperbole that some scholars express when treating civil society as if it were the only or the most important factor, rather than simply one important factor among others. But in the end, while they might dispute over the relative emphasis placed on civil society when compared to other factors, few would actually deny its importance in establishing and sustaining a vibrant and healthy democratic system. And fewer still, if any, would suggest that a weaker civil society would actually be more beneficial for a democracy. The scholarship on the beneficial effects of civil society can be broken down into two general approaches. The first, most closely associated with the work of Robert Putnam (1993, 2000), emphasizes on the positive effects that participation in civil society has on individual people, which in turn contributes to a more peaceful, harmonious, and democratic society. Putnam has outlined a series of different ways in which civil society – or more generally the broader rubric of ‘‘social capital’’ – can have beneficial consequences. He writes (2000: 287): ‘‘Does social capital have salutary effects on individuals, communities, or even entire nations? Yes, an impressive and growing body of research suggests that civic connections help make us healthy, wealthy, and wise.’’ His study includes chapters
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on ‘‘Education and Children’s Welfare,’’ ‘‘Safe and Productive Neighborhoods,’’ ‘‘Economic Prosperity,’’ ‘‘Health and Happiness,’’ and ‘‘Democracy,’’ and for each, he synthesizes much of the scholarship on social capital from the past decade, highlighting its positive effects. More specifically, the basic logic of arguments made by Putnam and other ‘‘social capitalists’’ is that civil society organizations serve as what Putnam, paraphrasing Tocqueville, calls ‘‘schools for democracy.’’ In other words, the existence and flourishing of autonomous organizations allow ordinary citizens to interact with one another outside of their networks of family and close friends, thereby developing greater trust, tolerance, and bargaining skills, all of which are beneficial for democracy. Furthermore, their experience with the organizations of civil society allows people to gain a greater sense of their own roles and capacities in a participatory democratic system, thus creating a more proficient and engaged citizenry. The more people participate in the voluntary organizations of civil society – even in those that are not explicitly political – the more they internalize the norms and behavior of a participatory democratic citizenry, which can only strengthen the institutions and performance of a country’s democratic government. The second approach is generally associated with the work of historical institutionalists such as Theda Skocpol (2004), who argue that the organizations of civil society provide a direct source of popular influence on political or economic developments, thus benefiting individuals and society. Unlike Putnam, who emphasizes the socialpsychological benefits of consensus and cooperation that group participation will provide to its members and to society overall, this approach emphasizes the role of group conflict and struggle in shaping the historical development of modern democracy. As Skocpol and Fiorina (1999: 15) put it: ‘‘From an institutionalist perspective, voluntary associations matter as sources of popular leverage, not just as facilitators of individual participation and generalized social trust.’’ In the contemporary context, the institutional approach emphasizes the ability of the organizations of civil society to serve as a shield or a self-defense mechanism that protects citizens against a potentially intrusive state. In other words, in a democratic system, the groups and organizations of civil society have the capacity to prevent the state from passing new laws that oppose the organized interests of groups of citizens, as well as to positively influence those laws and regulations that do get passed. Moreover, voluntary organizations provide legislators with a greater breadth of information, viewpoints, and pressure, all of which can contribute to more effective and equitable policy making.
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The institutionalist emphasis on the direct political leverage of civil society can also be applied to individuals. As explained by Amy Gutmann (1998: 1): ‘‘Without access to an association that is willing and able to speak up for our views and values, we have a very limited ability to be heard by many other people or to influence the political process, unless we happen to be rich or famous.’’ Moreover, in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville (1969 [1835]: 190): ‘‘An association unites the energies of divergent minds and vigorously directs them toward a clearly indicated goal.’’ In short, membership in organizations provides direct and tangible benefits to individuals and to society, by allowing people to have an influence on the processes that affect their lives, and by achieving collective goals that could not be reached without the means of an organization. These two types of arguments are not at all mutually exclusive, of course, and proponents of one often recognize the importance of the other, but the difference in emphasis – either on the value of participation or on the power of institutional leverage – is analytically and substantively significant. Measuring Civil Society
Generally speaking, there are two alternative empirical approaches to the measurement of civil society within a wider comparative perspective. One is to focus on the organizations and associations themselves, by presenting extensive data on the distribution of different types of organizations within a country’s civil society, listing the numbers and percentages of voluntary associations that break down into different categories. Yet there are two main problems with this type of report: first, the categories of types of organizations are rarely standardized, and they vary tremendously from study to study, thus ruling out meaningful comparison across countries; second, the data are often collected haphazardly, based on unclear and unsystematic sampling methods, resulting in a dubious claim of representativeness. In addition to focusing on the distribution of voluntary organizations in a given country, some analysts report data on civil society organizations by showing the changes in the number of registered groups over time. This allows for an analysis of trends, a vital topic in most discussions of civil society, which attempts to measure or predict changes in the level of civil society over time. While a consideration of trends in the number of registered organizations is certainly more helpful than a simple typology of different types of organizations, nonetheless, it is problematic. The data should be viewed with a certain skepticism, given inconsistent methods for
counting the number of organizations across countries, especially when based on a subsample of organizations. These discrepancies make comparative analysis particularly difficult and tentative, since the findings have limited utility for researchers seeking to establish a comparative ‘‘baseline’’ on civil society across countries and regions. While there is no perfect measure of civil society across different countries, a second approach views representative surveys as a more valid and reliable starting point for such research. Indeed, the very reason why theorists and scholars have considered civil society an important feature of democracy is not so much because of the quantity and ‘‘form’’ of the groups themselves, but rather, is based on the meaning and ‘‘content’’ provided to them by the participation of ordinary citizens. By measuring the percentage of respondents who are members of voluntary associations, surveys not only give a better approximation of the development of a country’s civil society than a hollow list of total numbers or types of registered organizations, but they also allow for extensive comparisons, both with other countries and between different social strata within a country. Major survey projects such as the World Values Survey, the European Social Survey, and the US Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy survey have including questions about people’s membership and participation in voluntary organizations. Although there are certainly limitations to this approach as well – necessitating more in-depth case studies to contextualize larger patterns and differences – well-designed high quality surveys allow for more meaningful comparisons across countries. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses, and can be viewed as legitimate within the framework of a particular research project. But given the significant challenges in conducting valid and reliable comparative research on the organizational level, focusing on civil society as participation – measured by representative surveys that replicate the same questions in many different countries – probably provides a better starting point for comparative research on this important attribute of democracy and democratization. Civil Society in Nondemocratic Contexts
An important question in the comparative study of civil society is whether civil society does (or can) exist in nondemocratic and/or non-Western countries. There are a variety of possible answers, spanning from a very narrow to a quite broad conceptualization of civil society. A narrow view will posit that civil society derives from the particular theoretical tradition and practical
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historical experience of the West. According to this position, civil society refers specifically to the kinds of voluntary organizations that emerged from the American and West European models, and in some sense, civil society can only exist in societies with that historical background. In other words, even if this gives the concept an ethnocentric bias, civil society is viewed as an inherently Western concept that arose out of a distinct historical experience. In contrast, a broad view of civil society – of the type that is generally stressed by anthropologists – argues that the conceptualization and measurement of civil society should be expanded from its narrow focus on voluntary organizations in democracies, so that it treats all forms of social organization and practices as different manifestations of the same general phenomenon, civil society. According to this perspective, each country has its own civil society, and any cross-national variation is in the form that civil society takes, rather than in its level or strength. A third approach is closer to the middle. According to this view, civil society is not a universal concept that exists everywhere, just under different guises. And it does not support that the original definition and empirical manifestations of civil society should be diluted and stretched in order to fit contexts that are vastly different, since this may result in the mischaracterization of some of the most interesting and unique forms of political and social action in some countries, by forcing them into the ‘‘civil society’’ label. At the same time, however, unlike the narrow view, this approach does not restrict the applicable empirical terrain to countries that are culturally or historically ‘‘Western.’’ For there is an actual substantive and practical basis for the study of civil society – even while still viewing it as a specifically Western concept – in non-Western countries, since many of them have attempted over the past few decades to Westernize and democratize. From this perspective, regime type is the crucial distinction, and what one might call ‘‘classical’’ civil society can only really exist within countries that have democratic institutions (regardless of their ‘‘Western-ness’’). This is not to say, however, that countries must be advanced liberal democracies in order for civil society to exist, but rather that they should meet the basic minimal criteria of procedural democracy. In other words, civil society is a legitimate, appropriate, and important object of exploration and analysis within countries that can be considered electoral democracies. But to extend the concept beyond that to various types of authoritarian regimes may risk lumping in too many different phenomena and forms of organization into one already-beleaguered concept.
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This debate is by no means resolved. As the comparative study of civil society continues to grow and expand (Heinrich & Fioramonti, 2007), and as more scholars develop empirical indices to measure the strength of both civil society and democracy, the concept of civil society will continue to be applied to a wide array of countries and contexts – perhaps with mixed results for those concerned with systematic and meaningful comparisons.
Future Directions The study of civil society and democracy has come a long way since the early 1980s, when few people had heard of the term ‘‘civil society,’’ and democracy was hardly on the political agenda in most areas of the world. Although the flurry of research and advocacy work on civil society in the 1990s may have exaggerated its existence and impact in many places, the current state of the field is somewhat more sober and realistic about the relationship between civil society and democracy, both in advanced democracies and in countries struggling to institutionalize elections within an authoritarian historical tradition. While there will certainly be no shortage of skepticism and debate – whether on the larger conceptual issues or the more technical empirical questions of measurement and operationalization – civil society will continue to serve as an object of study and fascination within the context of democracy and democratization.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Economy ▶ Civil Society Indexes and Indicators ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ Participation ▶ Political Society ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Skocpol, Theda ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Theories of Nonprofit Sector, Political
References/Further Readings Berman, S. (1997). Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. World Politics, 49(3), 401–429. Diamond, L. (1996). Rethinking civil society: Toward democratic consolidation. In L. Diamond & M.F. Plattner (Eds.), The global resurgence of democracy (pp. 227–240). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edwards, B., & Foley, M. W. (1998). Civil society and social capital beyond Putnam. American Behavioral Scientist, 42(1), 124–140.
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Gutmann, A. (1998). Freedom of association: An introductory essay. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Freedom of association (pp. 3–32). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heinrich, V. F., & Fioramonti, L. (2007). CIVICUS global survey of the state of civil society (Vols. I & II). Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Howard, M. M. (2003). The weakness of civil society in post-Communist Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Linz, J. J., & Stepan, A. (1996). Problems of democratic transition and consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and postCommunist Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Skocpol, T. (2004). Diminished democracy: From membership to management in American civic life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Skocpol, T., & Fiorina, M. P. (Eds.) (1999). Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press and the Russell Sage Foundation. Tocqueville, A. (1969 [1835]). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans.). In J. P. Mayer (Ed.). Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books.
provided social scientists with tremendous insight into the economic possibilities and limitations of human, institutional, and other forms of agency influencing redistribution schemes advancing civil society construction. This body of knowledge has not only demonstrated the importance of public and private mediating responses independently, but has also demonstrated their impact when integrated together through subcontracting and other complex systemic arrangements. The political economy of public and private mediation, as well as the structures that these activities have developed, have sometimes eluded more action-oriented theorists advocating change. Nevertheless, the systemic processes of economic intervention that seek to ameliorate or maintain existing inequalities associated with stratified societies should be of profound interest to researchers concerned with civil society building around the world. This branch of knowledge has evolved under the rubric of economy of civil society.
Definition
Civil Society and Economy LISIUNIA A. ROMANIENKO Wrocław University, Wroclaw, Poland
Introduction In exploring the economic evolution of theoretical frameworks to demystify civil society, the discussion begins with Berger and Neuhaus’s (1977: 148) concept of mediating structures, which are defined as ‘‘those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and large impersonal structures of public life.’’ The concept emerged in research attempting to align the role of the individual to powerful institutions including voluntary or nonprofit organizations. In addition to the nonprofit sector, the state figures prominently as another powerful institution of mediation. Both the state and nonprofit sectors as mediating structures are of tremendous importance in unraveling the concept of civil society, because public and private institutions are able to intervene (individually, competitively, or cooperatively) in the often deleterious socioeconomic processes that lead to unequal distribution of societal resources within nation-states and across the globe. The mediating structures of interest are therefore, the welfare apparatus (public intervention) and the nonprofit apparatus (private intervention). By focusing on these dual mechanisms of mediation, civil society epistemology has
According to Patten (2002), civil society refers to the action of community-building in democratic societies that ideally seeks to capture pluralistic voices of discourse, that motivates individuals to accumulate increased forms of human capital, and that tends to occur within a charitable atmosphere full of cooperation spirit. Both public and private sector community-building figure prominently. Economic perspectives of civil society were first described by Weisbrod (1977), who viewed civil society construction in both public and private spheres as a layered response to failures of other sectors. His failure diversification paradigm argued that the demand for public goods is first attempted by the state when left unsatisfied by the market. Then when the demand for public goods is left unsatisfied by the state, the desire to meet demand is attempted through the private sector. In this early view, public or private sector provision of social services (as goods) is an economic model of opportunism driven exclusively by consumer demand. Extending this notion, Esping-Andersen (1990) called this sectoral interdependence the public-private mix. He described three systemic typologies in the industrialized civil society, the liberal welfare regime (characterized by minimizing the state, individualizing risks, and promoting market solutions), the social democratic regime (characterized by universal provision, comprehensive risk coverage, generous benefits, and egalitarianism), and finally, the conservative welfare regime (status segmentation and familialism, where head of households prevail and high pension returns are derived for high status workers).
Civil Society and Economy
While the typology provides a global framework suitable for cross-cultural analysis, the delineation between public and private schemes is not clearly delineated. Theorists like Salamon et al. (1999) distinguished public and private partnerships by focusing on civil society construction through the nonprofit supplementary paradigm, which views private mediation as the innovative fulfillment of particular social service objectives which the state has not been historically involved. Others like Handy (1988) prefer the transactional perspective or cooperative view, focusing on subcontracts and other resources flowing between the two that illustrates high degrees of interdependence rendering them virtually inseparable. Wagner (2000) transcends beyond cooperative agreements, and focuses on power inherent in contract relationship types as either complementary (where public and private partnerships together share some elements of primary responsibility) or substitutive (where the state holds primary accountability but substitutes its role through providers in the private sector). Young (2000) adds the adversarial view, suggesting that public and private structures are not always harmonious in pursuing respective interests. Regardless of perspective, the economic construction of civil society through both public and private sector mediation has a rich tradition of scholarship that highlights unique intervening mechanisms used independently or in conjunction to redistribute (often scarce) societal resources. To demystify how mediation operates with greater specificity, scholars have gone to considerable lengths to distinguish public and private approaches to economic construction of civil society through elaborate mapping of emerging structures and activities associated with the rise of the welfare state and the nongovernmental or nonprofit sector.
Key Issues Public Mediation Through the Welfare State
Piven and Cloward’s (1971) groundbreaking work discussed the welfare state as a necessary response to the failures of capitalism. Due largely to demand fluctuations in goods during declining periods of economic depression and recession, coupled with the production changes brought about through modernization; unemployment is demonstrated to be a permanent and irrevocable feature of capitalism. Because workers are unable to adapt as quickly as economic conditions warrant, periods of unemployability are a consistent longitudinal generational phenomenon. When social instability arises as a result of these changes, civil society construction occurs through
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the design and implementation of welfare state programs in an effort to realign social unrest back to a state of equilibrium (pp. 7, 40). "
[T]he legitimacy of the social order itself becomes questioned. The result is usually civil disorder. . .that may even threaten to overturn existing social and economic arrangements. It is then that relief programs are initiated or expanded. To restore order, the society must create the means to reassert its authority. [Welfare is] a surrogate system of social control . . . used to recapture the allegiance of disaffected blocs.
The mechanism of control is not physical or psychological coercion as has been the case under communism in the Soviet Union and China, but is instead a quid pro quo involving transactions of aid in exchange for fostering certain conforming behaviors among the needy. The goals of state welfare systems are highly normative. They involve the quelling of expressions of civil discontent, reengaging electoral participation, coercing individuals to accept undesirable low wage work, compelling employers to sustain exploitative hiring practices by providing endless supplies of historically marginalized laborers, perpetuating the segmentation of labor markets, motivating submission through complex bureaucratic systems of humiliation and degradation, and the absorption of moral, psychological, or other character deficiency (as opposed to economic capitalist systemic deficiency) among an entire strata of citizens. Another groundbreaking work that strengthened interest in this branch of knowledge is Wilensky’s (1975) research that fully discounted state ideology as a determinant of welfare state expenditures which he defined as government-protected minimum standards of income. Instead, his cross-cultural structural analysis found evidence to suggest that demographic factors, especially age, played a significant role in influencing the extent to which a state provides collectivistic versus individualistic protections. Although on the surface the findings provide evidence to bolster Weisbrod’s suggestion that welfare is a consumer-driven demand-based market phenomenon, Wilensky showed that welfare allocations compete and are mitigated by simultaneous demands for other public goods and services. Competition of public goods includes military spending, which are asserted by the state and not exclusively determined by consumer preferences. Welfare expenditures as transfer payments are similarly influenced by levels of taxation, so citizens residing in large industrialized nations tend to benefit exponentially. By exploring these combinations of variables, Wilensky advanced welfare mediation scholarship by moving
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beyond simple demand-oriented consumer models, to offer macrosocioeconomic nonmarket factors that influence welfare state allocations around the world. His analysis attempted to demystify the causes of fluctuating levels of welfare expenditures in both capitalist and communist industrialized societies exhibited at the time of his analysis. But are these fluctuating expenditures any genuine indication of structural mediation per se? In looking back at two decades of welfare analysis, Esping-Andersen (1990) believes that social scientific explorations of international welfare should have yielded more to this understanding. He suggests that Wilensky and others fall into what he called the comparativist framework, which distort realities by focusing on expenditures and related bureaucratic and demographic correlates. Expenditures in his view are no genuine indication of welfare mediation, because resource transfers originating from the elite are often absorbed circuitously by the elite (i.e., civil servants, administrative directors, insurance pension matching schemes, etc.). He suggests that welfare states not only prevent the redistribution of wealth, but paradoxically operate to rigidly solidify and deepen existing class divisions of a given society. Here, the role of welfare structure mediation is not a redistributive one, but rather, one that is self-confirming, self-perpetuating, class legitimating, and ‘‘an active force in the ordering of [existing] social relations’’ (p. 23). Esping-Andersen agrees that the net redistributive effects of welfare are determined largely though taxation, but he suggests greater attention to analytical details. He recommends demographic segmentation to determine what proportion of recipient populations such as the aged are found among a nations’ poor and needy. He also suggests taking into account level-of-living, which transcends beyond dollar exchange rates with regard to budgetary welfare allocations, and attempts to capture sociocultural nuances that can greatly inflate or deflate the quality of living in a given society. Welfare allocation levels compared cross-culturally, as dismal as they sometimes may appear, actually overestimate the strength of redistribution efforts in industrialized societies. In an attempt to move beyond false perceptions in order to embed ideology and demographics more deeply within welfare mediation scholarship, the issue of segmented labor markets under conditions of capitalism is integrated by feminist analysis such as that offered by Scott (1984: 7, 9) to suggest that public welfare services are disproportionately in demand by women. The author argues therefore, that any analysis of welfare state mediation must incorporate gender rigorously.
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Sociological literature offers us packaged explanations to the effect that poverty is influenced by class, race, nation, economic region, ethnic group, and gender. This is an ideologically impeccable conclusion that can never get you into trouble but also does not leave you much the wiser. In fact, considerable academic research has been done on the role of the first five factors in determining who is poor, the sixth is a recent afterthought. Yet gender cuts across all the others. Women are poorer than men in all five categories. Surely this says something about the power of gender as a way of getting at the whole issue of poverty.
Clark, Cochrane, and Smart (1987) also argue that mediating welfare state structures have disproportionate affects upon women. The combination of capitalism and patriarchy led women (and their dependent children) to be more economically vulnerable and in need of special mediations. The intention was to move women on a continuum from paternalism to independence, and from individualism to collectivism. This led to legislation attempting to provide direct public relief to women when needed, rather than through spousal or other household indices (pp. 146, 149). "
Key concepts in the formation of these more coherent analyses of welfare and social policy [involved] a major critique of traditional family life and its values, and a rejection of the institution of marriage [thus weakening the] system of male oppression over women. In contemporary feminist ideology the state is fully implicated in the structure of family life, the labour market and hence in constructing the very poverty of women which in turn causes women to make demands of the state for welfare benefits.
Women of color who are simultaneously vulnerable to institutionalized discrimination by gender as well as race face particularly difficult conditions of double jeopardy (Romanienko, 2001). Societal mediation through public welfare is thus viewed by many race, gender, and class theorists as a potential source of liberation to reverse historic economic and cultural oppression that manifests through reduced accumulation of educational and cultural capital as well as the severe socioeconomic deprivation that these disparate conditions cause. Leonard (1997) suggests that these ideological goals remain largely unfulfilled. The civil society dreams of mediation that are inherent in the welfare state as an ‘‘emancipation project of progress and order . . . upon which human betterment [could be] constructed’’ fell somewhat short of its intended target. The welfare state
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merely shifted functions of dependency from the family and labor market toward the state, giving vulnerable citizens choices of dependency types. These arrangements create significant dual-edged threats to the existing elite, thereby worsening the social and economic conditions of both parties (pp. 51, 53). "
[D]ependency on state financial support means the absence of support on the labour market, the latter being a form of dependency essential to the reproduction of capitalist social relations. At the same time, lack of dependency on the labour market results. . .in a reduced ability to consume. In brief, dependency on the market is approved precisely because it is necessary to the dynamic of the capitalist system itself . . . while dependency on the state is criticized or even reviled.
He discusses the lack of human emancipation through the perspective of those invoking structural mediation, the welfare recipients, which he describes as resistant moral agents, whose action serves as an indictment against the existing arrangements that leads to stratified dissimilarity. This perspective significantly broadens the definition of dependency and the role of human agency with regard to mediating structures. Private Mediation Through the Nonprofit or Nongovernmental Sector
Beyond public interventions through the welfare state, the second pillar of mediating structures lies in the activities of the nonprofit sector. Through the act of association, individuals organize freely within this sector to aid in the construction of civil society. It has been suggested by Meister (1984) that this form of mediation has the fewest impediments for social integration, when compared to for-profit and governmental sectors. He cites three forms of association activities that describe non-state, private mediation. They are routine association (typified in professional associations, other existing group representing particular interests), instigated association (usually in response to environmental stimulus such as antiwar organization proliferation), and voluntary association (usually created by members to fulfill a need). Beyond typology, Meister extends Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s (1962) notion of instrumental collectivism and argues that association manifests as a result of strong human need to instrumentalize contacts and interpersonal relationships. Because the social structure is antagonistic, individuals create and withdraw into voluntary groups seeking warmth and camaraderie at levels of action that cannot be provided by traditional family structures. Social distances inherent in complex institutional arrangements are
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thus mediated, and shared commonalties discovered to advance mutual interests and mediation objectives. While Meister’s research illustrates the social circumstances that facilitate the formation of voluntary association groups, it does not describe the social, economic, political, or cultural functions beyond the immediate needs of organizing participants. Later Ware (1989) offers a broader analysis. He describes four functional levels of importance; first, nongovernmental organizations or nonprofits act as a countervailing source of economic power to balance the activities of both market and state. Secondly, they give democratic citizens a level of participation that is unavailable through for-profit or government sectors. Here, the act of nonprofit association is viewed as a form of participatory democracy constructing civil society through social integration. Next, the sector provides public goods (services) that are unavailable through the other sectors, and does so safer and more efficiently than possible through government. Finally, the sector stabilizes democratic principles by providing financial and other opportunities for direct structural mediation by giving voice to oppositional forces and enabling them to mobilize collective efforts. Salamon (1995) elaborates on the mediation functions of the nonprofit sector in even greater detail, stating that the sector is much more powerful than previous research suggests. Nonprofit sector organizations enjoy substantial degrees of autonomy, exercise tremendous discretion over the spending of public money, and have developed an arsenal of sophistical weapons of political resistance he calls the ‘‘proliferation of new techniques of social action.’’ The increased prestige surrounding nonprofit associational activities is rooted in the unique qualities of sectoral activities. The innovation and lack of centralization, or what Salamon refers to as the directness-automatic dimension, enables swift accountable action without regard for strict chain of command, thus enabling these organizations to rapidly and quantifiably mitigate many of the deleterious consequences of poverty. Beyond mere effectiveness, Salamon describes the importance of the creativity-visibility dimension. This enables organizations to reach objectives through a variety of innovative approaches, such as the distribution or solicitation of inkind relief (Poole et al., 2000), and to do so creatively in a haute couture, non-civil service-like fashion. So if the nonprofit sector is such a powerful and effective economic instrument to combat social, cultural, and political inequality internationally; why does inequality persist with such vehemence and why does the world remain so uncivilized? Salamon reminds the reader that
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the sector is plagued with problems preventing it from fulfilling its’ economic mediation role in strengthening civil society. First, he states that sectoral failures are to blame. Just as markets and governments fail, so too do organizations in the nonprofit sector. Secondly, the sector’s inability to generate the necessary resources results in leadership spending an inordinate amount of time cultivating relations and actions advancing fundraising activities, which he calls philanthropic insufficiency. In addition, nonprofits tend to fixate on particular forms of civil society construction, to the detriment of others, which he calls philanthropic particularism. Also, the sector has been undemocratically usurped by dominating powerful funders, whose special elite interests rarely align with those at the bottom, a phenomenon he calls philanthropic paternalism. Salamon also attributes mediation weaknesses with certain occupational specializations resulting in philanthropic amateurism. In his view, the immersion of social workers and psychologists that disproportionately design and conceptualize sectoral activities negatively influences the trajectory of actions toward a therapeutic ‘‘self-help’’ orientation, misdirecting precious resources toward programs addressing the emotional needs of middle-class paraprofessionals, rather then the truly disadvantaged that their programs are allegedly intended to serve.
International Perspectives The challenges facing those involved in public and private mediation efforts, as well as the complex organizational factors that are associated with these mediation failure theories elaborated by researchers, is expected to become even greater for the future. Demands for economic mediation in light of demographic shifts taking place around the world will only intensify pressures for relief. Aging populations, collapsing financial institutions, increasingly inhospitable labor markets for women – youth – people of color, the rise in full-time gainfully-employed working class poor, the eradication of labor unions, deindustrialization, dismantling of small scale agrarian production, continued migration to overcrowded cities, proliferation of low-skilled service sector employment, bilateral trade agreements benefiting large corporations, coercive regulatory government intervention hindering nonprofit activities, and tax legislation that discourages philanthropic support; are some economic factors that are expected to intensify challenges for international mediation around the world. In addition, with the end of the cold war and dismantling of communist regimes no longer competing with capitalism on a global stage, there is no longer a need to publicly legitimate market failure or
democracy through formal ideological mediation (Seibel, 1990; Standing, 1996). Yet Van Til (2000) points out that nonprofits have, and will continue to behave, as a festering source of institutional pedagogy socializing citizens in ways to advocate on the behalf of pluralistic voices in democratic societies. Smith et al. (1972) argues that economic social scientific mediation scholarship must move inquiry beyond enumeration and multiple-level sectoral mapping, to provide interested constituencies with more compelling insight into genuine socioeconomic and political factors influencing global community organizing. Bayat (2005) and Wuthnow (2004) suggests that Islamic, Christian, and other faith-based organizations will be a powerful contestational force for capacitybuilding, while Van Aelst and Walgrave (2002) identify web-based communication as revolutionizing the speed, efficacy, and popularity of economic justice mediation efforts disseminated across borders.
Future Directions In the spirit of the challenge to demystify the economic roots of civil society construction taking place in complex public and private mediation structures evolving around the world, Wagner (2000) has suggested that transactions are an important source of political agency that influences systemic programming, while Handy (1988) goes further to describe calculative transactions (fairly explicit exchanges involving tilted but harmonious controls), cooperative transactions (creative pursuit of mutually beneficial exchanges with balanced controls), and coercive transactions (exchanges occurring through concentration of powers with the method of control involving threat of punishment that can include deprivations). Although transaction-oriented methodologies have enjoyed limited popularity, an exploration of exchanges taking place across core to periphery might enable those concerned with economic paradigms and processes driving the civil society project to abandon the strict sector-centered view by functional differentiation, in order to more accurately portray complex resource exchanges taking place in light of an increasingly globalized, often coercive, one world economy (Frank, 1966; Wallerstein, 2000). Another potentially fortuitous approach for future analysis is to focus on civil society professionalism, which could advance the understanding of organizations significantly. Brown, Kenny, and Turner (2000) embed organizational power in the professionalization of occupations under capitalism. They suggest that the phenomenon results in occupational conflict among elites and others, vying to inform activities within the frameworks of each
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respective profession. This results in severe internal competition that may be a detriment to operations. Excessive professionalization is rendered even more problematic through the contemporary absorption of generic managerial types from business to superficially legitimate (but substantively weaken) sectoral progress. Exorbitant remuneration for celebrity spokespeople and executive leadership are deemed shockingly excessive by many charitable observers, while occupational eliticism brought on by nepotistic interlocking directorates is expected to further weaken institutional legitimation. Isomorphism and routinization might present even more deleterious consequences for authentic civil society construction for the future (Gibelman, 2000; Meyer and Rowen, 1991). The recent preponderance of mergers and franchises may also be leading to excessive financial, cultural, and ideological dependencies through large scale multilateral public – private mediation efforts. Critics claim these increasingly counterproductive, non-mediating, dependencybreeding efforts taking place around the globe attempt to cultivate unsustainable development patterns and projects that are highly inconsistent with avant-garde alternative economic justice globalization strategies known as alterglobalization; while inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) contributing to the chaos and lawlessness that fosters exploitative trade relations prioritizing industrial petroleum, diamond, and arms proliferation over development goals. Observers suggest that the economic construction of civil society among governmental and nongovernmental organizations is leading to such widespread complicity with powerful, multilateral structures such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and bilateral trade commissions; that they run the risk of rendering the civil society project virtually innocuous. The intended or unintended consequences of existing arrangements is, by even the most casual observation, resulting in unprecedented levels of death and destruction to the planet and its people manifesting through genocides and mass dislocation of refugees, widespread famine and starvation, water wars, dwindling access to genetically unmodified food, generic pharmaceuticals to combat the HIV pandemic, climate change, and many other urgent socioeconomic, political, and ecological conditions on a scale, breadth, and depth that civil society organizations have been unwilling or are yet unable to sufficiently address. By many accounts, neither public nor private mediation efforts constructing the global civil society have developed any authentic or cohesive economic resistance strategies to effectively combat the complex consequences of
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exploitative capital circulating around the globe due to collusive deregulatory government policies that have detrimental affects upon the poor. In response, participants at worldwide alterglobalizing events are working outside and beyond conventional public and private mediation organizations to conceptualize and implement alternative forms of economically-sustainable civil society that attempts to recognize and mitigate these hegemonic socioeconomic and political conditions. Has the potential of traditional mediating structures been permanently and irrevocably usurped as a result of financial dependencies on world capitalist system? Scholarly inquiry will surely have to address these rather plausible indictments posing difficult introspective questions, if research is to continue to strengthen the utopian potential inherent in the global civil society project for the future.
Cross-References
▶ Contracts and Contract Regimes ▶ Esping-Andersen, Gøsta ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Functions of ▶ Social Origins Theory ▶ Theories of Nonprofit Organization, Economic ▶ Theories of Nonprofit Sector, Economic ▶ Weisbrod, Burton A
References/Further Readings Bayat, A. (2005). Islamic and social movement theory. Third World Quarterly, 26(6), 891–908. Berger, P., & Neuhaus, R. (1977 [re-issued in 1996]) To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy [re-named] To Empower People: From State to Civil Society] American Enterprise Institute Press. Berger, P. L., & Neuhaus, R. J. (1996). To empower people: From state to civil society. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. Brown, K. M., Kenny, S., & Turner, B. S. (2000). Rhetorics of welfare: Uncertainty, choice, and voluntary associations. New York: St. Martin. Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit over people. New York: Seven Stories. Clarke, J., Cochrane, A., & Smart, C. (1987). Ideologies of welfare: From dreams to delusion. London: Hutchinson. Esping-Anderson, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Frank, A. G. (1966). The development of underdevelopment. Monthly Review, 18(17), 17–31. Handy, C. (1988). Understanding voluntary organizations. London: Penguin. Gibelman, M. (2000). The nonprofit sector and gender discrimination: A preliminary investigation in to the glass ceiling. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 10(3), 251–269. Goldthorpe, J. H., & Lockwood, D. (1962). Affluence and the British class structure. Sociological Review, 11(2), 133–163. Leonard, P. (1997). Postmodern welfare: Reconstructing an emancipatory project. London: Sage.
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Meister, A. (1984). Participation, associations, development, and change. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1991). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. In P. J. DiMaggio & W. W. Powell (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago. McPherson, J. M. (1981). Voluntary affiliation: A structural approach. In P. Blau & R. Merton (Eds.), Continuities in structural inquiry. London: Sage. Patten, M. (2002). Democracy, civil society, and the state. In K. L. Brock (Ed.), Improving connections between governments and nonprofit and voluntary organizations. Montreal, Canada: McGill University. Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1971). Regulating the poor: The functions of public welfare. New York: Pantheon. Poole, D. L., Ferguson, M., DiNitto, D., & Schwab, A. J. (2002). The capacity of community-based organizations to lead local innovations in welfare reform. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 12(3), 261–276. Romanienko, L. A. (2001). Dual labor market theory and the institutionalization of farmers markets. Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 12(4), 359–373. Salamon, L. M. (1995). Partners in public service: Government – nonprofit relations in the modern welfare state. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Salamon, L. M., Anheier, H. K., List, R., Toepler, S. S., & Sokolowski, W. (Eds.) (1999). Global civil society: Dimensions of the non profit sector. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scott, H. (1984). Working your way to the bottom: The feminization of poverty. Boston, MA: Pandora. Seibel, W. (1990). Organizational behavior and organizational function. In H. Anheier & W. Seibel (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: International and comparative perspectives. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. Shiva, V. (1999). Stolen harvest: The hijacking of the global food supply. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Smith, D. H., Reddy, R., & Baldwin, B. (Eds.) (1972). Voluntary action research. Lexington, MA: DC Health. Standing, G. (1996). Social protection in Central and Eastern Europe: A tale of slipping anchors and torn safety nets. In G. Esping-Anderson (Ed.), Welfare states in transition. London: Sage. Van Aelst, P., & Walgrave, S. (2002). New media, new movements ? The role of the internet in shaping the ‘‘Anti-globalization’’ movement. Information, Communication, and Society, 5(4), 464–493. Van Til, J. (2000). Growing civil society: From nonprofit sector to third space. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. Wagner, A. (2000). Reframing ‘‘Social Origins’’ theory: The structural transformation of the public sphere. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 29(4), 541–553. Wallerstein, I. (2000). The essential Wallerstein. New York: New Press. Ware, A. (1989). Between profit and state: Intermediate organizations in Britain and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Weisbrod, B. A. (1977). The voluntary sector: An economic analysis. Lexington, MA: Lexington. Wilenski, H. L. (1975). The welfare state and inequality: Structural and ideological roots of public expenditures. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Wuthnow, R. (2004). Saving America: Faith-based services and the future of civil society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton. Young, D. R. (2000). Alternative models of government-nonprofit sector relations: Theoretical and international perspectives. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 29(1), 149–172.
Civil Society and Ethnicity MARY KAY GUGERTY, TRAVIS REYNOLDS University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
Introduction The idea that ethnicity and ethnic heterogeneity may be inimical to civil society has long been debated. Crosscountry empirical research suggests that ethnically diverse societies have slower economic growth and are more prone to corruption and political instability than ethnically homogeneous societies, as a result of political conflict and lack of cooperation across ethnic groups (Mauro, 1995; Knack and Keefer, 1997). Easterly and Levine (1997) argue that ethnic diversity has had particularly harmful effects in sub-Saharan Africa, the most ethnically diverse region in the world. While civil society has been increasingly praised for its growing role in public service provision in countries across the globe, agreement on the link between ethnic diversity and lower provision of public goods appears so strong that it has been characterized as among the ‘‘most powerful theses of political economy’’ (Banerjee et al., 2005).
Definition Ethnicity
Ethnic identity can be broadly construed as a communal and individual identity that is both felt and expressed – a notion of ‘‘our people’’ (Fenton, 2003: 114). Family and kinship obligations are not equated with ethnicity, though certainly family and household life constitute important venues for learning and exercising many aspects of an ethnic identity. Early theories of ethnic identity understood ethnicity as ‘‘primordial’’ (Geertz, 1973; Rabushka and Shepsle, 1972); even today ethnic identity is still believed to be exceptionally salient for group identification because it is organized around characteristics that are either impossible to change, such as color of skin, or difficult to change, such as language or religion (Posner, 2005). Horowitz (1985) argues that the concept of ethnicity includes all categories based on ascriptive group identities (race, religion, tribe, or caste) that are based on a myth of common ancestry. In some societies ethnic categorizations may overlap with economic class – as in the cases of apartheid South Africa, or the caste system in India for example – such systems can be thought of as ranked ethnic systems. Fearon (2003) proposes that individuals linked by ethnicity have a distinct history as a
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group or share a common culture that is valued by the majority of members. However, though the importance of such more or less immutable attributes remains readily apparent today, ‘‘primordial’’ conceptions of ethnic identities have given way to a notion of ethnicity as a partially constructed category (Chandra, 2004; Horowitz, 1985; Olzak, 1992; Hutchinson, 2000; Posner, 2005) that is flexible, influenced by contextual factors and group leaders’ strategies, and amenable to change over time (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2005; Fearon and Laitin, 2000). Recent evidence from political science confirms the idea that the salience of an ethnic identity is based in part on the nature of political jurisdictions (Posner, 2004a). Other evidence suggests that the immediacy of important events such as highly contested elections shifts the salience of ethnic identity for individuals (Eifert et al., 2008). Ultimately, as Chandra (2006) argues, ethnicity as a category is in need of additional clarification. Chandra proposes that ethnic identities be understood as a set of identities in which membership eligibility is determined by attributes associated – or believed to be associated with – descent. In this definition, ethnic identities are characterized by two features: constrained change and visibility. Ethnic identities are constrained because, although malleable, these identities are also sticky and resistant to change. Visibility implies that some information about an individual’s ethnic identity can be obtained through ‘‘superficial’’ observation. Civil Society
Just as with ethnicity, there is not universal agreement on what constitutes civil society. Some scholars see civil society simply as the public sphere (Habermas, 1998, 1992) – any of the myriad relations and communications between citizens, possibly informed by laws and government policies but not dependent on them (Dewey, 1927; Fraser, 1992; Edwards, 2004). Others see civil society as a source of the attitudes, norms, and values needed to ‘‘make democracy work’’ (Hodgkinson and Foley, 2003). Shils (2003) for example construes civil society as the realm of public spiritedness, tolerance, civic virtue, and indeed ‘‘civility’’ towards one’s fellow citizens. Tocqueville saw a civil society that could limit majority tyranny and teach civic virtues: ‘‘[he] likens civil associations to permanently open schools of public spirit within which citizens learn their rights and obligations, press their claims, and become acquainted with others’’ (Keane, 1988: 61). Putnam’s acclaimed work follows a similar argument, linking differences in the efficiency and legitimacy of local governments to the degree of civic engagement by
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citizens in different regions (Putnam et al., 1993). In this view, ‘‘social capital’’ – or social networks and the norms that sustained them – are crucial to democracy and economic prosperity (Putnam, 1995a, 1994b, 2000). Recently researchers have linked social relations and communication to increased participation in civic and political life (Wollebaek and Selle, 2002), and for some the notion of a ‘‘global civil society’’ promises to expand peace and democracy across the globe (Heinrich, 2007; Vogel, 2006; Rohrschneider and Dalton, 2002; Easterly, 2001). Nevertheless there are counterarguments – and indeed there has long been debate over whether or not civil society is a ‘‘good thing.’’ Hegel saw in civil society the danger of particular interests overwhelming the public good, and argued for a state that could and would override civil society when necessary for the greater public well-being. Along a similar vein Marx and later Gramsci saw civil society as a non-state sphere of outright domination controlled by the ruling elite (Bobbio, 1988). Civil society was merely another tool by which the modern state (an expression of the power of the dominant class) could maintain control over society without the need for extensive use of force. Gramsci in particular saw civil society as an alternate battlefield in which the struggle for class dominance and hegemony took place. These philosophers saw civil society neither as performing a democratic ‘‘educational function’’ (Hadenius and Uggla, 1996: 1622) nor as promoting egalitarianism or democracy. Another perspective views associative groups in civil society not as instruments of control, but as interest groups advocating for members’ interests at the expense of the public good. Theorists in the public choice tradition have considered roles for both civic associations and ethnicity in the purported ‘‘rent-seeking’’ activity of groups. Buchanan (1981) argued in Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society that interest groups sought primarily to gain advantage (rents) from their ‘‘special relationships’’ with legislators and bureaucrats. Olson’s (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations claimed to show empirically that an increase in the relative number of organizations in a given country was associated with decreased economic performance and even the outright paralysis of political institutions. Perhaps the most commonly accepted notion of civil society is that there exists a space between the family and the state and which makes interconnections between individuals and families possible. Civil society is thus an organized part of society, a set of institutions and relationships which is distinct from states and markets, and which is generally formed for the purposes of advancing common interests and facilitating collective action (Edwards, 2004).
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Key Issues The Contributions of Ethnic Groups to Civil Society Can Be Both Reinforcing and Destabilizing
Can ethnic ties contribute to civil society or are they always inimical to it? Civic or civil values are sometimes thought to represent the highest ideals, while people’s attachment to ‘‘their mates, family, and wish for improvement’’ are seen to be secondary, superficial, and even selfish (Shils, 1957: 130). Hadenius and Uggla have argued that ‘‘traditional norms, rituals and patterns of authority are part of the reason why a strong and viable civil society is absent in many Third World countries’’ (1996: 1625). Edward Shils (2003, 1957) argued to the contrary, that ‘‘primordial’’ ties of kinship and more immediate ‘‘civil’’ ties exist essentially on the same social plane, but play different roles at different times: primordial ties are reinforced daily through interactions or through the definition of the relationship (as in blood relatives or shared ethnic heritage), while civil ties are more abstract and not acted upon on a daily basis, but come to the forefront in the face of national crises, or important events like elections. This gives rise to another series of questions: Must civil society organizations be voluntary? Can forms of organization that rely on acriptive characteristics or birth be civil? Gellner (1995) argues that a modern civil society is modular and transcends acriptive characteristics. He argues that traditional society is defined by segmentalism, in which categories are defined by birth. In this view, organizations built upon ethnic divisions are not civil. Wesolowski (1995) follows this line of thinking to define ‘‘associative ties’’ as the generic features of civil society. Civil groups share a number of key characteristics: they can be freely joined and left; they usually rely on debate to make decisions; and they tend to pursue interests and goals defined by their members. They may favor in-group loyalty, but nevertheless when negotiating with other groups they perceive and treat them as equally valid social units. As such, associative characteristics create ‘‘a framework for resolving conflicts between groups, and are typical of stable Western democracies’’ (Wesolowski, 1995). In contrast, Wesolowski argues, the ‘‘communal ties’’ that are characteristic of ethnicity have a much different character. An individual is born with them (and even then such ties only persist to the extent that fellow members of the community consider the individual to be born with them). Individuals are integrated into the group by a set of symbols, values, and beliefs that produce a high degree of loyalty and devotion to the group (Hutchinson and Smith, 1996). For nonmembers, however, communal groups are characterized by separateness and closure
(Portes, 2007; Oliver and Wong, 2003). Consequently communal groups are more prone to conflict than are associative groups – to members of a communal group, ‘‘other’’ groups may appear to be misguided, at best, or menacing, at worst (Wesolowski, 1995). In reality most associative group forms are likely hybrids – characterized by both freedom of access to the group and some fundamental values, as well as by aversion to other groups. Numerous authors have confirmed this suspicion (e.g., Stolle and Rochon, 1998). Bryant (1995) notes that civil society as a phenomenon is capable of being ‘‘inclusive and tolerant of pluralism (as in the Netherlands) or inclusive and assimilationist (as in France), or it can be exclusive and suspicious of pluralism (as in Germany)’’ (1995: 145). Varshney (2001) also notes that many communitarian organizations are hybrids: ethnic and religious associations combining elements of both ascription and choice. Indeed ethnic associations can perform many ‘‘modern’’ functions, such as participating in democratic politics, facilitating entry into modern education and so forth (Birnir, 2007; Tavits, 2005; Posner, 2004b; Trager, 1998; Agh, 1994; Rudolph and Rudolph, 1967). Ultimately it may be the goals of the association, more than the form of organization, that are the critical test of its contributions to civic life. Advocates for the importance of associative ties in creating a civil society often emphasize the importance of dense, reciprocal ties for sustaining ongoing cooperation (Putnam et al., 1993; Putnam, 2000); many ethnic groups contain these sorts of ties. A key basis for sustaining cooperation is the information on others that these associative ties produce. Ongoing interaction builds reputations and provides evidence on the likely strategies used by others in interactions, all of which combine to produce norms of trust to support cooperative strategies (Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Putnam et al., 1993). A number of underlying mechanisms might support this cooperation: common tastes, increased concern for the welfare of coethnics, the ability to devise common strategies and sanction noncooperators, and individuals’ choices about which strategies to use or behavior to employ in a given setting (Habyarimana et al., 2007). Recent empirical work confirms the power of ethnic ties to induce cooperative, civic behavior. Miguel and Gugerty (2005) find that social sanctions are more effectively imposed within ethnic groups than across them, leading to higher levels of public goods contributions and greater participation in school governance in ethnically homogenous areas. Habyarimana et al. (2007) find that co-ethnics tend to comply with in-group reciprocity norms that favor cooperative strategies.
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The evidence suggests that ethnic ties provide a template for cooperation, yet the empirical evidence also suggests that interethnic cooperation is a challenge and the lack of ties across ethnic groups can lead to conflict. Fearon and Laitin (2003) point out that given the heterogeneity of many societies, ethnic violence is actually quite rare. They attribute this to the importance of expectations – when both groups in a potential conflict expect that a breakdown of cooperation will lead to longterm conflict, the perceived costs of that conflict may be sufficient to maintain cooperation. In addition, ethnic groups may be willing to engage in in-group ‘‘policing’’ and sanctioning of co-ethnics who defect against an ethnic ‘‘other.’’ Nonetheless there is ample evidence that strong in-group ties may be associated with poorer public outcomes. Khwaja (2000) shows that social heterogeneity has a negative effect on the maintenance of community projects in northern Pakistan. Alesina et al. (1999) find that higher levels of ethnic diversity are empirically associated with lower local public goods funding across US municipalities, and argue that this may be the result of different preferences for public goods. Alesina and LaFerrara (2000) show that if individuals prefer not to mix across ethnic lines, participation in community organizations be lower in ethnically diverse areas, leading to lower provision of public goods, particularly when it is costly for distinct ethnic groups to self-segregate into separate organizations. Interactions Between Ethnicity and Civil Society Are Conditioned by State Context
Shils notes that one component of civil society which was neglected in practically all discussions in the nineteenth century was the concept of nation or nationality (Shils, 2003). Nation and nationality were supposed to be characteristics of the type of society which was being superseded by civil society. Nevertheless, Shils contended, as civil societies became increasingly widespread over the course of the nineteenth century ‘‘the nation or nationality provided the cohesion which would otherwise have been lacking in those civil societies’’ (2003: 294). Many of the classic definitions of civil society rely on the juxtaposition of civil society and state. In Democracy in America de Tocqueville distinguishes between state government and civil life: while the state is composed of assemblies, courts, police, and armed forces, civil life refers to the public life of citizens, that is, life that is neither part of the state nor part of life within the family or household. De Tocqueville noted in particular that civil life in America was notable for the proliferation of associations – phenomena which he defined as ‘‘citizens
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coming together in an organized fashion to pursue common purposes’’ (Hodgkinson and Foley, 2003). In de Tocqueville’s writings, private organizations such as churches and literary associations were treated similarly to public bodies like town councils – all were seen to be autonomous local public bodies providing ‘‘one of the means whereby citizens both achieve common purposes and maintain their independence of state and federal government’’ (Bryant, 1995: 143). Many authors have since echoed this sentiment: Frentzel-Zago´rska (1990) calls civil society ‘‘a structure of the self-organization of society, located outside, though not disconnected from, the institutional framework of the state.’’ Bryant (1995) defines it as ‘‘the association of citizens – social self-organization – between households and the state and aside from the market’’ (Bryant, 1995: 148). Since the enlightenment civil society has been considered by many as a defense against unwarranted intrusions by the state on individual rights and freedoms: ‘‘organized through the medium of voluntary associations. . . .civil society was a self-regulating universe of associations, committed to the same ideals that needed, at all costs, to be protected from the state’’ (Edwards, 2004: 7). More recently, Orvis declares modern civil society to be a public sphere of formal or informal, collective activity autonomous from but recognizing the legitimate existence of the state (Orvis, 2001). In contrast, ethnicity need not necessarily be separate from the state. Bryant (1995) calls ‘‘ethnic nations’’ those states that relate citizenship and full participation in society to ethnicity and descent. He contrasts these directly with ‘‘civic nations,’’ which may attribute a leading role in their formation to one or more ethnies, but also extend citizenship to other groups, and hold pluralist (or assimilationist) ideals. Bryant (1995) identifies France as a ‘‘civic nation,’’ with habitants and migrants of various origins accorded citizenship and entrance into civil society. This is in contrast to the strict hereditary criteria for citizenship in Germany. Kaldor (2003) uses the term ‘‘extreme ethnic chauvinism’’ to characterize those movements, like religious fundamentalism, which seek to play at identity politics – laying claim to political power in the name of identity (and to the exclusion of other identities). While civic associations are by definition inclusive and forwardlooking, she argues, fundamentalist or ethnic extremist identity politics is inherently backward-looking: ‘‘They conjure up an idea of a pure traditional way of life – nostalgia for a past where supposedly this existed’’ (2003: 98). Moreover, in her studies of societies in conflict Kaldor finds such nationalist strategies to be particularly effective among the poor – while the NGO sector may
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have widespread moral authority in many countries, it is often filled with an educated elite minority; nationalist and fundamentalist movements may be better able to capture popular sentiment (2003: 100). As a possible counterpoint Fenton speaks of different levels of ethnic identification: ‘‘totalizing ethnicities’’ that pervade all aspects of individual and group life; ‘‘tacit ethnicities’’ where cultural symbols are linked to ethnic identity but have no explicit social value; and ‘‘provisional ethnicities’’ that take on meaning only in certain social contexts external to the individual (Fenton, 2003: 115). Birnir (2007) suggests that ethnicity and civil society serve similar roles in organizing communities and forming identities: consequently in the absence of wholly voluntary associations (as in the case of an authoritarian state) it is likely that ethnicity will emerge as a strong organizing principle around which group members will rally. Kasfir (1998) suggests we should ‘‘use civil society to gain a wider understanding of particular societies and their relationship to their states’’ (3). When mobilized, both civil society and ethnicity can be powerful sources of action. Civil society has been linked to the toppling of regimes in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Ethnicity, meanwhile, as Fenton observes, has the potential to become a ‘‘totalizing identity: if people are concerned about their jobs, their neighborhoods, their education and that of their children, their legal status, their personal security, under the right circumstances ethnicity may be incorporated in all of these’’ (2003: 115).
International Perspectives If, as we have argued, the interactions of ethnicity and civil society are conditioned by the characteristics of societies and states, then patterns of interaction between ethnic groups and civil society will vary by region and country as well. Many scholars have argued that ethnicity and the primacy of ethnic groups restrict the growth of civil society in the developing world, for example. Hadenius and Uggla have argued the ‘‘traditional norms, rituals and patterns of authority are part of the reason why a strong and viable civil society is absent in many Third World countries’’ (1996: 1625). For such writers, NGOs and civil society are part of a wider project of transformation and development that seeks to break down undesirable institutions within ‘‘other’’ societies and to promote modern (i.e., liberal), democratic ones in their place ‘‘to make societies truly ‘civil’.’’ Membership in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other civil groups that cut across ethnic
and regional cleavages are considered a key mechanism for breaking down ‘‘traditional,’’ ‘‘deeply rooted’’ and potentially divisive sociocultural identities contrary to liberal democracy: ‘‘civil society can also be a crucial arena for the development of other democratic attributes, such as tolerance, moderation, a willingness to compromise, and a respect for opposing viewpoints’’ (Diamond, 1994: 8). Hadenius and Uggla similarly argue that ‘‘‘making civil society work’ is a question of ‘socialization into democratic norms . . . it is a matter of changing popular norms’’’ (1996: 1622–1623). The African continent provides a salient example. A common perspective blames ethnicity in Africa for a number of the continent’s ills. Callaghy (1994) and others argue that a lack of appropriate norms and deep cleavages in African society result in a civil society that is a ‘‘disorganized plurality of mutually exclusive projects that are not necessarily democratic’’ (Fatton, 1995: 75). Berman argues that modern ethnic identities are colonial constructions and argues that the lack of a trans-ethnic public arena, universalistic norms and civic trust means there is little to undercut the patron-client relations and neopatrimonialism most scholars see at the heart of African politics (Berman, 1998). As a result, ‘‘political tribalism’’ dominates (Lonsdale, 1994). A number of African scholars argue that western ideas of civil society cannot be easily applied to African societies. Kasfir (1998) suggests the definition of civil society provided by the ‘‘conventional view’’ should be broadened when examining Africa by dropping the normative elements in the definition in order to include ethnic and other types of political activity usually ignored or lambasted in the literature (1998: 127). Orvis argues that African civil society is guided by norms of ‘‘moral ethnicity,’’ rather than by norms of liberal democracy. These norms, he argues, provide a sphere of public activity separate from the state with the potential to limit state encroachment and to promote political participation (Orvis, 2001). The history of ethnicity and civil society in much of the Americas rests on a somewhat different foundation (Oxhorn, 1995; Arellano-Lopez and Petras, 1994). In many countries in the Americas, social movements organized around ethnicity – indigenous social movements – played an important role in helping citizens to achieve their rights. In Mexico, Fox (1994) describes how the thickness of indigenous social organizations influences the distribution of state resources and the gradual progression towards democracy. The politics of ethnicity in many South Asian countries with ranked ethnic systems, such
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as India, give rise to a different set of interactions between ethnic groups, the state, and civil society. For example, Clarke (1998) argues that despite the efforts made by Indian NGOs to establish a broad-based voluntary action umbrella network, the unity of the NGO sector remains lacking due to deep ethnic, religious, political, and regional cleavages in civil society (see also Banjeree et al., 2005). Clarke (1998) also points to the highly organized NGO sector in the Philippines where, in spite of extensive political engagement, broader cross-sector cooperative movements are short-lived because of personal, ideological, and regional tensions.
Future Directions Whether ethnic ties are supportive or inimical to civil society may depend in part on whether they have ‘‘bonding’’ or ‘‘bridging’’ characteristics (Putnam, 2000; Woolcock and Narayan, 2000). There may be ways in which policy can support more positive interactions between ethnic groups and civil society. For example, the presence of organized forms of interethnic engagement can help to prevent ethnic conflict (Varshney, 2002). Deliberate nation-building policies can help to overcome divisive affiliations and promote interethnic collective action (Miguel, 2004). Yet some of Gramci’s earlier arguments echo today in the form of critiques of the neo-Tocquevillian tradition: structural obstacles prevent some groups from articulating their interests based on ethnocentrism or unfounded assumptions about associations and their effects (Edwards, 2004). Globalization and economic restructuring, political corruption, and power relations all remain key factors in whether or not civil society ‘‘works’’ and who is incorporated.
Cross-References
▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Buchanan, James McGill ▶ Civic Action ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gellner ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Shils ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society, Violence and War ▶ Identity
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▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Trust ▶ Uncivil society
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Eifert, B., Miguel, E., & Posner, D. (2009). Political competition and ethnic identification in Africa. Afrobarometer Working Paper, No. 89. Ekeh, P. (1992). The constitution of civil society in African history and politics. In B. Caron (Ed.), Proceedings of the symposium on democratic transition in Africa (pp. 187–212). Ibadan, Nigeria: CREDU. Escobar, A., & Alvarez, S. (1992). The making of social movements in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview. Fatton, R. Jr. (1995). Africa in the age of democratization: The civic limitations of civil society. African Studies Review, 38(2), 67–100. Fearon, J. D. (2003). Ethnic structure and cultural diversity by country. Journal of Economic Growth, 8(2), 195–222. Fearon, J., & Laitin, D. (1996). Explaining interethnic cooperation. American Political Science Review, 90(4), 715–735. Fearon, J., & Laitin, D. (2000). Violence and the social construction of ethnic identity. International Organization, 54(4), 845–877. Fearon, J. D. & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war, American Political Science Review, 97(1), 75–90. Fenton, S. (2003). Ethnicity. Cambridge: Polity. Finlay, C. J. (2004). Hume’s theory of civil society. European Journal of Political Theory, 3(4), 369–392. Fisher, J. (1998). Non governments: NGOs and the political development of the third world. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Fowler, A. (1991). The role of NGOs in changing state–society relations: Perspectives from Eastern and Southern Africa. Development Policy Review, 9, 53–84. Fox, J. (1994). The difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship. World Politics, 46(2), 151–171. Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frentzel-Zagorska, J. (1990). Civil society in Poland and Hungary. Soviet Studies, 42, 759–777. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Gellner, E. (1995). The importance of being modular? In J. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Gramsci, A., Hoare, Q., & Smith, G. N. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Guarnizo, L. E., Portes, A., & Haller, W. (2003). Assimilation and transnationalism: Determinants of transnational political action among contemporary migrants. The American Journal of Sociology, 108(6), 1211–1225. Habermas, J. (1992). Further reflections on the public sphere. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 421–461). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1998). Between parts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habyarimana, J., Humphreys, M., Posner, D. N., & Weinstein, J. M. (2007). Why does ethnic diversity undermine public goods provision? American Political Science Review, 101, 709–725. Hadenius, A., & Uggla, F. (1996). Making civil society work, promoting democratic development: What can States and donors do? World Development, 24(10), 1621–1639. Hall, J. A. (1995). Civil society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge: Polity. Heinrich, V. (2007). CIVICUS global survey of the State of civil society. Bloomfield, CT: CIVICUS.
Hodgkinson, V. A., & Foley, M. W. (2003). The civil society reader. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Horowitz, D. L. (1985). Ethnic groups in conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hulme, D., & Edwards, M. (Eds.) (1997). NGOs, states and donors: Too close for comfort? London: Macmillan. Hutchinson, J. (2000). Ethnicity and modern nations. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23, 651–669. Hutchinson, J., & Smith, A. D. (1996). Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaldor, M. (2003). Global civil society: An answer to war. Cambridge: Polity. Kasfir, N. (1998). Civil society, the State and democracy in Africa. Commonwealth and Comparative Studies, 36(2), 123–149. Keane, J. (1988). Despotism and democracy: The origins and development of the distinction between civil society and the state 1750– 1850. In J. Keane (Ed.), Civil society and the state (pp. 35–72). New York: Verso. Khwaja, A. I. (2000). Can good projects succeed in bad communities?: Collective action in the Himalayas, Harvard University, Unpublished manuscript. Knack, S. & Keefer, P. (1997). Does social capital have an economic payoff? A country investigation. IRIS Working Paper 197, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park. Layton, R. (2006). Order and anarchy: Civil society, social disorder and war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lonsdale, J. (1994). Moral ethnicity and political tribalism. In P. Kaarsholm & J. Hultin (Eds.), Inventions and boundaries: Historical and anthropological approaches to the study of ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 130–150). Denmark: Institute for Development Studies, Roskilde University. Mauro, P. (1995). Corruption and growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110(3), 681–712. Mercer, C. (2002). NGOs, civil society and democratization: A critical review of the literature. Progress in Development Studies, 2(1), 5–22. Miguel, E. (2004). Tribe or nation? Ethnicity and public goods provision in Kenya versus Tanzania. World Politics, 56, 327–362. Miguel, E., & Gugerty, M. K. (2005). Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public goods in Kenya. Journal of Public Economics, 89, 2325–2368. Mouzelis, N. P. (1995). Modernity, late development, and civil society. In J. A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge: Polity. Ndegwa, S. (1996). The two faces of civil society: NGOs and politics in Africa. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Ndegwa, S. (1997). Citizenship and ethnicity: An examination of two transition moments in Kenyan politics. American Political Science Review, 91(3), 599–616. Oliver, J. E., & Wong, J. (2003). Intergroup prejudice in multiethnic settings. American Journal of Political Science, 47(4), 567–582. Olson, M. (1982). The rise and decline of nations: Economic growth, stagflation, and social rigidities. New Haven: Yale University Press. Olzak, S. (1992). The dynamics of ethnic competition and conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Orvis, S. (2001). Civil society in Africa or African civil society? Journal of Asian and African Studies, 36(1), 17–38. Oxhorn, P. (1995). From controlled inclusion to coerced marginalization: The struggle for civil society in Latin America. In J. A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Civil Society and Gender Portes, A. (2007). Migration, development, and segmented assimilation: A conceptual review of the evidence. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(1), 73–97. Posner, D. N. (2004a). Measuring ethnic fractionalization in Africa. American Journal of Political Science, 48(4), 849–863. Posner, D. N. (2004b). The political salience of cultural difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are allies in Zimbabwe and enemies in Malawi. American Journal of Political Science, 98(4), 525–545. Posner, D. N. (2005). Institutions and ethnic origin in Africa. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1995a). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Putnam, R. D. (1995b). Tuning in, tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. PS: Political Science and Politics, 28(4), 664–683. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rabushka, A., & Shepsle, K. A. (1972). Politics in plural societies: A theory of democratic instability. Columbus, OH: Charles Merriam. Rohrschneider, R. & Dalton, R. J. (2002). A Global Network? Transnational Cooperation among Environmental Groups. Journal of Politics, 64, 510–533. Rudolph, L., & Rudolph, S. (1967). The modernity of tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. (1957). Primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties. British Journal of Sociology, 8(2), 130–145. Shils, E. (2003). The virtue of civil society. In V. A. Hodgkinson & M. W. Foley (Eds.), The civil society reader. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Stolle, D., & Rochon, T. R. (1998). Are all associations alike? Member diversity, associational type, and the creation of social capital. American Behavioral Scientist, 42, 47–65. Tavits, M. (2005). The development of stable party support: Electoral dynamics in post-communist Europe. American Journal of Political Science, 49(2), 283–298. Trager, L. (1998). The politics of primary patriotism – home-town linkages and local development in South-Western Nigeria: Whose agenda? What impact? Africa, 68(3), 360–383. Varshney, A. (2001). Ethnic Conflict and Civic Civil Society: India and Beyond, World Politics, 53, 362–398. Varshney, A. (2004), Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, New Haven: Yale University Press. Vogel, A. (2006). Who’s making global civil society: Philanthropy and US empire in world society. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(4), 635–655. Wesolowski, W. (1995). The nature of social ties and the future of postcommunist society: Poland after solidarity. In J. A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge: Polity. Wollebaek, D., & Selle, P. (2002). Does Participation in Voluntary Associations Contribute to Social Capital? The Impact of Intensity, Scope, and Type. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 31, 32–61. Wood, G. (1997). States without citizens: The problem of the franchise state. In D. Hulme & M. Edwards (Eds.), NGOs, states and donors: Too close for comfort? (pp. 79–92). London: Macmillan. Woolcock, M., & Narayan, D. (2000). Social capital: Implications for development theory, research, and policy. World Bank Research Observer, 15(2), 225–249.
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Civil Society and Gender HAKAN SECKINELGIN London School of Economics, London, UK
Introduction The relationship between civil society and gender can be observed in a number of fields. The relationship between civil society and women has a long history. It can be traced back to the antislavery movement in the eighteenth century where many women supported and developed strategies for advocacy through their churches. Also, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed the suffragettes women’s movement both in the United States and in the United Kingdom advocating electoral equality with men. Women were also active in many nationalist movements in the Middle East during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The relationship further developed with the peace activism of the second part of the twentieth century. Here one of the most important arenas was activism against nuclear weapons. The Greenham Common protests of women in the United Kingdom from 1981 onwards are emblematic of the relationship between civil society and gender (Harford and Hopkins, 1984).
Definition Gender in this context means socially constructed and attributed roles of being man and woman in a society. These positions are the representation of relative value attributed to the status of women ad men in that society. They establish norms of regulating social relations too. Civil society has many definitions and conceptualizations. One definition that is broad enough to cover some of the differences is the definition used by the Centre for Civil Society, at London School of Economics: ‘‘Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes, and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family, and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family, and market are often complex, blurred, and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors, and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy, and power. Civil societies are often populated by organisations such as registered charities, development nongovernmental organisations, community groups, women’s organisations, faith-based organisations, professional associations, trades unions,
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self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions, and advocacy groups’’ (http://www.lse.ac.uk/ collections/CCS/pdf/CCSDL_LeafletJuly06.pdf).
Historical Background Recent developments in the relationship between civil society and gender can be analytically mapped into three areas. The reason to consider these three areas is to highlight both how conceptualizations of civil society have influenced women and how women’s movements have framed the civil society discussions. The first area is the relationship linked to the reemergence of civil society debates in the late 1980s due to the activism and struggles against communist regimes in the Eastern Europe and authoritarian regimes in Latin America (Einhorn and server, 2003; Tobar, 2003). The participation of various women’s organizations in these struggles identified women with the political activism towards regime change. In a number of Latin American countries the valorization of motherhood as the grounds for political activism enhanced women’s participation for social change (Arditti, 1999). The second area is the expanding use of civil society models as organizational innovations by national and international policy makers in their developmentrelated interventions in many countries. The emergence of many women’s groups in this process since the late 1980s has created a large number of organizations that can be seen under the nongovernmental organizations rubric across both Africa and Asia (Al-Ali, 2003; Tripp). The third area is the emergence of women’s activism within international organizations. In this field one of the most important international organizational platforms has been the United Nations itself. It has provided a space for many nongovernmental women’s organizations to develop, pursue, and implement pro-women policies across the world. This is evident in a series of UN-based debates and processes leading to a number of important conventions. The beginning of this process can be traced back to the 1975 First World Conference on Women in Mexico. The 1985 Cairo and 1995 Beijing conference are also important milestones in relation to women’s international activism. Follow-up procedures established for monitoring and reviewing the progress in the implementation of the conventions provided further space for international women’s activism. Another area within the UN is the women’s activism within the Security Council. Here the main aim was to establish women’s vulnerabilities, including violence against women during conflicts, as a central part of the UN’s peace and security agenda. The outcome of this process was the adoption of the Security Council’s resolution 1325 that recognized
women’s vulnerabilities and established priorities for dealing with them in UN missions (True-Frost, 2007). The process presents one of the junctures where women’s international peace activism, built by localized experiences of war, violence, and struggle to participate in peace processes, impacted on international organizations and the ways they engage with civil society. These areas demonstrate that women are active in civil society and in many cases their social activities create major reference points for understanding civil society activity in many countries. These processes also show that there is a great diversity in the women’s activism. In particular looking at the history of the UN Women conventions it is possible to understand the diversity of views that are employed for claiming women’s rights and equality. Another common ground in most of these areas is the attempt to claim rights for the women from a political authority dominated by men. As a result most of the relationships articulated between civil society and gender are discussed as a way of understanding women’s role in civil society and the success of the feminist politics in the last few decades in claiming equal rights for women. There is no doubt that feminist politics have been very central in many struggles to identify and fight problems faced by many women in many societies. The situation also raises an empirical and theoretical question as to the link between gender and women and their influence on civil society. If one takes gender to represent the socially constructed positions attributed to men and women in a given society, then the gender perspective needs also to account for the position of men and what happens to it as a result of the women’s activism within civil society. Furthermore, it requires one to ask about the ways norms and values have been instrumental in the civil society change on gender lines, because of the above mentioned activist movements. These questions remain open and require further research. More generally, these questions require us to unpack the relationship between civil society and gender to understand the interconstitution of gender and civil society as a space for social action.
Key Issues There are many articulations of civil society as a concept both in sociology and in political theory. Many definitions conceptualize civil society from a more structural functionalist position as a social space which is located between other social spheres, such as the state, market, and the family. In these articulations civil society is seen in various forms as a balancing factor in relation to other actors. Here the emphasis is on the kinds of organizations that can be observed in a given sociocultural context to assess the
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nature of civil society. Another way of thinking about civil society is from the position of a structure and agency relationship. Here the focus is on social relations that are constitutive of politics. The analysis is on how social relations are negotiated at the level of everyday exchanges in the society. The point is to acknowledge the existence of the structures and to see how they are constituted by people’s actions and how, in due course, the organizational world and people interconstitute each other in a given society. In this manner the conceptualization of civil society focuses on the relations that inform social action rather than prioritizing the existence of a distinct space that can be recognized as civil society. Such views have also helped analysts to understand non-western cultures and contribute to the debate in many different ways. In many of these debates there is an implicit assumption on the relationship between public and private spheres. In the western political tradition many civil society discussions there is a reference to public action, which takes place in public sphere, and life within families is considered private. At times civil society in its many variations is about getting out of the family, the private sphere, with its norms and values seen as limiting the individual (Cahoone, 2002). In some variations, for instance in Hegel’s arguments on civil society, the family is not included since he considers the family as a unit without much conflict (Howell, 2006: 5). Activities within the family sphere are considered distinct from the public sphere. No doubt that the designation of boundaries between public and private spheres varies across different societies. In many cases sociocultural norms and values underpinned by law, both as legislation and customary forms, provide the operational infrastructure for the relation between the public and the private. These norms and values establish boundaries between public and private spheres and also decide or regulate a designated category of actors’ participation in the public sphere and civil society. It is in this context that gender norms and values are central in underpinning a regulatory regime in the western traditions of civil society. Here the public sphere is considered to be a space for men’s activities outside the family, while women are located within the private sphere of the family. As a result the politics in the public sphere is about the politics of men, since they are the legitimate actors in this domain. Women’s rights and claims are mediated by the male members of the household. According to Cohen and Arato, the Hegelian tradition about the distinctness of civil society from family is also about regulating gender relations in the society. They argue that only the family’s ‘‘(male) head enters the world of civil society’’ (1997: 628–631). Jude Howell also points out that this gender-based distinction, which regulates different
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genders participation in the civil society, is still common place in some contemporary discussions (2006: 5). This tradition presents a limiting frame for civil society debate. Civil society is considered to be a secular space that is not linked with state ideology or with the specific norms, values, and attachments of a family. People (men) are expected to develop values differentiated from those particularistic feelings, towards the more socially transcendental norms and values relevant to everyone in the society. Such an expectation also implicitly suggests that women cannot take this step in that they are seen as more sentimental. Here Howell’s observation about the link between the story on the formation of civil society and how it implicitly impacts women’s positions is interesting: theorists ‘‘argued that the space and organizational forms of civil society emerged in the context of capitalist industrialization. By characterizing civil society as a modern category beyond the intimate ties of family civil society theorists not only contribute to the reification of the particular spheres. . . . but also fail to investigate the way these spheres are intertwined through blood-bound social relations, cultural norm sand values’’ (2006: 9). Another outcome of this limiting civil society to the sphere outside family has been to limit women’s participation in social change and to link their sociopolitical interests to their male relatives in the family. As a result civil society in general must be seen as an essentially gendered space where a patriarchal set of gender norms regulates participation and behavior within that space. The nature of these gendered norms and values must be also considered from a Gramscian perspective on civil society. If civil society is considered as a platform for hegemonic negotiations among various power holders in the society then the boundaries of gendered participation in that space will also reflect these actors’ interests and values. In the same vein the emergence of a gendered public/private sphere distinction which locks women into the private sphere is also the outcome of such processes. These hegemonic powers vary from society to society and at times include religious groups, military, judiciary, and institutions of education. Furthermore the outcomes of hegemonic negotiations on gendered limits of public sphere are maintained by institutionalizing these limits within various spheres. The ongoing debates on headscarves, for instance, in France and Turkey are interesting examples in this area (Seckinelgin, 2006). Civil society located within the framing based on the distinction of public and private represents a particular case in which patriarchal norms and decision making processes are taken to be guiding principles and participation in political discussion is naturalized as a male concern. While women
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might be excluded from these negotiations and political discussions, their lives are still framed by these debates. In other words they live lives determined and confined according to the interests of the dominant male ideology within the society. This also means that not all men agree with this but still can comply with it (Connell, 1995; Carver, 1998). Civil society in its approach to women becomes top-down and prescriptive. Civil society groups tend to be interested in maintaining a set of social norms in their work which focus on, for instance, the wellbeing of women at home, women’s acceptable sexual behavior and sexuality in a society. This confining quality of civil society together with the overall sociopolitical framing of gender relations came under severe and sustained attack from various forms of feminisms. Their motto ‘‘personal is political’’ is an important statement. It immediately politicizes relations in what has been ignored as the private sphere, family. It highlights that there can be different interests within the family and these cannot be presented only by the head of family in the public sphere. The impact of this strategy to highlight and use personal experience to appear in public life has been very effective. Many of the achievements that were outlined in the opening were linked with this strategy. Another aspect of this move was the development of feminist epistemologies that utilize the personal as a research tool (Jackson, 2006). This has provided an alternative research agenda to challenge some of the conceptual framings discussed above. In this way academic work and activism gender framings have been challenged both nationally and internationally. The analytical division provided at the beginning is relevant here. By the valorization of womanhood in terms of fighting communism and authoritarian regimes, the personal was valorized as a part of the debate, from a part of the society which had previously been ignored, family, or assumed to have converging interests with the public declarations of the authorities. Here, in the context of valorization of motherhood in a number of Latin American countries, there is an even more direct challenge to the established hegemonic discourses of the church in these countries. In terms of the second area, the emergence of women in developing countries as public actors participating in many areas also represents a shift in focus on thinking about women’s needs and addressing their needs by creating spaces for them to think how to solve problems in their own ways. For instance, the emergence of micro-finance institutions in many countries allows women’s emergence as public actors. In a number of African countries women were then able to move on to political life and to gain influential positions. The third issue in relation to the advocacy within the international organizations, it also demonstrates the emergence of women’s experiences as tools for change at
the global level. Here another interesting aspect is the global coalition building among various actors as global civil society. For instance, by utilizing women’s experiences in conflicts and war an alternative gender view on war and peace theory has been developed (Cockburn, 2007; Elshtain, 1995). In this process the feminist activism within the Security Council was successful due to the relations that they have established within the UN bureaucracy. Here the activism of the feminist bureaucrats called ‘‘femocrats’’ was central to the success (Thomson, 2001). This can be seen as an indication of how a cross social status, ethnicity, and nationality coalition was possible for resolution 1325 to be established.
Future Directions The analysis here highlights central tensions that remain in the relationship between civil society and gender. It is clear that there are large numbers of women who are creating civil society space, activism, and who are taking part in many other groups’ activities. However, it is not clear how far these have changed the patriarchal instincts that are foundational to western thinking about civil society. This presents a central challenge both to the conceptualization of this relationship and to civil society activity globally. While women have emerged as important actors within civil societies in the west, they seem also to have located their politics with the patriarchal framing. This position has global implications. While this move is linked with the particular politics of appearance in public as an actor, it also established an overall discourse about women’s activism and issues as a global framework for civil societies and women across the globe. It is possible to talk about an internal tension within women’s activism between universalistic instincts and the motto ‘‘personal is political.’’ This creates a paradox whereby a liberating social activism in one context can become a top-down prescriptive solution in another. This is due to the fact that not every society has public/private sphere distinctions similar to those which have been foundational in the western thinking on civil society. The most central problem is the focus on women. Most discussions in this area highlight the success and failure of civil society in relation to allowing or creating new spaces for women to have a voice in civil society and in the overall society. While this is important and central, it is not clear whether or not the success stories that have been mentioned have changed the overall gender framing of civil society thinking.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci
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▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Social Movements ▶ Transnational Forums and Summits ▶ United Nations
References/Further Readings Al-Ali, N. (2003). Gender and civil society in the Middle East. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4(2), 216–232. Arditti, R. (1999). Searching for life: The grandmothers of the Plaza De Mayo and the disappeared children of Argentina. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cahoone, L. E. (2002). Civil society: The conservative meaning of liberal politics. London: Blackwell. Carver, T. (1998). A political theory of gender: Perspectives on the ‘‘universal subject’’. In V. Randall & G. Waylen (Eds.), Gender, politics and the State. London: Routledge. Cockburn, C. (2007). From where we stand: War, women’s activism and feminist analysis. London: Zed Books. Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1997). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. London: Polity. Einhorn, B., & Sever, C. (2003). Gender and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4(2), 163–190. Elshtain, J. B. (1995). Women and war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harford, B., & Hopkins S. (1984). Greenham common: Women at the wire. London: Women’s Press. Howell, J. (2006). Gender and civil society. Global civil society Year Book. London: Sage. Jackson, C. (2006). Feminism spoken here: Epistemologies for interdisciplinary development research. Development and Change, 37(3), 525–547. Seckinelgin, H. (2006). Civil society between the state and society: Turkish women with Muslim headscarves? Critical Social Policy, 26(4), 748–769. Thompson, M. (2001). Femocrats and babes: Women and power. Australian Feminist Studies, 16(3), 193–208. Tobar, M. S. (2003). Chilean feminism(s) in the 1990s paradoxes of an unfinished transition. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4(2), 256–280. Tripp, A. M. Women in movement transformations in African political landscapes. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4(2), 233–255. True-Frost, C. (2007). The security council and norm consumption. International Law and Politics, 40, 115–217.
Civil Society and Religion MARK JUERGENSMEYER University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Introduction Civil society and religious communities have always had an ambivalent relationship. Some would argue that
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religious ideas and institutions have never been part of civil society – that the Enlightenment notion includes only voluntary civic associations and a sense of citizenship separate from the coercive influences of state and commerce. To a large extent leaders of religious organizations have tacitly agreed, often – but not always – siding with the power of the state. But religious movements often have played an antiauthoritarian role in mobilizing a population against perceived corrupt elements of the establishment. During the Protestant era of the social gospel in nineteenth century United States, religious institutions played a powerful role in movements of social reform. In the twentieth century churches became involved in movements for the prohibition of alcohol, women’s rights, and civil rights. In Latin America, Jesuits and parish priests joined liberation theology movements for social justice.
Definition At the end of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, religious movements were affected by currents of global civil society. Often the role of religious activists was stridently antiauthoritarian and opposed to modern organized society, and religion became identified with the culture and politics of the hostile antiurban village. Religion often appeared in the news as part of the angry local tribalism of Jihad that Benjamin Barber identified as the opponent to the homogenous global culture of McWorld (Barber, 1995). But at the same time, some religious activists have played a more active role in social change, and faith-based nongovernment organizations (NGOs) have played an important role in global social services. Even the religious opposition to civil society has been nuanced. Some of the most strident activists – such as militant Sikh supporters of the Khalistani movement in India – have wanted a new religious state, a sort of Sikh version of Shi’ite Iran. Others, like the Christian militia in the United States and bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, have envisioned a transnational religious entity, a kind of religious civil society to supplant the secular one. Other forms of religious opposition are far less strident. Prophetic religious voices have called for moderation, justice, and environmental protection, joining those of other concerned civic citizens in speaking out against the unbridled excesses of civic capitalism and an indiscriminate popular consumer culture. Some faith-based NGOs have been issue-oriented, urging civil rights, social justice, and freedom of religion. These religious activists do not blow things up, but when it comes to the contemporary social order they do demur: they seek a better world than the one of civic consumerism. So even when
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religion is the enemy of the establishment, its opposition has been varied, and its voices have been diverse. Although often religion has been a divisive element within society, religious ideas and institutions have also played a positive role in helping to provide a basis for social and cultural integration. Religious communities have provided the understanding and tolerance necessary for civil society’s multicultural communities. And at times it has offered alternative visions of civic values of its own.
Key Issues The fact is that religion is a part of civil society in many ways. Whatever civil society is – whether one conceives it as the homogenizing forces of a national community, or a sense of citizenship with transnational dimensions – the globalizing trends within contemporary societies have led to new cultural patterns and shared values that have affected religion along with everything else. This civic interaction of people and information around the world has produced new forms of cultural syncretism that contain religious sensitivities and moral values as one ingredient. This means that the religious factor in civil society is often a puzzling one. Its role – though significant – is frequently contradictory. In some cases it provides the resources for shared values – including a universal sensibility toward spirituality and the elements of a civic ethic – that provide the cultural basis for transnational laws and regulations, agencies of economic and social accountability, and a sense of civic citizenship. In some cases it helps to ease the cultural difficulties experienced in multicultural societies by providing the shared values that allow peoples of divergence cultures to live together in harmony. In other cases it sounds a prophetic note by warning against the superficial aspects of a homogenous civic culture. And in extreme cases it also fosters ideologies of rebellion that embolden its proponents to reject civil society and reassert traditional allegiances, sometimes with quite violent methods. How can one make sense of this religious ambivalence to civil society? Part of the analytic difficult resides in the terms ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘civil society’’ in the context of contemporary civic social change. ‘‘Religion,’’ for instance, can mean the expressions of particular organized communities of faith, but it can also imply a more widely shared sentiment of morality and spirituality. The term, ‘‘civil society’’ can point not only to nongovernmental service organizations but also to a broader sense of civic citizenship, both in specific national societies and in transnational communities of global civil society. So there are both narrow and broad interpretations of both of these terms.
But whether one is speaking about the role of religion in civic civil society in the narrow or broad definitions of these terms, there are common elements. In each case one can assume that there are forms of culture that are global, that there is a transnational community that in some way nurtures a civil society on a global scale, and that religion is a factor in this civic culture and its attendant civil society. Religion in the broadest sense is most conducive to civic civil society when it is conceived in the broadest sense of those terms, but religion’s civic role cannot be placed into a single mold. There are at least six ways in which religion plays a role in civil society: Religious Identities. Traditional societies gain much of their sense of internal cohesion and cultural integrity from religious culture. But people do not stay put, and they take their religious identities with them. The remarkable mobility of the world’s population in an era of mass transportation and easy communications means that most religious communities are now dispersed across the planet. This creates both difficulties and new possibilities as diverse religious groups occupy the same civil society. On one level, religious culture provides a strands of multiculturalism in pluralist societies. But religious commitments also allow adherents to go beyond the superficial acceptance of multiculturalism and inquire into the religious conditions for cultural tolerance in civil society. This suggests that religion, in such changing contexts, can adapt to pluralistic contexts and help to undergird the unity of multicultured societies. Civic Values. Some of the traditional values of religion – including honesty, justice, fair play, tolerance, and respect for others – are necessary for the maintenance of any society, perhaps even more so for a multicultural society that is not dominated by any one tradition. In a civic culture the shared values of different religious traditions can provide a collective sense of virtuous conduct in public life. Virtually every religious tradition embraces the concept of hospitality towards those who are different, and there are shared legal assumptions that could undergird a world legal system. Religious attitudes towards property and place can be antithetical to a sense of cross-cultural citizenship but also in some instances enhance it. Social Criticism. These same values of morality in public life can be marshaled by critics of society when they perceive that these values are being undermined. Hence religion can be opposed to aspects of society that are seen as unjust or immoral, at times playing a prophetic role. Socially-conscious religious groups have been active in critiques of what they regard as exploitive and unjust policies in the neoliberal global economic system,
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and often play a role in assisting developing countries that are often left out of the successes of the global economy. Guerilla Antiauthoritarianism. In extreme cases religion can support the position of enemies of a social order deemed so immoral and corrupt as to be beyond reform, or an international force that it regards as oppressively imposing the values and power of one country over the others. This is the position associated with many of the most strident religious activists, including Christian militia in the United States, and Muslim jihadi activists in the Middle East. Acts of terrorism are sometimes associated with these religiously-motivated guerilla antiauthoritarian activists. Though these radical religious activists oppose the dominant social order they also imagine a more just political order structured along traditional religious lines. In this sense the radical religious politics of the contemporary age involves a contest between opposing views of social order and in some cases, competing understandings of civil society. Alternative civil society. As noted above, the criticism of civil society often contains alternative visions of a just order and a different understanding of the righteous relationship between the citizenry and the government. There are, indeed, many ways to conceive civil society – and for that reason, many ‘‘civil societies.’’ Religion often conveys the differences among these views. For instance, some Islamist groups resist what they regard as the Americanized version of civil society and affirm the values of civic civil society in their own Islamic way. The Ayatollah Khomeini was animated over what he regarded as ‘‘Westoxification’’ – the inebriation of Western values – that he thought permeated Iranian society during the time of the Shah. The purpose of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 was to transform Iranian social values and create a new kind of civil society as much as it was intended to provide a regime change of government rules. A less extreme example of a culturally based alternative civil society is in the efforts of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to utilize traditional Chinese Confucian values to develop a new kind of civic culture for the island nation. Civic Religiosity. One of the most interesting alternative visions of civil society is a world in which the shared sense of spirituality and morality forms a new kind of civil religion. The blending of American political heritage and religious images in the United States, for instance, has produced a civil religion that is often expressed in the pious platitudes of politicians and in the religious character of national patriotism. A similar pattern of religious nationalism exists in other countries. In the era of global civil society, there are also spiritual and ethical
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dimensions of an emerging global civic culture. Hence it is useful to inquire not only whether there is religion in civil society but also whether there might be a religious dimension to civil society. It is possible, therefore, to identify the diverse forms that religion takes in responding and relating to civil society. At the same time there are central issues that weave through all over these different forms of religion in civil society. One of the most important of these issues is the question posed at the outset of this essay: Is religion good for civil society or its foe? The easy way of responding is to say that it is both. But the more difficult response is to determine what conditions make the religious factor conducive to civil society and what situations make it antithetical to it. As Abdullahi An-Na’im puts it, the issue is what kind of role religion can play in civil society – whether it can enter into a kind of ‘‘tactical cooperation’’ or ‘‘reluctant partnership,’’ or whether it will resist civil society and persist in standing outside it, providing its own alternative communities. In an increasingly multicultural world, religion’s role could go either way, depending on the religion and on the perceived character of the social context around it. Religion could foster shared values or become an agent of schism. In some cases, civil society will have to mediate between warring religious camps and determine which, if either, it will allow to play a dominant social role. Legal systems could provide one location where religion and civil society interact. Since the establishment of civil order on a large social scale requires a shared moral basis for law, this implies a faith in justice that could be supported by all. Such a shared ethical and spiritual sensibility could provide the basis for a civil religion and moral community beyond the limitations of a particular religious community. The public theologies of particular faiths could address the moral concerns of a whole society – even multicultural ones – as well as traditional communities. Religious attitudes towards property and citizenship can also shape the ability of groups to transcend the defense of particular allegiances and locations and provide the basis for a sense of civic community and a shared responsibility for the environment. As we have noted, religion can also play a prophetic role in rejecting the oppressive features of an unjust social order that may permeate a civil society. In some instances religion may be identified with movements not only for justice but also for mercy, as in the case of the religious support for relief of international debts. When religious activists do reject civil society this may be a complicated matter and may, in many cases, lead not only to escape and withdrawal from
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society but to innovative new visions of a civil society in which religion plays a more dominant role. This tension between the parochialism of religion and its potentially civic reach is at the heart of religion’s ambivalence towards civil society. Case studies demonstrate that these issues are part of the dynamics of particular communities in which religion plays a role in alternative notions of civil societies. In one Islamic movement in Egypt, for instance, radical religious politics have been transformed into more moderate forms that are compatible with secular democracy through a process that the movement calls ‘‘political learning.’’ Sometimes these forms point towards a new understanding of the role that religion can play in civil society. A study of a multicultural religious environment in an urban American setting showed that religious leaders were able to move beyond the superficial homogenous secular culture of multiculturalism and provide a kind of interfaith-based notion of the shared spiritual values in civil public space. It is therefore not possible to provide a simple yes-orno answer to the question of whether religion is good for civil society. Though one might think that Islam does not allow for social change, tolerance, and democratic ideals, the example of the case above is a dramatic illustration of a situation in which it is Muslim leaders who are at the forefront of acceptance and social change. This Islamic discussion raises an even larger question: whether it is possible to profile any religion. Do the histories and cultures of religious traditions define religions in predictable ways, or do the diversity of religious strands, the changing interpretations of religious tenets, and the various social settings in which religious communities exist make religions so malleable as to be nigh near unpredictable? Social scientists like to deal with known sets of values, but often religious stances are not so easy to predict.
Future Directions Religion interacts with the forces of civil society in various ways and plays a role in both national cultures and an emerging global civil society. It is fair to conclude that when religion is seen primarily in limited organizational terms, and when civil society is viewed primarily as voluntary associations for public service, the two may be on different tracks. In the narrow view of religion, the values of particular communities of religion may indeed clash with the wider social milieu. But when religion is conceived in its widest sense, as a stratum of spiritual sensibility and shared moral responsibility, it is congenial with the notion of civil society in its broadest sense – the idea of civic citizenship.
In this latter case we might envision not a clash between religion and civil society but the possibility of a coalescence between them. Since the world’s religious traditions have abundant resources for thinking about tolerance, harmony, and human dignity on a civic scale, religion can be seen as a deep repository of shared moral values and social order. No one tradition – certainly not contemporary Western consumer-oriented popular culture – has a monopoly on a vision of shared values and the family of humanity. Hence there is every reason to expect that members of all religious traditions are potentially participants in civil societies within their own national communities, within multicultural societies, and within a global world civilization. This is the interesting possibility raised by the political scientist, Susanne Rudolph in her edited book, Transnational Religion and Fading States (Rudolph and Pescatori, 1997). In her introductory essay she speculates about the future of religion in the global age. She presents a prophetic vision that some day the emergence of a global civic society will lead to new forms of shared morality, spirituality, and social values. In Rudolph’s vision, a future generation of global citizens will look back on such widely venerated figures of today as Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Bishop Tutu, and the Dalai Lama and see them as civic saints. They may be viewed in the future as the harbingers of a civic spirituality in a new global civil society. At the same time, the hostile attitudes towards civil society persist among many religious activists. Hence it is safe to conclude that all the options are open – from religion as supportive of guerilla antiauthoritarian social movements to religion as a harbinger of a new civic religiosity. As the world changes the role of religion in civic civil society also evolves, often in innovative and surprising ways. It is not inconceivable, then, that one religious response to civil society will be a new form of civic religion, as both religion and civil society become transformed within a global age.
Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Dalai Lama ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Gandhi, Mohandas ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Mother Teresa ▶ Religious Organizations ▶ Values
Civil Society and Social Capital in Australia and New Zealand
References/Further Readings Berger, P. L., & Huntington, S. P. (Eds.) (2002). Many globalizations: Cultural diversity in the contemporary world. New York: Oxford University Press. Herbert, D. (2003). Religion and civil society: Rethinking public religion in the contemporary world. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Religion, Culture & Society Series. Juergensmeyer, M. (Ed.) (2006). Religion in global civil society. New York: Oxford University Press. Roof, W. C. (Ed.) (2007). Religious pluralism and civil society. Philadelphia: Annals of the American Academy of Religion. Rudolph, S. H., & Piscatori, J. (Eds.) (1997). Transnational religion and fading states. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Australia and New Zealand MARK LYONS1, GARTH NOWLAND-FOREMAN2 1 University of Technology Sydney, Lindfield, NSW, Australia 2 Unitec New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand
Introduction Australia has been populated for around 60,000 years by aboriginal peoples from Asia who spread thinly over the continent. Organized into tribal and clan structures they spoke over 300 languages. By contrast, New Zealand is one of the most recently settled major landmasses. The first settlers were Eastern Polynesians who came probably in a series of migrations between 700 and 2,000 years ago (King, 2003). Europeans, mainly from the British Isles, first settled both countries at the end of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century several British colonies had been established around the Australian mainland, in Tasmania and the two islands of New Zealand. Over the next 50 years the population of these colonies grew greatly, the consequence of several major gold discoveries. Self government was negotiated and at the beginning of the twentieth century the five colonies on the Australian mainland and Tasmania federated to form Australia. New Zealand became a separate nation. Both countries gradually separated themselves from the influence of the British government. Between the 1880s and 1914 both countries saw the granting of male and then female suffrage, the emergence of trade union controlled labour parties, a consequent polarization of the polity along class based lines and the first governments anywhere
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to be formed by the labour movement. Australia and New Zealand were studied and praised by progressive Europeans as social laboratories. The nineteenth century settler societies that emerged in what were to become two nations reproduced and amplified the civic institutions and active civil society that characterized British society. Colley (1992: 88) identifies this as a time when voluntary associations were ‘‘breaking out like measles over the face of Britain and the rest of Europe.’’ Indeed, some of these organizations had previously ‘‘helped drive the colonial enterprise: missionary and emigration societies encouraged British intervention and then facilitated the movement of settlers [to New Zealand]’’ (Tennant et al., 2008: 6). Trade unions, friendly societies, cooperatives, mechanics institutes, sports clubs and a vast variety of hobby and interest groups proliferated. So too did business and professional associations. The better-off supported benevolent societies and hospitals for the poor. In the absence of an established church a great variety of Christian denominations fought for adherents in an increasingly skeptical populace. In those parts of Australia, especially along the east coast, where large numbers of Irish Catholic migrants mixed with people with English and Scottish ancestry, occasional outbursts of sectarian conflict sustained many denominational charities: hospitals, child and more general welfare services and, especially, Catholic schools. When, in the middle of the twentieth century, governments came to take over and expand hospitals and welfare services, they did not touch the existing denominational providers, but instead added to the subsidies many already received. In the 1960s government assistance was provided to nonprofit schools. Thus even today, on the east coast of Australia there is a stronger nonprofit provision of education, health, and welfare services than in the western parts or in New Zealand. The last 50 years of the twentieth century saw large changes in the shape of civil society in both Australia and New Zealand. The friendly societies were the first to shrink in the face of public provision of sickness, unemployment, and other benefits beginning with the passage of the New Zealand Social Security Act in 1938, followed by similar Australian legislation over the next 10 years. Then, beginning in the 1970s most large finance and insurance mutual associations succumbed to competition from for-profit enterprises, a process encouraged by government policy. In Australia, of the big mutuals, only hospitality clubs and credit unions survived unscathed into the twenty-first century. Trade unions and the major Christian denominations also lost adherents. Class based
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political parties ceased to be mass movements and were replaced by a variety of social movements: feminism, environmentalism, and various rights based movements. But many new forms of association emerged, in health, in the arts and among the growing immigrant populations from continental Europe, Asian, and Pacific countries. A major difference between civil society in Australia and New Zealand is the place of indigenous organizations in each country. In Australia, European settlement disrupted the way of life of the aboriginal peoples. Many died from introduced diseases or were killed; the remainder coerced into settlements. Only since the 1970s have government policies and the law come to recognize their prior settlement and continuing rights to land. There are now many thousands of aboriginal associations but most are in dependency relations with state and national governments. By contrast, in New Zealand, the strength of Maori social organization, and the encouragement of missionary societies, meant that settlers recognized their prior occupation and sought to purchase land and develop a treaty with Maori chiefs. The role then of indigenous Maori social organization in New Zealand has been identified as distinctive by international standards, not only in maintaining traditional kin-based associational forms – indeed with ‘‘renewed potency’’ since the later twentieth century – but also ‘‘participating in the organizations of mainstream society, bringing distinctive cultural perspectives to them, while borrowing some of their structural forms. . . . , result[ing] in distinctive forms of organization which do not readily fit internationally recognized nonprofit sector categories’’ (Tennant et al., 2008: 3). Today, 21 million Australians occupy a land mass of 7,692 million hectares, an extremely dry continent but one rich in minerals. Around 60% of Australians live in the five mainland state capital cities. Four million New Zealanders occupy just under 270 million more temperate hectares; almost one third in the North Island city of Auckland.
Civil Society In Australia and New Zealand the term civil society has no agreed meaning and little popular resonance. Michael Edwards (2004) has attempted to group the great variety of ways the term is used into three broad conceptions: associational life, the good society and the public sphere. All three can be found in the thin discussion of civil society in both countries. When it first emerged, in the 1990s, civil society was intertwined with the concept of social capital and barely moved beyond the pages of a few pamphlets. In 1994, Nick Greiner, an ex-Premier of New South Wales, in a conference
speech called for a renewal of ‘‘the institutions for common action’’ which relied on the instincts for voluntary collaboration and cited several well known voluntary associations. He championed these institutions and deplored the common polarization between the institutions of state and market. An expanded version of the speech, published by a right-leaning think tank (Greiner, 1995) cited many key American and British writers on these matters, such as Robert Putnam, Elinor Ostrom and David Green, but while Greiner talked of civil society, his preferred term for this set of institutions was civic capitalism. Social capital was described as an important institution for facilitating coordinated action. This idea of civil society as a third set of institutions between state and market received little attention. The powerful polarizing force of the conventional state/market dichotomy soon reasserted its influence. The first time civil society received popular attention in Australia was when the feminist commentator Eva Cox titled her 1995 Boyer lectures A Truly Civil Society (Cox, 1995). She argued for a stronger role for the state in preserving and growing the institutions of civility, especially the allocation of basic rights. She claimed these had been weakened by the growing power of markets. She too invoked social capital: a civil society was one that had strong social capital. At the same time the Business Roundtable, a major New Zealand right wing think-tank, commissioned From Welfare State to Civil Society: Towards Welfare that Works in New Zealand, from a visiting UK commentator and champion of friendly societies, David Green (1996). This sparked a considerable local debate – though one with little if any New Zealand content or analysis. Although Green argued that his philosophy was not individualistic, but based on a ‘‘rich view of community,’’ he essentially argued for greater private responsibility and a smaller role for the state, assuming greater voluntary activity would emerge to produce his vision of civil society. At the end of the decade a study for the Commonwealth Foundation, Civil Society and the New Millennium, used Michael Walzer’s formulation of civil society as a space for uncoerced citizen action. Based on an analysis of secondary data, focus groups and interviews the Australian report for this study noted a decline in the membership of many well-known associations and reported claims that the capacity for associational life was not as strong as it had been a generation ago and that alienation from government was growing. The report noted the growth of new forms of association and of political engagement and concluded that civil society was undergoing a transformation (Stewart-Weeks & Lyons, 1999). Four years later two prominent social scientists at a leading university, in final
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reflections at the conclusion of a multivolume study of Australia’s institutions regretted that they had not included any examination of Australia’s civil society (Brennan & Castles, 2002). The New Zealand research for the Commonwealth Foundation study noted a dearth of data on New Zealand associations, threats and opportunities for citizen engagement, and the relevance of concepts of social capital in reforming public policy as it related to civil society organizations and citizens (Bradford et al., 2001). The term civil society remains on the periphery of public discourse, available to be invoked in one or other of its conceptions. In 2004, the executive directors of two large umbrella organizations representing many church sponsored health and social service nonprofits edited a book entitled Church and Civil Society (Sullivan & Leppert, 2004). The context explained the title. Church sponsored nonprofits provide many health and social services in Australia. Many of these and other church leaders had become increasingly critical of Australian government policies and were in turn told by government ministers to keep out of the public sphere. The book was a claim that the churches contributed to a civil (i.e., a good) society and had a right to participate in wider public debates. The term civil society is used rarely to describe the sum or even a part of either country’s large and diverse nonprofit or third sector. Bradford et al. (2001: 84), for example find only a handful of authors using the term in the New Zealand literature up to that time. There is little understanding of the scope of the nonprofit sector, even among leaders of various parts of what some academics would describe as nonprofit sector or civil society. People talk loosely of NGOs, of not-for-profit organizations, of community groups and voluntary organizations, of private or nongovernment schools, of sports groups, of unions, of churches, of environment groups, of charities and of the community sector without ever seeking to provide definitional clarity and without trying to encompass them by reference to civil society or to any other overarching term (Lyons, 2001; Tennant et al., 2006). Increasingly leaders of nonprofit organizations providing social services claim to speak on behalf of the nonprofit sector, but examination of their claim reveals that they are speaking only for social service nonprofits. Civil society is rarely invoked by groups of nonprofit organizations to describe themselves. In 2006, the Australian Council of Trade Unions organized a meeting of national umbrella groups encompassing unions, environment groups, churches, and social service nonprofits to explore common grievances with government policies. It called itself the National Civil Society Dialogue (Australian
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Conservation Foundation, 2008). It meets annually, but has had little impact. In late 2008, anyone searching the ubiquitous Google website for ‘‘civil society’’ in Australia would first find a link to Civil Society, an agency that provided bands to music festivals!
Social Capital The concept of social capital has had a higher profile in Australia and New Zealand than civil society. It has been examined by many academics and taken up by governments and applied in many policy settings. But its popularity has been at the cost of conceptual clarity; it has been increasingly criticized and has now declined into infrequent use. The term social capital was already being used in sociology and education disciplines before Robert Putnam’s popularizing of the term in the mid-1990s. As a result there were a score of Australian articles using social capital as an identifier in the decade before Cox’s Boyer lectures gave it a wider public airing. In the next 3 years there were 69 articles (Winter, 2000). The range of topics are wide: the meaning of social capital, whether it is always a good thing or whether it can be found in discriminatory associations, whether it can be measured and whether government policies can strengthen its positive forms (Winter, 2000). Some of these studies were conceptual and sought to establish the importance of social capital by examples. They drew on focus groups and vignettes and were designed to explore strengths and weaknesses of social relations at the local level. Some of their authors had also contributed to the civil society literature and were interested in the well-springs of collective action (Norton et al., 1997; Stewart-Weeks & Richardson, 1998). Other work focussed on measurement. One of the most important of these was a demonstration that social capital could be operationalized and measured along different dimensions in different communities (Onyx et al., 1997; Onyx & Bullen, 2000). In New Zealand, there was also a particular interest in the Maori tradition of social capital, as a collectivist kin-based culture – for example, Williams & Robinson (2002). The potential that an understanding of social capital held for shaping more effective public policies generated considerable interest within and outside government. Robert Putnam was brought out to New Zealand in 1996 by some nonprofit activists and researchers. The intention of at least some is summed up in the title of a paper presented to an Institute of Policy Studies seminar the following year – ‘‘Bringing Back Balance: The Role of Social Capital in Public Policy.’’ The balance referred to in that paper included recognition of the importance of
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social as well as economic goals, of community as well as individual interests, and of the important place of ‘‘church, voluntary and other civic bodies’’ in society (Riddell, 1997: 13). Putnam spoke in private and public sessions with senior politicians, bureaucrats, and nonprofit leaders. With the direct interest and support of the then Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, high level policy work on the application of this concept was undertaken in a wide range of agencies – including those responsible for finance, health, conservation, justice, trade and industry, community development and local government. The Institute of Policy Studies sponsored workshops in 1997, 1998, and 2000 on aspects of social capital and public policy (Robinson, 1997, 1999 and 2002) Statistics New Zealand developed a framework for the measurement of social capital (Spellerberg, 2001). This surge of policy interest, however, was short-lived, as Bolger was replaced as Prime Minister in December 1997 by his own political party. Two factors led to his demise: perceptions that he was not tough enough in his dealings with a minor coalition partner and his use of ‘‘social capital’’ as the theme of his Leader’s Address to that years annual regional conferences of his political party’s members. In Australia, some of the interest in social capital was driven by a lively debate about the decline of rural communities and the associated emergence of One Nation, a populist movement with racist overtones that stole votes from all parties, especially the conservative coalition. Social capital was used to understand why some communities adjusted more readily to decline than others and to develop policies to strengthen communities. This work was most fully developed by the Victorian government. In 2001 and again 2002 the Australian Institute of Family Studies published papers proposing approaches to the measurement of social capital (Stone, 2001; Stone & Hughes, 2002). In 2003 the Australian government’s economic think-tank, the Productivity Commission published a paper on social capital arguing that while it was difficult for governments to grow social capital, government actions could diminish it and these should be avoided (Productivity Commission, 2003). In the following year the Australian Bureau of Statistics published a framework and a set of indicators for measuring social capital (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004). Data on these indicators were collected by the ABS in its 2006 General Social Survey, but by the time results were released in 2007, interest in social capital had waned (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007a). In July 2008 the director of a leading university based social policy research centre observed that social capital ‘‘had been superseded in the political lexicon’’ and claimed that
it ‘‘has become an overburdened and tired expression with little meaning’’ (Katz, 2008).
Empirical Data One interpretation of civil society equates it with nonprofit associations. It has been estimated that there are around 700,000 nonprofit associations in Australia (Lyons et al., 1995). Of these only around 40,000 are what the ABS describes as being economically significant (in effect large enough to employ staff). According to a survey of a sample of these organizations conducted by the ABS in 2007, they employed 885,000 persons, or 8.6% of all employed persons. Their revenue was Au$74.5 billion. Of this 38% came from the sale of goods and services, 34% from government and 14% from fundraising and membership fees (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008). These economically active nonprofits were found in many industries. The sample was too small to allow much disaggregation, but 21% of total expenditure of Aus$68 billion was by nonprofits in education and research, 16% by those providing social services, another 16% by those providing culture or recreation, 14% by those in health and 13% by business and professional associations and unions. Nonprofit organizations provide a majority of social services and over 30% of children are educated in nonprofit schools. In both cases a majority of these nonprofit organizations have links to religious organizations. The best guide to Australia’s nonprofit sector is Lyons (2001). The size and economic value of New Zealand’s nonprofit sector was first systematically reported in Non-profit Institutions Satellite Account 2004 (Statistics New Zealand, 2007) and put in international comparison by Sanders et al. (2008). Around 97,000 nonprofit organizations were identified. Ninety percent of these employed no paid staff; relying entirely on volunteers. The remaining 10% employed just over 100,000 people or 5.4% of employed people. Thirty percent of these were employed in social services and 19% in education & research and 16% in culture and recreation. Overall, the income of these organizations in New Zealand was NZ$8 billion. Of this 45% came from the sale of goods and services, 25% from government, and 24% from fundraising and members fees. In addition, the contribution of volunteers has been conservatively costed at NZ$3.3 billion. Nonprofit organizations are widely supported by Australians. Around 87% belong to at least one association (Passey & Lyons, 2005); a similar percentage support them each year with donations worth Au$5.7 billion in 2004 (Lyons & Passey, 2005). A 1999 study found that 70% of
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New Zealanders identified themselves as belonging to an organization, club, or group (Ministry of Social Policy, 2001). Volunteering is another form of support for nonprofit associations; it is also taken to be an indicator of social capital. In its latest Voluntary Work Survey (for 2006) the ABS estimated that 35% of adult Australians had volunteered more than 700 million hours during that year (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007b). Eighty-seven percent of these hours were volunteered for nonprofit associations, the rest for government agencies or for-profit firms. This has been estimated as contributing the equivalent of a further Au$13 billion to the nonprofit sector. One million New Zealanders (31% of the population 12 years and over) volunteered an estimated 270 million hours in 2004 (Statistics New Zealand, 2007). Internationally, New Zealand nonprofit organizations are more reliant both on volunteers (making up 67% of the full time equivalent nonprofit workforce, compared to a 41 country average of 42% and 40% for Australia) and philanthropy (making up 20% of nonprofit income, compared to 15% for a 38 country average and 10% for Australia) (Sanders et al., 2008). Another measure of social capital is the percentage of people who are prepared to trust strangers. Only 54% of those surveyed by the ABS in 2006 felt that ‘‘most people could be trusted’’ (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007a). This was relatively uniform across population groups and regions. In 2006, 76% of New Zealanders said they believed people can be trusted, with 18% reporting people can almost always be trusted and 58% reporting people can usually be trusted. This is relatively high by international standards – sixth highest among 25 OECD countries. Levels of trust increased with personal income, and was lower among Maori and Pacific Island populations than European New Zealanders (Ministry of Social Development, 2008).
Outlook/Concluding Assessment The terms civil society and social capital encompass a range of institutions and practices: voluntary associations, public civility, high levels of civic and political participation, responsive governments, a tolerant public. At a superficial level signs of change can be found in many of these institutions: declines in membership associations, the professionalization and corporatization of large charities and sports, a levelling-off in numbers volunteering, but these can be balanced by new forms of association emerging around new causes, some using new web-based technologies. In Australia and New Zealand, although it is unlikely that the terms will be widely used, it is likely that the institutions of civil society and social capital will continue slowly to transform, but fundamentally will remain strong.
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Cross-References
▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Missionary Societies ▶ Nonprofit Organizations in the System of National Accounts ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Trust ▶ Volunteering
References/Further Readings Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2004). Measuring social capital: An Australian framework and indicators (Catalogue No. 1378.0). Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2007a). General social survey: Summary results 2006 (Catalogue No. 4159.0). Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2007b). Voluntary work, Australia 2006 (Catalogue No. 4441.0). Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2008). Not-for-profit organisations, Australia, 2006–07, from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats Australian Conservation Foundation. (2008.). Climate change: A call for leadership on climate change, from http://www.acfonline.org.au/ articles/news.asp?news_id¼1946&c¼265951; 26/09/08. Bradford, S. (2001). Citizens and governance in New Zealand. Wellington: Association of Non-Governmental Organisations of Aotearoa. Brennan, G., & Castles, F. (Eds.) (2002). Australia reshaped: 200 years of institutional transformation. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Colley, L. (1992). Britons. Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cox, E. (1995). A truly civil society. Boyer Lectures, Sydney: ABC Books. Edwards, M. (2004). Civil Society. London: Polity Press. Green, D. (1996). From welfare state to civil society: Towards welfare that works in New Zealand. Wellington: New Zealand Business Roundtable. Greiner, N. (2005). Civic capitalism: An Australian agenda for institutional renewal (CIS Occasional Papers 54). Crows Nest: Centre for Independent Studies. Katz, I. (2008). From the director. SPRC Newsletter, 99(3). King, M. (2003). The penguin history of New Zealand. Auckland: Penguin Books. Lyons, M. (1995). Data on Nonprofit Organisations: An Examination of Two Data Sources (CACOM Working Paper No. 30). Lindfield: CACOM, University of Technology, Sydney. Lyons, M. (2001). Third sector: The contribution of nonprofit and cooperative enterprises in Australia. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Lyons, M., & Passey, A. (2005). Australians giving and volunteering 2004, Report for the Prime Ministers Community Business Partnership. Ministry of Social Development. (2008). The social report Te Puronga Oranga Tangata 2008. Wellington: Ministry of Social Development. Ministry of Social Policy. (2001). The social report Te Puronga Oranga Tangata 2008. Wellington: Ministry of Social Policy. Norton, A. (1997). Social capital: The individual, civil society and the state. Crows Nest: Centre for Independent Studies. Onyx, J., & Bullen, P. (2000). Measuring social capital in five communities. The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 36(1), 23–42. Onyx, J. (1997). Measuring social capital in five communities in NSW: An analysis (CACOM Working Paper No 41). Lindfield: CACOM, University of Technology, Sydney.
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Passey, A., & Lyons, M. (2005). Voluntary associations and political participation. In S. Wilson (Eds.), Australian social attitudes (The First Report). Sydney: UNSW Press. Productivity Commission. (2003). Social capital: Reviewing the concept and its policy implications. Research Paper. Canberra: AusInfo. Robinson, D. (Ed.) (1997). Social capital and policy development. Wellington: Institute of Public Policy, Victoria University of Wellington. Robinson, D. (Ed.) (1999). Social capital in action. Wellington: Institute of Public Policy, Victoria University of Wellington. Robinson, D. (Ed.) (2002). Building social capital. Wellington: Institute of Public Policy, Victoria University of Wellington. Statistics New Zealand. (2007). Non-profit institutions satellite account: 2004. Wellington: Statistics New Zealand. Stewart-Weeks, M., & Lyons, M. (1999). Civil society in the new millennium: A report to the commonwealth foundation. Lindfield: CACOM, University of Technology, Sydney. Stewart-Weeks, M., & Richardson, C. (1998). Social capital stories: How 12 Australian households live their lives. Crows Nest: Centre for Independent Studies. Stone, W. (2001). Measuring social capital: Towards a theoretically informed measurement framework for researching social capital in family and community life. Research paper No. 24. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies. Stone, W., & Hughes, J. (2002). Social capital: Empirical meaning and measurement validity. Research Paper No. 27. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies. Spellerberg, A. (2001). Framework for the measurement of social capital in New Zealand. Research and Analytical Report 2001:14. New Zealand: Wellington Statistics. Sullivan, F., & Leppert, S. (Eds.) (2004). Church and civil society: A theology of engagement. Adelaide: ATF Press. Tennant, M. (2006). Defining the nonprofit sector: New Zealand (Working Papers of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, No.45). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Centre for Civil Society Studies. Tennant, M. (2008). The history of the non-profit sector in New Zealand. Wellington: Office for the Community and Voluntary Sector. Williams, T., & Robinson, D. (2002). Social capital-based partnerships: A maori perspective and a comparative approach. In D. Robinson (Ed.), Building social capital. Wellington: Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. Winter, I. (2000). Social capital and public policy in context. In I. Winter (Ed.), Social capital and public policy in Australia. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Brazil MARCO ANTONIO FIGUEIREDO MILANI FILHO, MARCIA SERRA RIBEIRO VIANA Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Introduction The Brazilian civil society had its foundations laid during the process of colonization by Portugal at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The first nongovernmental
organizations were the Santa Casas de Miserico´rdia, charitable organizations originated from Portugal’s medieval guilds’ effort to organize it communities’ needs. In Brazil the Santa Casas were established as Civil Counsels maintained by society’s notable men, rich, and related to the Catholic Church. Historically these organizations cared for the sick, widows, orphans, abandoned children. With time, their main service became the maintenance of hospitals, providing free services of health (Landim, 1993). These organizations of social welfare and health were the only ones authorized by the Portuguese government to work with the population, as they served the interests of Portugal by dealing with popular demands. The participation of the charity organizations with religious ties continued even after independence, with the advent of the Brazilian Monarchy (1822–1889), that had yet Roman Catholic faith as official state religion, and in the subsequent republican period, even though the republican constitution established a freedom of faith and religion. The social movements emerged with more emphasis only after 1920, with industrialization and urban population growth. Such movements have been influenced by ideologies such as Marxism and Anarchism, relating to the labor issues and policies, but, in general, were not yet expressed through independent and formal organizations. The State was driven by established oligarchies, but the social movements represented expressions of disagreement with the existing sociopolitical situation. Later, during the government of the authoritarian and populist Vargas (1930–1945), the labor movement was organized under State regulation and unionism had expression in national scenario. Despite the strengthening of the labor movement, the Civil Society was based more on welfare than on political institutions. During these years the organization groups of different ethnic origins, in associations and foundations, are created to attend the needs of migrant communities. In general, these groups emerged after the economical success of some of the immigrants’ community. From 1964–1985, during the military government, various organizations of Civil Society did not meet the State’s interests, and were considered illegal and then banned. The free expression of popular interests with political connotations was restricted. Many organizations with social goals were established with government support to act in areas considered strategic for the socioeconomic development. The unions continued to exist, but under intense monitoring of their activities. Since 1986, considering the democratization of politics and with the new Brazilian Constitution issued in 1988, the Civil Society has watched the emergence of various Civil Rights organizations and protection of
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interests of disadvantaged minorities (Indians, women, afro-descendents etc.). It is assumed that the 1980s were a landmark for the Brazilian Third Sector. Currently, there are about 338 thousand nonprofit entities in Brazil and it is estimated that the Third Sector represents about 1.5% of the Gross National Product, and employs about 1.5 million people (IBGE, 2004). There is a trend of growth and development of activities related to civil rights, but the practices of social assistance are predominant. Organizations of the Third Sector are the subject of debates in the academic community regarding the discussion if they are complementing the State in the formulation and implementation of public policies or are replacing the State in the care of social demand which is a public responsibility. Researchers on the role of the State and its relationship with society, as Bresser Pereira (2000, 2001), argue that the expansion of the Third Sector is a consequence of the greater adequacy and efficiency of nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations to provide social services that are not naturally monopolistic. However, it is assumed the existence of social mechanisms to control these organizations by the Civil Society in order to assure that the services can be efficient and effective. Brazilian regulatory bodies are starting to devote more attention to nonprofit organizations, which are experiencing a period of transition considering the management aspect, moving from the amateurism that characterized the managers of many entities in the past or even trying to change the negative image caused by occasional frauds and financial scandals in order to adapt themselves to the demands and responsibilities expected for professional managers. Accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness are words that have been incorporated into the vocabulary of modern managers, as well as these professionals have become elements of monitoring by their stakeholders. Besides the Government, the donors and supporters of Civil Society organizations have become the main pressure elements for the improvement of the managers in the Third Sector. The approval procedures for the transfer of resources imply in performance monitoring of the social projects, following stricter criteria. The requests for information on the use of resources, on the targets set and on the achieved goals, driven the fund raising process from simple advertisings based on emotional appeal to complex activities based on feasible plans of actions and well-prepared budgets. Another point of discussion in recent governmental and academic spheres is the increasing influence of environmental organizations with headquarters or offices in
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other countries on specific issues which are considered to be strategic to Brazil. There are different points-of-view if those influence and practices can interfere in national sovereignty, such as the preservation and sustainable use of Amazonian forest, or the production of biofuels (ethanol alcohol). The major challenge being faced by legislators, scientists, managers, donators, and other stakeholders is balancing the different interests present in relations between State and Civil Society, particularly in the design and implementation of mechanisms for accountability and governance. The objective is, also, that the disclosure on the economic, financial, and social performance of the institutions of the Third Sector provides the information needed for their respective stakeholders to make decisions to allocate resources efficiently and effectively.
Civil Society Definition
There is not a unique definition for Civil Society, but basically its concept refers to a realm where private nonprofit organizations and voluntary movements support and promote activities in order to meet social needs and common interests. Civil Society is also known as the Third Sector. Despite being a popular expression, commonly used by the media, the concept of Third Sector is still unknown to most of the Brazilian population, and yet, it generates some disagreement among researchers. It is a space to gather people and organizations that share common interests and values to achieve collective objectives. It represents a virtual area that brings together all private organizations with public purposes. Considering a set formed by three sectors, where these sectors are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, the Third Sector exists between the Public (First Sector) and the Market (Second Sector). Classifying an organization, just as nongovernmental, is not enough to express its real purpose, because this fact only characterizes it as an entity that is not owned nor run by governmental organs and agencies. All private companies (Second Sector) are not governmental too. On the other hand, if the organization is nonprofit one, this fact only characterizes it as not belonging to business activities. The governmental agencies (First Sector) are nonprofit oriented too. Organizations of the Third Sector, therefore, differ from the First Sector because they are not run by the Government, and are differentiated from the Second Sector because they are nonprofit oriented. In other words, it
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can be said that these organizations are simultaneously nongovernmental and nonprofit. The three sector approach is not absolute, but it is a simplified framework in order to contrast the nature and purposes of the organizations. As the interests and aims of the researcher, it is possible to separate and to rejoin the organizations according different criteria. A common mistake is to confuse the meaning of Third Sector with the Tertiary Sector, which is used in the economic perspective to represent the companies that provide services. Despite the great diversity among the organizations of the Third Sector, such as different sizes, specific objectives, economic resources etc, it can be possible to highlight the following common characteristics: they all have
– No owners – Autonomy policy – Take upon themselves the role of the state, in response to certain social needs Structure and institutional presence Seek to provide social benefits Are economic agents No distribution of the excess of revenues over expenses to its members or employees, reinvesting the surpluses achieved – Tax privileges, established by law
– – – –
Examples of organizations of the Third Sector are: philanthropic hospitals, environmental organizations, unions, associations, religious organizations, associations of neighborhoods. These organizations can also obtain certificates that recognize their social objectives and, officially, their social relevance. In Brazil, the main certificates are: Utilidade Pu´blica – UP, Beneficeˆncia e Assisteˆncia Social – CEBAS, Organizac¸a˜o da Sociedade Civil de Interesse Pu´blico – OSCIP. Main Objectives of the Third Sector
Considering the mission and objectives of the Third Sector’s organizations, various projects are formulated and implemented for providing services and for offering products regarding collective interests. Problems related to the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of government policies in the face of increasing social demands are considered by the government failure theory, whose central idea is cited by authors such as Weisbrod (1988) and Salamon and Anheier (1998), suggestive as a reason for the emergence of nonprofit organizations, as a response of Civil Society to government inefficiency. From this perspective, the government failure theory assumes new contours as the Government itself may be,
deliberately, encouraging that Civil Society organizations develop and take public actions, not necessarily because the Government is unable, but because it prefers to rely on civilian organizations such as extensions of its social policy. Falconer (1999) discusses the intention of liberal governments to reduce their direct participation in social activities and promote or encourage the entry of organizations of the Third Sector in public programs, as partnerships. Under a complementary approach, the lack of economic interest of business companies to provide social services can contribute to the growth of the Third Sector. The so-called market failure theory suggests that the Third Sector is encouraged to offer goods and services to the community when these products have no economic attraction for the Second Sector. Some of the issues addressed by the Third Sector are: health, social assistance, civil rights, transparency, and corruption, the environment preservation, labour, and income improvement, education, arts, and culture, youth, transport, violence, freedom etc.
Social Capital Social Capital is a concept related to the people’s connections, with emphasis on collective activities, social networks, shared information and values. According to Putnam and Goss (2002), the feeling of unity based on common interests and goals improves the relationship among the members of a group and it facilitates to reach political, social, and economic objectives. In this sense, a strong Civil Society needs a strong social capital framework, based on collaborative actions, trust, defined objectives and freedom. Under a historical and political perspective, democratic contexts stimulate situations for development of voluntary organizations and social movements, and from another standpoint, Civil Society is an essential factor for mobilizing efforts against authoritarian regimes. Sen (1999) considers democracy as a relevant element to expand political rights and guarantee freedom of expression in order to induce social responses to economic needs.
Empirical Data Historical and Human Geographical Background
Brazil has a social history webbed on diversity resulting from groups of migration, settled in a vast territory, as well as a Portuguese cultural base, that integrates the new in the existing culture. The result is a changeable permanence, that is, a culture that receives new traces as its own by
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incorporation, does not tend to isolate social groups, and maintains its identity through constant changes. It causes no estrangement, therefore, to find Brazilian Civil Society’s action equally diverse, adaptable, and changeable. Barbosa (2007) indicates that, as far as mobilization, organization, and articulation one should be expect action of Civil Society to be as diversified as society as a whole. The difficulties are, in a way, originated from the countries enriching diversity. A population formed by constant migration movements, from colonial days to this date. Some basic data might help understand this scenery in which Brazilian Civil Society organizes itself. Dealing with a territorial dimension of 8.547.403 km2, a population of 183.9 million (according to estimates, to the year of 2025, this population should reach 228 million), a demographical density of 21.5 inhabitants per km2, 75.4% inhabiting urban areas; 49.7% declare themselves white, 42.6% of mulatto, 6.9% of negroes and 0.8% other origin, as declared to the 2006 house to souse research. (IBGE, 2008). The population is distributed in the regions as follows: Southeast (77.8 million), Northeast (51.5 million), South (26.7 million), North (14.6 million) and Central West (13.3 million). Most concentration of people is in the following cities: Sao Paulo (6.0%), Rio de Janeiro (3.3%), Salvador (1.6%), Brasilia (1.4%), Fortaleza (1.3%) e Belo Horizonte (1.3%). The pyramidal graphic of absolute age distribution for 2006 shows balanced sexual division of the population, with 48.7% of men and 51.3% of women; in the distribution by age groups, 26% are from 0 to 14 years old, 63.8% from 15 to 59 and 10.2% of 60 or more; the gross of the population is found on the productive strata. Almost 20% of these men and women live on the rural area and about 80% on urban regions. Most of this population inhabits the southern and southeastern states of the country, and the costal areas of northeaster states. The northern, central, and western states have a low density population. Even though the rate of illiteracy has dropped on the last decades, the country still has (IBGE, 2008) 9.9% of men and 9.3% of women 10 years old or more who cannot read or write. Of the population more than 15 years old, 10.1% of women and 10.6% of men are still illiterate, with small chance of changing their schooling situation. The financial situation of the population is not exactly better than their illiteracy: 0.2% do not have any income, 29.4% earn up to 1 minimum wage (m.w.), 51.8% earn from 1 to 3 m.w., 9.2% earn from 3 to 5 m.w., 5.6 earn from 5 to 10 m.w., 1.8% earn from 10 to 20 m.w., 0.5% earn more than 20 m.w. As far as wages are concerned, the country has, yet, a great concentration of its population on the lower wages strata.
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The composition of the work force, as far as gender, is relatively equitable; of the economically active population, in 2006, 43.7% were women and 56.3% men. About 8.4% of Brazilian workers are on agricultural activities, working from less than 14 h to more than 49 h a day; of the 91.6% working on nonagricultural activities, 47% have from 40 to 48 h a day; 13% work more than 49 h a day, 14% work from 15 to 39 h a day, and 3% work up to 14 h a day. Once more, there is a large concentration on the lower side of the pyramid, 60% work from 40 to more than 49 h day. Living conditions of this population are not in a level of excellence: 80% houses have running water; 70% have what is considered sanitary satisfactory condition (either with sewerage system or patent concrete cesspit); 85% of the residences have trash collecting service; 99% have electrical light and 75% telephone services. One should observe that, as it was mentioned, the demographic concentration on regions such as South and Southeast, could result in bias, since general statistical indexes does not take in consideration that those populous regions are also the areas with better living condition. As a consequence, one could infer that the country, as a whole, had a better tendency of well fare that it really has. Good living conditions, however, are not universal for Brazil. This is the basic scenery in which the Brazilian Civil Society finds a need to organize itself; a population that works up to 48 or 49 h to earn, if so much, from US$50 to US$600, having difficulty, therefore, to participate on the consumer’s market; even on urban area, a good number has yet to be able to read and write properly. Sanitary conditions are improving, but health situation has in its most important indicator, infant mortality, a very fragile point. International Perspectives
Historically established as result of the financial and communitarian effort of the members of its own citizenship, Brazilian Third Sector has had direct international influence, along with other countries of the Third World. Falconer (1999,) states that since the period of 1970s The World bank made a heavy contribution to this Sector in the third world, including Brazil. The authors go on, indicating the role of Foundations such as Ford and W. K. Kellogg as Maecenas of the Third Sector. In fact, this is more than a tendency, it is par of the reality of financial support for the Sector’s organizations all over Brazil: if on one hand the great enterprises of the country invest heavily on the sector, on the other hand the international investment responds to a need that results in the continuous growth of large and longtime projects.
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Technological development and global communication enables simultaneous knowledge of happenings in different regions of the planet and promotes the perception of how local social and economic problems can affect the rest of the world. The more a local issue is related to global concerns, the more attention it will be given. Information, ideas and interests flow across borders. A positive aspect of this fact is that local solutions can be shared globally and governments and organizations can evaluate what works best in which conditions. In addition, external help can be used, if possible, to solve internal problems. But there are delicate issues, such as the discussion about matters pertaining to the national sovereignty, which need to be treated carefully. In Brazil case, there is a dynamic Civil Society dedicated to find solutions to local problems, and many organizations of the Brazilian Third Sector keep relationship with international agencies and nonprofit organizations. It is, therefore, expected that, as this Sector matures, the influences of and in international Civil Societies will continue, and a tendency of participating in the Sector’s international discussion will grow continually.
Apart from the increasing research interest for the Third Sector in Brazil, there are gaps of knowledge about the real contribution of nonprofit organizations to the development of the country. Global and domestic emerging issues, such as economic growth, rational utilization of water, conservation, and climate change, sustainable agriculture in the Amazonian forest, production of biofuels, education, violence etc, have become part of the Brazilian civil society’s agenda for the coming years.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Social Inequality ▶ Community Philanthropy ▶ Grupo de Institutos, Fundacoes e Empresas (GIFE) ▶ Instituto Ethos ▶ MST ▶ Philanthropy in Latin Ame´rica ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Movements ▶ Third Sector
Outlook/Concluding Assessment
References/Further Readings
The Brazilian Civil Society is multifaceted and complex, therefore it cannot be presented under a single perspective. Considering its regional contrasts, different approaches can be used to discuss the main aspects of this arena. Like other nations in Latin America, after living through periods of authoritarian regimes, Brazil is strengthening the democratic mechanisms for the expression of Civil Society and this fact has decisively contributed to the emergence of thousands of private nonprofit organizations dedicated to the care of social, political, and economic interests of the citizens. On the community development, there are many Brazilian nonprofit organizations focused on this subject. It is relevant to separate the programs considering two regional characteristics: urban and rural areas. The Brazilian population is predominantly urban. The South and Southeast areas are more socially and economically developed than North, Northeast, and West Central areas. For small communities, there are many social and economic programs supported by nonprofit organizations and by the Federal Government, specifically in the poorest regions (North and Northeast). Most of these programs have the objective to improve income and to reduce the poverty in urban areas. In the rural areas, nonprofit organizations and social movements are involved in activities of environmental preservation and land reform (reforma agra´ria).
Barbosa, I. M. S. P. (2007). Sociedade civil brasileira: ac¸a˜o, articulac¸a˜o e mobilizac¸a˜o. Revista 3 setor, 1(1), 34–38. Bresser, P. L. C. (2000). A reforma gerencial do estado de 1995. Revista de Administrac¸a˜o Pu´blica/FGV, 34(4), 7–26. Bresser, P. L. C. (2001). Do estado patrimonial ao gerencial. In S. Pinheiro, J. Wilheim, & I. Sachs (Eds.), Brasil: um se´culo de transformac¸o˜es. Sa˜o Paulo: Companhia das letras. Falconer, A. P. (1999). A promessa do terceiro setor: um estudo sobre a construc¸a˜o do papel das organizac¸o˜es sem fins lucrativos e do seu campo de gesta˜o. Sa˜o Paulo: Centro de estudos em administrac¸a˜o do terceiro setor, USP. Fernandes, R. C. (1994). Privado, pore´m pu´blico. Rio de janeiro: Relumedumara´. IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatı´stica. (2004). As fundac¸o˜es privadas e associac¸o˜es sem fins lucrativos no Brasil. Brası´lia: IBGE. IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatı´stica. (2008). Pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicı´lios: sı´ntese de indicadores. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE. IPEA – Instituto de Pesquisa Econoˆmica Aplicada – IPEA (2005). Radar social. Brası´lia: IPEA. Landim, L. (1993). A invenc¸a˜o das ongs – do servic¸o invisı´vel a` profissa˜o sem nome. Tese doutorado em antropologia social. UFRJ. Ministe´rio da Sau´de do Brasil. (2004). Evoluc¸a˜o da taxa de mortalidade no Brasil, from http://portal.saude.gov.br/saude/visualizar_texto.cfm? idtxt=24437; 10/28/2008. Putnam, R., & Goss, A. K. (2002). Introduction. In R. Putnam (Ed.), Democracies in flux. The evolution of social capital in contemporary societies. New York: Oxford University Press. Rose-Ackerman, S. (1986). The economics of nonprofit institutions: Studies in structure and policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Salamon, L. M. (1987). Of market failure, voluntary failure, and thirdparty government: Toward a theory of government-nonprofit
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe relations in the modern welfare state. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 16(1), 29–49. Salamon, L. M., & Anheier, H. K. (1998). Social origins of civil society: Explaining the nonprofit sector cross-nationally. Voluntas. (9)3, 213–248. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Weisbrod, B. A. (1986). Toward a theory of the voluntary nonprofit sector in a three-sector economy. In S. Rose-Ackerman (Ed.), The economics of nonprofit institutions: Studies in structure and policy (pp. 1–44). New York: Oxford University Press. Weisbrod, B. A. (1988). The nonprofit economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe KLA´RA CZIKE National Volunteer Centre of Hungary, Budapest, Hungary
Introduction Social capital is a relatively new research area in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – Albania, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Litvania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia (by OECD). At the same time, it is a very popular approach in the research about the region, applied, for example, by the World Bank or the United Nation’s Development Programme. At the same time, the concept of civil society has a great history in the CEE countries too. In this region, it was during enlightened absolutism that civil society started to thrive, firstly the Church, then the state and private individuals started to set up establishments: foundations and associations. The establishments that have existed in Western Europe since the fifteenth century, in this region, in fact, came about in the second half of the 1800s, following the growth of the middle class and the economic development. Although the wars did leave a trace in the development of the civil society in the west too, the laws of the CEE countries after World War II made the development of the civil society impossible for 40 years. At the same time, civil society continues to survive as an underground movement, as one of the manifestations of the dissidence. Later, following the political transformations, this informal development made it possible for the power of the civil society to manifest itself so fast in real organizations.
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It is important to emphasize that social capital is referred to not only as a horizontal voluntary organization or voluntarism (community participation). This article, however, will focus mainly on these two fields (while we can also speak about political participation, informal networks and sociability or trust, norms, and sanctions). The CEE countries are very diverse, but, as a special group, are even more clearly distinct from those of the western countries. Some countries are closer to the Western European and North American civil society models. Here belong Poland or Slovenia with their wide civil society base and civil traditions. Another group comprises the Czech Republic and Hungary where civil initiative both traditionally and culturally is defined differently. In Hungary, for instance, the coming about of the nongovernmental organizations after the political transformation was initiated both by the state and private individuals, but these organizations were established with a much smaller social base than in, for instance, Poland. It is exactly this wide social base behind the nongovernmental organizations that has been missing until today, and this has also been the reason behind the fact that a large part of the NGOs still exist in dependency from the state. Because of this dependency, only a small part of the NGOs can be considered to represent real criticism of the state, or is seen as the replacement and quality control of state services. Large community foundations that are typical of the Anglo-Saxon civil society, or even of Poland, do not really exist in Hungary or the Czech Republic. At the same time, it is typical of the whole region that the states function with little flexibility and considerable political predetermination, and these circumstances make the emergence of innovation difficult.
Civil Society The definition of the civil society is as old as that of democracy. According to the majority of the earliest authors (Hobbes, Locke, Ferguson, Tocqueville), civil society is the generic term for both active independent individuals who express their freedom and citizens who are in some relationship with the state. The modern and global definition of civil society is the entirety of institutions, organizations, individuals, values, and networks, etc., which point beyond the national societal, economic, and political boundaries. On the national level, civil society is culturally and historically embedded. Due to similar historical experience, the civil societies of the CEE countries are very similar, but individual specificities can also be observed. The concept nowadays is considerably interwoven with the concept of social capital.
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Social Capital There are many definitions of social capital, but a widely accepted version defines it as an ‘‘investment in social relations with expected returns in the marketplace’’ (Lin, 2001). This definition is consistent with the interpretations offered by all of the main ‘‘fathers’’: Bourdieu, Coleman, Lin, and Putnam. The term has been in use for almost a century, while the ideas behind it go back further still. Social capital may first have appeared in a book published in 1916. Author Lyda Hanifan referred to social capital as ‘‘those tangible assets [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit’’ (quoted from Putnam, 2000: 19). Since the early 1990s, the concept of social capital has been widely used both in research and development. The concept was popularised by Putnam in his book about the Italian civic culture (Putnam, 1993), but it also has former fathers such as Bourdieu or Coleman. Bourdieu defines social capital as ‘‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 248). Bourdieu’s aim was to analyze different forms of capital, such as cultural, social, political, symbolic, and economic. He also examines what impact these may have on each other. James Coleman, an American sociologist, defined social capital according to its function: ‘‘It is not a single entity, but a variety of different entities having two characteristics in common: they all consists of some aspect of social structure, and they facilitate certain actions of actors – whether persons or corporate actors – within the structure’’ (Coleman, 1988, cited in Adam & Roncevic, 2003: 159). Robert Putnam, who is the newest mediator of the concepts, defines social capital as ‘‘features of social organisation, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’’ (Putnam, 1993: 167). Francis Fukuyama, according to whom social capital is identical to trust, compares low trust (France, Italy) and high trust (USA, Japan) societies in order to examine the consequences of such differences as regards the levels of trust. In a low trust society, families can have a great deal of social capital (trust). The concept of social capital is not a clear theory but rather a fusion of various concepts: interpersonal trust, generalised trust (social solidarity), belief in the legitimacy of institutionalized norms and confidence in their implementation and cultural traditions.
According to the World Bank definition, ‘‘social capital refers to the norms and networks that enable collective action. It encompasses institutions, relationships, and customs that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s social interactions. Increasing evidence shows that social capital is critical for societies to prosper economically and for development to be sustainable. Social capital, when enhanced in a positive manner, can improve project effectiveness and sustainability by building the community’s capacity to work together to address their common needs, fostering greater inclusion and cohesion, and increasing transparency and accountability’’ (www.wordbank.org). Social capital is defined by the OECD as ‘‘networks together with shared norms, values, and understandings that facilitate co-operation within or among groups’’. (www.oecd.org) Putnam measures four indicators of social capital: vibrancy of associative life, incidence of newspaper readership, referenda turnout and preference voting (Putnam, 1993: 91–94). At the international and national level, there are numerous surveys which capture one or more dimensions of social capital. The World Bank approach to measurement is to identify patterns of bonding and bridging social capital through questions on whether other members of a group, organization, or network to which the respondent belongs are of the same ethnic, linguistic, gender, educational, occupational, or religious background. Informal social networks and mutual support is also a topic of interest in the World Bank approach. The World Values Survey (WVS) is conducted by an international network of social scientists. The main purpose of the survey is to measure changes in basic values and beliefs of the general public in more than 65 countries including a number of developing countries. It builds on the European Values Surveys, first carried out in 1981. A wide range of countries are included over various points in time, and links can be made to a potentially important outcome or correlate variables such as perception of health and well-being. Time use surveys generally approach questions on behavior through recorded time diaries. Data from the Multinational Time Use Study in respect of 23 countries are stored at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex. Information is recorded on different types of activities, including information on ‘‘where and with whom,’’ over a fixed time period. Typically, a very wide range of activities is covered, including work, leisure, conversation with others, study, personal care, voluntary work, ‘‘civic duty,’’ religious activities, visiting friends, travelling to
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work, etc. There is also a variable for other persons involved in the main activity. These other persons are distinguished by a family member in a household, other family members, relatives, colleagues, neighbours, strangers etc.
Empirical Data Social capital works on the basis of trust, which was shown also in the section containing definitions. Naturally, trust can be of many types. Answers can be as diverse as are the many institutions. The figure below shows the data revealed by the Eurobarometre in May 2008, and outlines the trust citizens have in the national parliaments of the respective EU countries (Figs. 1 and 2).
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At the same time, the situation does not change significantly even when the question is about the trust people have in consumer associations. The CEE countries again are below the EU average. The difference that is so frequently mentioned between Western and Eastern Europe in respect of the civil society or the level of development of social capital, can, therefore, be explained by economic, cultural, and historic differences. One of the main arguments in Putnam’s books is that social capital (the social engagements) is eroding in the world. The critics of the concept say that it is true only for the traditional forms of the movements (e.g., groups of neighborhoods, bowling leagues or school clubs for
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe. Fig. 1 Trust citizens have in their own national parliaments The figure shows well that all CEE countries have a level of trust in their own national parliaments that is below the European Union average.
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Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe. Fig. 2 Trust citiziens have in consumer associations.
parents) but not true in case of new groups such as environmental protection or lesbian/gay rights. These new groups are based on common beliefs, and are organized on the Internet rather than in the locality (e.g., Greenpeace, Amnesty International). It may be exactly for this reason that in the majority of the CEE countries the number of nongovernmental organizations and individuals pursuing volunteer activities still shows a growing tendency (the number of nonprofit organizations in Hungary has continuously been growing since 1989, and, within this, the associations have been growing even more dynamically. The situation is identical as regards the number of those who have been involved in voluntary activities). At the same time, cooperation among organizations is poor.
At the same time, a number of learning organizations have been set up in these countries in order to fight the old paternalistic forms. They follow up-to-date objectives such as protecting human rights or the environment, encouraging voluntarism, etc. In Western Europe less and less youth work in the third sector, and it is difficult to get them involved in voluntary work. These are not hot issues in most of the CEE countries, because more and more students and youth are ready to join these movements. Most authors claim that social capital in CEE is very low and/or is even diminishing in comparison with Western Europe or North America. Another group of authors argue that social capital in CEE is not much different, or, in some cases, it is higher than in the West.
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According to the reports (OECD, World Bank, etc.), the reason for this course of development in CEE countries is the deficit in interpersonal or organizational trust or confidence. The development of civil society and social capital is based on trust, therefore, it is difficult to run an independent civil society if the cooperation between organizations does not work (Figs. 3 and 4). The difference between the two figures is evident (Word Values Survey, 1999–2000): more than 70% of the polled individuals in CEE countries stated that one cannot be careful enough with respect to others, while in western countries there is a much larger variation in this respect – the differences among them can be explained much more with the cultural differences. The relationship between the state and the non-state actors is seen as crucial in the production or hindrance of civic engagement (Mihaylova, 2004). The states themselves in many cases have failed to recognize the power of the NGO sector. Also, in many cases, the critical and oppositional voice of the NGO sector has deterred the state from providing support to NGOs.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe. Fig. 3 Trust in people in western countries.
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For municipalities, these organizations frequently mean competition in the fight for resources. In many places, however, the power of joining forces and partnership has been recognized. NGOs compete with each other as well, mostly for resources. In many cases, professionalism as well as business and strategic mentality that ensure sustainability are missing. In order to improve the situation, reinforcement of trust is an important task (which can be achieved probably primarily by encouraging and teaching cooperation, as well as through the involvement of as many individuals in organizational and other voluntary activities as possible). The support for this to be achieved is in the hands of the European Union, since the earlier significant international or American support is provided only to a part of the CEE countries. Therefore, it is essential for the EU to have a concept for how to proceed with the development of these organizations that are half way through their development. The civil society of the non-EU CEE countries still requires significant development. Other countries could take part in this so that social capital in the countries of the region could further develop, and cooperation among an ever increasing number of countries and organizations could come about. In Hungary, NGOs organize their activities in an increasingly proactive and well-planned way. They seek donations, pay attention to the establishment of transparency, and the number of their volunteers is growing. The dynamic increase of the number of nonprofit organizations has stopped, but the growth is still significant. An important function of the civil society is that it passes on everything that the community used to know about the accumulation of social capital to the future generations. When examining the concepts of social capital and trust outlined in the section containing definitions, we found that, with respect to numbers, the extensive growth
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe. Fig. 4 Trust in people in CEE countries.
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of the Hungarian civil society has slowed down, but, with respect to quality, positive changes have appeared. Those social changes that have taken place in the past 30–40 years all over the world have significantly influenced the development of social capital, the trust between people, and have had a similar effect on the development of the role of civil initiatives and movements. These phenomena – the change of the role of the families, the decrease in the number of marriages, the increase of the number of divorces, the sudden increase in the number of one-parent families and those living alone, have all had their effect on the processes connected to civil society in America and Western Europe. Putnam (2000) elaborated a method of calculation extensively supported by scientific methods and statistics in order to examine the proportion in which social changes have affected the activity of people in the civil society, as well as the percentage by which they have decreased this activity. His research pointed to a number of such causes in the past couple of decades’ development in the American society, causes that can also be detected in the Hungarian society. Among these causes he lists the pressure that time and money exert on individuals, the economic difficulties, the changes in the roles families have, the geographical mobility, the effects of the television and of the revolution in the area of electronics, the effects of globalization, the growth of the welfare state, the revolution in the area of civil rights, as well as the influences of the social developments of the 1960s. In each case, his calculations are based on statistics and secondary analyzes, and the proportion of specific events in the social movements – with reference to certain causes of the decrease in the participation in civic actions – is estimated based on the numbers outlined at the end of the research. Summarizing the possible causes, he offers the following figure (Fig. 5): Among the generation changes are the social changes mentioned above, one third of which constitute also the
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe. Fig. 5 Possible causes for the decrease in the participation in civil actions in the United States.
emergence of the ‘‘TV generation,’’ therefore, the TV and the revolution in the area of electronics have, in fact, a double effect. According to Putnam’s argumentation, the pressure of time and money that burden individuals decreases social capital at least by one tenth. The largest social change that has taken place in Hungary was the economic transformation that took place after the political transformation. As a result of a transition to the market economy, the time and money that burden individuals has presumably a significantly stronger effect in the Hungarian society. For centuries, the development of the middle class took place parallel to urbanization. Nowadays, a trend opposite to this one can be observed: the wealthier part of the people (at the same time, as we saw earlier, those who brought about social capital) move out of the cities, and, hereinafter, exercises its role primarily on the local level. These trends can be discerned in Hungary as well. Putman estimates this trend’s contribution to the decrease of social capital to be at around 10%. Those technological changes at the core of which is the spread of the television and the computer also have a very significant effect. These activities generally take the time from the community initiatives. Although, with the spread of the Internet areas have become connectable and geographical distances/proximity has gained new meaning, this effect remains insignificant compared to the fact that the time spent on TV watching is still continuously increasing. According to a 1999 survey (Hungarian Central Statistical Office, 2000) which examined the time spending of the Hungarian population, men, and women spend more than a half of their free time watching television (women: 59%, men: 56%). The survey also revealed that the traditional roles continue to exist: compared to men, women are still less involved in the exercise of social activities. Activity of this type pursued by women is only one fifth of similar activities pursued by men. The time spent on social activities (conversation, receiving guests, exercise of religion, work carried out in organizations) is one third of the time spent on watching television for both men and women in the case of active population (15–74 years of age). These changes, according to Putman, are responsible for a quarter of the decrease in social capital. In Hungary, in my view, this proportion is somewhat higher: I believe that these processes are responsible for one third of the changes. Putman considers the transformation of the set of values between generations to be the most important change. He believes that these factors are responsible for 50% of the changes. As a result of the political transformation, the changes in the set of values in Hungary are
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even clearer than in America. The change of values and attitudes that is perceivable also in the everyday life can be easily experienced. However, this change shall be seen rather as a negative one as far as social capital is concerned. Studies justifying the understanding that the individualization processes ongoing in society (inter alia, Ferge, 1997) endanger the solidarity that used to exist within society appear one after another. In Hungary, these changes make for at least 50%, or even 60% of the evolvement of social capital. It is through living with a partner and through their children that the majority of people meet new people and establish new relationships. Therefore, states Putman, organizations that are connected to the school and/or kindergarten are much more popular in the American society than organizations that are connected to sports, culture, and social activities. It seems that in Hungary the majority of the population is also interconnected through leasure and sports activities, and membership performance in professional representations cannot be neglected either. Therefore, the phenomena described by Putman can be found and traced in Hungary. However, the Hungarian civil society, from this point of view, has not only deficits, but also resources that emerged following the political transformation. These resources can be traced in the continuous growth of the sector’s numerical proportion as well as in the quality changes. The categories mentioned by Putnam have also created new resources in Hungary, thus, the market economy, the development of a democratic institutional system and the technological development for the system provide authorization also for a positive consideration. It is not only the economic expenses that social capital optimizes or decreases. It is faster and easier to find solutions to the collective problems that emerge in a given society if the community is comprised of individuals who interact with each other, have trust towards each other, and who are ready for compromises and solidarity. The condition of social capital can be measured by the way and the efficiency with which individuals living in a society tackle their individual problems, that is, for instance, how high the suicide and divorce figures are, what the health related situation is, how large unemployment is, and what the level of tolerance towards each other is.
Concluding Assessment The conclusion is that application of the same measurement to different countries with different political, cultural, economical, and historical background is not a feasible method. At the same time, we cannot say that a country
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has a strong deficit in its civil society or social capital because ‘‘civil society’’ or ‘‘social capital’’ cannot see itself. It is important to measure social capital and compare the different cultures and attitudes toward the civil society and its institutions. Social capital as idea was the missing bridge between the third sector and the cultural, political, and economic background of a society. It means that the third sector is not homogenous and we cannot define it per se only with a very tight interaction with social capital and its outcomes. One of the most significant challenges is to accommodate the theory of these fields into practice, e.g., policy making in education, in health or employment.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society, Nineteenth Century ▶ Civil Society Theory: Ferguson ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Tocqueville ▶ Coleman, J. ▶ Putnam, R. ▶ Social Trust
References/Further Readings A lakossa´g ido˝felhaszna´la´sa 1999 szeptembere´ben. (2000). Budapest: KSH. (Hungarian Statistical Office) Alexander, J. C. (Ed.) (1998). Real civil societies – Dilemmas of institutionalization (p. 48). London: Sage Studies in International Sociology. Angelusz, R., & Tardos, R. (1998). A kapcsolatha´lo´zati ero˝forra´sok a´trendezo˝de´se´nek tendencia´i a 90-es e´vekben (pp. 234–255). Ta´rsadalmi Riport, Budapest: TA´RKI. Arato´, A. (1992). Civil ta´rsadalom Lengyelorsza´gban e´s Magyarorsza´gon. Politikatudoma´nyi Szemle 2. ´j Arato´, A. (1999). Civil ta´rsadalom, forradalom e´s alkotma´ny. Budapest: U Manda´tum Ko¨nyvkiado´. Bartal, A. M. (1999). Nonprofit szervezetek. Doktori e´rtekeze´s. ELTE Szociolo´giai e´s Szocia´lpolitikai Inte´zet. Budapest. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95–120. Czike, K., & Kuti, E´. (2006a). Lakossa´gi adoma´nyok e´s o¨nke´ntes teve´kenyse´gek – Gyorsjelente´s a 2004-es felme´re´s eredme´nyeiro˝l. ¨ nke´ntes Ko¨zpont Alapı´tva´ny-Nonprofit Kutato´csoport Budapest: O Egyesu¨let. ¨ nke´ntesse´g, jo´te´konysa´g, ta´rsadalmi Czike, K., & Kuti, E´. (2006b). O integra´cio´. NP Kutata´sok 14. Budapest: Nonprofit Kutato´csoport ¨ nke´ntes Ko¨zpont Alapı´tva´ny. Egyesu¨let-O Dahrendorf, R. (1997). After 1989 – morals, revolution and civil society. London: Macmillan. Deakin, N. (2000). Civil society as a revolution? The Hungarian case. Manuscript.
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Eurobarometer (http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb68/ eb68_en.htm) Ferge, Zs. (1997). A szocia´lpolitika paradigmava´lta´sa – A ta´rsadalmi individualiza´la´sa. Ke´zirat. Budapest: PHARE Szocia´lpolitikai Fejleszte´si Program. ELTE Szocia´lpolitika Tansze´k. Frane, A., & Roncevic, B. (2003). Social capital: recent debates and research trends. Social Science Information, 42(2). Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust: The social virtues of the creation of prosperity. Free Press Paperbacks/Simon & Schuster. Gellner, E. (2000). Trust, cohesion, and the social order. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations (chap. 9, pp. 142–157). Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. Hanifan, L. J. (1920). The community center. Silver, Burdett. Kuti, E´. (1996). A nonprofit szervezetek szerepe a kilencvenes e´vek magyar ta´rsadalma´ban e´s gazdasa´ga´ban. Ko¨zgazdasa´gi Szemle: okto´ber. Kuti, E´. (1998). Hı´vjuk tala´n nonprofitnak. Budapest: Nonprofit Kutato´csoport. Kuti, E´., & Marschall, M. (1991). A harmadik szektor. Budapest: Nonprofit Kutato´csoport. Lakossa´gi adoma´nyok e´s o¨nke´ntes munka. (1995). Budapest: KSH. (Hungarian Statistical Office) Lin, N. (2001). Social capital; a theory of social structure and action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mihaylova, D. (2004). Social capital in Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest: Central European University. Nonprofit szervezetek Magyarorsza´gon, (2006). Ko¨zponti Statisztikai Hivatal, Budapest, 2008 (www.ksh.hu). Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone. New York: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. Y. (1993). Making democracy work. Civic traditions in modern Italy. Priceton, NJ: Priceton University Press. World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org)
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Southern Africa SCHIRIN YACHKASCHI Cape Town, South Africa
Introduction In both southern and central Africa, the political contexts in each country are not homogenous. According to CIVICUS (2006: 25–26), the regions are challenged by severe income inequalities, rural-urban divide, insufficient basic services and infrastructure, extreme poverty, illiteracy and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Further, political turmoil and conflict in some of the countries have led to severe humanitarian crises. Civil society groupings in southern and central Africa have historically played a role through liberation movements fighting colonial oppression. Here, trade unions, youth groups and churches supported liberation
struggles. In the immediate postcolonial times, civil society organizations (CSOs) were closely linked to political parties. Initially, CSOs moved from liberation work to assisting the reconstruction and development of the countries. With the increase of repressive governments in the postcolonial era, civil society activity included activist work, leading to the emergence of new social movements and human rights organizations. In some countries like apartheid South Africa or conflict ridden Mozambique and Angola, community organizations emerged to provide humanitarian assistance supported by international organizations. Mashumba and Clarke (2005: 12) point out that with new political freedoms in countries like South Africa and Mozambique during the 1990s, a vast range of CSOs emerged. At the same time, the impact of neoliberal policies in an international context further influenced civil society activity. According to Habib and Kotze´ (2003, in Kotze´, 2003: 17) organizations formed to either function in line with such tendencies to implement more technocratic approaches to development, or organized to challenge the new order and fight for more social justice.
Civil Society According to Mashumba and Clarke (2005: 12) the concept of civil society in Southern Africa has been influenced by European groups and popular movements in Latin America that contested the interests of oppressive states and international financial interests. This notion became relevant particularly in the 1990s when the subregion experienced a shift from authoritarian, one-party governments to multiparty democracies (such as in South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia). In countries where authoritarian governments prevail such as Zimbabwe, political tensions between civil society groupings and governments are predominant. This has also led to links between civil society groupings and opposition political parties, such as the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in Zimbabwe or the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) in Zambia. The distinction between civil society and oppositions parties is not always as pronounced in the region as in other parts of the world. In central Africa, the concept of civil society is evolving with political changes in the subregion. Many conflict ridden areas are in different phases between conflict and democratic consolidation. Hence, civil society formations have emerged in response to their contexts, and range from liberation movements over human rights activists to negotiators in peace processes.
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Social Capital While the term civil society is widely used in southern and central Africa due to the region’s history of civil society activity, the concept of social capital is not as strongly in use, and does not feature much in the literature of the region. Social capital has mainly been introduced as a concept by international organizations like the World Bank, but does not yet form part of the language of most CSOs. Some civil society actors dislike the term as it is associated to an instrumentalist view of society as a form of capital. Andersson (1999: 2) describes social capital in the context of grassroots community organizations in South Africa and their activities related to building the social fabric, such as the work of cre`ches, religious groups and cultural associations. Robson and Roque (2001: 118–125) refer to the diminishing social capital in the bairros of Luanda, Angola due to the high degree of poverty and crisis. Here the importance of both structural social capital (understood as forms of organization, structure, rules, and procedures) as well as cognitive social capital (through culture, ideology, norms, and values) are seen as important to revitalize collective action. With increasing focus on community development and the recognition of the need to support communitybased organizations in the region, the concept of social capital is relevant, but the term may not always be used in those contexts. Maluccio, Haddad, and May (1999: 3) point out that the concept of social capital is related to the understanding of ‘‘Ubuntu’’ in South(ern) Africa, which describes an African notion of humanness in the sense of ‘‘I am because you exist.’’
Empirical Data The following section provides an overview of empirical data in the region. It is subdivided into themes relevant to the topic. Civil Society Organizations
According to Mashumba and Clarke (2005: 13), civil society in southern Africa includes diverse actors, spaces and institutional forms, such as registered charities, development organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, coalitions, and advocacy groups. Most CSOs work predominantly towards poverty eradication and, less pronounced, towards environmental sustainability.
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Civil society formations in southern Africa have been active in development, welfare and service delivery, peacebuilding, advocacy and human rights work, research and documentation and capacity building work. In the absence of government delivery to poor communities, many CSOs have formed in response to dire needs at grassroots level. Ekiyor and Mashumba (2006: 26) argue that in central Africa the role of civil society is still evolving, as central African countries are at various stages of conflict, peace, post-conflict reconstruction and democratic consolidation. Hence, their work is guided by the environment in which they operate. In the Central African Republic (CAR), human rights organizations emerged as a response to human rights violations during recurring civil wars, particularly women’s organizations. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the Mobutu Sese Seko era (1965–1997) CSOs resembled political parties. The Institute for Security Studies (2006: 5) point out that particularly in conflict ridden countries such as Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique and the DRC, CSOs contributed to humanitarian relief, international advocacy work and campaigning for peace. According to Ekiyor and Mashumba (2006: 26–27), faith-based organizations have played an important role in both regions and seem in some countries the strongest civil society formations supporting communities and advocating against human rights violations. Examples are listed from Angola, the DRC, South Africa, Malawi, and Zambia. Women’s organizations have been particularly vital in conflict ridden areas, as wars and conflict often worsen gender relations, increase violence against women and in some cases women are forced to combat. In central Africa, women’s groups, associations and networks have played roles in peace-building and post-conflict situations, such as in the DRC, Burundi and Rwanda. At a grassroots level, women’s groups assist in rebuilding their societies. However, in central Africa, women have been largely excluded from all formal peace negotiations and processes. According to Mashumba and Clarke (2005: 20), in southern Africa, women’s organizations have a stronger influence on regional policies, issues and injustices such as gender inequality, poverty, and conflict. Women’s organizations advocated successfully for the adoption of the 1997 Declaration on Gender and Development in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. CSOs in some countries in the region still have to operate under colonial legislation and in others the legislation governing nonprofit organizations is not comprehensive. Registration processes can be lengthy and costly in
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many countries and discourage grassroots organizations. This impacts directly on the ability to receive state and donor funding which generally requires formal registration. Donor conditionality can further become a problem among civil society groups, who increasingly spend their time to comply with such conditions, which reduces their ability to respond to the needs of their constituencies. The issue of donor-driven behavior of many CSOs is enforced by a still widely top-down approach from various donors. Many organizations lose their grassroots credibility as a result of upwards accountability to donors (Yachkaschi, 2008: 157–158). Networks and Umbrella Bodies
Because of its diversity, civil society cannot be identified as an entity, or represented by an overarching structure. Therefore, civil society can rather be understood in its specific formations or networks in a particular context. Internationally, some activist organizations are linked to networks such as the World Social Forum (WSF), and the African Social Forum, which includes a wide range of human rights and social justice organizations on the continent. Regional, national or local Social Forums are connected to the larger umbrella, such as the Central Africa Social Forum, Southern Africa Social Forum. Bond (2006: 152) points out that the WSF and its affiliates still need to develop collective programs, which need to emerge from real social struggles. On a regional level of government networks, the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) in 1983 and the SADC in 1992 have been established to foster regional integration, economic growth, defense, as well as peace and security issues. In both communities, civil society participation forms part of the agenda, but has been rather weak in practice. Support from civil society to governments, such as in research, capacity building and conflict, has had some successes, whereas contentious areas such as democracy, governance, and human rights work have not been embraced by governments (Ekiyor & Mashumba, 2006: 21–24). In Southern Africa, the Southern African Regional Poverty Network (SARPN) is advocating for socio economic justice, providing a platform for policy generating dialogue in the region. Similar regional work is provided in collaboration by the Economic Justice Network (EJN). National and international networks complement the work, such as faith-based organizations like World Vision, the World Lutheran Church and the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). Ekiyor and Mashumba (2006: 26) argue that in central Africa many organizations do not consult each other,
leading to a duplication of initiatives. Regional or national networks, such as in southern Africa, are not yet organized. In the CAR, however, over 200 human rights oriented nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have established a coordinating team. On a national level, there are various networks of CSOs in southern Africa, such as the South African NGO Council (SANGOCO), the Lesotho Council of NGOs (LCN), the Botswana Council of NGOs (BOCONGO), the Council of NGOs in Malawi (CONGOMA) and Zimbabwe’s National Association of NGOs (NANGO). The purpose of such networks is to provide inclusive platforms for civil society voices, strengthening collaboration and minimizing doubling and competition for financial resources. The successes of such networks vary due to the diversity of organizations, ongoing competitions and a lack of inclusiveness. Mashumba and Clarke (2005: 26) further list differences in ideology, strategies and mandate, and therefore argue for the need for more inclusiveness and acceptance of a diverse range of organizations. The networks listed above have provided the framework for a subregional SADC-CNGO. The membership in this body is limited to organizations who are members in their national bodies, excluding organizations that cannot participate in those. However, while the diversity of CSOs may hinder their collaboration and cohesion, Mashumba and Clarke (2005: 27) also stress the strength that lies in the diversity of roles that CSOs play from large, formalized organizations to small community-based structures, including a range of expertise from academic, formal skills to indigenous knowledge and capabilities of coping with crises. Relationships with Governments and Networks
Generally, civil society activities are influenced by the presence or absence of an enabling environment in which they operate. This includes their relationships with governments as well as their ability to be formally recognized and supported through resources and networks. CSOs have to balance their role between collaboration with and contestation of governments. In more repressive states, questions arise whether to strengthen state institutions towards better governance, or to actively work towards regime change. Tactics vary and are ideologically motivated, where organizations have to choose between using the ‘‘boardroom’’ versus the ‘‘street.’’ Historically, civil society has played a vital role in fighting colonialism and advocating for democratic governance in postcolonial autocratic or conflict ridden countries. In countries with repressive legislation and mechanisms like Zimbabwe, CSOs continue to contest
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governments as well as provide basic services to the most vulnerable people suffering from marginalization, poverty and HIV-AIDS. In southern Africa CSOs have contributed to multiparty democracies, for example through trade unions, such as in Zambia in 1991. In various countries the main opposition parties have their roots in trade unions, like the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in Zimbabwe. Similarly, in Swaziland trade unions and other CSOs have advocated for democracy and a written constitution. In countries where the dominant parties were constituted out of former liberation movements, such as the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) or the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, there may be assumptions that the party still represents civil society, while contemporary CSOs, particularly social movements, are viewed with suspicion. In southern Africa, CSOs active in development, service delivery or conflict resolution have easier relationships with governments, whereas organizations advocating for human rights, democracy and good governance are seen as a threat and viewed with suspicion. In many countries in the region, civil society’s impact on policy making is low and activist organizations are frequently harassed by state officials. CSOs often avoid contesting government activities, and are on the contrary increasingly subcontracted by local government to become providers of government services. Galvin (2005: 7) describes how changes in the funding environment have forced many NGOs to look to government for funds, which has led NGOs to adopt a more corporate identity leading to less independence. Habib and Kotze´ (2003, in Kotze´, 2003: 17) describe a paradigm shift, where the language of neoliberalism has led to a more technicist discourse about development and a lack of critical engagement from NGOs with economic and political matters. Particularly human rights organizations have been accused by governments of being manipulated by external donor agendas, such as by statements from former South African president Thabo Mbeki in 2005 who questioned the credibility of CSOs that were critical of government policy, like the antinuclear energy movement of Earthlife Africa. Governments are increasingly questioning the legitimacy and mandate of CSOs aiming at challenging and influencing policy. In South Africa, Oldfield and Stokke (2004: 30) describe the competition over the right to be the legitimate representatives of poor people between the dominant parties and trade unions and their civil society affiliates; and new
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social movements which challenge the postapartheid neoliberal democracy and advocate for more socioeconomic justice. This is leading to civil society having to balance between engagement and opposition in a period generally marked by mistrust between CSOs and state actors. Habib (2003: 238–239) describes the plurality of responses of South African CSOs to the effects of democratization and globalization; which are divided into three distinct blocks along a spectrum: on one end of the spectrum are survivalist CBOs in marginalized communities, who have no relationship with the state. On the other end are social movements or activist communitybased organizations challenging neoliberal policies, and engaging with the state in an adversarial role. The third block is constituted by formal, service related NGOs which enter partnerships with the state or are subcontracted. The boundaries between the blocks can be blurred, as the organizational forms are diverse and cannot easily be classified. In various countries, social movements are not only challenging government policy but also international global institutions such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and their prescribed structural adjustment programs, such as through demonstrations from Harare University students in Zimbabwe and the South African Durban Social Forum Declaration, linking neoliberal country policies to international institutions like the WB, IMF, G8, and the world Trade Organization (WTO). In 2004, half a million workers in Zambia participated in a strike against the IMF, organized by the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions. Social movements around various issues have emerged on the political landscape since the late 1990s, advocating for an alternative development agenda and social justice, including food security, debt relief, environmental justice, land rights, women’s rights, access to AIDS-treatment, rights to sexual orientation and against the privatization of basic services and resources. In central Africa, relations between civil society and government have been tense, mainly due to human rights violations by governments, as well as corruption and mismanagement. For example, Chadian CSOs have been criticizing the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline for its negative impacts on human rights in the region. Civil society actors have also been seeking dialogue with governments as a contribution to consolidating peace. However, CSOs operating within autocratic states also face the challenge of governments trying to steer civil society operations and co-opting organizations to act on their behalf. In the Inter-Congolese Dialogue Process of 2002, several civil society associations were included as a
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neutral third party next to the government and armed groups. In the process, CSOs entered into competition with each other, aligned with strong opposition parties or were co-opted into the transition-government of 2003. This brought into question their level of cohesion and independence, and their impartiality became impossible. Particularly in countries where governments are less accountable, transparency and accountability is not widely practiced by CSOs either, including cases of corruption. A weakness of formal CSOs has been their lacking ability to include ordinary citizens in informal democratic processes. In this way, advocacy campaigns remain driven by elitist groups in large cities who are often disconnected from the realities of people at grassroots level in the periphery of cities and in rural areas. The following section therefore discusses the role of community-based organizations. Community-Based Organizations
The discourse about CSOs in southern and central Africa is often limited to more formalized NGOs. The more formal and better resourced NGOs are mainly based in large cities, and therefore remain removed from the majority of citizens, which live in rural areas. Especially women and rural dwellers remain excluded from citizen participation in civil society activities run by larger NGOs. There are however many community-based organizations (CBOs) within rural areas and impoverished parts of cities. Those groupings are largely informal and marginalized, suffering from the lack of resources and their inability to cooperate with one another (CIVICUS, 2005: 25–26). According to a national study, there were nearly 99,000 nonprofit organizations in South Africa in 1998, 53% of which were CBOs or Voluntary Associations (53,929 in total). They worked in sectors like culture and recreation (15,853), development and housing (12,023), social services (10,011), health (4,191), education and research (4,028), advocacy and politics (3,465), religion (2,532) and environment (1,826) (Swilling and Russell, 2002: 21). The study contradicts a dominant image that development services are mainly provided by formal and professionally run NGOs, and shows that most organizations have been established by people from poor communities to meet needs from within through community organizing and solidarity. Similarly, in Namibia there are an estimated 150 NGOs and as many CBOs (with a population of only two million people) (Ho¨hn, 2008: 3). Galvin (2005: 13–19, 30) developed a typology of rural CBOs in South Africa, classifying them into (a) coping/ survival CBOs; (b) income generating CBOs; (c) service
delivery, governance and advocacy CBOs; and (d) culture, youth and sport CBOs. The composition of those CBOs also reflected local power dynamics and gender divisions: survival and income generating CBOs were predominantly run by voluntary members, most of whom were women; and service delivery, governance and advocacy CBOs were mainly constituted by elected members with political or economic standing, who were mostly men. Such local power dynamics seem to limit CBOs in their ability to play a larger role in society. While CBOs are seen as an indicator of social capital in poor communities, Habib (2003: 236–237) argues that as a response to globalization and neoliberalism, civil society has reconstituted, including formations like CBOs, in order for marginalized communities to survive. Hence, one cannot simply understand them as indicators for a strong and vibrant civil society, but as survivalist responses towards a state that does not meet its socioeconomic obligations. Government spending on social development is too little in relation to historical inequalities and future needs, and can only allow for slow improvements over time (Swilling & Russell, 2002: 71). Added to this can be the discourse on voluntarism. Whereas 49% of the workforce of the nonprofit sector in South Africa was made up of volunteers in 1998 (Swilling & Russell, 2002: 22), this may mainly constitute CBOmembers. Kotze´ (2003: 24) refers to a level of exploitation in the face of acute poverty; and a growing gap between well- and under-resourced CSOs.
Outlook/Concluding Assessment Civil society has been playing an important role in both regions, and is still relevant today in its diversity of formations. Although in many countries there is a sense that support and international funding may be waning, as organizations now have to compete with governments for international funding, there are still many organizations that receive foreign and local funding for their activities. In this context, the independence of CSOs is often questioned, as many donors (from international and national aid organizations, foundations as well as government) tend to overtly or covertly dictate activities, even if their focus is on participatory practices. Tendencies from international organizations like the WB to support social capital by strengthening CBOs are therefore also seen with suspicion, as the stronger the power asymmetries, the higher the danger for small organizations of being instrumentalized in the process, leading to them becoming cheap implementers of international aid projects (Yachkaschi, 2008: 74).
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Generally, the diversity of CSOs is seen as a strength, while at the same time also pointing to the varying theories of development, leading to the diversity of responses to problems. The divide between service oriented organizations versus activist organizations, as well as between well resourced NGOs versus poor and informal CBOs reflects divisions in societies at large, and choices resulting from social standing, ideology, education and levels of marginalization.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in East Africa ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in West Africa ▶ Civil Society and Social Inequality ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society in Post Conflict Scenarios ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Grassroots Associations ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Social Capital ▶ Social Movements
References/Further Readings Andersson, G. (1999). Partnerships between CBOs, NGOs and government in South Africa: Insights derived from experience. Pretoria, South Africa: USAID. Ballard, R., Habib, A., & Valodia, I. (Eds.), (2006). Voices of protest. Social movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Durban, South Africa: UKZN Press. Bond, P. (2006). Looting Africa. The economics of exploitation. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa/London: UKZN Press/ZED Books. CIVICUS. (2006). CIVICUS Civil Society Index: Preliminary findings, phase 2003–2005, from http://www.civicus.org/civicusbooksandpublications/csi-publications, 1/3/2009 Colvin, J. C. (2007). Civil society and reconciliation in Southern Africa. Development in Practice, 17(3), 322–337. van Donk, M., & Pieterse, E. (2004). Contextual snapshots: Development challenges and responses during the transition. In E. Pieterse, & F. Meintjies (Eds.), Voices of the transition. The politics, poetics and practices of social change in South Africa Sandown: Heinemann.(pp. 38–52). van Driel, F., & van Haren, J. (2003). Whose interests are at stake? Civil society and NGOs in South Africa. Development Southern Africa, 20(4), 529–543. Ekiyor, T., & Mashumba, N. (2006). The peacebuilding role of civil society in Central Africa. Policy Seminar Report. Centre for Conflict Resolution. Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town. Friedman, S. (2003). Golden dawn or white flag? The state, civil society and social policy. Avocado Working Paper Series. Durban, South Africa: Olive. Galvin, M. (2005). Survival, development or advocacy? A preliminary examination of rural CBOs in South Africa. Avocado Working Paper Series 1/2005. Durban, South Africa: Olive.
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Habib, A. (2003). State civil society relations in post-apartheid South Africa. In J. Daniel, A. Habib, & R. Southall (Eds.), State of the nation. South Africa 2003–2004 Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC Press.(pp. 227–241). Haysom, N., Cachalia, F., & Molahleli, E. (1999). Civil society and fundamental freedoms. An enabling framework for civil society in Southern Africa. South Africa: The Development Resource Centre. Ho¨hn, S. (2008). The failures of success – NGOs and the decreasing support for civil society in Namibia. Political Perspectives, 2(1), 1–21. Institute for Security Studies & Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. (2006). Civil society and governance in Southern Africa. Cape Town, South Africa: KAS & ISS. James, R., & Katundu, B. (2006). Counting the organisational cost of HIV/ AIDS to civil society organisations. Pilot Research Study, Malawi. Praxis Paper No. 11. Oxford, UK: INTRAC. Kotze´, H. 2003. Responding to the growing socio-economic crisis? A review of civil society in South Africa. In Centre for Civil Society (Eds.), Development update. The deepening divide. Civil society and development in South Africa 2001/2002 (pp. 1–32). Johannesburg, South Africa: Interfund. Lo¨fgren, M. et al. (Eds.) (2007). Global civil society. More or less democracy? Development Dialogue, 49, November 2007. Maluccio, J., Haddad, L., & May, J. (1999). Social capital and income generation in South Africa, 1993–98. Paper prepared for IDS-IFPRI Workshop April 7–8, 1999, Economic Mobility and Poverty Dynamics in Developing Countries. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC/Centre for Social and Development Studies, Durban, South Africa. Manji, F., & Burnett, P. (Eds.) (2004). African voices on development and social justice. Editorials from Pambazuka News. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers. Mashumba, N., & Clarke, Y. (2005). The peacebuilding role of civil society in Southern Africa. Policy Seminar Report. Centre for Conflict Resolution and Electoral Institute of Southern Africa. Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town. McKinsey, D., & Naidoo, P. (Eds.) (2004). Mobilising for change. The rise of new social movements in South Africa. Development Update, 5, 2. Notes from Nowhere. (Ed.) (2003). We are everywhere. The irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London: Verso. Oldfield, S., & Stokke, K. (2004). Building unity in diversity: Social movement activism in the Western Cape Anti Eviction Campaign. Durban: University of Kwazulu-Natal, School of Development Studies. Piazza-Georgi, B. (2002). Human and social capital in Soweto in 1999: Report on a field study. Development in Southern Africa, 19(5), 615–639. Pieterse, E. (2003). Rhythms, patterning and articulations of social formations in South Africa. In D. Everatt, & V. Maphai (Eds.), The real state of the Nation. South Africa after 1990 (pp. 101–136). Development Update 4/2003, Special Edition. Johannesburg, South Africa: Interfund. Preece, J., & Mosweunyane, D. (2006). The name assigned to the document by the author. This field may also contain sub-titles, series names, and report numbers. What citizenship responsibility means to Botswana’s young adults: Implications for adult education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education, 36(1). 5–21. Robson, P. (2001). Communities and community institutions in Luanda. In P. Robson (Ed.), Communities and reconstruction in Luanda in Angola. Occasional Paper No. 1 (pp. 163–181).Canada: Development Workshop.
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Robson, P., & Roque, S. (2001). Here in the city there is nothing left over for lending a hand. In search for solidarity and collective action in periurban areas in Angola. Occasional Paper No. 2. Canada: Development Workshop. Swilling, M., & Russell, B. (2002). The size and scope of the non-profit sector in South Africa. South Africa: University of the Witwatersrand and University of Natal. Yachkaschi, S. (2006). Drinking from the poisoned chalice. How the demands of the ‘‘development industry’’ undermine the resourcefulness and identity of Community-Based Organisations. CDRA Online: http://www.cdra.org.za/LibraryandResources/Nuggets.htm, 10/13/2006 Yachkaschi, S. (2008). Towards the development of an appropriate organisational development approach for optimising the capacity building of Community-Based Organisations (CBOs): A case study of 3 CBOs in the Western Cape. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stellenbosch, South Africa: University of Stellenbosch.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central Asia KIMAIRIS TOOGOOD-LUEHRS George Mason University, Arlington, VA, USA
as Central Asian Survey, particularly the third volume of the September 2005 edition which is completely devoted to the topic of civil society and on other related topics, such as nation-state development, economic underdevelopment, and the revitalization of Islam in daily life. Central Asian scholars and practitioners agree that a better understanding of the regions ever-evolving ‘‘civil society’’ is needed to further our analysis on the processes that are continuing to shape the region and its people. This entry intends to do two things. First, I will attempt to document the way in which the concepts of civil society has struggled into existence in today’s Central Asia. In doing so, I will illustrate the complexities involved in defining the concept of ‘‘civil society’’ in the region, and the nuances of thinking about how this definition applies in each of the Republics, with its unique post-independence experience. Second, I will use the concept of ‘‘social or human capital’’ to analyze both the current status of civil society and its future potential. One caveat is that it is impossible to give all five republics equal attention in a short encyclopedia entry, therefore, this entry seeks to discuss the region as a whole, comparing and contrasting the aforementioned countryspecific nuances in the process.
Introduction
Central Asia: Soviet Era and Beyond
Central Asia has long been an under-researched region of the world, with a growing number of researchers and practitioners from various disciplines expanding the body of literature on the plethora of development issues facing this Post-Soviet territory. Many questions remain unanswered pertaining to the past and current political, military, and socioeconomic status of the five republics that constitute the heart of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. This entry is prompted by one such question: ‘‘Is there a ‘civil society’ in Central Asia? If so, what form does it take? In this civil society, what is the understanding of the concept of ‘social capital’? If ‘civil society’ and ‘social capital’ do not exist, why not?’’ This topic was first critically analyzed in 1998 by prominent scholars at a two-day conference sponsored by the Center for Civil Society International in Seattle Washington and the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute of the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC (*the resulting book was titled Civil Society in Central Asia by Ruffin & Waugh, 1999). This is cited as the first substantive and comprehensive analysis on countryspecific and regional development issues facing Central Asian Republics from independence through its publication in 1999 (Central Asian Survey, 2005). Subsequent works, however, have followed in popular journals such
The region that is now known as Central Asia consists of five post-Soviet Republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. These nationstates were launched into existence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; however, the region’s history precedes the Russian and Soviet Invasions in 1717 and 1921 respectively, and was significantly influenced by the legacy of its aforementioned colonizers. The Central Asian region, known as the Ancient Tamerlane after the Mongol warrior that roamed the region in the Middle Ages, boasted one of the most historically significant trading routes from Asia to Europe, and was known for one of the most significant trading routes on the Silk Road. While the Central Asian region lost its most prominent when a water route was found linking India to Europe, it remained an important land trading route based solely on its geography. It is also known as ‘‘Middle Asia’’ or ‘‘Inner Asia,’’ and as parts of larger geographic understandings, ‘‘Eurasia’’ or ‘‘Turkestan’’ (Gleason, 1997; Roy, 1997). The inception of five individual republics resulted from Joseph Stalin’s policy of ‘‘national delimination,’’ of the breaking up of the landmass that was originally created by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin’s intention was to divide the power this single and centralized entity that would have been a competitor for the solidification of Moscow’s power. Interestingly for Central Asia’s future, this process of
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creating Soviet Republics created significant pockets of ethnic minorities residing within boundaries that were not their own, creating a region composed of ethnic pluralism that continues through independence in 1991 (Roy, 1997). The 70 years of Soviet rule had lasting effects on the history of the region. Moscow’s control ushered in heightened social and economic collectivism and strictly hierarchical political governing patterns. This period also brought high levels of literacy and education to the region, especially for women, and when not perceived as a threat to the centralized Soviet regime, saw the creation of semi-independent, citizen-based institutions that could be considered the precursor for postindependence civil society. In fact, the status of women in society was never higher than under the Soviet period with women organizations and associations outnumbering others, and continued at independence in 1991. Scholars continue to debate whether or not these institutions could in fact be considered a form of ‘‘state-led civil society’’ in Central Asia, as the Soviet state apparatus was intimately involved in this ‘‘realm’’ or ‘‘sphere’’ of societal relations (interesting debate on this between Babajanian and Illkhamov in Central Asian Survey 2005). This touches on the larger debate on whether or not liberal, Western definitions of civil society should be applied in the Central Asian context, and will be discussed in the next section. In addition to the Soviet legacy which questionably developed a type of ‘‘state-led civil society,’’ the region’s religious composition has had lasting effects on the development of civil society. Under the Soviets, many civil liberties and rights previously enjoyed under the Imams and Umahs of the Khanates were usurped by the governing apparatus in Moscow in order to build the greater Sovietization of the Muslims included in their union. Not particular to Central Asia, there are growing debates on the compatibility of Islam with the development of civil society in our globalizing world. Some scholars claim that Muslim societies privilege collective bonding such as those under the Soviet era which are at odds with the individualistic nature of citizenship rights emphasized by Western notions of civil society (Ernest Gellner, 1996; Serif Marden, 1999; S. Frederick Starr in Ruffin & Waugh, 1999). Other scholars claim that Muslim-dominated Central Asia does not need to reconcile its religious life with the creation of civil society as defined by Western philosophy, but must work to create its own notion of civil society that adequately combines religious practices with the creation of its social, political, and economic civic sphere (Sabine Freizer, 2005; Shirin Akiner, 2002; S. Frederick Starr in Ruffin & Waugh, 1999). The role of Islam does indeed
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play a vital role in this communal sense of civil society. Indigenous Islamic traditions regained their prominence with the cessation of the Soviet rule in the region, but are found to have played a vital role in daily life throughout colonization. And while this debate requires more space than provided in this entry, suffice it to say that there are adequate empirics to illustrate that the Central Asian region continues to struggle in developing its nascent civil society and, thus, its conception of social capital.
Civil Society ‘‘Upon independence in 1991, did the Central Asian Republics have a type of ‘civil society’?’’ The fundamental answer is ‘‘yes,’’ but it prompts a continuing debate among Central Asian scholars (Olivier Roy in A. Sajoo, 2002) between whether communal civil society and not the Western-supported neoliberal civil society that has been blossoming since independence should be considered (Howell in Central Asian Survey, 2005). In order to adequate describe ‘‘civil society in Central Asia,’’ it is essential to discuss both types of civil societies that exist in the region. And while I am discussing Central Asia as a regional bloc, I will attempt to differentiate the points of divergence between each nation-state when it becomes relevant, as it is difficult to find two civil societies that are composed of similar actors or function the same way all the time in all situations (Roy, 2005). Contemporary or ‘‘Neoliberal’’ Civil Society in Central Asia
Philosophers in the premodern and modern periods such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, John Locke and Karl Marx are cited as the foundation of political thought on civil society and its inception vis-a`-vis the state apparatus. Without discussing the entire debate, suffice it to say the crux of this debate centers on whether civil society can be interpreted as a political community which takes direct authority from the state or that it is a realm of choice, personal freedom and individual responsibility. Regardless of the side of the debate one theoretically leans towards, the relationship between the state and the civil sector is important, and that one must precede the formation of the other. In general, it is considered that the emergence of civil society depends on the existence of a minimum degree of basic social organization, and an effectively functioning state which protects the constitution and the rule of law in society must precede the formation of civil society (Atabaki, 1998). Under Soviet domination, it can be argued that the ‘‘state-led civil society’’ that was implemented could be considered the aforementioned political
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community that takes direct authority from the state. And with independence, there have been great strides made to decrease this understanding of civil society towards the latter understanding which creates a space between society and the state for autonomous decision making and action. Therefore, the on-going process in Central Asia is to transform the ‘‘state-led civil society’’ into the neoliberal civil society’ as dictated by Western donors funding the postindependence organizations and associations. Problems inevitably arise in this process of transforming Soviet institutions to mirror Western models (Weinthal). This topic prompts a larger debate on Central Asian regime capacity and transformation of the governing bodies and institutions, but it is understood among scholars and practitioners that the Central Asian republics, to a varying degree, are in a transition period. Whether or not that is a transition towards democracy building is debatable. The literature on postauthoritarian regimes has categorized the Central Asian republics as ‘‘competitive authoritarian’’ regimes as of 2008 (Levitsky & Way, 2002, 2006). Regardless, as part of a larger liberal peace theoretical effort, Western attempts to use the development of civil society as a democratizing tool has not been missed by the former Communist Party leaders that inherited the five Central Asian republics. From independence to the present, Central Asian leaders have verbally embraced the concept of democratization as an alternative to former authoritarian rule from Moscow, but the empirics on whether or not they have implemented the institutions associated with democracy have been lacking. Associated with this concept is a stress on the implementation of freedom of association and speech, equal rights for minorities and women, rule of law where citizens have meaningful rights and there are both nonprofit organizations and voluntary associations. It is more accurate to say that the laws that guarantee the freedoms of expression and association and the extent to which rule of law even exists throughout the region are in their infancy and will remain so if the corruption and poor governance structures, with associated nepotism based on kinship and clan ties persist. This is not to ignore the important relationship between civil society and the state institutions that it maneuvers through and or around, as is often the case in Central Asia. As the neoliberal civil society continues to push to define itself as a realm autonomous from state institutions and influences, it must also work with the state closely as it tries to serve as a watchdog for the ‘‘reforms’’ of state institutions. Therefore, this civil society must take into account and have a full understanding of the contextual political and institutional conditions in Central Asia, which are constantly in flux.
More importantly, unlike the post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe that used the banner of ‘‘civil society’’ to thwart their totalitarian regimes in the mid-1970s, the Central Asian republics have no similar history (Uhlin, 2006), but the leadership is fully aware of the consequences of such civic activism. And the financing that poured into the former Soviet Union breakaway countries upon independence from Western donors had an emancipator agenda tied to it that was interpreted as ‘‘democracy or bust.’’ And so what you find is that in order to continue to make agreements and arrangements with Western donors and powers, nepotistic Central Asian leaders allow the flourishing of this neoliberal conception of civil society through the proliferation of NGOs and allow citizens to exercise their rights to speech, press, media, religion, and association, but within limits. The threshold of this civic activity is when the government perceives a threat to stability of the status quo. Since independence there are several citable examples in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with the government meeting protesters with military might and bloodshed being the result (See Daniel Stevens’ ‘‘Political Society and civil society in Uzbekistan-never the twain shall meet?’’ for brief analysis of the Andijan massacre in May 2005). That being said, there are also limits to this threshold maintenance, and it is there that civil society in the neoliberal sense of the concept may in fact, be taking hold. Kyrgyzstan is cited as the most recent example of this, with its youth-backed social movement that ousted President Akaev in 2006. Who constitutes civil society actors in the neoliberal sense? Do political and nonpolitical actors count (Hewison & Rodan, 1996)? In all Central Asian republics with the exception of Tajikistan, neoliberal civil society is composed of organizations and associations with no overt political aims that may be perceived as threatening to the states. However, civil society groups are often acting politically regardless of whether they claim their aims to be inherently political. One civil society group in Tajikistan known as ‘‘Dialogue’’ which is run by the chairman of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP) may be considered the overlap of the political party institutions and the civil society groups in the civil society sphere. Regardless, for all the republics, civil society functions as the realm of institutions such as education, religion, economics, and commerce, community life, and health associations as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), all of which carry people through the stages of their lives. Like the mahalla leadership in communal civil society, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (both international and national) are perhaps the most important civil
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society actor in Central Asia. As highlighted above, NGOs are only one of many civil society actors at work in Central Asia, but as is the case in many transitioning countries, they often play the most visible and important role in the development of civil society. International NGOs such as Soros Foundation, Eurasia Foundation, and Mercy Corps have been active in the region for over a decade. Recognizing the difficult political situation of working in competitive authoritarian regimes, many international organizations began financing national NGOs to build social capital and networking capabilities between them, thus promoting a more sustainable corps to work on projects even after the international organizations leave. For example, Counterpart Consortium operates in all five republics and works to strengthen local NGOs. Between 1993 and 1997, ISAR contributed over $400 K in grants to over 350 NGO projects throughout Central Asia (www.isar.org). Debate continues in the development world if it is better for international NGOs to continue financing national or local NGOs even when they would not be sustainable without the financing (Erika Weinthal et al., 1996). NGOs first appeared in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan followed by Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, although unlike the previous countries, Tajikistan’s NGOs appear because of a near state collapse in the 1992 civil war. There has been a proliferation of all types of NGOs in Central Asia, but it is not to be assumed that quantity equals quality. The most significant factor in understanding the sustainability of quality NGOs is financial and mostly dependent on foreign aid money. Another pressing factor in the sustainability of these NGOs has and will remain the style of governing apparatus that controls the country. One interesting inregion comparison is between Former President Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan and the recently deceased President Saparmurat Niyazov or ‘‘Turkmenbashi’’ in Turkmenistan in which the former had allowed a semi-open space for civil society organization and association formation by limiting the registration fees for the organizations and making policies and regulations transparent unlike the Turkmenistan government. The result was that between 1991 and 1999,
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Kyrgyzstan had between four and six times as many NGOs and associations at work on building civil society than Turkmenistan. And since 1999, this number has continued to grow, although the Kyrgyz neoliberal civil society has received enormous praise and criticism since its forced resignation of President Akayev and support of elected President Kurmanbek Bakiyev since 2005.
Social Capital Traditional or ‘‘Communal’’ Civil Society and Associated Ideas of Social Capital
If we narrow our definition of civil society to Western notions of free markets and press, fair elections and competition, then Central Asia has not had a tradition of civil society in its modern history. But if we widen the understanding of what constitutes the ‘‘civil’’ sphere, we will find the traditional elements of the region’s people and history lends itself to the essential values of civility. These five states are composed of strong networks of familiar and community support with kinship and tribal connections within and across villages that is an important element of both civil society, and its sub-entity, social capital (Olivier Roy in A. Sajoo, 2002). Communal civil society has been defined as a sphere for social interaction on a voluntary basis in which individuals exchange information and deliberate collective action. In the Central Asian context, these exchanges and deliberations are highly informal and therefore often overlooked. But this realm is located in the family, community, within friendship networks and voluntarism, and has strong connections to conceptions of social capital. Some scholars say the various indigenous elements in Central Asian societies such as the community mahalla that served as a regulator of activity between the government and individuals, along with other communal associations such as the avlod, guilds, jamoat resource councils, and various village organizations which historically provided goods and services such as education or healthcare should be considered a type of, or basis for a
Country
Intl
Environmental
Business
Education
Health
Law and human rights
Social welfare
Women
Youth
Tajikistan
12
8
7
4
0
4
3
4
5
Turkmenistan
4
3
0
1
0
1
1
2
0
Uzbekistan
12
5
9
4
3
3
14
14
4
Kazakhstan
11
22
10
5
2
7
36
12
8
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communal conception of civil society in Central Asia (Sabine Freizer, 2005; Olivier Roy in A. Sajoo, 2002; S. Frederick Starr in Ruffin & Waugh, 1999). Traditional social organizations, also called ‘‘communitybased organizations’’ to Western donors, have been overlooked as an avenue to continue the development of a nascent civil society. And given the fluidity of the liberal NGOs and associations to be discussed in more detail below, these community-based or civil society organizations have persisted for the duration of Soviet rule, and are considered to be the basis for any form of citizen collective action given the entanglement with daily life. For example, throughout history, the mahalla, composed of several prominent community leaders, worked to promote the interests of the community through advocacy and served as a type of institutional structure for citizens when they had local conflict. There has been a recent effort by international NGOs to make partnerships with these mahallas in Central Asia, as they are beginning to understand the essential role these community organizations play (Daniel Stevens, 2005). I stress the role of the mahalla in daily life, as it plays a fundamental role in the way Central Asians conceptualize social capital. Without extrapolating on the various arguments surrounding definitions of social capital, it is essential to ground the Central Asian usage of the concept within one set of definitions. Social capital in the Central Asian context follows the ideas of Gittell and Vidal (1998) as well as Woolcock (1998), which stresses the horizontal ‘‘bonding and bridging’’ networks among individuals in a community, and the vertical ‘‘linkages’’ which promotes the spread of ideas from the individual to institutions. Bourdieu’s concept also fits these ideas, as individuals are able to translate their individual social capital into connections with others. The Robert Putnam definition of social capital that stresses the collectivity of social capital that stresses a level of social trust is difficult to assess in the Central Asian context. There are associated ideas of social capital and the level of ‘‘trust’’ that exists within society and in relation to the state, but there has not been significant analysis and data to assess trust levels among citizens in Central Asian republics although it is inferred to be low due to the high level of repression and corruption throughout society; therefore, that concept is not stressed or problematized in this entry (for empirical analysis of social capital and ‘‘trust’’ in Central Asia, see Takashi Inoguchi & Zen-u Lucian Hotta, 2006). This concept is also to be differentiated from that of human capital, which in Central Asia is marked by conventional quantifiable indicators (for a discussion of ‘‘human capital in Central Asia’’ see Bolormaa Shagdar, 2006).
The mahalla has historically and continues to be able to mobilize individuals in the community toward collective activity and empowerment through the social bonding and bridging function it serves. The more connections Central Asian have, the more social capital they have according to the definition above and the mahalla provides these ties and linkages up to the state for many individuals that would otherwise be isolated from these institutions of decisionmaking. Often in the pre-Soviet period, not only did these mahallas have a prominent role, but informal craft associations or guilds were regulating trade and labor throughout the region (S. Frederick Starr in Ruffin & Waugh, 1999). Many national NGOs in Central Asia arose from these guilds and other associations, and are contributing to the development of social capital in the region. This communal understanding of civil society, which stresses the bridging and bonding and linkages of organizations and associations is based on family and clan ties and friendship connections that enable the provision of goods and services in the material sense as well as emotional support. But that is not to say there is no critique of this communal civil society. Given the highly patriarchal nature of society in Central Asia, the values this communal civil society often claims reinforce this conservative tenet in the name of safety and security. Also, the very nature of ‘‘bonding’’ mechanisms is that often minority groups become alienated from the ‘‘in-group bonding’’ if they are not part of the familial or clan of that village, and thus, become excluded from communal civil society organizations and associations, limiting their social capital.
Empirical Data Several types of NGOs, both national and international, have been more active than others in the region. As highlighted above, NGOs with openly political aims are the least popular as the state considered them a threat to regime stability. Interestingly, environmental NGOs seemed to proliferate in all five Central Asian republics. In Kyrgyzstan, poverty reduction NGOs have had the most sustainability, while in Tajikistan, social welfare and women’s NGOs have lasted through the civil war to the present. This following section details the empirics associated with the neoliberal civil society organization and associations. One brief caveat is tied to the aforementioned point about having NGOs proliferation in quantity without quality. There is a difference in registered and active NGOs in the region, and the following table lists only REGISTERED NGOs without differentiating the active ones. Below is a general listing of common types of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in existence in all five republics: environmental, business, educational, health,
Civil Society and Social Capital in Central Asia
law and human rights, social welfare, women, and youth focused.
Outlook/Conclusions The process of building civil society and social capital in Central Asia is complicated, but has potential if a number of factors are considered, including levels of corruption. More importantly, any evaluation of civil society in the region is incomplete without accounting for the presence of neo-liberal communal civil society. Thus far, it is fair to say that all five republics at the heart of Central Asia have civil societies, although not all of them are in the same place in the development of the communal or neoliberal civil societies. There are a number of factors that have and will continue to dictate how civil society and social capital develops in these countries. One argument is that while there is an on-going national identity making process, there will be no solidification of civil society (Hanks in Ruffin & Waugh, 1999). The idea here is that in other Post-Soviet nation-states such as Ukraine and Poland, the national identity had not only territory associated with it but linguistic composition that did not need to be invented upon independence from the Soviet Union like the Central Asian republics did. It can be said that Central Asian countries had firm ethnoreligious identities upon independence, but no certain ideas about national identities, or a sense of collectivity that is a prerequisite for the formation of a civil society (Gleason, 1997). Also, associated with this national identity formation process is finding a role of Islam in the neoliberal civil society. The Central Asian republics have used Islam as a social bonding mechanism in communal civil society, and it will continue to play a fundamental role in the development of civil society in the region (Hanks in Ruffin & Waugh, 1999).
Cross-References
▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ Citizenship ▶ Civic Action ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Civil Society and Ethnicity ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Kant ▶ Good Governance ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Grassroots Associations ▶ INGOs ▶ NGOs and Sustainable Development
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▶ Open Society Institute ▶ Peace and Conflict Resolution Organizations ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of
References/Further Readings Akiner, S. (2002). Prospects for civil society in Tajikistan. In A. Sajoo (Eds.), Civil society in the Muslim world: Contemporary perspectives. London: I. B. Tauris. Also, see Open Society Institute’s September 25th, 2005 Forum titled: ‘‘Whither Civil Society in Central Asia?’’ Speakers: Andreas Berg, Alisher Illkhamov, and Daniel Stevens. www.soros.org/intitiatives/ cep/events/civilsociety Atabaki, T. (1998). The impediments to the development of civil societies. In T. Atabaki & J. O. Keefe (Eds.), Post soviet Central Asia. London: Tauris. Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bunce, V. (2005). Domestic conditions and democracy promotion. Paper presented at Roundtable on US democracy promotion in PostCommunist societies, US Department of State. Bunce, V., & Wolchik, S. (2005). Promoting democracy after communism: Electoral revolutions in Slovakia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Ithaca, New York. Collier, P. (2002). Social capital and poverty. In C. Grootaert & T. V. Bastelaer (Eds.), The role of social capital in development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, R. W. (1999). Civil society at the turn of the millennium: prospects for an alternative world order. Review of International Studies, 25, 3–28. Civil society on Central Asia and the Caucasus [Special issue]. (2005, September). Central Asian Survey, 24(3). Freizer, S. (2005 September). Neo-liberal and communal civil society in Tajikistan: Merging or dividing in the post war period? Civil Society in Central Asia and the Causasus [Special issue]. Central Asian Survey, 24(3), 225–243. Friends and Partners. Civil Society in Central Asia. Book Review. www.friends-partners.org/CCSI/info/civilca.htm Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Press (Multiple Reprints). Gellner, E. (1996). Conditions of liberty: Civil society and its rivals. London: Penguin. Gittell, R., & Vidal, A. (1998). Community organizing: Building social capital as a development strategy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Gleason, G. (1997). The Central Asian states. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Harvey, P. (1998). Rehabilitation in complex political emergencies: Is rebuilding civil society the answer? Disasters, 22(3), 200–217. Hewison, K., & Rodan, G. (1996). The ebb and flow of civil society and the decline of the left in Southeast Asia. In G. Rodan (Ed.), Political oppositions in industrializing Asia. London: Routledge. Hyden, G. (1997). Building civil society at the turn of the millennium. In J. Burbidge (Ed.), Beyond prince and merchant: Citizen participation and the rise of civil society. New York: Pact Publishers. Inoguchi, T., & Hotta, Z.-u. L. (2006). Quantifying social capital in Central and South Asia: Are there democratic, developmental, and regionalizing potentials? Japanese Journal of Political Science, 7(2), 195–220.
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Kamp, M. (1994). Between women and the state: Mahalla committees and social welfare in Uzbekistan. In P. J. Luong (Ed.), The transformation of Central Asia: States and societies from soviet rule to independence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. (2006). Competitive Authoritarianism: The origins and evolution of hybrid regimes after the cold war. Toronto/Canada: Manuscript. Marden, S. (1995). Islam and civil society. In J. A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge: Polity Press. McFaul, M. (2005, July). Transitions from postcommunism. Journal of Democracy, 16(3), 5–19. Megoran, N. (2005, March). Preventing conflict by building civil society: Post-development theory and a Central Asia-UK policy success story. Central Asian Survey, 24(1), 83–96. Pottenger, J. R. (2004, March). Civil society, religious freedoms and Islam Karimov: Uzbekistan’s struggle for a decent society. Central Asian Survey, 23(1), 55–77. Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Roy, O. (1997). The new Central Asia: The creation of nations. New York: New York University. Roy, O. (2005). The predicament of ‘civil society’ in Central Asia and the ‘Greater Middle East. International Affairs, 81(5), 1001. Ruffin, M. H., & Waugh, D. (Ed.) (1999). Civil society in Central Asia. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press. Sajoo, A. (Ed.) (2002). Civil society in the Muslim world: Contemporary perspectives. London: I.B. Tauris. Shagdar, B. (2006). Human capital in Central Asia: Trends and challenges in education. Central Asian Survey, 25(4), 515–532. Stevens, D. (2005, September 28). Whither civil society in Central Asia? Open Society Institute Audio Recording. New York: OSI. Tismaneanu, V. (1995). Political culture and civil society in Russia and the new states of Eurasia (Vol. 7). The International Politics of Eurasia Seminar. Armonk, NJ/London: ME Sharpe. Uhlin, A. (2006). Post soviet civil society. London/New York: Routledge. Weinthal, E. (2000). Central Asia: Aral sea problem. Foreign Policy in Focus, 5(6). Woolcock, M. (1998, April). Social capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework. Theory and Society, 27(2), 151–208.
Civil Society and Social Capital in China KIN-MAN CHAN The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Introduction The concept of civil society is somewhat foreign to most Chinese people, although a relatively autonomous societal space, minjian shehui, existed in traditional China until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. During Mao’s rule, independent social groups were either banned or absorbed into the party-state structure.
The idea of civil society was introduced into China after the launch of reforms in the late 1970s, as the Chinese state gradually withdrew from the economic and social arenas. There has been phenomenal growth in the number of civic groups in China, especially business, professional, and academic associations, although Unger and Chan (1995) query whether these groups constitute a system of corporatism rather than civil society. Recent studies of grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), however, reveal that many of these groups are devoted to providing services to the underprivileged, poverty alleviation, rural education, public health, and environmental protection. They are relatively autonomous and are paving the way toward civil society (Chan, 2005; Chan et al, 2005; Ma, 2006). Social capital is understood as the resources embedded in social networks, and the Chinese are famous for making use of guanxi, or instrumental-personal ties (Walder, 1986), to acquire the resources that they need. This article, however, investigates whether civic groups, rather than personal networks, can create social capital in China. It discusses whether vertical networks hamper the development of horizontal networks, and whether civic groups can provide an institutional basis for social integration in China.
Civil Society Civil society is often defined as a societal structure composed of autonomous civic organizations located between the state and the family (Frentzel-Zagorska, 1990; Cohen & Arato, 1995). This concept of civil society is rooted in a liberal tradition that pits society against the state. Huang (1993) argues that in traditional Chinese society, the public arena was understood as the ‘‘third realm’’ where state and social groups such as kinship organizations met and cooperated, and hence should not be mistaken for civil society, or the public sphere, in the Western sense of these terms. The idea of civil society was not directly transplanted into Chinese soil, given the notion’s cultural and political baggage. Chinese scholars are exceedingly cautious about constructing a discourse of civil society. According to Ma (1994), the first Chinese publication related to the subject appeared in 1986 with an article by Shen Yue, who unearthed the concept of ‘‘townspeople’s rights’’ (shimin quanli) from the classical writings of Marx (Shen, 1986). The term refers to the right of equal exchange of commodities that is available to all townspeople, both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It had been mistranslated as ‘‘bourgeois rights’’ (zichangjieji quanli) in Chinese, and these rights were thus regarded as a kind of improper
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privilege. Shen (1990) also argues that the term used by Marx and Engels, ‘‘burgerliche Gesellschaft,’’ had been mistranslated as ‘‘bourgeois society’’ (zichanjieji shehui). The correct translation, according to Shen, should be ‘‘townspeople’s society’’ (shimin shehui), which implies the universality of civil rights for different classes and is a concept that is remarkably similar to the idea of civil society. Fully aware of the political effect of the translation of the term ‘‘civil society,’’ Deng (Deng & Jing, 1992), one of the foremost thinkers on this subject, also adopts the term ‘‘townspeople’s society’’ (shimin shehui) in advocating for the construction of civil society in China. Ma (1994) argues that the concept and theory of civil society borrowed by most Chinese scholars in this period focus on the making of a modern citizenry that consists of law-abiding and civil members of society, and that the existence of this entity does not exclude the active involvement of the state. Since the 1990s, however, the translation of the term ‘‘civic groups’’ has evolved, from ‘‘social organizations’’ (shehui tuanti) and ‘‘intermediate organizations’’ (zhongjian tuanti) (Wang et al., 1993) to ‘‘people’s organizations’’ (minjian zuzhi). In 1995, many Chinese learned for the first time the term ‘‘non-governmental organization’’ (NGO) because of the prominent presence of NGOs at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing. The first research institute in China in this field, the NGO Research Center of Tsinghua University, was established in 1998. However, Peking University was the pioneer in using the term ‘‘civil society’’ (gongmin shehui) in setting up a similar institute, the Center for Civil Society Studies, in 2005. In 2006, the Institute for Civil Society was established at Sun Yat-sen University, signifying the growing acceptance of the idea of civil society in the Chinese academic world. Civil society has acquired a wide range of meanings in China. In the broader sense, it can mean a society constituted by people in their role as citizens. This notion of civil society, or ‘‘civilized society,’’ emphasizes the citizenry and civic virtue of people, and is appealing to Chinese because in the past, they were defined as ‘‘people’’ (renmin) in the political sense while without due legal protection of their rights. The Cultural Revolution further demoralized a generation of Chinese who had once been committed to ‘‘serve the people’’ but was finally traumatized by a series of political struggles. The idea of citizenship speaks to many Chinese who now demand proper protection of civil rights and value the genuine expression of social obligations, such as volunteering. Scholars usually use a more narrow definition of civil society, referring to an autonomous social structure composed of NGOs or
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non-profit organizations (NPOs) that not only provide services but also promote participation and social change. However, as the establishment of an NGO is still under stringent state control in China, informal networks and cyberspace are seen as alternative structures through which civic action can take place.
Social Capital The idea of social capital has begun to take root in China although Chinese have a long tradition of cultivating social relationships. The concept of social capital was introduced by Bourdieu (1977), who defines it as ‘‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.’’ Coleman (1990) defines social capital as a productive structure of social relationships. The concept calls for analysis at the individual and the collective level. Scholars investigating the individual level of social capital such as Lin (1999) and Burt (1992), focus on the social resources that one can assess in social networks and the instrumental utility of such resources (Lin, 1999). In contrast, those examining the collective level of social capital focus on how groups or associations develop and maintain social capital in terms of trust and norms of reciprocity. According to Putnam, social capital of this kind is crucial for maintaining effective democracy and capitalism (Putnam, 1993). The importance of social capital was recognized in China before the concept gained popularity in the West. However, the emphasis has mainly been on the individual rather than the collective aspect of social capital. Guanxi or instrumental-personal ties (Walder, 1986) is perceived to be important in Chinese society in terms of the social resources within social networks that one can access and utilize. Little attention has been paid to social capital at the collective level until recently. The influence of participation in social groups on the overall social and economic development in China is unclear as yet.
Empirical Data A special issue of Modern China (April, 1993) was devoted to a debate on whether civil society existed in traditional China. It was agreed that a relatively autonomous social sphere existed in the past because of the limited capacity of the state to penetrate into the vastness of rural China. Huang (1993), however, argues that this ‘‘third realm’’ should not be seen as a liberal sphere aiming at taming state power. Madsen (2002) argues that even the word ‘‘society’’ was transplanted from the West into China through Japan in the nineteenth century. Madsen (1986)
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found that by translating a public domain such as a village into a private domain, that is, family, traditional society could motivate people to contribute to the public good through Confucian (family) ethics. However, a number of studies show that a nascent civil society emerged in the late Qing and early Republican periods, that is, during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century (Rankin, 1986; Strand, 1989). Chambers of Commerce, guilds, kinship organizations, charity groups, and intellectual associations were established for fostering not only economic and cultural activities but also social and political participation. Intellectual salons, teahouses, and temples became part of a public sphere in which people could discuss public matters. This surge in associations and the development of a public sphere was partly due to rapid commercialization and the rise of urban centers in this period. It was also caused by the waning of the imperial state, which led to a relaxation of political control and an increasing need for local self-governance (White et al., 1996). These associations continued to participate in social and political affairs in the Republican period, but after the Nationalist government was set up in Nanjing in 1927, the party changed its strategy. It no longer sought to develop strong civic associations (to support its bid for national power) but rather to consolidate its rule by empowering the state through a combination of repression and incorporation. Radical organizations suspected of having a Communist background were suppressed or disbanded. After the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, associational life was further curtailed as spontaneous social forces were seen as a threat to the new regime. Society was organized by the party-state based on a principle of vertical rule. People were incorporated into hierarchically organized institutional systems through danwei (work units). The horizontal links of individuals and organizations across these danwei were restricted, and people’s lives were encapsulated within these systems. During this period, civic organizations were either banned or incorporated into official organizations such as the Women’s Federation and Federation of Industry and Commerce. The reforms that began in the late 1970s have brought dramatic changes to China. The gradual withdrawal of the Chinese state from the economic sector has resulted in the development of a strong market economy over the past 3 decades, but the promotion of ‘‘small government, big society’’ since the 1990s has yet to make a comparable impact. Immediately following the democracy movement of 1989, the Regulation on the Registration and Management of Social Organizations was enacted. After a screening period, the number of social groups was cut down to
107,304 in 1991. By 2007, however, the number had grown exponentially to 386,916, including 211,661 social organizations (shuhui tuanti or associations with membership), 173,915 ‘‘non-governmental non-enterprise danwei’’ (minban feiqiye danwei or public services agencies), and 1,340 foundations. The sector hired more than 4.5 million people (official website of the Ministry of Civil Affairs: www.chinanpo.gov.cn). Impressive as these numbers may appear, these are mainly organizations established under state policy guidance. In 2005, according to official statistics, 32% of social organizations were business organizations, such as trade associations or guilds, 30% were professional groups, such as accountant associations, and 23% were academic associations. The rest were friendship, sport, hobby, and cultural groups. They were established to enhance market transition, provide services to the needy, and enrich people’s cultural lives. Religious, environmental, and public health groups were relatively few in number, not to mention advocacy or human rights groups. Looking at their governance structure, many of these groups were far from non-governmental. A study in the late 1990s in Guangzhou found that in only 20% of these groups was the board of directors made up of everyday citizens. The board of directors of the majority was partly or completely made up of officials (Chan, 2005). Hence, most of these social organizations are called GONGOs (government-organized nongovernment organizations) in China. Scholars such as Unger and Chan (1995) argue that these groups constitute a system of corporatism – interest representation in which a limited number of constituent units are created and recognized by the state as monopolizing representatives of respective sectors. In the past decade, however, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of civic groups outside the state registration system. Community-based groups, such as book discussion clubs, choral societies, hiking clubs, amateur sports clubs, literary circles, religious groups, hobby groups, elderly associations, friendship groups, student associations, patient groups, and the like, flourish in every corner of Chinese society. Wang and He (2004) estimate that these civic groups may number as many as 30,000–50,000 nationwide (2004). Unable to fulfill the legal requirements for registration, many of these groups are forced to operate without legal protection. Some, however, have chosen to become ‘‘patronized groups’’ (guakao organizations) or to register as commercial entities to acquire quasi-legal status to continue their operations (Chan, 2005; Chan et al., 2005). Patronized groups are groups that are sheltered by government units, state or private enterprises, mass organizations, or registered
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social organizations. For example, universities shelter numerous volunteer organizations. Many groups exist as virtual organizations by setting up websites and communicating through email and discussion forums. The extensive use of the Internet not only cuts organizational costs but is also a way to avoid political risk. However, groups providing services in the community need to avoid bringing trouble on local governments by operating in the ‘‘safe zone’’ on projects such as poverty alleviation, gender issues, and education. When working in sensitive areas such as labor, NGOs need to be careful not to overstep the tacit boundaries (e.g., not try to organize trade unions) that have been laid down by the government. As concluded in the Civicus Civil Society Index Report (NGO Research Center of Tsinghua University, 2006), a nascent civil society has developed in China. The environment for this development is not particularly friendly given the legal and political restrictions. The structure of this civil society is rather fragile given the limited participation of citizens (37% of the population are members of at least one civic group; 57% of the population are volunteers in loose sense, meaning giving hand to others without pay) and lack of sustainable resources. Chinese civil society, however, exhibits a good degree of commitment to universal values such as equity, non-violence, and tolerance. It has also had a remarkable impact on poverty eradication and environmental causes. Can the civic groups discussed above create social capital in China? In fact, quite a number of studies have investigated the individual level of social capital in China, and most of them relate social networks with social mobility and social stratification (Lin, 1999; Bian, 1997). Of those examining the collective level, Chan and Qiu (1999) are among the first to apply Putnam’s theory to the context of China. Their study shows that many registered social organizations lack autonomy and demonstrate over-reliance on government. The vertical control of government over associations has also hindered them from developing horizontal connections with peer associations, and such connections are regarded as a key component to fostering trust and norms of reciprocity within a society. This finding, however, is far from conclusive. Wang and He (2004) argue that associations with good connections with the state may be more resourceful and still capable of producing social capital. Another important study is that of Tsai (2007), which addresses the question of how social capital can have an impact on governmental performance in countries such as China where strong democratic and bureaucratic institutions are absent. Her research in rural China reveals that Chinese officials still organize and provide public goods
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when there are local encompassing and embedding solidary groups. Solidary groups refer to groups based on shared moral obligations and shared interests; an encompassing structure means that the group is open to everyone under the local government’s jurisdiction; and an embedding structure means that the group has local officials as members. The magic of solidary groups, such as temples and lineage groups, lies in the informal rules and norms embedded in the groups that can award local officials moral standing if they provide public goods. Because of solidary groups, local officials have stronger incentives to provide public goods. Thus, Tsai’s (2007) research demonstrates the importance of social capital in holding local governments responsible, even when the general accountability of formal institutions is absent. Other research attempts to study the relationship between social capital and political participation. Sun et al. (2007) find that only political trust (perception of local government) has a significant impact on participation in elections, and that social capital (people’s participation in informal organizations and interpersonal relationships among village people) does not have a significant influence on political participation. Hu (2006) also finds that the correlation between social trust and political participation is insignificant but that participation in societal organizations and a sense of belonging to the local community do have a significant impact on people’s participation in village elections. In sum, community embedded with strong social capital is found to be able to exert an influence on local governance but not necessarily in the form of formal political participation such as voting in elections.
Outlook/Concluding Assessment In the 2006 Civicus Civil Society Index Report for China, China received a score of 1 for civil society structure and 1.2 for the environment (out of 3). The value dimension received a score of 1.8 and the impact of Chinese civil society, 1.6. The overall level of development was low, and China’s environment was deemed unfriendly and its structure fragile. Among the many civil society issues that China faces, two are particularly pressing. 1. Resources. At present, China has no statistics of the total amount of donation citizens contributed while it is clear that many NGOs complain that they lack resources. Civic groups relying on state resources face the problem of maintaining autonomy, whereas NGOs receiving funds from foreign foundations shoulder political risk. Many grassroots NGOs are unable to solicit resources or obtain funding from either source, which greatly constrains their development. The difficulty of developing
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philanthropy in China has to do with the problem of trust. Hsu (2008) argues that China has no history of organizations such as Western donation-style charities. How one can trust strangers (general trust) beyond the circle of familiar people (specific trust) is a cultural or social capital issue that needs to be addressed in China, especially as rampant corruption in the government and its affiliated structures means that people are naturally suspicious of where their donations to official charity organizations will go. Project Hope, a charitable organization that supports rural education, was the pioneer in breaking through these cultural and institutional barriers to soliciting donations from the public. In the past two years, NGOs and foundations established by successful entrepreneurs, including SEE (Society Entrepreneur Ecology), the Narada Foundation, and the China Social Entrepreneur Foundation, have not only made significant contributions to environmental protection, education, and poverty eradication but also become important local funding sources for many grassroots NGOs. Another important advance in the development of local philanthropy is the case of Jet Li’s One Foundation, which was established with the support of the Red Cross Society of China, a major relief GONGO. Because of this connection, the Foundation is allowed to independently solicit donations from the public. It not only devotes its resources to disaster relief but also aids in building a stronger charity sector by funding exemplary NGOs. To better mobilize local resources to support civil society, China desperately needs to relax the legal and administrative controls over foreign and local foundations related to the raising of funds from the public. Improving the governance of NGOs, such as their transparency, and their capacity in service provision are equally important in gaining people’s trust in this sector. 2. Political control. The Regulation on the Registration and Management of Social Organizations that was promulgated in 1989 and amended in 1998 stipulates that only one association of the same kind is allowed to register within an administrative region, which has resulted in the creation of a monopoly by some GONGOs in their respective areas. In addition, the Regulation stipulates the practice of ‘‘dual supervision’’ over civic groups. Each organization needs to find a related state unit (government department or official social organization) to be its ‘‘business supervisory unit’’ (yewu zhuguan danwei), and must register with civil affairs departments at different levels. These supervisory units have political responsibility for inspecting
the activities and finances of civic groups, and thus government units have little incentive to sponsor such applications except when there are material interests or personal connections involved. This is the most common reason that NGOs fail to register with the authorities. The Regulation also stipulates the number of members, the amount of funding, and the availability of premises as conditions for registration, which have become registration hurdles for many grassroots NGOs. The main reason for setting up such stringent laws is political in nature. The Chinese state is ambivalent toward the rise of civil society. On the one hand, the state needs the third sector to supplement the provision of public services. On the other hand, it is worried that civil society may turn into an independent political force that threatens communist rule. The state established a system of state corporatism with GONGOs as monopoly representatives of societal interests but has realized that a nascent civil society has emerged. In the near future, the Chinese government will be reforming the registration system to allow more community-based NGOs to acquire semi-legal status through connecting with local state structures. The development of service-oriented NGOs will be encouraged through state financial support in the form of purchasing services from NGOs, as has already happened in Shenzhen and Shanghai. However, advocacy groups and NGOs working on labor or other human rights issues, particularly those receiving foreign funding, will still be closely monitored and at times, suppressed.
Cross-References
▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ CIVICUS ▶ Coleman, James Samuel ▶ Corporatism ▶ Fundraising ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Government Organized Nongovernmental Organizations (GONGOs) ▶ Harmonious Society ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations ▶ Putnam, Robert
References/Further Readings Bian, Y. (1997). Bringing strong ties back. In Indirect connection, bridges, and job search in China. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 36–385. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (Richard Nice Trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Civil Society and Social Capital in East Africa Burt, R. (1992). Structural holes: social structure of competition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chan, K. (2005). The development of NGOs under a post-totalitarian regime: The case of China. In R. Wellner (Ed.), Organizing between family and state: Non-governmental organizations, globalization and political change in Asia (pp. 20–41). New York: Routledge. Chan, K., & Qiu, H. (1999). She Tuan She Hui Zi Ben Yu Zheng Jing Fa Zhan (Social Organizations, Social Capital, and Political and Economic Development). She Hui Xue Yan Jiu (Sociological Research), 4, July 20, 64–74. Chan, K., Qiu, H., & Zhu, J. (2005). Chinese NGOs strive to survive. Social transformations in Chinese societies, 1, 131–159. Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1995). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coleman, J. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Deng, Z., & Jing, Y. (1992). Jian Gou Zhong Guo De Shi Min She Hui (Constructing Civil Society in China). Zhong Guo She Hui Ke Xue Ji Kan (Chinese Social Science Quarterly), 4(5), 88–102. Frentzel-Zagorska, J. (1990). Civil Society in Poland and Hungary. Soviet Studies, 42(4), 759. Hsu, C. L. (2008). Rehabilitating charity in China: The case of Project Hope and the rise of non-profit organizations. Journal of Civil Society, 4(2), 81–96. Hu, R. (2006). Social capital and villagers local autonomous participation in rural China – An analysis of factors influencing villagers’ participation in village elections. Sociological Studies, 2, 61–85. Huang, P. C. C. (1993). ‘Public sphere’/‘Civil society’ in China? Modern China, 19(2), 216–240. Lin, N. (1999). Social networks and status attainment. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 467–87. Ma, Q. (2006). Non-governmental organizations in contemporary China. New York: Routledge. Ma, S-Y. (1994). The Chinese discourse on civil society. China Quarterly, 137(March), 180–193. Madsen, R. (1986). Morality and power in a Chinese village. Berkeley: University of California Press. Madsen, R. (2002). Confucian conceptions of civil society. In S. Chambers, & W. Kymlicka (Eds.), Alternative conceptions of civil society Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. NGO Research Center, Tsinghua University. (2006). CIVICUS Civil Society Index Report China (Mainland): A nascent civil society within a transforming environment. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rankin, M. B. (1986). Elite activism and political transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865–191. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shen, Y. (1986). Zichangjieji Quanli Ying Yi Wei Shimin Quanli (Bourgeois Rights should be translated as Townspeople’s rights). Tianjin Shehui Kexue (Tianjin Social Science), 4. Shen, Y. (1990). Shimin Shehui’ Bian Xi (An examination of ‘Townspeople’s Society’). Zhexue Yanjiu (Philosophy Study), 1, 44–51. Strand, D. (1989). Rickshaw Beijing: City people and politics in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sun, X., Xu, Z., Tao, R., & Su, F. (2007). Impacts of political trust and social capital on villagers’ committee election participation in China. Sociological Studies, 4, 165–245. Tsai, L. L. (2007). Solidary groups, informal accountability, and local public goods provision in rural China. American Political Science Review, 101(2), 355–72.
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Unger, J., & Chan, A. (1995). China, corporatism, and the East Asian model. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 33, 29–53. Walder, G. A. ( 1986). Communist neo-traditionalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wang, S., & He, J. (2004). Associational revolution in China: Mapping the landscapes. Korea Observer, 35(3), 485–533. Wang, Y., Zhe, Y., & Sun, B. (1993). Intermediate sphere in society: Reforms and Chinese social organizations. Beijing: China Development Press (in Chinese). White, G., Howe, J., & Shang, X. (1996). In search of civil society: Market reform and social change in contemporary China. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Civil Society and Social Capital in East Africa KARUTI KANYINGA University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
Introduction In the last 2 decades, civil society everywhere has expanded at a rate that authors such as Salamon et al. (1999) have described as a ‘‘global associational revolution.’’ Growth of civil society has taken place alongside global disillusionment with state institutions as agents of change in developing countries and as agents of channeling development assistance from the North. East Africa has witnessed this ‘‘associational revolution’’: countries that comprise East Africa – Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania – have witnessed an increase in the number and activities of civil society organizations in the last 2 decades. Partly responsible for the growth of Civil Society in East Africa is also disillusionment with the failure of the state to promote development and improve democratic conditions. Starting from the 1980s, this disillusionment occasioned donors to shift their attention towards private non-state institutions as agents for promoting development and democratic governance. Civil society agencies, of which Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) were well known and most visible in the development space, evolved as most viable for complementing government development efforts and countermanding bad governance. NGOs became even more important from the early 1990s when countries in the region were experiencing social-economic difficulties brought about by adoption of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). This resulted in reduced role of the state in the delivery of basic services. Civil society filled the gaps. Civil society in the region has been significant in another respect: facilitating expansion of the democratic space for enjoyment of rights and freedoms as well as
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countermanding bad governance. Actors within the civil society led the struggles for introduction of neoliberal political reforms including multiparty democracy beginning the early 1990s. Civil society in East Africa has a bearing on social capital in one important manner. Groups voluntarily form to address social-political challenges. People group together, voluntarily, to undertake collective action on various problems. It is in this context that ‘‘social capital’’ has acquired relevance in the region. Local communities and institutions in all the three countries uphold certain values and norms that drive their everyday relations. They are linked together by a desire for mutual and collective benefits or what Putnam (1995: 67) calls norms of reciprocity, trust, and social networking that facilitate cooperation. Civil society and social capital do not owe their origins to recent events. They have a base in Africa’s tradition of communalism and voluntarism whose existence predates the colonial situation. People would form age group associations, lineage, and kinship organizations and many others to promote local welfare and protect group interests. Elaborate mutual self-help groups organized along family, clans, or neighborhood lines existed have a long period of existence. Colonial experience beginning, the late nineteenth Century, brought about modern civil society organizations. This experience restructured communal and traditional mutual aid context in a variety of ways. In the three countries, Christian missionaries established charitable and education institutions that augmented traditional mutual self-help institutions. The three countries ascended to independence at different times in the first quarter of the 1960s. After independence, Kenya encouraged mutual self-help and traditional forms of social solidarity to mobilize political support for the new government. This gave rise to official recognition of the harambee (literally pulling together) collective efforts in which people would pool resources to build basic facilities. Tanzania established tight control of civil society at the outset. The government’s African socialism policies tightened state control of the development space and all agencies of development. State-civil society relations improved in the last half of 1980s when the state came to rely more on civil society to complement development. Uganda’s experience in the early period of 1960s was similar to Kenya. The state used civil society to mobilize political support. But political conflict that followed from the first coup d’etat in 1971 led to politicization of the civil society and a tendency by different regimes to coopt or marginalize organizations. Administrative regulations
effected this tendency. However, the last half of 1980s saw improved relations between the state and the civil society. A new government came to power through organized movement. This movement created an enabling policy for growth of civil society.
Meaning Civil Society
In East Africa, the meaning of civil society is a subject of debate especially because definitions draw from Western tradition and experiences. Authors such as Gibbon (2001) note the challenges of using this tradition in identifying civil society properties in Africa. This notwithstanding, Hegelian conception of civil society has been influential in providing a basis for identifying groups that compose civil society. In this usage, civil society broadly refers to the realm of autonomous and voluntary associations located between the state and the household. Its activities are voluntarily organized and are aimed at promoting social wellbeing. Individuals and groups of individuals, collectively, form these organizations for the purpose of promoting common good and/or protect their interests and values. But the use of the concept civil society has a very recent history in East Africa. Mamdani (1996: 19) observes that the concept came to prominence with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe through uprisings in the late 1980s. Following these uprisings, Africa experienced a wave of democratic struggles in which ‘‘popular organizations’’ took a leading role in mobilizing citizens for political change. A political conception of civil society came to the fore during this period: civil society now referred as well to civic associations and institutions that were involved in struggles for political change. Civil society came to be seen as a realm of plurality of selforganized and vigilant civil associations. Shivji (1990) argues that the term was used synonymous with autonomous organizations of people within the society with no aim of taking political power but seeking to control and democratize the state. Before the early 1990s, the term ‘‘Non-Governmental Organizations’’ (NGOs) was widely used in reference to autonomous and voluntary organizations. The term NGOs referred to formal and well established voluntary development organizations – national and international – that were undertaking social development. Usually exempt in this usage were groups of self-help voluntary organizations formed by ordinary citizens to undertake community development or delivery of services to members who formed the groups.
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An important feature of civil society in East Africa is its heterogeneity. There is a diverse range of autonomous associations and institutions that compose civil society. As noted by Kiondo and Mogella (2006: 25–29) with regard to Tanzania, Kanyinga (2004) and Mutahi (1999: 119–122) with regard to Kenya, and Bazaara (2002) on Uganda, civil society comprises different organizations involved sometimes in distinct subsectors within civil society. It comprises NGOs, human rights advocacy organizations, self-help community groups such as women and youth groups, cultural organizations, faith-based, or religious organizations, unions, professional associations and clubs, trusts, and foundations, and cooperatives. Although there is growing consensus on the meaning of civil society in East Africa, there is a debate on the extent to which civil society is independent of the state and the market. Mamdani (1996) in fact observes that the guarantor of that autonomy is none other than the state; it uses legal regime to guarantee or deny civil society that autonomy. The form of the state in the three countries has meant increased control of civil society through legal regimes. Secondly, relationship between political associations and civic groups especially during the struggles for democratization has aroused more debates on the boundaries between civil society and political society. Social Capital
James Coleman (1990: 302) brought the term ‘‘social capital’’ into wider usage with the claim that social capital is productive just like any other capital and that any group of people that places extensive trust in one another accomplishes much more than a comparable group lacking that trustworthiness and trust. Coleman (1990) further noted that social capital exists in the relations among persons and comes about through changes in these relations. Cooperation between and among individuals is therefore facilitated by social capital. Robert Putnam (1993: 167), however, has had the most far reaching influence on the usage of social capital because of his claim that voluntary cooperation is easier in a community that has inherited a substantial stock of social capital in the form of norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement. Other definitions also emphasis the significance of social capital in fostering cooperation in the society. These definitions show that social capital is produced through reciprocity and other values that stress cooperation for mutual benefit. Volunteerism and collective efforts therefore are important products of social capital; they are the result of trustworthiness among persons. Viewed this way, societies in East Africa are rich
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in social capital. They have a rich tradition of communalism, voluntarism, and collective self-help or the key features of social capital. Bazaara (2002) points out that in Uganda, communal organizations existed in precolonial Uganda to support production, distribution, and consumption. There was an elaborate mutual self-help networks organized along clan, family, or neighborhood lines. In Tanzania Ndumbaro and Yahya-Othman et al. (2007) observe that there were different mutual aid groups active in community affairs before colonialism. Kanyinga et al. (2004: 100) also notes that in precolonial Kenya communities established institutions that provided social safety net and emergency relief for members. In many societies in East Africa, thus people sharing common age status, family ties or lineages would organize themselves to accomplish certain production tasks and assist members in need. This remains the tradition in much of the region. The usage of the concept social capital in East Africa is implied in local development literature where it is used with specific reference to self-help voluntary efforts in which people pool resources to provide for basic services, among others. One good example of such endeavors is Kenya’s tradition of Harambee (literally, pulling together) in which people pool resources to undertake community development projects. But the history of traditional mutual assistance in the whole of East Africa has a deep history than Harambee would suggest and as discussed above. The importance of collective action and cooperation for mutual benefit is central in the civil society. Hyden (1999: 4) indeed notes that it is within civil society that values of social capital are nurtured and developed. Viewed this way, density of associational life itself is an explication of the strength of social capital and by implication vibrancy of civil society. And where these associations build social capital they contribute to development. In this sense, civil society contributes to development by promoting production of social capital through increased use of local communities and institutions. Use of indigenous knowledge and popular participation are expressions of this endeavour.
Nature and Scope of Civil Society and Social Capital in East Africa Size and Numbers
In East Africa, the size and scope of civil society varies between countries. A survey undertaken in the three countries in collaboration with the Centre for Civil Society Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in the early 2000 reveals differences in terms of size and scope of civil society in the region. Kenya has perhaps the highest number of CSOs.
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Kanyinga et al. (2007) show that the country had about 140,000 organizations in 1999. The number increased to about 186,000 organizations in 2002 and to about 350,000 organizations in 2005. Ndumbaro and Yahya-Othman (2007) study in Tanzania reported about 60,000 registered CSOs in 2001 while the study by Kibikyo (2001) on Uganda had about 30,000 registered civil society organizations by 1999. These figures are exclusive of thousands of associations that people form to promote interests such as culture and welfare. Such associations are not captured in governmental administrative records. These organizations often are informally established but have elaborate selfregulatory structures complete with office holders and record keeping. Economic Significance
Civil society is a significant economic force in each of the three countries. Kanyinga et al. (2004) show that in Kenya, civil society expenditure in 2000 represented about 2.5% of Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product. The workforce in the sector – both paid and volunteer – represented about 2.1% of economically active population. This was equivalent to 16.3% of Kenya’s nonagricultural employment. Kiondo et al. (2004) show that in Tanzania, civil society expenditure was about 2.9% of GDP while workforce was equivalent to 2.1% of Tanzania’s economically active population or over 20% of its nonagricultural employment. Uganda had a similar picture. The sector is large though relatively smaller compared to the size of the sector in Kenya and Tanzania. Bazaara et al. (2004) observes its expenditure was about 1.4% of GDP. Workforce represented about 2.3% of the country’s economically active population or 10.9% of Uganda’s nonagricultural employment. However, the sector’s workforce in Uganda is far larger than the public sector workforce in the country: It is one and half times larger than the public sector workforce in Uganda and over half the size of all manufacturing subsectors. Scope of Volunteering and Membership
Civil society in East Africa is significant in yet another way: volunteering. In Uganda, about 23% of the adult population engage in some volunteer work while in Tanzania 11% of the population engage in volunteer work. Kenya has the least number of volunteers: 6% engage in volunteer work. Many people in the region value volunteering and consider it an important undertaking – it is considered as an important moral responsibility to which one has to contribute at some point in life. But as already observed, there is a tendency for people to volunteer in an organization so as
to advance their careers and/or broaden their experience. This does not in any way imply diminishing social capital; it is social capital manifest in a modern form. Size of membership in the civil society is an important indicator of the significance of civil society. The estimated size of the civil society membership or people who belong to different civil society organizations is huge. In Kenya size of civil society membership in 2000 was about 17% of the national population. During the same period, Tanzania’s civil society membership was about 15%. Although there are no figures on membership of civil society in Uganda, figures on the size of the sector in the country suggest that that size of membership could be more than what obtains in Kenya and Tanzania. These figures are underestimates because they do not include community mutual aid groups, which dot all corners of the region. Adults everywhere seem to belong to some form of association or another. Some are formalized and others are not. Urban burial societies and welfare groups in rural areas, social clubs and numerous other groups are not captured in existing records. National accounting systems gloss over them in documenting economic related activities. Both issues of volunteerism and membership in civil society point to yet another important feature of the civil society and social capital in East Africa: levels of social trust. People form, contribute to, and maintain these associations because of the trust they have in one another. Social sanctions usually apply to errant behavior and therefore people cohere on account of confidence in each other. Of course at the national level, how much different communities trust one another ranges from one country to another with Tanzania leading as a ‘‘nation.’’ National integration in Kenya and Uganda is at a much lower level than in Tanzania.
Outlook/Concluding Assessment Civil society in East Africa comprises several sets of autonomous and voluntary organizations. It is a term that encompasses voluntary development organizations such as NGOs and other autonomous voluntary social economic organizations. It includes self-help groups and social-cultural organizations committed to the welfare of members and the society in general. The term civil society in East Africa has a very recent usage. Wider usage of this term began with the wave of democratization that swept the region from the early 1990s. Before then, the term ‘‘NGOs’’ was used in reference to the formally organized autonomous voluntary development organization. The term ‘NGOs’ excluded social-cultural and welfare groups. An important aspect of the civil society in East Africa is that it is within the civil
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society that social capital is nurtured. Various groups form on basis of trust among members. The group with the largest presence in all the countries is the self-help community organizations. These organizations are dependent on high levels of trust and reciprocity among members to reproduce themselves. Social capital is significant in East Africa in one important way. It is social capital that provides the values for formation of civil society organizations. Thus while civil society nurtures the values of social capital, the latter provides a base for formation of civil society groups. Dense associational life witnessed in the three countries – and Kenya in particular – owes much to social capital. The values of social capital are well embedded in the region. All the societies in the region have a rich tradition of communalism; voluntarism, trust, reciprocity, and the value of collective efforts is ingrained in societal life. This tradition and the community groups forming around it provide an appropriate entry point to local development by modern civil society organizations. The tradition of communalism thus is the bedrock of modern day associational life in East Africa. The basis of this voluntarism is social capital. The three countries have important variations in terms of size of civil society. These variations reflect the different political histories of the three countries. Common among the three countries is that civil society is an important social-economic and political force. Its share of GDP is significant compared to other sectors. Civil society contributions to democratization through advocacy work have been significant. Its workforce exceeds that of important sectors and in some instances exceeds the public sector workforce. The future of civil society in the region does not necessarily depend on levels of social capital. Social capital and civil society at present are well intertwined. The future is dependent on governmental policies and trends towards creating an enabling environment for the civil society. As argued by Mamdani (1996) the state is the guarantor of civil society’s autonomy and independence. Future state-civil society relations thus will dependent – and remain to depend on – regime types in the region.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Action ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Southern Africa
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▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in West Africa ▶ Civil Society: Definitions of, and Approaches ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Collective Action ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Self-Help Groups
References/Further Readings Bazaara, N. (2002). A critical analysis of the historical development of the nonprofit sector in uganda (Working Paper No.79/2002). Kamapala: Centre for Basic Research. Bazaara, N. et al. (2004). Uganda. In L. Salamon & W. S. Sokolowski (Eds.), Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector (Vol. 2). Bloomfield: Kumarian Press (in collaboration with Johns Hopkins comparative nonprofit sector project). Coleman, S. J. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press. Gibbon, P. (2001). Civil society, locality and globalization in rural Tanzania: A forty-year perspective. Development and Change, 32, 819–844. Hyden, G. (1999). Civil society, social capital, and development: Dissection of a complex discourse. Studies in Comparative International Development, 32(1), (spring 1997), 3–30. Kanyinga, K. et al. (2004). Kenya. In L. Salamon, W. S. Sokolowski, & Associates (Eds.), Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector (Vol. 2). Bloomfield: Kumarian Press (in collaboration with Johns Hopkins comparative nonprofit sector project). Kanyinga, K., Mitullah, V., and Njagi, S. (2007). The Non-profit sector in Kenya: Size, Scope and Financing. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies. Kibikyo D. L. (2001). Revenue, expenditure and employment and outputs of the nonprofit sector in Uganda. Kampala: Centre for Basic Research (Mimeo). Kiondo, A., & Mogella, C. (2006). Historical development of the civil society in Tanzania. In A. Kiondo & J. Nyang’oro (Eds.), Civil society and democratic development in Tanzania (pp. 19–32). Harare: MWENGO. Kiondo, A. et al. (2004). Tanzania. In L. Salamon, W. S. Sokolowski, & Associates (Eds.), Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector (Vol. 2). Bloomfield: Kumarian Press (in collaboration with Johns Hopkins comparative nonprofit sector project). Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and legacy of late colonialism. London: James Currey Ltd. Mutahi, N. (1999). Civil Society and the Challenge of Multi-party Transition in Kenya. In Nyang’oro, J. E. (Ed.). Civil society and democratic development in Africa: Perspectives from eastern and southern Africa. Harare: Mwongo Publications. Ndumbaro, L., & Yahya-Othman, S. (2007). The third sector in Tanzania: Capabilities and challenges of civil society organizations. Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam Press. Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Putnam, R. (1993). Civil society traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Shivji, I. (1990). State coercion and freedom in Tanzania. Lesotho: Institute of Southern African Studies. Salamon, L. et al. (1999). Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Centre for Civil Society Studies.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Japan YUTAKA TSUJINAKA University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
Introduction The term ‘‘civil society’’ (Shimin shakai) and the related words such as ‘‘NGO’’ (nongovernmental organization), and ‘‘NPO’’ (nonprofit organization), generally came into common use in Japanese mass media since the 1990s, particularly after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 (Tsujinaka et al., 2007a). However, the substance of civil society (indicating here simply social organizations independent from the modern state) has longer history in Japan, while their nature has been problematic in academia (Garon, 2003; Pekkanen, 2003; Gordon, 2003; Tsujinaka, 2003). Although this may be similar to the situation in other Asian countries, the context in which these phrases have been used differs from that of Western societies in daily life as well as academia (Alagappa, 2004). According to Fukuda (2006), there is a great deal of historical evidence concerning associational development in premodern Japan. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, what we consider modern associations formed rapidly. However, aside from the critical factor that the basic concept of such associations was imported from Western countries, it is impossible to relate Japan’s civil society experience with that of other countries without taking into consideration the organizational experiences and the accumulation of social capital that took place before Japan’s modern period. Since the modern revolution, Japan experienced several waves of democratization. First, during ‘‘the movement for freedom and people’s civil rights (Jiyu-minken)’’ from the 1870s into the 1880s, over 2,000 associations were recorded as being formed. Furthermore, together with the start of Japan’s constitutional government in 1889 (imperial sovereignty), increases in land taxes prompted close to 4,000 petitions in a certain year. Various groups such as agricultural associations, chambers of commerce, business associations, and industrial associations formed
rapidly. Particularly, during the development of party politics from 1918 to 1937, or the years of the TaishoShowa Democracy, the wave of association establishment included labor unions and social movements (Tsujinaka, 1988; Garon, 2003). However, by the end of the 1930s, all of the associations that were formed in the prewar period were either absorbed within war mobilization efforts or – for those who resisted – coerced and ultimately realigned into the state corporatist structure (Pempel and Tsunekawa, 1979). This meticulous systematization throughout almost all association sectors would directly affect Japan’s civil society after the war. After the war, under the Occupation, the Japanese Constitution was enacted in 1947, and societies and petitions were liberalized and became fully legitimated. Along the democratic constitution, various new laws were enacted relating to associations and Japan’s civil society was virtually reborn. Japan’s defeat and the postwar reforms caused a remarkable breakdown in civil society. A particularly reflective example is that of labor unions which recorded an unprecedented high unionization rate of 55.8% in 1949, despite the fact that there were no unions under the war-system (Tsujinaka, 1988). Similarly striking figures were also seen with cooperative associations, as consumer groups and citizens’ organizations such as the Japan Housewives’ Association came into being. After the end of the Occupation in 1952, further legislation was enacted, particularly with regard to industrial associations, providing the initial structure for Japan’s civil society that would continue through Japan’s high-growth period of the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Unlike the above understanding, a cross-national comparative survey of civil society from the perspective of the nonprofit sector conducted in over 30 countries by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (Salamon et al., 2004) ranked Japan in the middle between Western developed nations and non-Western developing nations. When considering ‘‘civil society’’ as an idealized alternative of Western societies, the Westerntype advocacy groups such as NGOs and NPOs have garnered a certain amount of attention, and it has been pointed out that Japan’s civil society is comparatively weak and underdeveloped. If the term ‘‘social capital’’ is used to refer to relationships between fellow human beings, public and private networks, trust, and reciprocity norms, then it can be argued that Japan’s economic-oriented society, with its traditionally broad and multiple grassroots structure, corporations and industry, demonstrates evidence of a wealth of social capital (Fukuyama, 1995). In fact, there has been a great deal of debate regarding the nature of Japan’s civil society as being ‘‘rich’’ in social
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capital yet ‘‘poor’’ in terms of civic or advocate mindedness (Pekkanen, 2003, 2006; Schwartz and Pharr, 2003). As it will be described later, there appeared a rich substance of civil society in Japan since at least 1970s on. Yet, puzzlingly why has the concept of ‘‘civil society’’ not acquired legitimacy until 1990s? These puzzles are clue to understand Japan’s civil society and social capital. There is a clear need for approaches to civil society with a broad perspective in order to answer these problems (Tsujnaka et al., 2007a).
Civil Society It is generally thought that the development of civil society in many Western countries has accompanied the appearance and features of modern societies and modern states (Schwartz and Pharr, 2003). Yet, in Japan, modern society and civil society were not considered to be corresponding. In fact, it was not until the 1990s when the two concepts became equivalent. What enabled it to become a widespread phrase was the tragedy of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 and the ‘‘volunteer revolution’’ that ensued. Three reasons can be provided for the amount of time that it has taken for ‘‘civil society’’ to take root in Japan even under the postwar democratic constitution. First, for a long time, the phrases ‘‘citizens’’ and ‘‘civil society’’ held the implications of participation in urban areas. As until recently opposition parties were mainly concentrated in such urban areas, and the concepts of ‘‘citizens’’ and ‘‘civil society’’ came to be associated with such opposition forces. For this reason, many conservative governing leaders and their supporters resisted using these terms. Second, the long ‘‘statist’’ bureaucratic regulations are another factor. Especially the Civil Code in 1896 and other laws have molded the arrangement of civil society since the Meiji era to the present and bureaucratic paternalistic culture toward civil society has been influential even since the postwar era until recently (Pekkanen, 2006; Garon, 2003). The state’s goals have revolved around modernization stances that have focused on bureaucracy-led ‘‘catching-up’’ processes (e.g., ‘‘rich nation and strong army’’ in the pre-war era and ‘‘Income Doubling plan’’ in the 1960s). Third, an additional criticism came from the left, pointing out that ‘‘citizens’’ (shimin), residents (jumin), and the populace (minshu) did not share the same ‘‘public’’ perspective. With a background of class consciousness, it was thought that there was a perceived bias towards urban residents, the educated class, and the socially aware middle class, leading to questions as to whether the working class and the general populace were being excluded. According to
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Yamaguchi (2004), there was also the further criticism from the left that residents’ movements were contrapositive to citizens’ movements. At this juncture in the twenty-first century, however, there are few definitive ideological differences between the ruling conservative government and the opposition. During the process of the formation of the NPO Law, ruling and opposition parties as well as labor and management were able to cross their existing boundaries to combine forces in establishing the law. Although the name of the NPO Law had changed from the proposed Citizen Activities Promotion Law to the Law to Promote Specified Nonprofit Activities, in the first section of the law, there is a description of the concept of ‘‘citizen,’’ and this law has assumed the character of a ‘‘law to promote civil society.’’ Thus, in the aftermath of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake together with the burst of volunteer activity, expectations for civil society are quite high.
Social Capital There are three elements related to the concept of social capital in Japan. First, research concerning the concept of socially related capital or Social Capital (The common usage of ‘‘social capital’’ by Putnam entails trust, reciprocity norm, and social networks, and it should be differentiated from social capital generally used in Japan), as it came into currency throughout the world in the 1990s, was originally imported to Japan and developed since the latter half of the 1990s. At the present time, conceptually speaking, it conformed to definitions mainly forwarded by Western authors and international institutions with little or no distinctiveness. In this regard, similar to the situations in other countries, while there has been no conceptual conformity, it has demonstrated diverse evolutions. Second, one particularly important distinction in the concept of ‘‘social capital’’ in Japan is its use in an entirely different context; namely, in general relation to economicrelated infrastructure. In fact, government statistics and the use of the phrase ‘‘social capital’’ in daily conversation tend to assume this understanding (Tsujinaka, 2002a; Miyamoto, 1976; Kodansha, 1993). Third, systematic research on civil society organizations, NPOs, the nonprofit sector, and NGOs continues to advance. This can be considered as part of the structural research that focuses on Social Capital. And finally, Social Capital has taken on a multifaceted character as a ‘‘variable’’ incorporating diverse social policy orientations and applications (Cabinet Office, 2003; Yamauchi and Ibuki, 2005; Ikeda, 2006; Inoguchi, 2002 as examples).
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In Japan, while research concerning social capital became quite popular in the early twenty-first century, conceptually speaking, it has not developed further from the Cabinet Office (2003) surveys that drew on Putnam’s work, as interest dispersed in different areas.
Empirical Data There has been a wealth of statistics collected concerning the development of civil society in the past half century, spanning from 1950 to the present time (Tsujinaka, 2002b 2003). Four phases of civil society in the postwar period and general trends of association establishments
As of the associational structure of Japan’s civil society, the disconnection between its prewar and postwar formations and the unprecedented rise in the number of associations during the Occupation, up to the middle of the 1990s, Japanese civil society maintained extremely stable development. However, Japan’s civil society reached a critical turning point in the latter half of the 1990s, exhibiting marginal increases in the number of associations, stagnating numbers of association staff, and rapidly worsening financial conditions. Furthermore, public participation also declined, save for one segment of the advocacy sector. With the enactment of the NPO Law, systematization in the advocacy sector progressed. Figure 1 illustrates the overall structure of civil society in terms of their establishments (offices). As a brief explanation, with regard to association establishment statistics, comparisons with similar statistics from the United States and South Korea may be informative (Tsujinaka, 2002b). In the 36-year period
from 1960 to 1996, the number of association establishments in Japan increased by 3.7 times; comparatively speaking, during the same period of time, there was close to a threefold increase in the number of American association establishments. In South Korea, there was a sharp increase after liberalization, and thereafter, stagnation. With regard to the density of associations as measured per capita (hereinafter referred to as ‘‘per capita association density’’), the US figure in 1960 was one third, which dramatically increased to 85% by 1996. However, after 1996, this figure stagnated, and as of 2006, 32 association establishments existed per 100,000 people. In examining the association figures in terms of type, while the predominance of business/economic associations (comprising approximately 40% of the total number of association) is noteworthy, their figures remained static throughout the 1980s and beyond. Rather, what is particularly striking is the rate of growth in the number of ‘‘other’’ associations (‘‘N.E.C.’’ or ‘‘not elsewhere classified’’ in Fig. 1). From the above representation, four distinct phases can be seen in the evolution of Japanese civil society. First phase (1945 until approximately 1957): During the first half of this period, the number of associations sharply increased. In general, rebirth and new formation of civil society took place during this period, with the focal point being the labor unions. In the late 1950s, substantial reorganization and retrenchment is evident. Second phase (1957–1975): While during this phase, there was an overall direction toward developmentalism, and business/economic associations and labor unions made up a substantial number of total associational formations, social movements such as citizens’ and residents’
Civil Society and Social Capital in Japan. Fig. 1 Number of associational establishments in Japan, 1951–2006 (per 100,000 people)
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movements, also started. In addition, progressive local governments also went through a reform period. Third phase (1975–1996): After the 1970s being a critically dangerous period for the ruling government, in the 1980s under the resurgence of the conservative mood, there was a shift from citizens’ and residents’ movements to citizen participation that coordinated their efforts with the public administration. Awareness of the activities pursued through initiatives led by civil society expanded beyond the local government level to include the central government as well. International NGOs also developed in parallel to ODA growth in this period (Reiman, 2003). Fourth phrase (1996 to the present day): While during this period a great number of social service and advocacyoriented NPO associations emerged, as seen later, in civil society overall, the financial conditions of associations sharply declined, as well as participation figures. ‘‘Associational revolution’’ and the establishment year of civil society organizations
Turning from the association establishment statistics, the topic will shift now to the comprehensive surveys focusing on the structure of civil society. These surveys named JIGS (Japan Interest Group Survey) have covered Japan and four other countries twice, and as of 2008, there is data available for a total of 10 countries. Figure 2 illustrates the findings of the JIGS2 survey conducted in 2006–2007. In this survey, data was collected from 6.1% of all neighborhood associations, 17.3% of the various social associations listed in the telephone directory, and 21.9% of the NPOs registered with the government (Tsujinaka et al., 2007b).
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Figure 2 illustrates three graphs pertaining to the establishment year of the civil society organizations. Drawing on a similar data from 10 different countries (Tsujinaka et al., 2007a, b) as well as what Salamon (Salamon, 1994) terms as an ‘‘association revolution,’’ it can clearly be seen that from the latter half of the 1980s until 2000, in a number of countries, an ‘‘establishment boom’’ took place. To a certain extent different from the pattern, establishment was somewhat dispersed in the United States, Germany, and South Korea. Yet, despite these cases, a similar phenomenon can be seen in many countries. In comparison, social associations in Japan, along with neighborhood associations, from the postwar period through to the period of high economic growth throughout the 1960s, assumed an ascending and enduring pattern of establishment. While certainly the noticeable outburst of registered NPOs can be described as an ‘‘association revolution,’’ as seen earlier, this did not have much of an effect on the number of association establishments and the number of social associations that were listed in the telephone directory. Basically, the phenomenon of what could be termed an ‘‘association revolution’’ in Japan only occurred in one segment of civil society which may only be attributable to institutional reform in terms of the NPO Law. Present Status of Civil Society in Japan
Japan’s incorporation system (legal personality) in general is complicated, and in addition, particularly with regard to the system for public interest legal persons (PILP), it has been pointed out that there are a number of
Civil Society and Social Capital in Japan. Fig. 2 Establishment year of Japanese civil society organizations, 1865–2006
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regulations and restrictions set forth by the government with respect to civil society (Yamamoto, 1998; Pekkanen, 2006). With or without incorporation, the government’s position towards each group within civil society in terms of the attitude it displays with regard to government authorization, sanctions, extent of promotion, is important (Pekkanen, 2006). Even aside from incorporated associations and foundations, Japan’s corporation law specifies 110 separate categories with special laws for social welfare corporations, educational corporations, and religious corporations, and allows them to receive benefits such as a prescribed amount of preferential tax treatment. Aside from PILP, there are 22 separate categories for corporations that are relatively close to the government such as semigovernmental corporations and authorized corporations. With regard to agricultural, fishing, and forestry cooperatives as well as their medium and small business counterparts, there are over 30 different types of cooperatives. Throughout Japan, in the period between 2005 and 2007, there were a total of 440,000 civil society organizations that had obtained corporate status or government registration. Of these, in terms of sheer numbers, religious corporations were the most prevalent with 183,000, followed by 76,000 registered political organizations, 61,000 labor unions, 38,000 medium and small business cooperatives, 35,000 registered NPOs, 22,000 authorized community-based associations, 18,000 social welfare corporations, 13,000 incorporated associations, and 12,000 foundations. According to the findings of the JIGS2 survey, among the associations listed in the telephone directory, 60% possessed legal status, of which 49% were incorporated associations and foundations, and 20% were cooperatives. While it is problematic to accurately comprehend the nonlegal status groups, among the existing 300,000 neighborhood associations, only 7% possess legal status as authorized community-based associations. There are a number of associations such as residents’ groups that are connected with recreational activities aimed at senior citizens, housewives, and children and found in the immediate area of neighborhood associations that do not have legal status. Associations in which citizens individually participate with advocacy have found it difficult to acquire legal status before the NPO Law was enacted. As a consequence, formalizing their organizations and acquiring amenities for operating a business such as having a place of business, staff, and a telephone have also proved difficult. Even if an association has obtained legal status, it is not necessarily the case that they have substance in the actual scope of their activities. For this reason, having a business establishment and a telephone can be said to be one
measure of the structure of civil society. It is possible to compare business establishment figures in Japan with those of the United States and South Korea. According to the distribution of associations in Japan in 2006, a total of 40,681 associations operate a business establishment, and of those, 37% are business/economic associations, 12% are labor associations, 2% are political associations, 3% are academic associations, and 46% are ‘‘other associations.’’ By comparison, in the United States, 16% are business/ economic associations, 14% are labor associations, 3% are political associations, 41% are civic associations, 7% are professional associations, and the remaining ‘‘other associations’’ are 20%, and in South Korea, 19% are business/ economic associations, 8% are labor associations, 3% are political associations, 6% are civic associations, 8% are professional associations, and the remaining 56% are ‘‘other associations.’’ From this comparison, certain distinct features emerge. Statistically speaking, although it may be difficult to accurately compare these figures as there is no category in Japan for ‘‘civic associations,’’ it is clear that there is too much importance is attached to business/economic associations in Japan (Tsujinaka, 2002b, 2003). In JIGS 2 survey above, among the major four categories, Japan has the largest proportion of the profit sector (including business and economic associations with direct linkages to producers and markets, labor unions, and agricultural associations), among the 10 countries surveyed. The nonprofit sector is somewhat large, and the citizen advocacy sector is the second smallest next to Turkey (Tsujinaka et al., 2007a). Thus, describing the framework of associations in Japan as assuming the characteristics of the developmental state as originally conceptualized by C. Johnson (Tsujinaka, 2003) has its roots in this structural arrangement. However, Japanese civil society in this type of developmental state, as shown in the chronological distribution, saw a turning point in the latter half of the 1990s. While the large variation in the number of association establishments shown in Fig. 1 may illustrate nothing more than static situation, in effect, with the economic stagnation that occurred during the 1990s, the financial conditions of civil society associations, particularly the business/economic and labor associations, suffered a major shock. Comparing figures in 1996 and 2006, on the whole, the financial situation of associations decreased 30%, deteriorating to the same level as in the mid-1980s. Citizen Participation and social capital
The turning point for associations did not stop at the market-oriented associations of the developmental state. As shown in Fig. 3, citizen participation in any organizations has eroded since the mid-1990s.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Japan
The Association for Promoting Fair Elections, an organization affiliated with the government, conducts public opinion surveys during each general election period in which it measures respondents’ sense of participation. Data compiled from 1972 through 2005 provides a comprehensive overview of citizens’ attitudes towards participation. The survey asks respondents if they are actually members any of civil society organizations. The highest rates of participation occur in neighborhood associations. While the level of participation in the mid-1980s reached 70%, in recent years, the level of participation has dropped to 50%, further slipping to 46% in the most recent survey. Even so, this level of high participation is not evident in any other countries (Pekkanen, 2006). Incidentally, respondents indicated relatively high rates of participation in groups such as clubs and hobby groups (approximately 15%). Participation in senior citizens’ clubs was close to 9%, while participation in women’s and youth associations decreased to 8% in recent years. PTA participation as well decreased by half to 8%. Participation in economic and producer-related associations on the whole declined as well to around 3–5%. In general, it is presumed that many associations saw their highest participation figures during the 1980s. The results also recorded a 1983 figure of 15% of respondents who were ‘‘non-participation in any organizations’’ had grown to over 30% by the early 2000s. As a cognitive aspect to social capital, while there have been debates concerning general feelings of trust and the amount of trust in various systems, comprehending these aspects through qualitative research and various survey outcomes have resulted in large variances (for instance Hamaguchi, 1996; Inoguchi, 2002). In fact, trust in itself has a strong bearing in cultural norms and is not readily adaptable to international comparisons. The Japan
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General Social Survey found that in terms of general trust, 20% of respondent indicated a positive response, 10% a negative response, and close to 70% claiming that ‘‘it depended on the given situation.’’
C Activities of civil society organizations and political influence
This final section provides characteristics of civil society based on JIGS2 survey (Tsujinaka et al., 2007b). As is shown, there are 300,000 neighborhood associations, approximately 90,000 listings in the telephone directory and 25,000 registered NPOs in the survey frame. While policy interests and areas of activity of them are mutually overlapping, in some degree their policy fields are also segregated. In fact, neighborhood associations have interest in the community policies, social associations’ primary policy orientation lies with industrial and development and NPOs are mainly concerned with social service policies. From the perspective of effectiveness on policy activities, the subjective relationships of neighborhood associations’ policy input and output, strength of influence, satisfaction, and trust is portrayed as a felicitous cycle. Social associations embed them in the upper echelon of the policy process, leaving NPOs that came late to the scene in the 1990s with a sense of dissatisfaction. In Japan, it is clear that neighborhood associations, social associations, and NPOs, each participate in the governance of families, enterprises and governments, and each makes contributions from their respective perspectives (Tsujinaka et al., 2007b).
Concluding Assessment As a tradition that has extended since premodern times, Japan has a thick layer of voluntary associational activity,
Civil Society and Social Capital in Japan. Fig. 3 Participation rate (neighborhood associations only) and nonparticipation rates (in any CSOs)
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with a history of human relationships with society that are based on trust. With the Meiji Restoration and the defeat in the war, while individual structures may have become disconnected, they also passed on a well-developed sense of organization. Since the Meiji Restoration through the postwar growth era, Japan’s goals have revolved around modernization stances that have focused on ‘‘catchingup’’ processes. Therefore, Japanese civil society has kept the developmentalist structure. After the war, the concept of civil society was adopted as an ideal type. At the same time, a welfare society was created through the welfare oriented companies and business associations, service-minded neighborhood associations, and variety of residential and citizen movements as late comer. However, three different reasons caused civil society concept foreign to the society until 1990s. After the bubble economy, the matured civil society in Japan became manifest. The critical years were the mid 1990s, with the loss of power by the ruling government, the major earthquake in 1995, and the enactment of the NPO Law in 1998. With fiscal concerns about the ageing and with globalization of society, civil society played a major role, and recognition of this fact that overcame various political ideologies, became clear. There was a burst of NPO activity at the grassroots level, although at the time, there was no fiscal support policy that could accommodate civil society organizations. One particular feature is that on the whole, civil society organizations entered a period of financial uncertainty. In this sense, the associational boom that occurred in the rest of the world in the 1990s also occurred in Japan ‘‘partially’’ only in some sector and in some regional area. Japan’s social capital, characterized by networks, trust, and reciprocity norm through its traditional structures and relationships, is quite difficult to measure in a concrete, comparative manner. However, as a whole, social capital, with its perspective in neighborhood associations and NPOs as well as rich developmental associations, can presumably maintain its support. While Japan has not passed through a period of being a welfare state, unlike some of its Western counterparts, it continues to aim at a high degree of publicness and social capital in the matured civil society, as well as lessening the burden on the government. From this time onward, it can be expected to see new policies and new associations that follow and maintain this path.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History of ▶ Civic Culture
▶ Civic Society-Business Relations ▶ Civic Society and Democracy ▶ Civic Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Corporatism ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Social Trust ▶ Salamon, Lester
References/Further Readings Alagappa, M. (Ed.) (2004). Civil society and political change in Asia: Expanding and contracting democratic space. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cabinet Office, Japan (Naikakufu-Nippon So-ken) (2003). Social capital: Yutakana Ningen-kankei to Shimin-katsudo no Kou-jyunkan wo motomete (in Japanese), Nippon Soken. Fukuda, A. (2006). Kesshu, Kessha no Nihon-shi [A history of association and people in Japan]. Tokyo: Yamakawa-shuppan-sha. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press. Garon, S. (2003). From Meiji to Heisei: The state and civil society in Japan. In F. Schwartz & S. Pharr (Eds.), The state of civil society in Japan (pp. 42–62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, A. (2003). A modern history of Japan: From Tokugawa times to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haddad, M. A. (2007). Politics and volunteering in Japan: A global perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamaguchi, E. (1996). Revival of Japanese type trustworthy society (in Japanese). Tokyo: Toyokeizaisinposha. Ikeda, K. (2006). Political culture and ‘‘Social Capital’’: Eastern and Western perspectives. In G. Helgesen & S. R. Thomsen (Eds.), Politics, culture and self: East Asian and North European attitudes (pp. 235–253). Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Press. Inoguchi, T. (2002). Broadening the basis of social capital in Japan. In R. D. Putnam (Ed.), Democracies in flux (pp. 359–489). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kodansha. (1993). Japan: An illustrated encyclopedia. Tokyo: Kodansha. Miyamoto, K. (1976). Theory of social capital (in Japanese). Tokyo: Yuhikakubooks. OECD. (2002). Social capital: The challenge of international measurement, 25–27 September 2002, London, from http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,3343,en_2649_39263294_2380248_1_1_1_1,00.html;1/ 31/2009. Pekkanen, R. (2003). Molding Japanese civil society: State structured incentives and the patterning of civil society. In F. Schwartz & S. Pharr (Eds.), The state of civil society in Japan (pp. 175–204). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pekkanen, R. (2006). Japan’s dual civil society: Members without advocates. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pempel, T. J., & Tsunekawa, K. (1979). Corporatism without labor: Then Japanese anomaly. In P. C. Schmitter & G. Lehmbruch (Eds.), Trends toward corporatist intermediation (pp. 231–270). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Reiman, K. (2003). Building global civil society from outside in? Japanese International Development, the state and international norm. In F. Schwartz & S. Pharr (Eds.), The state of civil society in Japan (pp. 298–315). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salamon, L. M. (1994, July/August). The rise of the nonprofit sector. Foreign Affairs 73(4), 109–122.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Korea Salamon, L. M., Sokolowski, S. W., & Associates. (2004). Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Schwartz, F., & Pharr, S. J. (Eds.) (2003). The state of civil society in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Japan General Social Survey, from http://jgss.daishodai.ac.jp/english/ eframe/englishtop.html 1/31/2009 Tsujinaka, Y. (1988). Rieki Shudan [Interest groups in Japan]. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press. Tsujinaka, Y. (2002a). The cultural dimension in measuring social capital: Perspective from Japan, OECD-website, from http://www.oecd.org/ dataoecd/2/2/2380346.pdf.;01/31/2009. Tsujinaka, Y. (Ed.) (2002b). Gendai nihon no shimin shakai, rieki dantai [Civil society and interest groups in modern Japan]. Tokyo: Bokutakusha. Tsujinaka, Y. (2003). Japan’s civil society organizations in comparative perspective. In F. Schwartz & S. Pharr (Eds.), The state of civil society in Japan (pp. 129–174). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsujinaka, Y., & Pekkanen, R. (2008). Civil society and interest groups in contemporary Japan. Pacific Affairs, 80(3), 419–437. Tsujinaka, Y., Choe, J.-Y., & Ohtomo, T. (2007a). Exploring the realities of Japanese civil society through comparison. ASIEN 105, 16–32. Tsujinaka, Y., Choe, J.-Y., Yamamoto, H., Miwa, H., & Ohtomo, T. (2007b). Nihon no shimin shakai kouzou to seiji sanka: Jichikai, shakai dantai, NPO no zentaizou to sono seiji kanyo [The structure of civil society in Japan and political participation: The overall picture of neighborhood associations, social associations, and nonprofit organizations and their political engagement]. Leviathan (Bokutakusha, Japan), 41, 7–44. Yamaguchi, Y. (2004). Shimin shakai ron: rekishiteki isan to shin tenkai [Civil society: Historical legacy and new developments]. Tokyo: Yuhikaku. Yamamoto, T. (Ed.) (1998). The nonprofit sector in Japan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Yamauchi, N., & Ibuki, H. (Eds.) (2005). Social capital in Japan (in Japanese). Osaka, Japan: School of International Public Policy, Osaka University.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Korea TAE-KYU PARK1, CHANG-SOON HWANG2 1 Yonsei University College of Business and Economics, Seoul, Korea 2 Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Chungnam, Korea
Introduction The brief history of Korean civil society, which was actually formed after the liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, will be first covered in this entry. It will be followed by the description of the main characteristics of various civil society organizations including definitions, boundaries, and cultural contexts of civil society in general. Some quantitative aspects of Korean civil society will also be introduced in the last section.
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History While civil society in the sense of a nonpublic sector arena is well developed in Korea, civil society in the sense of associational groups is not. Before 1945, the nonprofit sector was dependent on the government and as a result it built no indigenous capacity. Kinship-based and centralized agrarian social systems did not develop into a civil society with diversity and dynamics. After liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, a large number of social and political groups formed in a changing Korean society. They were politicized, from far right to far left. Many service-oriented religious groups and charities or enlightening institutions were also founded during this period. Korea has been increasingly influenced by nongovernmental civil organizations since liberation in 1945. The Korean experience of the nonprofit sector in the post-Liberation period can be roughly divided into three stages. The first stage encompasses the period before the early 1960s when the primary goal of the government was to maintain national security. Most nonprofit organizations in those days were service-oriented, providing welfare services or implementing development projects for the poor, and were mostly supported, if not established, by foreign aid. In this period Korea was still an agrarian society, and community and blood-based associations were popular. The realm of civil society in an agrarian society was in one’s neighbors, communities, and religious activities. Nevertheless, many political groups and social movements appeared in the changing Korean society, expanding the social sphere dramatically. They were ideologically diverse and successful in mobilizing people. After the Korean War of 1950–1953, the Korean government became repressive and undemocratic; Korean civil society subsequently had to endure a turbulent period. Consequently, the revolutionary movement broke out in April of 1960 when students and intellectuals revolted against the undemocratic state. The second stage began with the authoritarian developmental government. It lasted from the early 1960s until 1987 when the authoritarian regime fell under the Great Democratic Movement. Rapid growth of the economy resulted in the differentiation of society and the development of a middle class. In the meantime, there was a rapid growth of civil organizations. Activities of civil organizations in this period can be classified into three categories. (i) Advocacy-oriented organizations mostly involved dissident intellectuals and students who demanded a reduction in the government’s discretionary power. This movement aimed for the promotion of social justice, democracy, and human rights on behalf of the workers, peasants, and other alienated people in society. (ii) Education and service-oriented organizations had a
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nonpolitical character and played a significant role in providing public goods and social services. (iii) Quasigovernmental organizations functioned as governmental agencies. These pro-government organizations played a significant role in mobilizing people for national development or in publicizing government’s policies. In this period independent civil activities in Korea could develop only within a limited political space. Nevertheless, from the early 1980s popular support for various civic groups such as women’s groups, consumer advocacy groups, and environmental activities grew with the emergence of a middle class. Rapid industrialization and urbanization, differentiation of class structure, and the growth of the middle-class represents the preconditions for the awareness of the problems of the authoritarian regimes. Discrepancies began to prevail in almost every aspect of society: between city and country, between classes, between regions, and between sexes. Corruption was widespread in the government and among political elites. There were already popular organizations and substantial funding available when the democratic transition in 1985–1987 occurred. The third stage of the Korean nonprofit experience began with the abrupt end of the authoritarian regime in June 1987. However, the rise of people’s movements had already begun to play an important role in the mid-1980s. The dramatic rise of citizens’ and labor movements and nongovernmental organizations during the late 1980s and early 1990s was clearly due to the rapid democratization beginning in the mid-1980s. New at this stage of evolution of the Korean civil society was the emergence of increasingly effective and sophisticated civic groups led by younger generations. They emphasized progressive advocacy functions including efforts to broaden public debate and participation in the formulation of public policy, safeguard, or expand the domain of human rights, and safeguard public resources such as the environment from the pressures of economic growth. The immediate post-democratization period between the late 1980s and the early 1990s has added important new players to the old roster including the traditional leader groups such as student organizations and underground groups. They were gradually replaced by group of new civil organizations. It has been said that the decade of the 1990s in Korea was ‘‘the age of civil society.’’ This indicates several distinct evolutions within the sector. First, the Korean nonprofit sector has grown into a visible and independent entity in relation to the government and business. The Korean nonprofit sector has been understood as an institutionalized and self-generating reality capable of pressing bureaucrats, politicians, and big business. Second, the
Korean nonprofit sector has been internally differentiated significantly; this differentiation contributes to the development of the Korean nonprofit sector itself and to social and political pluralism. Finally, academic as well as journalistic interest in the nonprofit sector has been growing. Strong public awareness and support are also important developments.
Civil Society in Korea Related to civil society, there are several major terms used in Korea. These terms include: NPOs (beyoungri danche), NGOs (mingan danche), civil society organizations (simin danche), civic movement organizations (simin woondong danche), and public interest corporations (gongick bubin). They are not clearly defined and are frequently used interchangeably. The terms ‘‘NGOs’’ and ‘‘civil society organizations’’ (CSOs) are the most popular in the field of academia as well as in journalism. The term ‘‘public interest corporations’’ is commonly used only in a legal context. Although the major form of nonprofit organization is the civil associations, the sector also includes foundations and corporations. The NPO term has not been recognized well in Korea until recently since the terms NGOs and CSOs have gained much popularity among researchers and journalists. The term NPOs (beyoungri danche) is the most inclusive term that refers to all organizations that are neither governmental nor for-profit organizations. Beyoungri danche includes all NGOs, nonprofit hospitals, and educational institutions. Most culture and arts organizations, foundations, nonprofit nursing homes, research institutions, religious institutions, professional associations and interest groups are also constituents of NPOs (beyoungri danche). Now, the sector of nonprofit organizations is a distinctive entity, and the term NPOs (beyoungri danche) is used frequently in Korean society to denote all nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations and associations. The other major term used to describe nonprofit organizations in Korea is NGOs (mingan danche). In fact, NGOs is the most popular and general term to depict many kinds of private or voluntary organizations in Korea. NGOs actually cover almost all kinds of nongovernmental and nonprofit activities including the environment, women’s issues, social services, art and culture, membership-serving organizations, religion, and international cooperation. In Korea mingan danche means NGOs in a broad sense of NGOs since the term NGOs refers to all forms of associations that are nonprofit, nongovernmental, and voluntary. NGOs (mingan danche) covers civic groups,
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community organizations, social service providing institutions, environmental groups, culture, and art institutions, education, and research organizations, religious foundations and institutions, labor unions and activities, business, and professional associations, and international NGOs. South Korean NGOs usually do not include schools/universities and health/hospitals. Civil society organizations (simin danche) refer mostly to NGOs, but usually do not include foundations, business, and professional associations, social services, and art and culture organizations. Civil society organizations (simin danche) denote the more public-interest oriented NGOs. In South Korea, people assume that civil society organizations are exemplary NGOs since they are private, public-good oriented, and voluntarily managed. Particularly under the democratic government in the years after 1992, the term ‘‘civil society organization’’ (CSO) has become a social and political reality. Even though there has always been a large number of social service providing institutions and professional associations, these institutions and associations have not played an important role in promoting democratic mobilization. Civil movement organizations (simin woondong danche) refer simply to civic groups or advocacy organizations that are advocating democracy, citizens’ rights, justice, and quality of life concerns. The most distinctive characteristics of civil movement organizations (simin woondong danche) are reform-oriented and public-mobilizing civil society organizations (simin danche). These organizations are very active and influential in South Korean society. Advocacy organizations, civil rights organizations, and workers and peasants organizations are the key components of civil movement organizations. Public interest corporations (gongick bubin) usually refer to legally established nonprofit organizations. In Korea public interest corporations generally mean registered NGOs. So, the term of public interest corporations is a legal term rather than an academic or journalistic one. The most distinguishing characteristic of public interest corporations is that they are registered. Public interest corporations can also be divided into two categories based on their purposes: public-benefit organizations and nonprofit organizations whose orientation is member-serving. Public interest corporations may also be divided into incorporated foundations and incorporated associations, depending on the basis of their establishment. While most incorporated foundations belong to the public benefit category, incorporated associations can belong to either category of public interest corporations. The three dominant types of public interest corporations are educational institutions, foundations providing
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research grant or scholarships, and social welfare institutions. Religion, art, and culture, and medical corporations are three other popular types of public interest categories Public interest corporations are relatively well organized and active since they possess legal status. The Civil Code in general, and the Nonprofit Act and accompanying Decree in particular, provide the specific procedures and requirements for formal establishment of a nonprofit corporation as a legal entity. As for social capital, the term is rarely used by civil society practitioners in Korea. Only the academic circles use the term to compare the general level of trust in society, to test the role of informal networks in corporations and other organizations, or sometimes to apply the concept to life long education and other learning situations. While scholars and journalists emphasize the importance of social capital in developing Korean society from low trust society to high trust society, the term has some limitations to fully apply in everyday life.
Empirical Data The size of nonprofit sector in terms of total expenditure, except religious organizations, relative to GDP in Korea is estimated to be 3.89% in 2003. As of 2003, total employees of nonprofit sector are 585,101. The size of employment of nonprofit sector relative to nonagricultural sector and service sector is estimated to be 2.9% and 9.5% respectively. Looking at the composition of nonprofit sector in 2003, education & research still accounts for the largest proportion of the nonprofit sector, followed by health sector. Composition percentage of education & research sector has been 32.9%, while health sector has increased from 32.4%. As of 2003, the total volunteer full-time equivalent employment is 396,408. For volunteer employment, ‘‘Religion’’ becomes the first as 11.3% of the total, ‘‘Social Services’’ 21.0%, ‘‘Civic & Advocacy’’ 55.8%, ‘‘Health’’ 1.3%, ‘‘Culture & Recreation’’ 4.9%, ‘‘Education & Research’’ 5.4%, and ‘‘Professional Associations’’ 0.3%. Including both paid and volunteer FTE employment, ‘‘Education & Research’’ still becomes the first employer sector, 30.9%, then followed by ‘‘Religion’’ 23.8%, ‘‘Health’’ 19.7%, ‘‘Social Services’’ 11.8%, ‘‘Civic & Advocacy’’ 7.5%, ‘‘Culture & Recreation’’ 3.7%, and then ‘‘Professional Associations’’ 2.6%. As of 2003, there exist 18,180 nonprofit organizations of all types, including educational, health, social services, and civic & advocacy organizations. And the participation rate in social organization is 44.8%, including multiple responses. Those membership organizations, such as
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culture & recreation, civic & advocacy, religion, professional organization, have more than 16 million memberships in total. The participation rate in voluntary service is 14.6% and more than 63% of Korean people participate in charitable giving.
Concluding Assessment Since the end of the Japanese colonial period, nonprofit organizations have played an important role in Korean society. Nonprofit organizations have been acting as major providers in education, social welfare, and medical services as well as important employers in those areas. Advocacy nonprofit organizations also have contributed to political democratization and to building a new governance model of Korean society. Especially, in Korea, advocacy-oriented nonprofit organizations that have blossomed beginning in the late 1980s’ have changed the characteristics and role of Korean civil society profoundly. Those organizations have begun to participate actively in public discussions on many important social issues and sometimes offered policy alternatives to the government. They have been remarkably successful in broadening public agenda in politics and the media, and they have been pivotal in reforming the national governance structure in Korea. Civil society has had a significant impact on societal development and change in Korea. However, the activities of NPOs in Korea are constrained by insufficient personnel and financial resources. And they are sometimes blamed for opaqueness in its operation for the inadequate accountability and less transparency. Nevertheless, the capacity and opportunity of institution building of the nonprofit sector will be more concrete in Korea. It is expected that the governments in Korea will institutionalize the impact of civil society and build a good relationship between government and civil society.
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Labor Movements/Labor Unions ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Social Movements ▶ Social Trust ▶ QUANGOs
References/Further Readings Citizens’ News Paper. (2006). Korea nonprofit organization yearbook. Citizens’ News Paper. (2006). Korea nonprofit organization yearbook: 2006, Citizens’ News Paper, Seoul, Korea. (in Korean).
Hwang, C. -S., & Kim, I. (1999). The history of nonprofit organizations in Korea. Seoul, Korea: Institute of East & West Studies, Yonsei University. Jung, K. S. (1991)‘‘The historical review of private nonprofit activities in Korea,’’ Social Science Review, Institue of Social Science Research, Vol. 2, pp. 279–311, Kangnung National University, Kangnung, Kangwon-do, Korea. (in Korean). Jung, K. -S. (1991). The historical review of private nonprofit activities in Korea. Social Science Review of Kangnung University, 2. Kim, I., & Hwang, C. -S (1999). Defining the nonprofit sector. Seoul, Korea: Institute of East & West Studies, Yonsei University. Korea Nationa Statistics Office. (2006). 2005 Social indicators in Korea, Korea National Statistics Office, Seoul, Korea. (in Korean) National Statistics Office of Korea. (2006). Social indicators in Korea. Park, T. K. (2006). A study on estimation of nonprofit organizations and its economic meaning. Quarterly Bulletin, Bank of Korea. Park, T. K. (2006). ‘‘A study on estimation of nonprofit organizations and its economic meaning,’’ Quarterly National Accounts, Vol. 4, pp. 44–77, Bank of Korea, Seoul, Korea. (in Korean). Park, T. -K., Lee, H. –k., Hwang, C. –S., & Kim, I. (2005). The impact of the nonprofit sector in Asian industrial countries. Seoul, Korea: Institute of East & West Studies, Yonsei University. You, P. M. (1998). The history and social functions of non-governmental social movement organizations in recent Korea. Dongseo Yongu, 10, 77–120.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Mexico and Central America ALEJANDRO NATAL1, JORGE CADENA-ROA2 SARA GORDON RAPPOPORT2 1 El Colegio Mexiquense, Toluca, Mexico 2 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico
Introduction After independence, the countries of the region inherited a number of associations organized around the Catholic Church, who was the main provider for social needs. Therefore, Catholic values permeated social action: social care was understood as a moral duty, and philanthropy and volunteering as Christian charity. Nonetheless, the nineteenth century witnessed a number of associative forms – independent from the state and the Church in financing and decision making. These were mainly scientific, artistic, and cultural associations that emerged in most cities and even in some towns of the region. Similarly, mainly in Mexico, several associations started to promote political culture and build up public opinion. This was the case of the Patriotic Juntas dedicated to promote republican
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ideals by organizing civic festivities and honoring national heroes, therefore playing an important role in civic values socialization and the creation of national identity. In the nineteenth century, independent media became also an important channel for developing public opinion. There were intense debates on federalism and on citizenship rights, among others. In parallel, the growth of higher education institutions contributed to spreading liberal ideas. The National University and the Institutos Literarios (Centers for Higher Education) in Mexico, the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, and the University of Leon in Nicaragua became spaces where liberal ideas were shared and openly discussed. These educative centers contributed to the construction of independent states vis-a`-vis factual powers, such as the military and the Catholic Church. They paved the way to liberal governments and fostered the enactment of laws aimed at consolidating the new States. Liberals also brought a new understanding of social care, which turned private charity and moral commitment into a state duty, contributing to further differentiate the associative sector. In Mexico, liberal laws and specialized fund-raising agencies boosted social assistance and the emergence of civil society organizations (CSOs), such as second-tier grant makers, social and mutual organizations, as well as social assistance nonprofits (mainly hospitals and orphanages). Similar tendencies took place in Central America, where Liberal Reforms – undertook roughly from 1870 until the 1930s – fostered the creation of several mutuality associations. However, liberal ideas and reforms were inhibited by lack of administrative experience, political instability, and bankrupted governments. All this compounded with endemic problems, such as, a restrained access to education, widespread poverty and systemic inequality. Reforms also clashed with a culture of intolerance, privilege, hierarchical, and exclusionary values, as well as by an understanding of citizenship that marginalized the majority of the population: a culture in which elites rarely had social initiatives apart from the Catholic Church and that, thus, maintained Catholic values at the center of philanthropy. Under this state of affairs, the Church, therefore, not only kept its place as the main social care provider throughout the nineteenth century but became the core of sector, increasing her power. A dominant Church in the social arena was only one of the aspects of this strong factual power, whose values and resources were brought to the large and harsh struggle for political supremacy it had with the States of the region in the nineteenth century (particularly Mexico). A struggle that in some cases, has continued ever since in the form of distrust, competition, and even open conflict.
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In this manner Mexico and Central America entered the twentieth century. For the case of Mexico, after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the State managed to become the main actor in political affairs and economic planning. The State controlled also public action and validated the spaces and arenas for public involvement. Furthermore, the State legitimized social organization through state-sanctioned corporate organizations. Attention to social needs was subordinated to the political agenda and to groups’ loyalty to the official party; in consequence, the understanding of citizenship came to be equal to partisan membership and the exercise of voice and citizen participation in public affairs were often not tolerated. Social entrepreneurs were coopted, bribed, or even persecuted and/or imprisoned. Challenging this state of affairs and aiming at opening up participation spaces, a number of social movements (SM) appeared through the early to middle twentieth century, whose impetus brought up in the late 1960s a contracultural movement leaded by the students of the National University (UNAM). Though this movement was viciously repressed, it gave rise to a number of other different social actors, such as independent unions, feminists, environmental, and human rights movements, among others. In parallel by late 1960s Paulo Freire’s methodologies for education, the Theology of Liberation and the adoption of alternative and self-help development ideas, spread widely and informed NGOs’ work. All these factors contributed to the emergence of highly politicized organizations and forms of civic action, from urban SM to independent peasant networks, as well as a growing number of NGOs. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church continued playing a key sponsorship role to welfare associations and NGOs initiatives and kept capturing most private donations, mainly because private funding of social affairs was seen with suspicion by the state. During the last quarter of the twentieth century recurrent economic crises limited the Mexican government capacity to pay loyalty and attend client groups, diminishing its legitimacy. For CSOs, these economic crisis compounded by a rigid fiscal framework and lack of philanthropic culture, were major limitations to their growth and action. Nonetheless, the 1985s earthquakes in Mexico sprung up an unprecedented and widespread social participation and meant a turning-point for a number of social actors that realized their own collective potential and weaved new links in the social fabric. From then on, organized collective action started to have unprecedented achievements by lobbying and institutional building. Key examples of the Mexican society capacity to pressure for, proposing and even building
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institutions are the National Commission for Human Rights, the NAFTA ‘‘parallel agreements’’ on labor and environment (resulting from joint lobbying of Mexican, Canadian, and American CSOs). Most noteworthy, CS forced the government to step out from the IFE, the national agency charged of organizing and overseeing elections. These societal achievements paved the way to the arrival of the first democratically elected Mayor of Mexico City and a plural Congress in 1997 (when the official party lost the majority of seats), and finally a peaceful alternation in the Executive branch in 2000. The new administration, as expected, widened participatory mechanisms at different levels and spheres so CSOs could express their views on public policy implementation, thus opening unprecedented participation in the design, planning, and scrutiny of policies and programs. More public funding for CSOs and larger governmentCSOs collaboration followed, as did the Law for the Right to Information and a Law aimed at Fostering CSOs Activities. Private resources to finance social action also grew and contributed to create a better climate for the development of CSOs, though did not match the needs of a resource-hungry and speedily developing sector. By 2006, a major social coalition proposed an agenda for the in-coming government – the Acuerdos of Chapultepec – signed by all presidential candidates. Nevertheless, the incoming government not only neglected them but also dismantled the agency dedicated to fostering CS-state relations and radically reduced CSO funding and participation spaces. In Central America, with the exception of Costa Rica and to a certain degree of Honduras, Theology of Liberation as well as various Marxist ideas influenced SM, labor, middle class and popular organizations against the brutal military dictatorships that governed the region (Paige, 1997). In Guatemala, the guerrilla warfare (mid-1950s), and radicalization of Maya indigenous leadership linked to Marxist guerrilla (1970s) faced brutal military repression but finally attained the change of the political regime. In El Salvador, SM started as early as 1925 posing social demands to the authoritarian government. The failure of democratization efforts of the opposition coalition in the 1972 presidential election resulted in the emergence of guerrilla organizations linked to SMs who fought for labor rights and democratization. Political polarization led to civil war which lasted until the early 1990s when a Peace Treaty was signed. In Nicaragua, the student movement turned in a guerilla (late 1960s) that ended with the Somoza dictatorship. The Sandinista government, which took over, gave way to political change and democratization.
This, decades-long struggle against dictatorships and systematic violations of human rights by vested interests shaped Central America’s CS organizations and SMs. Thus, the construction of democracy became one of the main objectives of a number of organizations which have played a major role in the democratization of the region (Thomas & Armony, 2000). In Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, for instance, several organizations have networked aiming at increasing authorities’ accountability, monitoring electoral campaigns, as well as promoting participation and citizenship construction. On this line, it is remarkable the Asociacio´n Latinoamericana de Organizaciones de Promocio´n, an example of how regional networks can successfully fight powerfull vested interests. The arrival of democratic governments, the opening of participation in public affairs, and the support of international financing, have contributed to an increasing differentiation of civil society in CA. Nonetheless, a large dependence on foreign donors has significantly shaped the agenda of organizations in the region, though some local agendas have somehow emerged. In Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, for instance, the local private sector has started to sponsor social and political local projects on issues like environment, violence, development, women empowerment, and disaster relief. More recently, trade issues have also raised special attention. NGOs and grassroots organizations in Central America have proposed ideological and market alternatives to neoliberalism (Hale, 1994). Likewise, several NGO have participated in Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiations, stimulated by international organizations such as International Development Bank (IDB). This has contributed to foster collective action diversification and to attenuate social polarization, slowly configuring new organizational paths. One interesting outcome of this process is the number of local organizations dedicated to attend gender issues, like Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres and Pro-Mujer, which deal mainly with women involvement in community development, violence, and women empowerment. The environment has also become an issue of attention and a number of conservation and lobbying organizations have been formed, like the Fundacio´n Defensores de la Naturaleza in Guatemala. This evolution of the associative sector has been analyzed in the region around three main different concepts: Civil Society (CS), Social Movements (SMs) (which for reasons of space we will discuss in the same section) and Social Capital (SC). Though these approaches are not incompatible, each considers different elements as central for the sector and therefore focuses on distinct types of
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actors and organizational forms. These approaches rarely debate among themselves.
Civil Society Civil Society in the region is generally understood in relation to political society and citizens-rulers relations within a theory of democracy, and therefore, debates have been dominated by political scientists. The main issues discussed are: the study of the relations between CS and the state (Olvera Rivera, 2003); CS contribution to Mexico’s democratization (Cadena-Roa, 2003); the creation of institutions and SMs reactions to public policies. In Mexico, research on CS has been organized around two main traditions. One marshaled by Manuel Canto, which develops issues like participation, civic organizations and its relationships to public policy (Canto Chac, 1998). A second one is leaded by Alberto Olvera, who, building on Habermas and Cohen and Arato, sees CS as a self-limited sphere, differentiated of the market and the State, seeking to influence the public sphere by bringing up alternative solutions to problems derived from power and the need of adding plurality to society. Besides these two lines of thought, in Mexico, there have been also studies on the number of CSOs (Verduzco Igartu´a, 2003) and their legal framework, the networks they have built, their relations with political parties, their use of technology, their experiences at the local level, and their international links (see Cadena-Roa, 2004). In Central America, the fight against dictatorship and/ or civil war has produced research concerned with: how societal actors build relations with the state, as well as with the military and paramilitary forces. Thus, conventional wisdom in CA understands the concept of CS in Gramsci’s terms; and though most authors acknowledge that there is a distinction between CS and political society, they are concerned with how to build up CS hegemonic project in a context of social movement organizations’ fragmentation. This is specially the case for Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Authors are also interested with the limited influence some organizations and SMs exert in public policies and elections monitoring, mainly in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. Others are interested with the growth, diversity, and fragmentation of organizations in the region (Monge Granados, 1999). Social Movements are in the region a significant part of CS, and even as a promoter of the rights that allow its development and strengthening. The difference is that SMs use noninstitutional channels to raise their demands, while the rest of CSOs use more often institutional or noncontentious means. Therefore, SM concept is concerned with noninstitutional forms of political participation used by
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powerless and poor people groups when the institutional political participation forms (such as parties, elections, and bodies of political representation) are closed to their demands. In Mexico, the study of SMs became a booming industry. It encompasses a large body of literature focusing on particular cases, seeking to describe relations, processes, and outcomes, such as labor movement history and studies of several fields of collective action on the assumption that they were expressions of CS. The study of urban movements became particularly salient because they were multiclass – labor and recently migrated peasants – and had a significant political potential; they were also seen as the modern expression of traditional movements controlled by the State. In Mexico, SMs research has put special attention on domestic agents’ role on social change in relation with state institutions, and explored the relations among structures, social actors and the perspectives of democracy building (Gonza´lez Casanova 1979 [1965]). Research encompasses pre-1968 movements, as well as the 1968 movement itself; its impact on the country’s polity, its consequences on the democratization process and on transition to democracy (Cadena-Roa, 2003). In Central America years of political struggle and polarization has also produced studies on SMs that have been linked to actors in conflict, either from the left or right. Departing from the concept of CS, other research trend analyzes NGO and SMs’ ideological orientations. There are also a number of scholars interested in the role of CSOs of Central America peace processes, poverty reduction and political consensus building, mainly in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (Castellanos Ponciano, 1996). More recently, there have also been studies analyzing the relations among Central American CSOs and international agencies and the impact of foreign aid organizations (Ortega Carpio & Luz, 1994). More recently, research on SM in the region is guided by specific questions seeking to test and develop theory, such as: the relationship between movements and rights; the influence of political opportunities in grassroots electoral participation, or the impact of SMs on public services planning. Contemporarily, four main forces impinge on the rise of SMs in Mexico and Central America and its study: struggles for recognition; anti neoliberal movements; seizing opportunities opened by democratization; international networks of advocacy and support. Many SMs seek recognition based on specific identities such as indigenous peoples, women, and indigenous women. The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, created a whole body of literature (Ruiz & Lorena, 2005). Research on anti neoliberal movements analyzes
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how economic global pressures impacting poor population livelihood translate into protests, as well as resistance against neoliberal policies constraining access to social rights, from which international agencies and local governments are the parts to blame. SMs role on promoting transition to democracy in Central America, has also been studied. Recent approaches point research questions on SMs collective action in the frame of a more open polity that protects civil and political rights, independent political parties, competitive elections and the opening of new channels between institutional and noninstitutional politics. Finally, SM studies in Mexico and Central America analyze the impact on local collective action of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and advocacy networks, as well as the spreading of global communications in a context of international treaties protecting rights and putting under scrutiny local authorities. Those studies recognize new and significant players at global level on topics such as labor, farmers, and farm workers, trade advocacy, immigrants, human rights, and environmental protection.
Social Capital SC in the region is understood as sum of relations among people that facilitate coordination, resource mobilization, and economic development. It emphasizes civic virtues and values such as trust, reciprocity, and commitment. In the region there were several works on the matter since the late 1980s (Durston, 2000), but it was the publication of Putnams’ Making Democracy Work which became most influential (Gordon, 2006; Milla´n & Gordon, 2004). Some authors acknowledge the Third Sector as a concept that identifies a number of actors that the orthodox understanding of CS does not apprehend. Other authors study CSO involvement in development, recognizing that it is an economic, social, and political process, and that associative experiences can produce alternative solutions to those proposed by the State and the Market. Within this understanding authors analyze community actors and their networks; institutional arrangements as reciprocity and norms; and cooperative processes. They understand that associative forms act against State failures and power abuse, and that civic action helps solving complex problems such as poverty. This perspective has brought up to light several organizations previously neglected by researchers and policy planners in Mexico, like rural community based organizations, community foundations (Natal, 2007), microcredit (Conde, 2000) and assistance organizations (Guadarrama Sa´nchez, 2008), among others. The SC perspective does not carry a specific political program, but expects an incremental civil influence of societal
actors on Market and State affairs. Other group of new studies include topics like social organizations NGOs (Me´ndez, 1998); organizations participation in global affairs such as international trade (Natal & Gonza´lez, 2002). Likewise, some scholars have increasingly acknowledged the complexity of associational forms in different areas of social life and have developed research on associational performance (Espinosa & Christina, 2008). Though SC studies in Central America are beginning to develop, at least three mainstreams of analysis can be identified: one influenced by Coleman (Cruz, 2001); another related to Putnam’s civic engagement view; and a third informed by Durston’s understanding of community cooperation (Durston, 2000). Often, SC is conceived as the quantity and quality of grassroots organizations and researchers also inquire about NGO’s positive or negative impact on SC (Miranda Abaunza, 2003). Other explored topics are, SC relation to violence in urban poor settings and to democracy building in an environment of repression; impact of agriculture programs in Nicaragua and Costa Rica on SC; poverty and violence in Guatemala; and citizen participation and electoral processes in Honduras. In parallel to academic work, there is a large grey literature produced by a number of NGOs as in-house research. The Mexican Centre of Philanthropy (CEMEFI), using a definition of Third Sector that makes little differentiation between societal actors and their processes within democracy or development theory, has published research on volunteering, philanthropy, and corporate social responsibility. Similarly, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, organizations have produced interesting research closely related to donors’ interests. Main topics discussed are: local democracy, environment, violence, development, women empowerment and disaster aid.
Empirical Data For the case of Mexico, Calvillo and Favela (Calvillo & Favela, 2004) identified 8,618 CSOs in 1998 and 10,805 in 2000, a 25.4% increase in the period. Of them, 1.7% were created before 1940, while 25.5% were created in the 1980s and 52.3% in the 1990s. These figures indicate that every year new CSOs are formed and that some of them are dissolved or enter into latency, while a reduced number endure through long periods. A 36% of these CSOs lacked any legal registration and 53% legally registered as asociaciones civiles. Most Mexican CSOs (73%) promote welfare and development. There are other data basis with similar numbers, like CEMEFI with 10,485 OSCs registered (http://cemefi.org/directorio/buscasl.php [access: 12/ FEB/09] and the National Registrer of CSOs with 8,785
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(http://201.155.34.177/buscadorOSC1/index.aspx [access: 12/FEB/09]). For Mexico there is also the very controversial study by Salamon and associates’ (Salamon et al., 1999), which most unexpected finding is that the Mexican Nonprofit sector (NPA) represents the smallest one in Latin America, smaller even than Haiti’s. For these authors, the Mexican NPS had a share of total paid employment in 1995 of 0.4%, (while the 22 country average was 4.8% and the Latin American of 2.2%); volunteer time 0.7% (Latin American average of 3.0%). They report the strong Catholic Church influence through charitable service entities (hospitals and schools). They also stress that, relative to funding, Mexico’s NPS is a fee-dominant country (85% of the NPS revenue). However, this study underestimates the size and importance of the Mexican NPS, and of its volunteering, since a number of activities developed in the social economy were not accounted for and a large number of organizations were not acknowledged because they could not be captured by the study’s conceptual framework. All the studies on Mexican CSOs, have in common that they fail to capture those small, informal, and resource constrained organizations that do not need/want to have legal registration but still develop activities in favour of third parties. The 2006 LAPOP survey includes an indicator of interpersonal trust for several Latin American countries. The survey reports that in Mexico a fifth of the population expresses that people within their community are very trustworthy, while almost 50% think they are relatively trustworthy; one quarter thinks they are little and 10% think people aren’t trustworthy. In comparison with Central American countries, Mexico has larger levels of trust than Panama, but similar to those of Nicaragua and Guatemala; and less than El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica (see Ricardo et al., 2007). The LAPOP 2006 reports an increase in the participation in religious organizations and a decrease in the participation in Unions (LAPOP, 2006). For Central America, Booth and Bayer (1998), analyzed public opinion surveys conducted in the early 1990s to explore the links between the formation of political and social capital and levels of democracy existing in the region. Employing multiple regression techniques they studied items like political participation, political attitudes, values, and democratic values, they found that CS activism raise respondents’ levels of social and political capital. This study reports that formal group activism contributes significantly and positively to political information (beta=0.253) and interpersonal trust (beta=0.054); while communal level activism contributes negatively to political information
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(0.097), but positively to interpersonal trust (0.059). The authors also found that the power of civil society activism for political information levels is very strong (R2 of 0.25), while it accounts very little for interpersonal trust (less than 1%). They report that political repression, destroys both, social capital (information and trust) and political capital (democratic norms, voting, contacting, and campaigning), what may indicate that political context is determinant in the shaping of civil society and in the formation of social and political capital. Most notably, authors also report that GDP per capita does not correlate positively with social and political capital. In terms of trust, the LAPOP for El Salvador shows that 35.1%, have much trust in their community, the 28.3% relative, 25.8% some and the 10.8% none. El Salvador has more than the average of the region, and LAPOP states that it is among the countries with larger trust.
Concluding Assessment The hallmark of Mexican CS during the twentieth century was its quest for democracy and its long struggle against corporatism, cooptation, patronage, corruption and authoritarianism. Now-a-days the sector is growing, strengthening, and diversifying itself. However, there are still many challenges, chiefly, the creation of trust as a main component of social capital, the increase in citizens’ participation, the overcoming of an elite culture of Catholic philanthropy and popular expectations that the State could and should solve all kinds of problems with no need of nongovernmental public action. Similarly, Central American CS has systematically faced violence and human rights abuses but still contributed significantly to the transition to democracy in the region. Some of the challenges to be faced in the region are mainly, an increase in citizens’ participation, more CSOs diversification, a larger interaction with citizens, the construction of local agendas, and the reduction of social and ideological polarization.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci ▶ Civil Society in Post-Conflict Scenarios ▶ Centro Mexicano para la Filantropia, AC (CEMEFI) ▶ Freire, Paulo ▶ Mutual Organizations/Mutual Societies ▶ Peasant and Farmers’ Organizations ▶ Social Economy ▶ Social Movements
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References/Further Readings Booth, J., & Bayer, P. (1998, August). Civil society, political capital, and democratization in Central America. The Journal of Politics, 60(3), 780–800. Cadena-Roa, J. (2003). State pacts, elites, and social movements in Mexico’s transition to democracy. In J. A. Goldstone (Ed.), States, parties, and social movements (pp. 107–143 ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cadena-Roa, J. (Ed.). (2004). Las organizaciones civiles mexicanas hoy. Me´xico: UNAM. Calvillo, M., & Favela, A. (2004). Dimensiones cuantitativas de las organizaciones civiles en Me´xico. In J. Cadena-Roa (Eds.), Las organizaciones civiles mexicanas hoy (pp. 73–120). Me´xico: UNAM. Canto Chac, M. (1998). De lo cı´vico a lo pu´blico. Una discusio´n de las organizaciones civiles. Me´xico: REMISOC-CAM. Carpio, O., & Luz, M. (1994). Las ONGD y la crisis del desarrollo. Un ana´lisis de la cooperacio´n con Centroame´rica: IEPALA. Castellanos Ponciano, K. (1996). El rol de la sociedad civil en los procesos de paz de Guatemala y El Salvador: procesos de negociacio´n comparados. Guatemala: INCEP. Conde, C. (2000). ONGs y combate a la pobreza. Proyectos financieros Internacionales para pobres. In Cuadernos de Discusio´n sobre el Tercer Sector. Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios del Tercer Sector. El Colegio Mexiquense. Me´xico. Cruz, Jose´ Miguel. (2001). Pandillas y capital social. Estudios Centroamericanos, 56, 637–638. Durston, J. (2000). Que´ es el capital social comunitario? Santiago: CEPAL. Cristina, P. E., & Luna, M. (2008). Accio´n colectiva y organizacio´n: estudios sobre desempen˜o asociativo. Me´xico: UNAM. Gonza´lez Casanova, P. (1979 [1965]). La democracia en Me´xico. Me´xico: Era. Gordon, S. (2006). Confianza, reciprocidad y asociatividad: Relacio´n indispensable para el desempen˜o institucional? Estudios Sociolo´gicos, El Colegio de Me´xico, 24(71). Guadarrama Sa´nchez, G. (2008). Tiempo, circunstancia y particularidades de la asistencia privada en el estado de Me´xico. Me´xico: El Colegio Mexiquense. Hale, C. (1994). Resistance and contradiction. Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Me´ndez, J. L. (1998). Organizaciones civiles y polı´ticas pu´blicas en Me´xico y Centroame´rica. Me´xico: MAP. Milla´n, R., & Gordon, S. (2004). Capital social: una lectura de tres perspectivas cla´sicas. Revista Mexicana de Sociologı´a, 64(4), 711–747. Miranda Abaunza, B. (2003). Capital social, institucionalidad y territorios. El caso de Centroame´rica. Nicaragua y Costa Rica: ICCA. Monge Granados, H. (1999). Centroame´rica: la sociedad civil, protagonista del proceso de integracio´n. Costa Rica: ALOP-CECADE. Natal, A. (2007). Instituciones privadas para fines pu´blicos. Me´xico: CEMEFI-SYNERGOS. Natal, A., & Gonza´lez, T. (2002). La participacio´n de la sociedad civil en los procesos de integracio´n comercial: el caso del ALCA en Me´xico. In Cuadernos de discusio´n sobre el terceer sector, 18. El Colegio Mexiquense. Olvera Rivera, A. (2003). Sociedad civil, esfera pu´blica y democratizacio´n en Ame´rica Latina: Me´xico. Me´xico: FCE. Paige, J. (1997). Coffee and power. Revolution and the rise of democracy in central America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ricardo, C., Cruz, J. M., Seligson, M. A. (2007). Cultura Polı´tica de la Democracia en El Salvador, Data, University of Vanderbilt. USAID. Ruiz, P., & Lorena, M. (2005). Todos somos zapatistas! Alianzas y rupturas entre el EZLN y las organizaciones indı´genas de Me´xico. Me´xico: INAH.
Saiz, R., & Manuel, J. (1987). El movimiento urbano popular en Me´xico. Me´xico: Siglo XXI. Salamon, L. M., Anheier, H., List, R., Toepler, S., Woljciech Sokolowski, S., & Associates (1999). Global civil society. Dimensions of the nonprofit sector. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. Verduzco Igartu´a, G. (2003). Organizaciones no lucrativas: visio´n de su trayectoria en Me´xico. Me´xico: COLMEX-CEMEFI.
Civil Society and Social Capital in North Africa ANDREA LIVERANI London School of Economics, London, UK
Introduction Forms of civic and community organization have existed in North Africa for centuries, especially around ideas of mutual self help (Touiza), charitable giving and community organization such as corporations, religious brotherhoods (turuq); religious lodges zawaˆyaˆ and village assemblies (jama‘aˆt). Contemporary forms of associationalism developed within the contours of modern state forms, especially during the colonial period. In Egypt, modern charity associations and mutual aid societies started appearing in the middle of the nineteenth century (LaTowsky, 1997). Similarly, colonial Algeria was characterized by a large associative sector spurred by the enactment of the 1901 law on freedom of association (Carlier, 1995: 43–65). This entry explores some of the main features of North African civil society. The investigation of the concept of social capital is only touched upon here because of the scant research to draw upon. Although the experience of each country is different, the entry focuses on similar trends and features, giving particular emphasis on the key issues. (a) Without attempting to be exhaustive, it delves into some of the distinguishing features but also on the uncertain character of civil society and social capital in North Africa and attempts to define the quantitative extent of these concepts in practice; (b) sums up the literature exploring its import for social and political dynamics in the region; (c) explores key issues and avenues for future research.
Civil Society and Social Capital The connotation of Social Capital and Civil Society varies across and within North African countries. The colonial legacy is an important driver of such differentiation, as
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the second language spoken in the country is often the one through which notions of civil society and social capital penetrate social research and political debate (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999). In Egypt, civil society is normally intended in its Anglo-Saxon meaning, i.e., the space between state, family, and market normally occupied by traditional life (Ibrahim, 1988). In Francophone countries, this meaning is sometimes blurred with references to notables or intellectuals, or more generally the elite not directly associated with the visible power structure. Increasingly, civil society is used as a catch all phrase referring to organized social life structured around associations, and particularly nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Particularly in the Maghreb, the ‘‘associative movement’’ or ‘‘associational life’’ are terms used interchangeably with ‘‘civil society.’’ In the Maghreb notions of social capital are less widespread and limited to social science research. In common language, the phrase ‘‘social capital’’ is affected by a degree of ambiguity in that its literal translation into French – ‘‘capital social ’’ means ‘‘registered capital’’ of private companies. It is worth noting here that Pierre Bourdieu – one of the leading French anthropologists, developed his notion of social capital based on his work in Algeria (Addi, 2004). As imported notions, the application of civil society and social capital to the NA context needs to pay due attention to the Western biases and assumptions which they come with. Research on how these notions are actually perceived and applied in different countries in the region and by different strata and groups is needed.
Empirical Data Conceiving civil society as an associative realm allows for the quantification of its scope. Over the last 2 decades the number of associations in North Africa countries has increased exponentially. Considering that freedom of association was granted only in 1989, Algeria’s associative growth has been striking. Officially registered associations grew from a few thousands at the end of the 1990s to over
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70,000 in 2006 (Derras, 2008). The associative sector is larger than in other comparable countries which show equivalent or even larger populations, legal systems allowing comparable degrees of associative freedom, and longer histories of associational life (Marzouk, 1997: 196; Ben Nefissa, 1997; Denoeux and Gateau, 1995). In Tunisia, up to 10,000 NGOs officially exist. According to the Egyptian Government, in 2006, the number of NGOs in Egypt hit 23,000 (GOE, 2007). As to Morocco estimates clam that by 2006 there were over 30,000 NGOs across the country (Ennaji, 2006) (Fig. 1). Yet, these figures mask a complex reality. Despite the large number of officially registered NGOs, very few are actually active. In Egypt less than half of all organizations are said to be active (AbdelRahman, 2004: 121), and the same is the case for Tunisia (Civicus, 2007), and Algeria (Liverani, 2008). Moreover, active associations often revolve around a limited number of people. In Egypt for instance, only a small minority of citizens (3.5%) claims to be active in CSOs, although volunteering is more common 6.4% (Civicus, 2007: 116). Research on Algeria shows that associations tend to be family centered and revolve around a close-knit group of individuals (UNDP, 1998; Derras, 1999; Liverani, 2008). These qualifications also help quantifying the extent of social capital in the region. Since the work of Robert Putnam, civic associations have been considered as a site where trust is built, stored and spread. The vibrancy of associational life represents a proxy for the presence of networks of horizontal cooperation, norms of reciprocity and society’s endowments of social capital (Lewis, 2002: 571). Hofstede provides a rating of Arab countries according to cultural measures including societal trust measures (1991: 53, 68, 84, 113). Indicators of associationalism such as the width of associations’ membership or the number of associations per capita are taken to measure levels of social capital within a country and thus indicate a proxy for its future developmental trajectory (Putnam, 1993; Mishler & Rose, 1997; Rose, 1998). Yet, research
Civil Society and Social Capital in North Africa. Fig. 1 Growth of registered local associations in Algeria 1989–2005. Sources: Liverani (2009)
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on North Africa only partially confirms this. In Algeria for instance, widespread instances of scissions due to internal strife within associations lead to their residual existence around individuals rather than groups. This calls for investigating whether – rather than a site of social capital formation – the forms and evolution of the associative sphere can be interpreted as a symptom of a breaking down of social trust and a reliance on traditional forms of social ties, primarily the family (Liverani, 2008). The quantification of the associative phenomenon in North Africa remains an important empirical gap in the literature.
Africa. First, in all North African countries, Islamic charities represent the largest associative sector by far. Second, the analytical distinction between religious and secular civil society organizations becomes increasingly blurred on the ground. There is no clear-cut boundary consistently demarcating Muslim from secular organizations. Third, as Singerman points out: ‘‘The organizational structures, repertoires of contention, collective identity, and so forth of Islamic movements are similar to those of other movements throughout the world’’ (in Wiktorowicz, 2004: 143). Fourth, the analysis of Islamic charities in North Africa is still limited (Benthall & Bellion, 2003; Harrigan, 2009).
Civil Society and Islam
The interrelationship between Islam and ‘‘civil society’’ is a central theme in the literature. Gellner (1994) argued that Islam is structurally and normatively incompatible to civil society, because of its tendency to deny autonomy to the individual and impede society’s differentiation. The argument has been questioned and/or qualified by a number of authors (Zubaida, 1995; Ayubi, 1995, Herbert, Goldberg, 1991; Hanafi, 2002). Harrigan (2009) provides a comprehensive discussion of social capital in Islam. The influence of religion on the development of civil society in the region also shaped Western research less explicitly. Turner (1984) shows that the interplay of civil society and Islam has provided a central hinge for Orientalist comparisons of West and East, including the works of Marx and Weber. In general, two kinds of normative biases can be detected in the literature. Models of civil society applied to the region often exclude religious associations, either explicitly or implicitly, thereby assuming secularism and individualism as defining traits of ‘‘civil society’’ (Carapico, 2007). The second is a tendency to treat the spread of Islamic associations as product of marginalization, poverty and exclusion, ‘‘as a compensatory reaction to structural changes rather than a potential force for change in itself ’’ (Sparre & Petersen, 2007: 16). Another research avenue concerns the role of charities in the rise of political Islam. In Algeria, the FIS built its electoral strength on a vast network of Islamic charities born out of Mosque building societies (Boukra, 2002). In Egypt, Islamic NGOs provide the space through which the Muslim Brothers can put pressure on the state (Leiken & Brooke, 2007). Because of the role they play in relaying political opposition, Islamic CSOs are tolerated – and strictly controlled – by the North African state. Four general statements can be made in relation to the interplay between religion and civil society in North
Civil Society and Economic Liberalization
The role of economic liberalization in spurring the growth of civil society and the spread of social capital is another important, although less studied, research issue. Economic liberalization programs have been a feature of all North African countries, except Libya. State retrenchment under liberalization has contributed to opening up spaces for civic actors to provide welfare provision, particularly on health and education. In Tunisia state welfare provision actually increased under liberalization, while in Egypt and Algeria increased poverty and a decline in the quality of state welfare provision under liberalization programs led to a large increase in welfare activities carried out by civic organizations. Far from happening purely by default, this process was partly encouraged by North African governments. In Algeria for instance, freedom of association was granted through two laws (1987 and 1989) at a time when the state was clearly disengaging itself from social service provision (Babadji, 1989). Faith-based charities have been most prominent in filling the vacuum left by the retreating North African state (Harrigan, 2009). Building on a long tradition of responsibility towards the needy (Habib, 1990) In Egypt, Islamic, but also Coptic societies became key in ensuring welfare provision (Sullivan, 1994, 1997). The collapse of oil and gas revenues in the 1980s and the prolonged fiscal crisis of the 1990s reproduced the same dynamics in Algeria. But throughout the region, certain segments of the associative sector also provided a countervailing force to governments’ liberalizations policies. In Morocco, during the period of economic reform, both trade unions and civic groups mobilized several national strikes and demonstrations (Ennaji, 2006). Tunisia was the only country which managed to avoid the collapse of social services during economic reform, and therefore limit the role of civic organizations in this area. Based on the role
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of liberalization and welfare provision retrenchment in spurring an increase in civic activity, Harrigan (2009) hypothesizes a positive correlation with increases in social capital. Research on trust within associations in Algeria questions this type of conclusions (Liverani, 2008: 47–68). The Social Bases of Civil Society
One of the ideas underlying neoliberal portrayals of civil society is that its growth is driven by emerging and increasingly assertive social groupings engaged in a struggle with the state to maintain or reshape the contours of the publicprivate divide (Gill, 2002; Norton, 1996). The scant evidence on the social bases of associational life in North Africa questions this view. Although in its initial stages associative growth revolved around the liberal professions (lawyers, engineers, academics) in all countries its quantitative development has inevitably led to an expansion of associational life to broad sectors of the population. Particularly prominent are public sector employees. Research on Morocco (Denoeux and Gateau, 1995: 19) Egypt (BenNefissa, 2000) and Algeria (Derras, 1998, 2007) shows that the public sector employees (including doctors and teachers) provide the main human capital behind associational life. Given the relative size of the public sector in these countries, this is not surprising. Other explanatory factors for the prevalence of public sector workers within associative sphere include (a) the need to compensate for the relative fall of status and living standards due to state downsizing, and (b) a de facto intersection between bureaucracy and associative sphere fostered by the legal and administrative constraints on associative activities. Throughout North Africa, civil society remains a predominantly urban phenomenon: 80% of Egyptian associations for instance are found in urban areas (CIVICUS, 2006: 29). Civil Society and Gender Inclusion
The role of civic associations in furthering women’s rights has provided an important theme in western research. As other parts of the associative sectors of North African countries, the women movement generally finds its roots during colonial time. In Tunisia for instance, early forms of organized women’s engagement in the public sphere go back to the 1920s (Arfaoui, 2005). Algerian women played a key role in the 1954 revolution (Smail Salhi, 2005). The civic sector has undoubtedly opened a space for women’s public participation, sometimes leading to substantial successes regarding women’s rights. In
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Morocco, for instance, the women’s movement was instrumental in the reform of the legal code (Mudawana) and in securing quotas in elected positions. In Algeria, where the women’s movement battled against an equally repressive Family Law, progress has been more limited. The drivers and outcomes of the women civic movement remain an important object of future research. Civil Society and Democracy
By far the main object of the focus on civil society in North Africa has concerned its relation to democratization. Throughout the 1990s, the regional rise of voluntary associations fuelled a vast literature applying Tocquevillian notions of associationalism. This literature is characterized by a blurring of analytical and normatively charged objectives. Associational life is both used (a) as a conceptual device to investigate state-society relations, and (b) as a precondition of democracy. It is in this dual capacity – epistemological and normative – that the focus on civil society has gradually shifted from the role played by voluntary organizations and grassroots groups in the demise of authoritarian regimes in Latin America (O’Donnel & Schmitter, 1986) and Eastern Europe (Keane, 1988) to the democratization processes in Africa (Bratton, 1989; Chazan, 1992) and then the Middle East and North Africa (Hudson, 1991; Bellin, 2004; Norton, 1993, 1995; Schwendler, 1995; Marzouk, 1996). The remarkable rise of associational life in Algeria was no exception to this rule. With Algeria being perceived as an exemplary case of failed democratization and reversal into repressive authoritarianism (Entelis, 1994; Zoubir, 1995; Djebaili, 1996; Norton, 1995: 114; Zoubir, 1999), observers of Algerian politics saluted the associative sector’s rapid expansion as an encouraging sign of the country’s democratic prospects. The authoritarian state on the other hand was singled out as the main obstacle to its consolidation (Layachi, 1995). Although the ‘‘civil society in democracy perspective’’ remains the dominant paradigm for understanding the emergence of the associative sphere in the North Africa, the idea of a positive, universal connection between associational life and democracy has been questioned from various angles, both in general (Armony, 2004) and with specific reference to the North Africa and more generally the Middle East (Yom, 2005). Much of the focus is on the state’s attempt to control the development of associations, either through funding, legal and administrative rules as well as other means. The North African state is an active funder of associational life. In Egypt, 35% NGOs receive some funding from the Ministry of Social Affairs.
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In Algeria, specific budget lines are allocated to financing associations, and public funds from central and local governments constitute the main income of associations. In Morocco, specific funds have been created to finance associations, such as the Hassan II Fund, the Compensation Fund, and the Mohammed V Fund. In most countries, regulations attempt to closely monitor the activities of associations. In both Algeria and Egypt, the main laws regulating the associative sector (Law 32 of 1964 in Egypt and law Law 31 of 1990 for Algeria) give the government sweeping powers to recognize associations, limit their activities particularly in relation to fundraising, and disband them (Liverani, 2008). The North African state also directly engages in the creation of civil society organizations – in Morocco, where the Monarchy has actively established prominent NGOs (Denouex & Gateau, 1995) such as the associations such as the Fes-Saiss Association, Association du Grand Atlas and Association Oujda-Angad. An opposing and interesting view casts the inability of North African civil society to bring democracy as not due to its weakness, but to its strength. Democracy is not occurring in the region precisely because civil society is too vibrant and intransigent, particularly in its Islamist component, for the state to engage in a pacted transition (see Volpi, 2004). The growth of associational life in North Africa might not necessarily mean the development of civil society as understood by Western political theory, and indeed it might not lead to ‘‘democracy.’’ This realization is spurring new empirical investigations of the character of North Africa’s liberalized autocracies (Brumberg, 2003). The contribution of this literature to a better understanding of the political role of the associative sector in North African political development is still in its infancy. Veering away from a focus on the effect of civil society on the form of government (i.e., democracy vs. autocracy) to its impact on the form of state (welfarist, nationalist, security-oriented), and more importantly on the continuing process of state building that countries like Algeria are still going through, can provide important avenues for future research.
Concluding Assessment The application of the twin concepts of social capital and civil society to the region is however recent, and has gained currency in both academic enquiry and political discourse since the late 1980s. Imported directly from western political theory, the notion of civil society has taken root as a methodological tool to investigate the dynamics of social
and political change, as well as well as a normative domain where varying view of political and social development play out. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco have all provided case studies and evidence. Data and research for Libya are more limited. The application of the notion of Social Capital to North African context is on the other hand scarce. As in relation to other regions, democratization has provided the main theoretical framework for investigating these notions. The interplay of religion and civil society has provided another key perspective.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in the Middle East ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gellner ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Freedom of Association ▶ GONGOs ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations ▶ Mosques ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Social Movements ▶ Social Trust
References/Further Readings AbdelRahman, M. (2004). Civil society exposed: The politics of NGOs in Egypt. Cairo, Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press. Addi, L. (2004). Pierre Bourdieu revisite´. La notion de capital social In L’anthopologie du Maghreb selon Berque, Bourdieu, Geertz, et Gellner. Paris: Awal Ibis Press. Arfaoui, K. (2005). The development of the Feminist Movement in Tunisia: 1920s–2000s. Sixth Annual Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting Florence. Ayoubi, N. (Ed.) (1995). Rethinking the public/private dichotomy: Radical Islam and civil society in the Middle East. Contention, 4(3), 79–105. Babadji. (1989). Le phe´nome`ne associatif en Alge´rie: Gene`se et perspectives. Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, XXVIII, 229–260. Ben Ne´fissa, S. (2000). NGOs, Governance and Development in the Arab World: Discussion Paper. Management of Social Transformations (MOST-UNESCO), 46, 1–32. Boukra, L. (2002). Alge´rie, La Terreur Sacre´e Algiers: Favre. Carapico, S. (2007). Muslim NGOs: Sleeping with the devil? ISIM Review, 20. Carlier, O. (1995). Entre nationa et Jihad. Histoire Social des Radicalismes Alge´riens. Paris: PFSP, 43–65. Cavatorta, F. (2006). Civil society, Islamism and democratisation: the case of Morocco. Journal of Modern African Studies, 44(2), 203–222. Civicus. (2007). Global Survey of the state of civil society (Vol. 1). Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Comaroff & Comaroff. (1999). Civil Society and the political imagination in Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Russia Denoeux, G & Et Gateau, L. (1995) L’essor des associations au Maroc: a´ la recherche de la citoyennete´’ Monde Arabe n 150. Derras, O. (1999). ‘Le fait associatif en Alge´rie. Le cas d’Oran’ in Insanyat n.8 Mai-Aout. Ennaji, M. (2006). Socialpolicy in Morocco: History, politics and social development, Chapter 4. In M. Karshenas, & V. Moghadam (Eds.), Social policy in the Middle East: Economic, political, and gender dynamics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferrie´, J. N. (2003). Les Limites d’une Democratisation par la societe civile en Afrique du Nord CEDEJ (MAE/CNRS, Le Caire) Gellner, Goldberg, E. (1991). Smashing idols and the state: The protestant ethic and Egyptian Sunni radicalism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33, 3–4. Government of Egypt. (2007). State Information Service Yearbook Cairo. Habib, R. (1990). Religious protest and class struggle in Egypt. Egypt: Dar Sinai. Hanafi, H. (2002). Alternative conceptions of civil society: A reflective Islamic approach. In S. Chambers & W. Kymlicka (Eds.), Alternative conceptions of civil society (pp. 171–189). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harrigan, J., & El-Said, H. (2008). Economic liberalisation, social capital and Islamic welfare provision. Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac Millan. Herbert, D. (2000). Faith, trust and civil society. In F. Tonkiss, A. Passey, N. Fenton, & L. C. Hems (Eds.), Trust and civil society. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ibrahim, S. E. (1998). The troubled triange: Populism, Islam and civil society in the Arab World. International Political Science Review, 19(4), 373–385. LaTowsky, R. J. (1997). Egypt’s NGO sector: A briefing paper. Education for Development Occasional Paper Series, 1(4), 1–22. Layachi, A. (1999). State, society, and democracy in Morocco: The limits of associative life. Review – book reviews. Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ). Leiken, R. S., & Brooke, S. (2007, March–April). The moderate Muslim brotherhood. Foreign Affairs. Marzouk, M. (1997). ‘The Associative Phenomenon in the Arab World: engine of democratisation or witness to the crisis?’ in Hulme, D. and Edwards, M. NGOs, States and Donors: too close for comfort? New York: St. Martin. Sadowski, Y. (1993, July–Aug). The new orientalism and the democracy debate. Middle East report, 14–21. Singerman, D. (1997). Avenues of participation: Family, politics and networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo. Cairo, Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press. Smail Salhi, Z. (2005). Claiming their space on Earth: Algerian women’s struggle to conquer the public sphere during colonial times. Sixth Annual Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, Florence 2005. Sparre, S. L., & Petersen, M. J. (2007). Islam and civil society case studies from Jordan and Egypt. DIIS Report 2007:13, October 2007, p. 116. Sullivan, D. (1994). Private voluntary organisations in Egypt: Islamic development, private initiative and state control. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Sullivan, D., & Abed-Kotob, S. (1999). Islam in contemporary Egypt: Civil society vs the State. London: Lynne Rienner. Turner, B. (1984). Orientalism and the problem of civil society in Islam. In A. Hussain, R. Olson & J. Qureishi (Ed.), Orientalism, Islam, and Islamists. Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books. Zubaida, S. (1992, Nov–Dec). Islam, the state & democracy: Contrasting conceptions of society in Egypt. Middle East Report.
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Civil Society and Social Capital in Russia LEAH GILBERT Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Introduction After the Soviet Union collapsed, many hoped civil society organizations in Russia would play a central role in the country’s democratization. Indeed, initial analyses of Russian civil society in the early 1990s showed a rapid growth of nongovernmental organizations (‘‘NGOs’’) throughout the country. These NGOs provided essential services to citizens during the transition from a state-based to a market economy and allowed individuals to actively take part in Russia’s political transformation. Despite these successes, civil society in postcommunist Russia has faced severe challenges, including uncooperative state authorities, intense resource scarcity, and a population that does not embrace volunteering. While the current regime maintains that the development of civil society is a governmental priority, many scholars argue that the form of civil society now promoted by the Putin/Medvedev administration is too closely tied to the state to effectively promote democratization.
Civil Society Definition
Similar to the international literature on civil society, there is much diversity in the way civil society (grazhdanskoe obshchestvo) is conceptualized in Russia. Some scholars employ relatively broad definitions of civil society that include informal organizations or social movements (e.g., Evans et al., 2006; Henderson, 2003; Uhlin, 2006), while others have more narrow definitions (Fish, 1995; Howard, 2003). Similarly, there is scholarly disagreement over whether ‘‘civil society’’ is a useful term or can even exist in nondemocratic contexts, which is a crucial issue considering Russia’s political history (Weigle, 2000: 29–33). Despite these controversies, most Russian and Western understandings of civil society focus on organizations that people join voluntarily, are orientated towards public ends, are noncommercial in nature, and are independent from the state. The degree to which a civil society organization must be independent from the state has been a subject of much debate. This issue is of particular importance in Russia, as Vladimir Putin has advocated for a state-centered version of civil society since he took office in 2000. According to a
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statist conception of state–society relations, the state has the right to regulate social organizations in order to protect both nonstate society and the state (Hale, 2002: 309). The ultimate goal of the statist model is to maintain order (Hale, 2002: 307).
nonstatist approach, social capital cannot be created by the state, although the state can destroy it (examples cited by Petro, 2001: 229 include Nichols, 1996; Rose, 2000). While there are many alternative approaches, most definitions of social capital center on the norms and networks that enable people to achieve common ends.
Historical Overview of Civil Society in Russia
Elements of Russia’s historical record can lead to both a pessimistic and optimistic assessment of its potential to develop civil society. Historically, civil society in Russia has been shaped by the country’s ruling political regime. During the Tsarist period civil society was limited, as the regime repressed most forms of free association and expression. However, the state’s attempt to prevent the emergence of independent associations was not entirely successful and some argue that a vibrant ‘‘middle sphere’’ emerged in late imperial Russia (Clowes et al., 1991; see also Balzer, 1996; Conroy, 2006). This situation changed dramatically after the October revolution. Anchored by an ideology that stressed the importance of a mobilized society to build its ideal of socialism, the communist regime eliminated almost all independent associations and channeled the populace into state sponsored organizations (Evans, 2006a: 38). For example, almost all children in the Soviet Union belonged to a ‘‘Young Pioneer’’ organization and working adults were required to be members of a state-sanctioned trade union for their profession. Thus, the communist period was notable for forced participation in public life in a manner directed by the state. Nevertheless, as in the Tsarist period, the totalitarian state was unable to fully inhibit the independent organization of its citizens. This was particularly true once General Secretary Gorbachev began to institute his reforms in the 1980s. Under the rubric of perestroika and glasnost, new space was created for public engagement and discourse. ‘‘Informal’’ groups independent of state control emerged all over the Soviet Union and by 1990 some estimate that as many as 60,000 such groups existed (Hosking, 1990: 64).
Historical Overview of Social Capital in Russia
Like civil society, Russia’s historical record may point to either a pessimistic or optimistic assessment of its potential to develop social capital. When discussing social capital in the Soviet period, scholars often highlight the role of blat, or the use of personal networks and informal contacts to deal with the shortages and bureaucratic hurdles that characterized daily life in the Soviet Union (Ledeneva, 1998). More than just providing material benefits, there is evidence that blat generated trust over the long term (Ibid., 141), leading scholars such as Marsh (2000: 187) to suggest that blat may be a distinctly Russian form of social capital. Despite the existence and importance of blat, most scholars do not believe that there was a significant amount of social capital in Soviet society. Instead, scholars focus on the high levels of distrust and apathy that resulted from people’s experience of living under a totalitarian regime that lacked trustworthy institutions (Rose, 1994). For example, Ken Jowitt (1992) maintains that an exclusive distinction was drawn between the official and private realms of society to deal with the political monopoly of the communist party and its penetration of social life. This distinction created a particular worldview in which ‘‘political life is suspect, distasteful, and possibly dangerous; to be kept at bay by dissimulation, made tolerable by private intimacy, and transcended by private virtues or charismatic ethics’’ (293). In other words, individuals focused their energy on private relationships and interests and avoided public engagement.
Empirical Data Post-Soviet Civil Society
Social Capital Definition
As is the case with civil society, the meaning of social capital in Russia is a source of debate. Scholarship is divided between ‘‘statist’’ and ‘‘non-statist’’ approaches (Petro, 2001). As Petro (2001: 229) notes, those who employ a statist approach view the state as an important facilitator and source of social capital (examples include Petro, 2001; Twigg & Shechter, 2003). In contrast, according to the
The number of independent social organizations in Russia has grown dramatically since the end of the Soviet period. Between 1993 and 1997 the number of organizations in Russia increased from an estimated 50,000 to nearly 66,000 groups that were registered with the authorities (Weigle, 2002: 123). By 2005, 450,000 organizations were registered with the authorities; although, only 20–25% of these organizations are considered to be regularly active (USAID, 2006: 169). While organizations of all types and sizes operate within the Russian Federation, the majority
Civil Society and Social Capital in Russia
are engaged in social or charitable activities (Ibid., 169). While less in number, trade unions remain some of the largest civil society organizations (Kubicek, 2002). Membership in the umbrella organization Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia is estimated at 28 million in 2007 (http://www.fnpr.org.ru/1/8/1274.html). Nevertheless, membership is largely perfunctory and in general trade unions have not been a strong political force (Kubicek, 2002; Ashwin & Clarke, 2003; Davis, 2006). Despite the initial outburst of organizational fervor at the end of the Soviet period, the overall level of membership and activity in voluntary associations throughout the Russian Federation remains low by international standards. According to the New Russia Barometer, a yearly public opinion survey, in 2007, 95% of respondents said they did not belong to any sports, arts, community, or charitable organization (Rose, 2007: 13). Low organizational involvement is not only a trend in Russia, but is a common feature of the entire postcommunist region and is considered one of the enduring legacies of communist rule (Howard, 2003). Despite low overall volunteering rates, USAID (2006: 175) notes that citizen volunteering in Russia appears to increase every year. The general weakness of civil society in Russia is commonly explained by the overarching influence of the state and its impact on attitudes and forms of organization. For example, Fish (1995) highlights the unique structural barriers put up by the Soviet state that negatively influenced the organizational capacity and functional capabilities of the nascent democratic opposition in Russia. Similarly, in his comparative analysis of Russia and East Germany, Howard (2003) notes the powerful impact of the state on individual attitudes and behavior and focuses on three factors that explain the weakness of Russian civil society: citizens with higher levels of mistrust in communist organizations tend to be less active in voluntary associations today, people whose friendship networks have persisted in the postcommunist period are less likely to join organizations, and the more disappointed people are with postcommunist developments the less likely they will be to participate in voluntary organizations. Civil society in Russia has also been impacted by foreign funding. Due to the large amounts of money invested by international donors (By 2000 USAID had spent over $1 billion on democracy promotion in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; Henderson, 2003: 6) as well the general environment of resource scarcity in Russia, foreign funding has been extremely important in shaping post-Soviet civil society. Multiple studies have found that foreign funding has had mixed results in Russia (e.g., Sperling, 1999; Richter, 2002; Crotty, 2003;
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Henderson, 2003; Sundstrom, 2006). While foreign funding increased a group’s professionalism and resources, it also caused many groups to focus more on the donor’s expectations and priorities than on those of its domestic constituency (Henderson, 2003). Foreign funding frequently spurred competition rather than coordination among groups (Sperling, 1999). Foreign donors appear to have learned from their mistakes and are increasingly changing their funding requirements in an attempt to address these weaknesses. Despite these difficulties, Russia has a number of successful civil society groups. For example, scholars have noted the strength and influence of soldiers’ rights organizations (Caiazza, 2002; Sundstrom, 2006). Prominent among these organizations is the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, which in the late 1990s became two groups: the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia and the Russian Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers (Sundstrom, 2006: 193). According to Sundstrom (2006), in addition to achieving various policy victories like amnesty for army deserters who experienced abuse during the first Chechen war, this group has also expanded its membership, regional coverage, and public awareness (179–180). Smaller scale successes have also been achieved by groups advocating on behalf of causes like the environment, women, and the disabled (see case studies on these topics in Evans et al, 2006). Post-Soviet Social Capital
Many of the same factors that shaped the trajectory of civil society’s development in Russia have also had an enormous impact on social capital. For example, many studies have found that the Soviet legacy and contemporary sociopolitical contexts have a strong impact on social capital in Russia (Nichols, 1996; Rose, 2000; Twigg & Schechter, 2003). Scholars have likewise highlighted the role of corruption and an unresponsive and inefficient government in both generating and perpetuating widespread distrust and apathy (Rose, 1998). Key measures of social capital, such as associational activity and trust in political institutions, reveal that the national stock of social capital in postcommunist Russia is comparatively low. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the yearly New Russian Barometer survey, which documents the levels of trust in political institutions over time. In a 1993 survey only 40% of respondents stated that they trusted courts (Rose, 1994: 14). This figure dropped to 28% in 2007 (Rose, 2007: 37). The level of trust respondents have in political parties is also exceptionally low, although during this period it did slightly increase from 7% to 10%. The level of social capital in Russia is further
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complicated by the role of blat in the current regime. For example, Ledeneva (1998) argues that the transformation to a market economy significantly disrupted the traditional use of blat. While informal networks continue to be important in post-Soviet Russia, these networks are based on different principles and ethics (Ibid., 211). Despite this generally bleak picture, research on social capital in postcommunist Russia has produced some reasons for optimism. When replicating much of Putnam’s methodology, Christopher Marsh found large variation in the stocks of social capital across Russia’s 89 regions (Marsh, 2000). Marsh maintains that a number of Russia’s regions, like Moscow, Pskov, and Smolensk have high levels of social capital, which is reflected in their greater level of democratization and economic performance in comparison to other areas of Russia (198). Similarly, Nikolai Petro’s (2001) analysis of social capital in Novgorod, a region 190 km south of St. Petersburg, demonstrates that its economic success can be attributed to high levels of social capital, which he argues resulted from local government policy. These studies show that stocks of social capital are by no means uniform throughout Russia and that regional trends may hold important lessons for its development on a national level (see also Twigg, 2003). Even so, more recent work on social capital in Russia’s regions suggests that the casual link between economic growth and social capital is tenuous (Buttrick & Moran, 2005).
Outlook/Concluding Assessment At the convocation of the 2001 Civic Forum, President Putin stated his intent to actively work with civil society and emphasized its contribution to Russia’s democratic development (Weigle, 2002). This announcement stood in stark contrast to Yeltsin’s stance towards civil society. Although the legal framework for independent associations was established under Yelstin, most scholars believe that he did not view civil society as an important part of Russia’s political process (Weigle, 2002: 132; Hale, 2002: 314). Since the 2001 forum, the Putin administration has undertaken a number of new measures that have had a large impact on civil society. For example, Evans (2006b) documents the increased pressure that was placed on human rights groups and others critical of the regime during Putin’s first term as President. He also notes that by 2004, President Putin and other top officials openly criticized groups that received foreign funding, linking them with foreign governments and non-Russian values (Ibid., 150). Notably in 2006, the Federal Security Service (FSB) accused human rights groups of receiving funding from an alleged British agent in what became known as the ‘‘spy scandal’’ (see Bigg, 2006).
Another significant policy was the creation of the Public Chamber (obshchestvennaia palata) in 2005 to promote greater interaction between society and government authorities (http://www.oprf.ru/ru/about/). The Chamber’s 126 members are chosen in ways that allow the Kremlin to influence which individuals and organizations are allowed to participate. The Chamber’s recommendations to the government do not carry the force of law and by filling the chamber with its supporters, the Chamber may be a way for the regime to control societal approval of its policies (see Abdullaev, 2005). Another important policy is Russia’s 2006 NGO law, which introduced changes to the regulation of domestic and foreign NGOs. This new law created a wide range of new regulations on registration procedures, reporting of activities, and sources of funding. These new regulations have placed significant burdens on NGOs and have set up many new barriers for their operation (USAID, 2008; Orttung, 2008). Finally, the support of government organized nongovernmental organizations, or ‘‘GONGOs,’’ is a new feature of the organizational landscape in Russia. One of the most visible GONGOs is the pro-Putin youth movement, Nashi (‘‘ours’’), which commentators believe is the Kremlin’s response to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The meaning of these changes is an object of considerable debate. Proponents of these measures argue that they are meant to strengthen the role of civil society in Russia by providing new sources of funding (The Public Chamber gave $51 million via competitive grants in 2007; USAID, 2008: 196) and engagement with public officials. These proponents also believe that closer regulation of Russia’s NGOs will minimize incidences of fraud and corruption and ensure that other governments are unable to use foreign-funded NGOs to destabilize Russia. Critics counter by stating that these measures are generally hurtful for civil society and require groups to give up their independence in exchange for influence and resources. Some claim that these measures demonstrate that Vladimir Putin seeks to build a quasi-civil society in which ‘‘social organizations are subordinated to the authority of the state and express demands within the parameters of the program of the highest executive leadership’’ (Evans, 2006: 149). Regardless of the trajectory of Putin’s policies, due to both domestic and international pressures it is unlikely that civil society in Russia will revert to its repressed Soviet form (Sundstrom & Henry, 2006: 319). However, it may be argued that Vladimir Putin’s policies, combined with the general weakness of civil society in Russia, make it less likely that any change to the political status quo will be initiated from below. Finally, the economic crisis that began in 2008 created daunting new challenges for a
Civil Society and Social Capital in Russia
revised leadership lineup with Dimitri Medvedev as President and Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister. These challenges promise to provide new opportunities as well as pitfalls for the future development of civil society and social capital in Russia.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Economy ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Central Asia ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society Indicators and Indexes ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ GONGOs ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definitions and History ▶ Philanthropy in Russia and Central Asia ▶ Social Capital, Definitions of ▶ Uncivil Society
References/Further Readings Abdullaev, N. (2005, February 21). Public chamber left toothless. Moscow Times, from http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/9062–12.cfm; 10/31/08 Ashwin, S., & Clarke, S. (2003). Russian trade unions and industrial relations in transition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Balzer, H. (Ed.) (1996). Russia’s missing middle class: The professions in Russian history. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe. Bigg, C. (2006, January 25). Russia: Spy Scandal Highlights Mounting Pressure on NGOs. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, from http:// www.rferl.org/content/Article/1065077.html; 7/6/2009. Buttrick, S. C. & Moran, J. P. (2005). Russia’s missing Link? Social capital, entrepreneurialism, and economic performance in postcommunist Russia. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 38, 357–368. Caiazza, A. (2002). Mothers and soldiers: Gender, citizenship and civil society in contemporary Russia. New York: Routledge. Clowes, E. W. et al., (Eds.) (1991). Between tsar and people: Educated society and the quest for public identity in late imperial Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conroy, M. S. (2006). Civil society in late imperial Russia. In A. B. Evans et al. (Eds.), Russian civil society: A critical assessment (pp. 11–27). Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Crotty, J. (2003). Managing civil society: Democratisation and the environmental movement in a Russian region. Communist and PostCommunist Studies, 36, 489–508. Davis, S. (2006). Russian trade unions: Where are they in the former workers’ state? In A. B. Evans et al. (Eds.), Russian civil society: A critical assessment (pp. 197–210). Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Evans, A. B. (2002). Recent assessments of social organisations in Russia. Demokratizatsiya, 10(3), 322–342. Evans, A. B. (2006a). Civil society in the Soviet Union? In A. B. Evans et al. (Eds.), Russian civil society: A critical assessment (pp. 28–54). Armonk: M.E. Sharpe.
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Evans, A. B. (2006b). Vladimir Putin’s design for civil society. In A. B. Evans et al. (Eds.), Russian civil society: A critical assessment (pp. 147–158). Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Evans, A. B. et al., (Eds.) (2006). Russian civil society: A critical assessment. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Fish, S. M. (1995). Democracy from scratch: Opposition and regime in the new Russian revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, from http://www. fnpr.org.ru/1/8/1274.html; 10/31/08 Hale, H. (2002). Civil society from above? Statist and liberal models of state-building in Russia. Demokratizatsiya, 10(3), 306–321. Henderson, S. (2003). Building democracy in contemporary Russia: Western support for grassroots organizations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hosking, G. (1990). The awakening of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Howard, M. M. (2003). The weakness of civil society in post-communist Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jowitt, K. (1992). New world disorder: The leninist extinction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kholodkovsky, K. G. (Ed.) (1998). Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo v Rossii: Struktury i soznanie (Civil society in Russia: Structure and conscience). Moscow: Nauka. Kubicek, P. (2002). Civil society, trade unions and post-soviet democratisation: Evidence from Russia and Ukraine. Europe-Asia Studies, 54(4), 603–624. Ledeneva, A. V. (1998). Russia’s economy of favours: Blat, networking and informal exchange. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Marsh, C. (2000). Social capital and democracy in Russia. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 33, 183–199. Nichols, T. (1996). Russian democracy and social capital. Social Science Information, 35(4), 629–642. Orttung, R. (2008). Country Report: Russia. In Nations in transit. Freedom House. Petro, N. N. (2001). Creating social capital in Russia: The Novgorod model. World Development, 29(2), 229–244. Public Chamber, from http://www.oprf.ru/ru/about/; 10/31/08 Richter, J. (2002). Evaluating Western assistance to Russian women’s organizations. In S. Mendelson & J. Glenn (Eds.), The power and limit of NGOs. Rose, R. (1994). Distrust as an obstacle to civil society. Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde. Rose, R. (1998). Getting things done in an anti-modern society: Social capital networks in Russia. Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde. Rose, R. (2000). Uses of social capital in Russia: Modern, pre-modern, and anti-modern. Journal of Post-Soviet Affairs, 16, 1, 33–56. Rose, R. (2007). New Russia barometer XV: The climax of the Putin years. Aberdeen: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Aberdeen. Shineleva, L. T. (2002). Obshchestvennye nepravitelstvennye organizatsii i vlast (Non-Governmental Organizations and power). Moscow: Dashkov. Sperling, V. (1999). Organizing women in contemporary Russia: Engendering transition. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Sundstrom, L. M. (2006). Soldiers’ rights groups in Russia: Civil society through Russian and Western eyes. In A. B. Evans et al. (Eds.), Russian civil society: A critical assessment (pp. 178–196). Armonk: M. E. Sharpe. Sundstrom, L. M., & Henry, L. (2006). Russian civil society: Tensions and trajectories. In A. B. Evans et al., (Eds.), Russian civil society: A critical assessment (pp. 305–322). Armonk: M.E. Sharpe.
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Twigg, J. L. (2003). Social capital in Russia’s regions. In J. L. Twigg & K. Schecter (Eds.), Social capital and social cohesion in post-soviet Russia. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Twigg, J. L., & Schecter, K. (Eds.) (2003). Social capital and social cohesion in post-soviet Russia. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Uhlin, A. (2006). Post-soviet civil society: Democratization in Russia and the Baltic states. New York: Routledge. United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Bureau for Europe and Eurasia. (June 2008). Country overview: Russia. In The 2007 NGO sustainability index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Bureau for Europe and Eurasia. (May 2006). Country overview: Russia. In The 2005 NGO sustainability index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Weigle, M. A. (2000). Russia’s liberal project: State-society relations in the transition from communism. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Weigle, M. A. (2002). On the road to the civic forum: State and civil society from Yeltsin to Putin. Demokratizatsiya, 10(2), 117–146.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Scandinavia KARL HENRIK SIVESIND1, PER SELLE2 Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway 2 University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
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Introduction The Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, are characterized by high levels of trust, volunteering, participation in voluntary organizations and a political culture that combines equality, national solidarity, and individual autonomy. The Scandinavian countries are in many comparative studies ranked on top when it comes to social capital (Rothstein, 2002), organizational participation (Dekker & van den Broek, 1998), and civil society’s vitality (Salamon et al., 2004). The popular movements have been important for the development of these characteristics. The first part of the article goes through some common features in Scandinavian history. The second part looks at volunteering, social trust and civic engagement in recent studies. In the last part theoretical explanations of the findings are examined.
Civil Society Civil society, through voluntary associations and popular movements, has played a significant and distinctive role in the building of democracy, nations, citizenship rights and welfare states in the Scandinavian countries since early in the nineteenth century. Stein Rokkan among others used the concept of an ‘‘age of associations’’ (Rokkan, 1967) to
describe emergence of the popular movements. Associational life in Scandinavia in this early phase was in many senses a direct continuation of the life in the traditional homogenous social structure with a nobility too weak to prevent the farming class from being economically and politically independent. In addition, there was a Lutheran culture of a Nordic type, much more oriented towards inclusion than towards establishing an opposition towards the state and other main institutions and actors (Stenius, forthcoming). Philanthropy was limited and oriented towards self-help through work, since there was no upper or middle-class strong enough to be able to sustain welfare, cultural, or educational institutions for the needy. Instead, a political culture developed that to a large extent emphasized one norm for all: people in general were expected to contribute a certain minimum – more if they could – to what was considered common responsibilities, such as helping the worthy poor, building churches, and mutual neighbour assistance. The institution of ‘‘voluntary community effort’’ (dugnad) had existed since the Middle Ages and became important in coordinating the production of public goods. Similar norms may be found other places as well. However, in Scandinavia, as voluntary associations emerged, they were considered as a crucial part of this common responsibility, and therefore the norm of ‘‘dugnad’’ applied to them. This is important for understanding the evolving role of the popular movements in Scandinavian societies, and a precondition for high levels of social capital and a political system with openness towards civil society (Kuhnle & Selle, 1992; Tra¨ga˚rdh, 2007). The golden age of popular movements lasted from 1880 to 1960. Most important were farmers, fishermen, smallholders, temperance, lay Christian, and social and humanitarian associations, and in Norway there was also a countercultural struggle for New Norwegian language. As institutions, the local associations were the core level with a high level of autonomy in a nationally coordinated organizational structure. Almost without exception, organizations imitated the levels of the political system (local, regional, national) and chose the same structure as the parties, to which many of them were also directly affiliated. As a consequence organizational community in Scandinavia was characterized by not being divided between the local and national level. This hierarchical structure represented rather stable channels of communication between the local and the central level – between individual and society. There was a comparatively broad recruitment of members, and through the organizations they were pivotal in the development of democracy, nation
Civil Society and Social Capital in Scandinavia
and welfare state. The hierarchical structure promoted loyalty and a sense that the individual members belonged to a greater cause. At the same time, ties to the central level provided the opportunity to bring local matters to national attention, and to bring information about political and social issues back to be discussed on the local level. The popular movements were important for political mobilization. The different movements were connected to ‘‘their own’’ political parties and were crucial in the competition for political power. This resulted in political and administrative systems that were quite open towards the popular movements and interest groups and paved the way for ‘‘corporative pluralism’’ (Rokkan, 1966). Stein Kuhnle and Per Selle, with their relational perspective, used the term the ‘‘state friendly society,’’ to describe how general welfare associations and the state in the post-war period joined forces in a search for the best common solutions to social problems mounting in the post-war period, such as care for elderly and seniledement patients. In many cases, the voluntary organizations promoted public solutions, even in welfare fields in which they had been pioneers, policy makers, and entrepreneurs (Kuhnle & Selle, 1992; Selle, 1993). There was a strong growth in number and types of organizations until about 1980. During the nineties, however, there was no numerical growth, but the types and structures of organizations still changed (Wijkstro¨m, 2004; Wollebæk & Selle, 2002a). Until about 1960 the public health and other nonmember benefit organizations grew at the same time as the welfare state expanded. From the 1960s, the recreation and culture field was the fastest growing field, with musical groups, hobby associations, sports clubs, and associations for children and youths, as an affluent leisure society gradually emerged (Wollebæk & Selle, 2002a). Since the late 1980s/early 1990s new organizations tend to view participants more as customers than members with democratic governing-rights. Some of them adopt new management strategies inspired by business management. New public management ideas have also infused the relations between public sector and voluntary sector providers with a contract culture, focusing on competition, timedelimited contracts, legal control, and accountability (Sivesind, 2008a). This is in strong contrast to what Kuhnle and Selle (1990; 1992) described as a relationship between state and voluntary associations characterized by high degree of proximity in terms of communication and contact, while dependence by means of finance and control was been less prominent. Even if some organizations could be heavily dependent on public funding, they had great autonomy in the use of that money.
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Since the 1980s, the popular movements are no longer a dominant part of the voluntary sector, i.e., farmers, fishermen, smallholders, New Norwegian language, temperance, lay Christian, and social and humanitarian. The expanding organizations have more informal and less committing relations to members and participants, and the activities are oriented towards local community, culture, sports, and recreation. The organizational community is less conflictoriented and focussed on broad social matters, and more consensus-oriented and focussed on members. The expanding types of organizations are service organizations, dominated by the expanding culture and recreation organizations. Still, interest organizations have a strong position, although they seem to become more oriented towards the members and local issues. There are also examples of successful communitarian organizations that are oriented towards consensus and society, such as local community associations, and historical societies. The most striking feature, however, is the lack of successful popular movements, a form of organization that have played a decisive role as democratic infrastructure connecting the central and the local level since the beginning of the ‘‘associational revolution.’’ These democratically organized, member-based, and hierarchically structured organizations have brought broad segments of the population in contact with decisive political opinion- and decision-making processes (Wollebæk & Selle, 2002a, 2008). The feminist and environmental organizations culminated in the 1970s and 1980s. They have contributed to change of policy and attitudes in their areas, but never reached remotely similar proportions as the old popular movements. One reason may be that politicians surpassed each other in political correctness and the state took on responsibility in these policy areas, which made civic engagement seem redundant. For instance, the state established foundations and campaigns that emulated environmental organizations (Grendstad et al., 2006). In the 1990s, new organizations are to a less extent connected to national networks, resulting in a more fragmented organizational community. The local and the central level have become more separate, even within the same organization. New organizations tend to have a specialized purpose and a weak ideological foundation, primarily accommodating the members’ participation in activities. People seem less interested in spending much time in meetings working for social change in the long term. These kind of democratic processes are increasingly perceived to take too much time. In stead, new organizations create relations to members that are more similar to the relations between producers and consumers in a market, often inspired by business management ideas. The
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organizations present activities that members either want to take part in, or they leave the organization. Participants are less loyal and organizations more short-lived. There is also a growing segment of organizations that are building local identities, such as local community associations, local history associations, or societies for conservation of old ships, houses, or other relics. To a large extent, these organizations also lack ideological foundation and change-orientation (Wollebæk & Selle, 2002a, 2008). Many recent trends converge in a ‘‘here-and-now’’ type of organizations (Tranvik & Selle, 2007), but it is still an open question how dominating it will become as part of civil society. An important reason for the decline of social movements is the weakening of collective identities that were constructed under remotely different social structures and cultural conditions. The economic foundations for primary sector-based interest-representation have eroded in an increasingly differentiated and knowledge-based economy. Organizations for industrial workers are in decline while professional and public services are increasing. New forms of interest organizations represent sick, disabled, and welfare clients in relation to administrations and public and private service providers. A strong reduction of the most urgent social problems and high public sector ambitions in policy areas previously targeted by voluntary organizations, have contributed to the decline of social movements for women, environment, and general health and welfare. In short, social movement organizations decline in areas where people think it seems less likely that they can contribute to significant changes. In addition, secularization, cultural globalization, and social and geographic mobility have weakened traditional forms of counter-cultural identity organization. On the other hand, partly commercialized, transnational youthcultures gives rise to new more or less organized sparetime activities, such as skateboard, snowboard, cricket, computers, games, role-play, fantasy and science fiction. At the same time new policy areas such as sustainability and climate, infrastructure, and security politics have gained importance – all fields with many voluntary organizations and NGOs involved in governance networks on local, national, and supranational level. However, many of them have a weak membership base, and some have no members at all. Many of them also lack mechanisms for democratic governance, in contrast to the popular movement organizations. All in all we have seen a transformed role for popular movements in Scandinavia as service and knowledge based economies and an affluent leisure society gradually have emerged. Whether this also means a weakened civil society will not be concluded here. However, it seems to result in a less distinct civil society compared with other Western European countries. In the next section,
recent comparative studies of social capital will be analyzed to see how distinct the Scandinavian countries are in that respect.
Social Capital Although many of the characteristics of the popular movements have declined in the transition towards a service and knowledge-based economy and an affluent leisure society, the organizational community in Scandinavia still stands out in comparative perspective. Almost three quarters of contemporary voluntary associations are part of a hierarchical structure – a much higher percentage than Torpe and Ferrer-Fons’ (2007: 101) report from five other countries. Voluntary organizations still enjoy broad popular support. The average number of memberships per person has been declining – in particular among young people. However, analysis of the European Social Survey (2002) shows that the Nordic countries, alongside the Netherlands, rank highest whether organizational affiliation is measured by membership or active participation (Wollebæk & Selle, 2008). In addition, record high shares of the population volunteer. This can be demonstrated by comparing population surveys of volunteering for nonprofit organizations during the last 12 months. The Scandinavian surveys from 2005 and 2004 are compared with recently published findings from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP) (Salamon et al., 2004) (Table 1). In Norway the adult participation rate was 58%, in Sweden it was 49, while in Denmark it was just 35. However, this is still higher than the data for industrialized countries from the CNP-study. United Kingdom has
Civil Society and Social Capital in Scandinavia. Table 1 Share of the population that has volunteered during last year in industrial countries (Percent) Country
Volunteers
Norway
58
Sweden
49
Iceland
40
Denmark
35
UK
30
USA
22
Netherlands
16
France
14
Australia
13
Sweden and Iceland 2005, Norway and Denmark 2004, other countries 1995. Source: Hrafnsdo´ttir, 2006; Koch-Nielsen et al., 2005; Olsson et al., 2006; Sivesind, 2007; Salamon et al., 2004.
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30%, USA 22, Netherland 16, France 14, and Australia 13%. This means that the voluntary associations attract broad support in Scandinavia, and the tendency seems to be that more people volunteer now than 10 or 15 years ago (Sivesind, 2007: 12; Fridberg et al., 2006: 68; Olsson et al., 2006: 13). If we look at volunteering FTE in relation to the size of the economic population, we find that Sweden has the highest share with 6.7%, then comes Norway with 4.5% and Denmark with 3.1% (Note: The Swedish survey is counting hours volunteering reported for last 12 months, while the other countries count volunteering last 4 weeks. This probably results in a higher number in Sweden. Calculations are based on (Olsson et al., 2006, 1335)). This is still higher than the 2.3% average that can be found in what is called the welfare partnership countries in the CNP-study (See Salamon et al., 2004). All these countries have ambitious welfare arrangements, but in Scandinavia this does not reduce the level of volunteering. Even with a very high participation rate, the average hours per volunteer is relatively high. In Sweden the average per volunteer is 14 h in a month (Olsson et al., 2006: 15), in Norway it is also 14, while in Denmark it is 17 (Fridberg et al., 2006: 69). Moreover, volunteering FTE in Scandinavia is highly concentrated in the culture and recreation field, with 54% in Norway, 49% in Denmark and 50% in Sweden. In the welfare partnership countries the share is just 32% (Table 2). In contrast, the shares in the welfare field (Education and research, Health, and Social Services) are rather small. They are from 22% to 12% in Scandinavia compared to 32% in the welfare partnership countries. However, since welfare services to a larger extent are financed and provided by the public sector in Scandinavia, nonprofit welfare services represents a much smaller field than in the welfare partnership countries. Seen in relation to the paid employment on the welfare field, volunteering is high in Sweden, average in Norway, and low in Denmark, compared to Western EU-countries (Sivesind, 2008b). Moreover, volunteering on the welfare field in Scandinavia to a large extent takes place in the member-based activities in organizations like Cancer Societies, National Health Organizations, Red Cross, People’s Aid, and to a less extent in relation to the provision welfare services (Table 2). In religion we find only 6% of the volunteering FTEs in Denmark and Norway and 8% in Sweden, compared to 15% in the welfare partnership countries. This seems to be a declining field with many small organizations and volunteers with high age (Sivesind, 2007). The Scandinavian countries do not diverge so much if we look at society-oriented organizations, which includes
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Civil Society and Social Capital in Scandinavia. Table 2 Volunteering FTE for voluntary organizations by organization category (Percent)
Sweden Norway Denmark
Welfare partnership countriesa
Activity
50
54
49
32
Welfare
22
12
15
32
Society
10
10
16
10
Housing/ economy
8
17
13
8
Religion
8
6
6
15
Sweden 2005, Norway and Denmark 2004, other countries 1995. a Unweighted average of France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, United Kingdom. Percentages do not add up to 100 because ‘‘other organizations’’ are omitted. Source: Koch-Nielsen et al., 2005; Olsson et al., 2006; Sivesind, 2007; Salamon et al., 2004.
environment, civic and advocacy, international and aid organizations, and housing and economy organizations, which includes housing cooperatives, and local neighbourhood organizations. The exceptions are Denmark that has a large share of volunteering in society-oriented organizations and Norway where housing and neighbourhood organizations has a large share. Volunteers can be board members, and in addition, all dwellers are expected to take part in fixing up common areas, gardens, and playgrounds. The decline of religious organizations, and societyoriented organizations, is a consequence of the weakened traditional movements. However, people still consider voluntary organizations as a common responsibility where the ‘‘dugnad’’ norms apply, in particular in the culture and recreation field. Above all, parents volunteering for organizations where their children are active has been increasing (Sivesind, 2007; Fridberg et al., 2006: 69). To some extent this replaces paid employment, but volunteers are extensively used to generate income for organizations through cafe sales, flea markets, performing tasks for municipalities and businesses that the organizations get paid for. This keeps the membership fees down, and thus contributes to levelling out economic differences. In addition, music and cultural festivals attract increasing numbers of volunteers. Many organizations on the welfare field coordinate, supervise and train volunteers to do limited tasks like visiting sick and elderly, guiding refugees, homework assistance, etc. Tasks necessary for the normal operation of organizations like board member, cashier, that are difficult to set the limits of, are less popular. All in all, this means that
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volunteers increasingly are non-members and contribute to culture and sports activities, in addition to supplementary welfare activities.
Outlook Even if it is difficult to show that participation in voluntary organizations and volunteering contributes to social capital on an individual basis (Wollebæk & Selle, 2002b), country comparisons show that a reciprocal causal relationship seems reasonable. People in the Nordic countries (Scandinavia and Finland) have the highest generalized trust scores in the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002/ 2003 (Fridberg & Kangas, 2008). The Nordic countries are also ranked high in trust for national institutions and the legal system in the ESS 2004 (Listhaug & Ringdal, 2008). Much of the citizens’ trust and the organizations’ trust in the state are accumulated in the process by which next to any group can be consulted in the state’s decision-making processes. Bo Rothstein and Dietlin Stolle have argued that social capital is embedded in and linked to formal political and legal institutions. Not all political institutions matter equally, however. Trust thrives most in societies with effective, impartial, and fair street-level bureaucracies (Rothstein & Stolle, 2003). The causal mechanism between these institutional characteristics and generalized trust is illustrated in a cross-national context. This institutional approach seems important to explain particularities of the Scandinavian countries (Wollebæk & Selle, 2007). However, in historical perspective, the popular movement tradition is an indispensable factor for the development of an open political culture where the state is not considered as remote and alien, but as a common endeavour of the people. In political rhetoric the same word has often been used for community and state (Tra¨ga˚rdh, 2007). Hence a bottom up perspective is necessary to explain how Scandinavian particularities in social capital and civil society have developed over time.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civil Society and Cultural Organizations ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Collective Action ▶ Corporatism ▶ Goverment-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Participation ▶ Peasant and Farmers’ Organizations ▶ Political Organizations ▶ Religious Organizations ▶ Salamon, Lester ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Change Organizations
▶ Social Movements ▶ Social Trust ▶ Volunteer Management ▶ Volunteers ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Dekker, P., & van den Broek, A. (1998). Civil society in comparative perspective: Involvement in voluntary associations in North America and Western Europe. Voluntas, 9, 10–38. Fridberg, T., & Kangas, O. (2008). Social capital. In H. Ervasti, T. Fridberg, M. Hjerm, & K. Ringdal (Eds.), Nordic social attitudes in a European perspective (pp. 65–85) Cheltenham, UK/Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Fridberg, T., Koch-Nielsen, I., & Henriksen, L. S. (2006). Frivilligt arbejde. In T. P. Boje, T. Fridberg, & B. Ibsen (Eds.), Frivillighed og nonprofit i Danmark. Omfang, organisation, økonomi og beskæftigelse SFI-rapport 06:19 (pp. 41–70). København, Denmark: Socialforskningsinstiuttet. Grendstad, G., Selle, P., Strømsnes, K., & Bortne, Ø. (2006). Unique environmentalism. A comparative perspective. New York, NY: Springer. Hrafnsdo´ttir, S. (2006). The Icelandic Voluntary Sector. Development of research. In A.-L. Matthies (Ed.), Nordic civic society organisations and the future of welfare services – a model for Europe? TemaNord 2006:517. Copenhagen, Denmark: The Nordic Council of Ministers. Koch-Nielsen, I., Henriksen, L. S., Fridberg, T., & Rosendahl, D. (2005). Frivilligt arbejde – Den frivillige indsats i Danmark Rapport 05:20. København, Denmark: Socialforskningsinstitutet. Kuhnle, S., & Selle, P. (1990). Meting needs in a welfare state: Relations between government and voluntary organizations in Norway. In A. Ware & R. E. Goodin (Eds.), Needs and welfare (pp. 165–184). London: Sage. Kuhnle, S., & Selle, P. (1992). Government and voluntary organizations: A relational perspective. In S. Kuhnle & P. Selle (Eds.), Government and voluntary organizations. A relational perspective (pp. 1–33). London: Avebury. Listhaug, O., & Ringdal, K. (2008). Trust in political institutions. In H. Ervasti, T. Fridberg, M. Hjerm, & K. Ringdal (Eds.), Nordic social attitudes in a European perspective (pp. 131–151). Cheltenham, UK/ Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Olsson, L.-E., Svedberg, L., & Grassman, E. J. (2006). Medborgarnas insatser och engagemang i civilsamha¨llet – na˚gra grundla¨ggande uppgifter fra˚n en ny befolkningsstudieno. Arbetsrapportserie nr 39. Sko¨ndal: Sko¨ndalsinstitutet. Rokkan, S. (1966). Norway: Numerical democracy and corporate pluralism. In R. A. Dahl (Ed.), Political oppositions in Western democracies (pp. 1–401). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rokkan, S. (1967). Geography, religion, and social class: Crosscutting cleavages in Norwegian politics. In S. M. Lipset & S. Rokkan (Eds.), Party systems and voter alignments (pp. 367–444). New York: The Free Press. Rothstein, B. (2002). Sweden: Social capital in the social democratic state. In R. D. Putnam (Ed.), Democracies in flux. The evolution of social capital in contemporary society (pp. 289–331). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rothstein, B., & Stolle, D. (2003). Social capital, impartiality and the welfare state: An institutional approach. In M. Hooghe & D. Stolle (Eds.), Generating social capital. Civil society and institutions
Civil Society and Social Capital in South America in comparative perspective (pp. 191–210). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salamon, L. M., Sokolowski, S. W., & Associates (Eds.). (2004). Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector, Volume II. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Selle, P. (1993). Voluntary organisations and the welfare state: The case of Norway. Voluntas, 4, 1–15. Sivesind, K. H. (2007). Frivillig sektor i Norge 1997–2004. Frivillig arbeid, medlemskap, sysselsetting og økonomi. Rapport no. 2007:10. Oslo, Norway: Institute for Social Research. Sivesind, K. H. (2008a). Halvveis til Soria Moria. Ikke-kommersielle velferdstjenester, politikkens blinde flekk? Rapport no. 2008:03. Oslo, Norway: Institute for Social Research. Sivesind, K. H. (2008b). Nonprofit organisasjoner pa˚ velferdsfeltet i Norden. In B. Ibsen, T. P. Boje, & T. Fridberg (Eds.), Det frivillige Danmark (pp. 161–178). Odense, Denmark: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Torpe, L., & Ferrer-Fons, M. (2007). The internal structure of associations. In L. Tra¨ga˚rdh (Ed.), State and civil society in Northern Europe. The Swedish model reconsidered. New York: Berghahn Books. Tranvik, T., & Selle, P. (2007). The rise and fall of popular mass movements: Organizational change and globalization - the Norwegian case. Acta Sociologica, 50, 57–70. Tra¨ga˚rdh, L. (2007). State and civil society in Northern Europe. The Swedish model reconsidered. New York: Berghahn Books. Wijkstro¨m, F. (2004). Changing focus or changing role? The Swedish nonprofit sector in the new millennium. In A. Zimmer & C. Stecker (Eds.), Strategy mix for nonprofit organisations: Vehicles for social and labour market integrations (pp. 15–40). New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2002a). Det nye organisasjonssamfunnet – Demokrati i omforming [The New Organization Community – Democracy in Change]. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2002b). Does participation in voluntary associations contribute to social capital? The importance of intensity, scope and type. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 31, 32–61. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2007). Origins of social capital: Socialization and institutionalization approaches compared. Journal of Civil Society, 3, 1–24. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2008). A social democratic model of civil society? In B. Jobert & B. Kohler-Koch (Eds.), Changing images of civil society. From protest to governance (pp. 47–70). New York: Routledge.
Civil Society and Social Capital in South America MARIO ROITTER Center for the Study of State and Society – CEDES, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Introduction South America as a region comprises 13 countries, most of which share similar social, economic, and cultural features in various areas. Notwithstanding, the strong
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diversity in many fields that makes it difficult to approach the region as a whole in a simple way, there are similar patterns that allow us to consider it as a single unit of study, focusing on shared trends and characteristics. This entry covers Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela. (Brazil, Guyana, Surinam and French Guyana are not included.) The presence of private non profit organizations goes back to the historic period previous to the consolidation of the different National States that took place by the end of the nineteenth century. In all of these countries, even in Colonial times, there were numerous institutions of public welfare acting in the social, cultural, political, and above all, in the welfare area (Campetella y Gonza´lez Bombal, 2000; Sanborn, 2008; Villar, 2001). Yet, what constitutes a relatively recent event is the growth that these organizations have had and the public visibility that they have reached, as well as the will to consider them part of a sector that, even though they are characterized by being very diverse between themselves, would place them in parallel with the State and the market as part of a trisectorial concept’ and logic of the economy. As List and Salamon pointed out, ‘‘[. . .] in recent decades, [. . .] this sector has been significantly reinvigorated by a new associativism that has empowered new strata of society and encouraged a broad process of democratization. The result is a rich assortment of institutional types – still dominated in terms of overall economic weight by religiously affiliated schools and hospitals, but also including more autonomous community-based groups, human rights agencies, and intermediary support organizations of various types’’ (List & Salamon, 2001: 1). Around the mid-1980s, a transition towards consolidated Democracies is witnessed and from the beginning of the 1990s the economic and social policies put into practice claim a reappraisal of the relationship between the public and the private spheres. From that moment onwards, Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) became more and more important so that it is in the mid-90s that the first systematic studies about their structure and scope are commenced. The idea of social capital has become evident at a later stage, at the end of the nineties after the impact that the so call Washington Consensus recipes have had on the region and considering the poor results that the neoliberal economic and social policies implemented have yielded in terms of social equity.
Civil Society The vocabulary used in the region to designate the wide range of social organizations that work institutionally
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Civil Society and Social Capital in South America in comparative perspective (pp. 191–210). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salamon, L. M., Sokolowski, S. W., & Associates (Eds.). (2004). Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector, Volume II. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Selle, P. (1993). Voluntary organisations and the welfare state: The case of Norway. Voluntas, 4, 1–15. Sivesind, K. H. (2007). Frivillig sektor i Norge 1997–2004. Frivillig arbeid, medlemskap, sysselsetting og økonomi. Rapport no. 2007:10. Oslo, Norway: Institute for Social Research. Sivesind, K. H. (2008a). Halvveis til Soria Moria. Ikke-kommersielle velferdstjenester, politikkens blinde flekk? Rapport no. 2008:03. Oslo, Norway: Institute for Social Research. Sivesind, K. H. (2008b). Nonprofit organisasjoner pa˚ velferdsfeltet i Norden. In B. Ibsen, T. P. Boje, & T. Fridberg (Eds.), Det frivillige Danmark (pp. 161–178). Odense, Denmark: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Torpe, L., & Ferrer-Fons, M. (2007). The internal structure of associations. In L. Tra¨ga˚rdh (Ed.), State and civil society in Northern Europe. The Swedish model reconsidered. New York: Berghahn Books. Tranvik, T., & Selle, P. (2007). The rise and fall of popular mass movements: Organizational change and globalization - the Norwegian case. Acta Sociologica, 50, 57–70. Tra¨ga˚rdh, L. (2007). State and civil society in Northern Europe. The Swedish model reconsidered. New York: Berghahn Books. Wijkstro¨m, F. (2004). Changing focus or changing role? The Swedish nonprofit sector in the new millennium. In A. Zimmer & C. Stecker (Eds.), Strategy mix for nonprofit organisations: Vehicles for social and labour market integrations (pp. 15–40). New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2002a). Det nye organisasjonssamfunnet – Demokrati i omforming [The New Organization Community – Democracy in Change]. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2002b). Does participation in voluntary associations contribute to social capital? The importance of intensity, scope and type. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 31, 32–61. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2007). Origins of social capital: Socialization and institutionalization approaches compared. Journal of Civil Society, 3, 1–24. Wollebæk, D., & Selle, P. (2008). A social democratic model of civil society? In B. Jobert & B. Kohler-Koch (Eds.), Changing images of civil society. From protest to governance (pp. 47–70). New York: Routledge.
Civil Society and Social Capital in South America MARIO ROITTER Center for the Study of State and Society – CEDES, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Introduction South America as a region comprises 13 countries, most of which share similar social, economic, and cultural features in various areas. Notwithstanding, the strong
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diversity in many fields that makes it difficult to approach the region as a whole in a simple way, there are similar patterns that allow us to consider it as a single unit of study, focusing on shared trends and characteristics. This entry covers Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela. (Brazil, Guyana, Surinam and French Guyana are not included.) The presence of private non profit organizations goes back to the historic period previous to the consolidation of the different National States that took place by the end of the nineteenth century. In all of these countries, even in Colonial times, there were numerous institutions of public welfare acting in the social, cultural, political, and above all, in the welfare area (Campetella y Gonza´lez Bombal, 2000; Sanborn, 2008; Villar, 2001). Yet, what constitutes a relatively recent event is the growth that these organizations have had and the public visibility that they have reached, as well as the will to consider them part of a sector that, even though they are characterized by being very diverse between themselves, would place them in parallel with the State and the market as part of a trisectorial concept’ and logic of the economy. As List and Salamon pointed out, ‘‘[. . .] in recent decades, [. . .] this sector has been significantly reinvigorated by a new associativism that has empowered new strata of society and encouraged a broad process of democratization. The result is a rich assortment of institutional types – still dominated in terms of overall economic weight by religiously affiliated schools and hospitals, but also including more autonomous community-based groups, human rights agencies, and intermediary support organizations of various types’’ (List & Salamon, 2001: 1). Around the mid-1980s, a transition towards consolidated Democracies is witnessed and from the beginning of the 1990s the economic and social policies put into practice claim a reappraisal of the relationship between the public and the private spheres. From that moment onwards, Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) became more and more important so that it is in the mid-90s that the first systematic studies about their structure and scope are commenced. The idea of social capital has become evident at a later stage, at the end of the nineties after the impact that the so call Washington Consensus recipes have had on the region and considering the poor results that the neoliberal economic and social policies implemented have yielded in terms of social equity.
Civil Society The vocabulary used in the region to designate the wide range of social organizations that work institutionally
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attributes of the organizations that form this third sector, this point of view is particularly objected to. The process of globalization of the idea of civil society as a new way of referring to a non profit and associative universe starts in the mid 1990s, when it was added to the vocabulary of the Multilateral Development Banks (MDB) and other international agencies (Mato, 2004). Roughly, there are two ways of linking civil society with the nonprofit sector: the first one, would consider them quasi synonymous; the second one would conceive them as social representations or social images that have just some elements in common but have neither equivalent content nor similar scope (Nun & Aboy Carles, 2002; Roitter, 2005). As a mater of fact, and following in some way the European tradition, the notion of civil society that is more widely accepted in South America is that which emphasizes the impact functions in the public area rather than the provision of goods and services. In reference to Latin America Edwards and Foley point out that in this region people tend to think of civil societies as the space that ‘‘generates identity and voice to the distinct interest and diverse points of view characteristic of a modern society; it stimulates public debate and presses government for action’’ (Edwards et al., 2001: 6). Quoting Olvera (1999), Gonzalo de la Maza states that civil society has two main components: on the one hand, the corpus of institutions that define and protect citizens’ political, social, and individual rights and encourage their free association, the possibility of protecting themselves from strategic actions of power groups and the market and the viability of citizen intervention in the dynamics of the system. On the other hand, the group of social movements continually brings up new principles and values, new social demands and also controls that the rights already granted are precisely exercised. That is to say that civil society is more than the gathering of associations and that the sum of these associations is something different from civil society (de la Maza, 2000: 10). Precisely, in order to establish the relevant differences between the non profit sector and civil society, the expression ‘‘organized civil society’’ has recently turned up, taking for granted that the space that these societies occupy is part of a much wider universe. This denomination has been appearing more frequently in congresses and regional and international meetings, particularly in those promoted by European agencies. It is important to point out that sometimes this sort of ‘‘terminology inflation’’ has a theoretical justification. But, in many cases, various social actors, either as individuals or as a collective might express semantic differences in order to improve their relative positioning in the academic arena or in other fields of social struggle. This in no
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way implies ignoring the discussion for the content and sense of terminology where various social actors intervene. They may participate in the institutionalized world or not, they may belong in the NPS or other sectors. But, in any case, this debate expresses the very essence of the idea of civil society, as long as it is conceived as the arena where disputes are settled, consensus is built and sometimes new social agreements are reached.
Social Capital The idea of social capital brings to mind the whole universe of social articulations built on the basis of mutual trust and the reciprocity relationships that arises from it. The production and accumulation of this form of capital is essentially social. It is brought into being when a certain type of relationships is produced between groups and individuals through their participation in networks that are established by different organizations. The reintroduction of this concept in social sciences, particularly in economy, tries to change the focus of analysis from the study of individual behavior of organizations to an approach that emphasizes the social relations that they establish with different social groups and institutions. The promise of social capital is centered in that the poor, by means of their organization (which is a readily available resource) could reach external resources (potentially available) by constructing relationships with other organizations (horizontal bonds) and with the state (vertical bonds) (Villar, 2004). In South America, this concept was recently introduced in the vocabulary of policy makers, mainly by the impulse of the MDBs that operate in the region (WB, IDB) as well as by international agencies such as the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) and the United Nation Development Program (UNDP), which are interested in taking part of the development strategies in the region. There are numerous definitions used in the region to designate social capital. As the ex Executive Secretary of the ECLAC, Jose´ Antonio Ocampo points out there is a wide range of dispersion in the definition of social capital and this is undoubtedly related to the fact that the different accents and disciplinary languages that surround this concept converge together (Ocampo, 2003: 28). The unconsolidated characteristics of the notion, the relative intangibility of this form of capital and the fact that authors who belong to different theoretical traditions or even have antagonistic points of view make extensive use of the term, generates a vast empirical work that show a tendency to present an individual notion of social capital that has close relation or is similar to others already created by the
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pioneers in the field or by the authors who have used this approach more frequently to explain different social phenomena. In this sense, it is not possible to determine a unique sense for this concept, nor to establish a specific form of usage and much less to find a unique way of understanding how it interacts with other factors that have an effect on social and economic development. As for example, and especially in South America, the case of the unfair distribution of income and the macroeconomic policies enforced during the last years that have little to do with the encouragement and strengthening of social capital. However, many authors agree on highlighting the importance that social capital has in economic development and, they also coincide, though to a lesser extent, in considering it useful to ameliorate the persistent poverty that nowadays afflict significant segments of rural and urban population. As for the critical opinions on social capital in the region, two authors, among others, can be mentioned: Portes and Landolt (2000) and Hintze (2004). Portes and Landolt claim that this concept has acquired such popularity and is used in such a varied way that its original sense and its explanatory aptitude is severely questioned. According to these authors its importance has been exaggerated because the phenomena that the concept refers to have already been studied under other labels. Similarly, Susana Hintze, on the other hand, expresses a marked restraint in granting a special explicative value and objects to its political implicances. She points out that reciprocity, trust, and growing nets formed by relatives and neighbors have evolved from a kind of resource in the strategies for survival of the poor to a capital, a social capital in these cases. That is why she proposes a disillusioned and critical look on the current expansion of the term in a context where the inequalities of income and wealth in the region have acquired enormous dimensions. Social Capital and Development
In South America, the widespread disappointment with the results of the developing models that were put into practice during the last decades, visible through the unrelenting existence of poverty, the increase in social tension and the wider gap of income distribution as well as the limited participation of subordinated social actors in finding a solution to their problems, have helped in the search for new strategies and perspectives that could achieve higher levels of social inclusion. Following the pioneers in this field, authors such as Serageldin (1998) or Kliksberg (2000) among others in the region, have linked the question of social capital to the problem areas of development. In the main, the approaches to social capital and development have been
conceived to act locally, for example microcredits, and to reach social and productive organizations, leaving aside the broader discussion on macroeconomic and institutional policies. In this way, they focus on actions aimed at opening spaces for the expression and empowerment of the people by means of strengthening social capital. The idea of empowerment is not only circumscribed to the development of self-centered collective action of impoverished and isolated communities, but it also requires to articulate the bonds of solidarity that exist at the core of excluded groups with the bridges that would give them access to other available resources present in society. As Serageldin (1998) points out, even though there is consensus on the relevance of social capital for achieving development, there is no agreement among researchers and actors who implement social policies on the different ways in which social capital should be conveyed, in how to generate or multiply it and how to study this phenomenon systematically and empirically. Portes and Landlt (2000) point out the limitations of the concept as a force capable of transforming communities or even nations when it is taken out of context. They conclude that it is not advisable to be optimistic about what can be achieved by reinforcing bonds based only on trust and solidarity. Social capital is no substitute for the granting of health, education, infrastructure, and loans. The vast majority of essays and research on social capital and development deal with impoverished urban sectors. However, in some countries, a high percentage of the population lives in rural areas. Durston, who has studied Chilean rural areas, has a high regard for the opportunities provided by the approach of social capital in such areas, because it gives certain centrality to the territorial dimension of this notion. In this respect, he highlights that rural communities provide an ideal atmosphere for social capital to emerge or be generated. The fair stability of personal relations glued together by family and circumscribed to the same area during the whole life, holds the promise to be a kind of precursor of social capital. But he warns that it is important not to fall into a bucolic romanticism when considering rural life; an idealized vision of farming communities and rural life should be avoided. Social relations in these areas are certainly multiple and complex but not necessarily are they dense. That is to say, the social space is affected by the geographical location, and the distances between neighbors (at least in models of disperse settlements) and the inadequate means of transport all conspire against the creation of a strong institutionalization of rural social capital (Durston, 2002).
Civil Society and Social Capital in South America
The relation that is established between civil society and capital has led to measure social capital through organizational density that is in direct relation to a determined population. Among the indicators intended to measure social capital organizational density (measured in terms of number of NGOs per 1,000 inhabitants) and volunteer involvement (studied in terms of the amount of time devoted to work in community projects) are highlighted. This methodology has been questioned drawing attention to the fact that most of these indicators shed little light on their own and have to be ‘‘accompanied by information about two indicators: what people actually do as members, and how far its relates to public as well as private goods’’ (Schuller et al., 2000: 27). That is why, broadly speaking, research relays mainly in case studies instead of measurements such as the ones mentioned above (Portocarrero et al., 2006).
Empirical Data There have been two important attempts, encompassing several countries of South America, aimed at generating and systemizing information about the dimensions, structure, and main characteristics of the organizations that operates in a distinguish sphere between the business sector, the public sector and the families. The first one was developed by the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University, while the other, the Civil Society Index (CSI), was initiated by CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation, an international NGO. The pioneering one was the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP), based on a structural and operational definition and on the International Classification of Nonprofit Organizations System (ICNPO). This Project was implemented in 37 countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Me´xico, and Peru. Taking into account the research carried out by the CNP in the Latin American countries, a series of common traits among the NPOs in the region can be detected: (a) A large proportion of informal NPOs, which are not easily accounted for in the available registers and not even in the national census. (b) Many of the organizations have been created, promoted, financed, and even controlled by the State. (c) The existence of a variety of specific organizational models that do not fulfill all the characteristics specified in the structural-operational definition has been detected in each country, the bone of contention being the criteria used to define ‘‘voluntary.’’ (d) A sort of dualism has been detected, represented on one hand by well structured, professional
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organizations which provide the highest number of salaried employees in the respective NPS and which in many cases also offer services to the middle classes, mainly in the fields of education and health. On the other hand, the largest part of the organizations are generally small and are based on volunteer work, lending assistance the poor. The results of the second phase of the CNP not only highlighted differences among the Latin American countries that participated but also between these and the developed ones. This can be explained from a perspective based mainly on differences that hinge upon the degree of urbanization, the distribution of income and sociohistorical factors that seem to have created an environment and certain conditions that affected the NPS differentially in each of South American countries. One of the most intellectually sophisticated frameworks conceived for the understanding such differences is the theory of the Social Origins, which posits a set of more or less distinct regimes that can be traced to an identifiable and predictable set of social circumstances (Salamon & Anheier, 1996). Each of these types of nonprofit regimes (liberal, social democratic, corporatist, and statist) is characterized not only by a particular state role but also by a particular position for the third sector; and, most importantly, also reflects a particular constellation of social forces. As to the size of the NPS in South America, the information given by List and Salamon (1999: 8) points out that ‘‘[. . .] the nonprofit sector constitutes an important economic force in the Latin American region as a whole, accounting for considerable shares of expenditures and employment in most of the countries. In fact, the nonprofit sector in these five Latin American countries had 2.2% of their joint gross domestic product (GDP).’’ Furthermore, behind these expenditures lies a sizable workforce that includes the equivalent of nearly 2 million full-time equivalent (FTE) paid workers. This represents 2.2% of all nonagricultural workers in these five countries, 7.3% of service sector employees, and the equivalent of nearly 19% of the people who work for government at all levels. There is no homogeneous information on the number of organizations and the amount of paid workers they employ for all the countries of the region, so it is not easy to reach any conclusion based on the available sketchy data, because of the different moments some of these estimations refer to and because of the dissimilar methodological approach they used. In any case, the most outstanding difference is the higher density of organizations that can be detected in Chile, Peru, and Colombia,
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which would seem to indicate a higher degree of ‘‘capillarity’’ in contrast to the case of Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela (See Table 1). In reference to the participation of volunteers, Salamon et al. (2003) points out the existence of a Latin American Model. One of the characteristics of this model is that ‘‘volunteers play an unusually small part in the workforce of the Latin American civil society sector, accounting for 0.7% of the economically active population on average. This may be related to the role that civil society organizations play in this region. That role, as reflected in the data, is heavily oriented to service functions, and particularly education, which absorbs a third of the total civil society workforce and 44% of the paid workers. While some of this represents religious education open to all, a significant portion also reflects elite private education. Reflecting this, fees and charges constitute an unusually large share (74%) of total civil society sector revenue in Latin America. Even with the value of
Civil Society and Social Capital in South America. Table 1 Size of the third sector
Country
Number. of organizations
Argentinaa 51.750/104.642
1.49/2.95
Bolivia
N/D
N/D
Chileb
86.723
5.38
Colombiac 135.599
3.54
Ecuador
N/D
N/D
Paraguay
N/D
N/D
Peru´d
110.621
4.64
Uruguaye
3.566/7.000
1.09–2.15
Venezuelaf 27.249 a
Number of organizations/ 1,000 inhabitants
1.16
The first number corresponds to 1995. Source: Roitter and Bombal (2000) and the second to 1999, source PNUD/BID/GADIS (2004). These cannot be compared due to the methodological differences in the gathering of facts, the first based on the National Economic Census and the second on legal registers and surveys b Year: 2004: source: Irirrazaval, et al (2006) c Year: 1995: source Villar (2001) d Year; 1995: source: Portocarrero, et al. (2001) e Year: 1997. The first number refers to the OSFL having legal status and the second is an estimate of the total number of OSFL that exist in the country. Both figures consider the religious subsector. Source: Bettoni and Cruz (1999) f Year: 1998: source Go´mez as cited in Ja´come, F. (2007) The information about the total population of each country for the corresponding year was taken from CEPALSTAT, Latin American and Caribbean Statistics. Available at http://www.eclac.org/estadisticas/ bases/
volunteering included in the revenue base of the region’s civil society organizations, fees account for two thirds of the support [. . .] While there is clear evidence of the emergence of advocacy and empowerment-oriented organizations, these institutions maintain a wary coexistence with the more substantial elite oriented educational institutions and church-related assistance agencies’’ (Salamon, et al., 2003: 50). Taking the data provided by these authors, in Argentina, Colombia y Peru´, the amount of working time volunteers dedicate to nonprofit organizations represents on average, 34% of the total number of hours of their human resources, while the average resulting from 35 countries is 38%. With respect to distribution, according to the fields of activity within the NPS and taking as an indicative variable the number of salaried people, it can be seen that ‘‘ [. . .] Of all the types of nonprofit activity, the one that accounts for the largest share of nonprofit employment in all five Latin American countries is education[. . .] more than 44% of all nonprofit employment in the Latin American region is in the education field [. . .] significantly more than any other region’’ (List & Salmon, 1999: 12). In Chile, two thirds of the total number of people employed by the non profit sector (this includes salaried and volunteer workers) are concentrated in four fields of activity: education, health, social services and community development (Irarra´zaval et al., 2006). In Uruguay, the most prominent nonprofit organizations are the ones that carry out sports activities and social activities (youth, childhood, women, elderly population, and health) (Bettoni & Cruz, 1999). Venezuela represents a particular case for which Francine Ja´come (2007) citing Go´mez, points out that the main activities, according to the number of organizations, are related to ‘‘laws, the defence and promotion of rights, parents, and representative associations and housing.’’ In some South American countries, there is a high concentration of NPOs in urban contexts. Although the data is incomplete and unsystematic, there are some figures that seem to confirm this tendency. In the case of Argentina, 34% of the NPOs and 51% of employment is concentrated in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (Roitter, 2001). This situation is even more manifest in Uruguay where 70% of the organizations are headquartered in Montevideo (CIVICUS-ICD, 2006). On the other hand, Chile evidences a lower concentration because only 35% of employment is found in the Santiago Metropolitan Area (Irarra´zabal, 2006). The opposite seems to occur in Bolivia, where a CSI Community survey – Bolivia, (2005) – indicates that 44% of persons affiliated to NPOs live in rural areas, which is consistent with
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the relatively low percentage of the population residing in urban areas, in fact one of the lowest of all South America. The sources of income in Argentina, Colombia, and Peru´ stem mainly from instalments, payments, or services lent to the organizations (Salomo´n et al., 1999). A similar situation occurs in Chile (Irarra´zaval et al., 2006). The second most important source of income in these countries is the State, whereas less than 15% comes from philanthropic sources. In Ecuador, according to CIVICUS-Fundacio´n Esquel (2006), the main source is other local donors, along with the instalments, while the State’s contribution is marginal. Although figures are not available, it is safe to say that companies and private foundations are providing an increasing amount of financing in almost all the countries but nevertheless the amounts are not very important in the overall picture. Likewise, the importance of funds provided by international cooperation institutions has decreased in those countries with higher levels of per capita GDP (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela). As was previously pointed out, another empirical approach applied in the region is the Civil Society Index (CSI), which was launched in 1997. ‘‘The CSI is designed to assess and score four different dimensions of civil society: (1) the structure of civil society, (2) the external environment in which civil society exists and functions, (3) the values held and advocated in the civil society arena, and (4) the impact of activities pursued by civil society actors’’ (CSI Team CIVICUS, 2006). Based on the analysis of the Structure of the Civil Society as a dimension defined by CSI, the documents prepared for each country take into account the averages for the scores obtained for the overall size, strength, and influence of civil society in human, organizational, and economic terms (see Table 2).
As a result of the review of these outcomes, an overview report was prepared for each country obtaining the following results. The score for the dimension structure in Argentina ‘‘indicates the existence of a civil society with almost a half of the highest possible mark’’ (CIVICUS-GADIS: 20). In the case of Bolivia, ‘‘the score for this Dimension is 1.8, indicating that the structure of civil society in Bolivia is moderately strong’’ (CIVICUS-CIPCA-CRS: 25); In Chile the ‘‘[. . .] final score (1.9) indicates a not so well structured civil society of medium strength’’ (CIVICUS-Fundacio´n Soles:22); ‘‘These features are described in terms of Ecuadorian CSOs’ human resource base. The scoring received by the Structure dimension was 1.2, which represents a rather small civil society’’ (CIVICUS-Fundacio´n Esquel: 26); In Uruguay the ‘‘[. . .] structure dimension is the dimension with the lowest score (1, 3), indicating a rather weak structure’’ (CIVICUS-ICD: 24).
Outlook/Concluding Assessment As was pointed out by Catalina Smulovitz (1996), Gonzalo de la Maza (2000), Olga Lucı´a Toro (2001) and Ine´s Gonza´lez Bombal (2001) in their respective evaluations on the state of Latin American research, the foundations have been laid for the appearance of a new intellectual space which is receiving much recognition within the academic field. Indeed, empirical and theoretical research in South America, on the questions of civil society and civil capital has taken great strides since the mid-90s when the JHU’s International Comparative Project – an initiative that established a first vision of the universe of associations in some countries in the region – was begun. Since then, the CIVICUS initiative has made noteworthy contributions in the region, including an increased number of dimensions and aspects to be studied by means of the Civil Society Development Index. At the same time, the participation of Latin American
Civil Society and Social Capital in South America. Table 2 Scores for the structural dimension – civil society index Sub-dimensions
Argentina
Bolivia
Chile
Ecuador
Uruguay
Breadth of citizen participation
2
Resources
1
2.2
2
1.2
1.2
1.7
1.5
1.3
0.7
Inter-relations
1.5
1.7
3
2
1
Level of organization
1.2
2
1.5
1
1.2
Diversity of civil society participants
1.7
1.5
2
1.5
1.5
Depth of citizen participation
1.2
1.7
1.3
0.3
2
Average structural dimension
1.4
1.8
1.9
1.2
1.3
Sources: CIVICUS Country Reports. All reports available at http://www.civicus.org/csi/phase-one/csi-country-reports: Argentina: CIVICUS – GADIS (2006), Bolivia: CIVICUS-CIPCA (no datado), Chile: CIVICUS-Fundacio´n Soles (2006), Ecuador: CIVICUS-Fundacio´n Esquel (2006), Uruguay: CIVICUSICD (2006)
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researchers in the ISTR (International Association of Third Sector Researchers) has been important, as has the creation of a Latin American chapter of the same network. The training processes, the post graduate formation at various Latin American institutions as well as the generation of specific places for the production of knowledge at various institutes and universities in the region have also contributed to move things along in that direction. Likewise, in all South American countries, a continuous growth process can be seen in relation to the number of organizations, their participation in the supply of goods and services, their influence on the drawing up of public agendas and in their bringing to debate of different problems that affect the lives of people in South America. Particularly relevant to this is the struggle to increase citizen’s rights with respect to social equality, access to health services, education, and housing. Another important achievement in this respect is the presence of numerous social movements that participate in the construction of the public sphere and their influence on society. It is important to mention a current initiative of The Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University oriented to promote the implementation of the UN Nonprofit Handbook which seeks to improve the treatment of nonprofit organizations in national economic statistics. The System of National Accounts, of which this Handbook is now a part, is a consensus system. Countries are encouraged to abide by its guidelines but are not required to do so. That is why this Project includes disseminating the Handbook to national statistical agencies, encouraging them to adopt it, ensuring effective implementation, and creating a mechanism to assemble and report the results. It comprises 31 countries that have committed to implementing the Handbook or some version of it, among them Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru´. As it is demonstrated by the facts presented, it is still necessary to advance in search of more and better information, as well as a better understanding of the sense, scope, and non-neutrality of the terms employed when referring to these organizations as a whole, thus avoiding over-simplified views and perspectives that present civil society in South America in a unilateral, biased, or naı¨f way. To this effect, it would be important to pay attention to the local-global complexity and the specific practices of the various social actors that take part in it, taking into account both the cooperation processes as well as the conflict that characterizes it.
Cross-References
▶ CIVICUS ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Brazil
▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Mexico and Central America ▶ Civil Society Indicators and Indexes ▶ Collective Action ▶ International Society for Third-Sector Research ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Nonprofit Organizations in the System of National Accounts ▶ Philanthropy in Latin America ▶ Social Movements ▶ Social Origins Theory ▶ Solidarity ▶ Third Sector ▶ Volunteers
References/Further Readings Bettoni, A., & Cruz, A. (1999). El Tercer Sector en Uruguay. Montevideo, Uruguay: Instituto de Comunicacio´n y Desarrollo. Campetella, A., & Gonza´lez Bombal, I. (2000). Historia del sector sin fines de lucro en Argentina. In M. Roitter & I. Gonza´lez Bombal (comps.), Estudios sobre el sector sin fines de lucro en Argentina. Buenos Aires: CEDES – The Johns Hopkins University. CIVICUS. Civil society index summary of conceptual framework and research methodology, from http://www.civicus.org/new/media/ CSI_Methodology_and_conceptual_framework.pdf CIVICUS – CIPCA. (no datado). Civil society index report. Civil Society in Bolivia: From mobilization to impact. Bolivia. CIVICUS – Fundacio´n Esquel. (2006). An efficient civil society going beyond its weaknesses. Quito, Ecuador. CIVICUS – Fundacio´n Soles. (2006). Chile: the associational reconstruction of a nation. Santiago, Chile. CIVICUS – GADIS. (2006). La Sociedad Civil por dentro: Tiempo de crisis, tiempo de oportunidades. ´Indice CIVICUS de la Sociedad Civil Argentina (2004–2005). Argentina: Buenos Aires. CIVICUS – ICD. (2006). The brilliance & imperfections of a diamond, Results of the civil society index in Uruguay. ICD – Instituto de Comunicacio´n y Desarrollo, Montevideo, Uruguay. Civil Society Index Team Civicus (2006). Civil society index: Preliminary findings phase 2003–2005. CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. de la Maza, G. (2000). Sociedad Civil y Construccio´n de Capital Social en Ame´rica Latina: Hacia do´nde va la investigacio´n? Dublı´n, Ponencia presentada a la 4ª Conferencia Internacional de la International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR). Dublı´n, 5 al 8 de julio 2000. Departamento de Asuntos Econo´micos y Sociales de las Naciones Unidas. (2003) Durston, J. (2002). El Capital Social Campesino en la Gestio´n del Desarrollo Rural. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. Edwards, B., Folley, M., & Diani, M. (Eds.) (2001). Beyond Tocqueville. Civil society and the social capital debate in comparative perspective. New England: Tufts University Press. Hintze, S. (2004). Capital Social y Estrategias de Supervivencia. Reflexiones sobre el “Capital Social de los Pobres. In C. Danani (Compiladora) Polı´tica Social y Economı´a Social, Debates Fundamentales. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Altamira-Fundacio´n OSDE.
Civil Society and Social Capital in South Asia Irarra´zaval, I., Hairel, E. M. H., Wojciech Sokolowski, S., & Salamon, L. M. (2006). Estudio comparativo del sector sin fines de lucro – Chile. Santiago de Chile: Johns Hopkins University/PNUD/Focus Estudios y Consultorı´as. Ja´come, F. (2007). La Sociedad Civil en Venezuela, 1999–2006. In B. Sorj & M. D. de Oliveira (Eds.), Sociedad Civil y Democracia en Ame´rica Latina: crisis y reinvencio´n de la polı´tica. Rı´o de Janeiro, Brazil/San Pablo, CA: Ediciones Centro Edelstein/Ediciones iFHC. Kliksberg, B., & Tomassini, L. (2000). Capital Social y Cultura: claves estrate´gicas para el desarrollo. Buenos Aires, Argentina: BID-Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica. List, R., & Salamon, L. (1999). Beyond NGOs: The third sector in Latin America. Baltimore: Center for Civil Society Studies, Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. Mato, D. (coord.) (2004). Actores globales, redes transnacionales y actores locales en la produccio´n de representaciones de ideas de sociedad civil. In Polı´ticas de ciudadanı´a y sociedad civil en tiemos de globalizacio´n. Caracas, Venezuela: Facultad de Ciencias Econo´micas y Sociales, Universidad Central de Venezuela. Nun, J., & Carle´s, G. A. (2002). Los estudios sobre organizaciones de la sociedad civil en Argentina, trabajo no publicado. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de General San Martı´n. Ocampo, J. A. (2003). Capital social y agenda del desarrollo. In R. Atria, M. Siles, I. Arriagada, & S. Whiteford (Compiladores), Capital social y reduccio´n de la pobreza en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe: en busca de un nuevo paradigma. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. PNUD/BID/GADIS (2004). Indice de Desarrollo de la Sociedad Civil de Argentina Total Paı´s. Buenos Aires, from http://www.gadis.org.ar/ documentos/IDSC%20de%20Arg.pdf Portes, A., & Landolt, P. (2000). Social capital: Promise and pitafalls of its role in development. Journal of Latin American Studies, 32(2). Portocarrero Sua´rez, F. (2006). Capital social y democracia: explorando normas, valores y redes sociales en el Peru´. Lima, Peru: Centro de Investigacio´n de la Universidad del Pacı´fico. Portocarrero, F., Sanborn, C., Cueva, H., List, R., & Salamon, L. M. (2001). El tercer sector en el Peru´: una aproximacio´n cuantitativa. CIUP. RedEAme´rica, from http://www.redeamerica.org/Portals/0/Publicaciones/ Cuadernillo_1_esp.pdf Roitter, M. M. (2001). Apuntes para contribuir a (des)cifrar el sector no lucrativo argentino en el contexto latinoamericano. Ponencia presentada al Tercer Encuentro de la red latinoamericana de ISTR, Buenos Aires 2001/Cape Town, 2002, from http://www.istr.org/ conferences/capetown/volume/roitter.pdf Roitter, M. M. (2005). Tercer Sector como Representacio´n Topogra´fica de Sociedad Civil. In B. Arditi (Ed.), Democracia post-liberal? El Espacio Polı´tico de las Organizaciones Ed Anthropos. Barcelona. Roitter, M. M., & Gonza´lez Bombal, I. (comps.). (2000). Estudios sobre el sector sin fines de lucro en Argentina. Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad. Buenos Aires: The Johns Hopkins University. Salamon, L. M., & Anheier, H. K. (1996). Social origins of civil society: Explaining the nonprofit sector cross-nationally. Working papers of the Johns Hopkins comparative nonprofit sector project. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, Institute for Policy Studies. Salamon, L., Anheier, H., List, R., Toepler, S., & Sokolowski, W. (Eds.) (1999). Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society.
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Salamon, L., Sokolowski, W., & List, R., (Eds.) (2003). Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector. Baltimore: Institute for Policy Studies, Center for Civil Society Studies, Johns Hopkins University, from http://www.kpbooks.com/pdf/gcs2.pdff Sanborn, C. (2008). Filantropı´a en Ame´rica Latina: tradiciones histo´ricas y tendencias actuales. In C. Sanborn & F. Portocarrero (Eds.), Philanthropy and social change in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schuller, T., Baron, S., & Field, J. J. (Eds.) (2000). Social capital: A review and critique. In Social capital. Critical perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Serageldin, I. (1998). The initiative on defining, monitoring and measuring social capital: overview and program description. In Social capital initiative. Papeles de trabajo Nº1, Banco Mundial. Smulovitz, C. (1996). La investigacio´n sobre el Tercer Sector: El Sur Tambie´n Existe. Baltimore: ISTR. Thompson, A. (1990). El tercer sector y el desarrollo social. In E. Bustelo & E. Isuani (Eds.), Mucho, poquito o nada. Crisis y alternativas de polı´tica social en los 90. Buenos Aires: UNICEF – CIEPP/Siglo XXI. Toro, O. L. (2001). El Estado de la Investigacio´n sobre el Tercer Sector y la Sociedad Civil en Ame´rica Latina y el Caribe. Baltimore: ISTR. Villar, R. (2001). El Tercer sector en Colombia: Evolucio´n, dimensio´n y tendencies. Bogota´, Colombia: Confederacio´n Colombiana de Organizaciones No Gubernamentales (CCONG). Villar, R. (2004). Niveles de intervencio´n en el desarrollo de base. RedEAme´rica.
Civil Society and Social Capital in South Asia HANS BLOMKVIST, KATRIN UBA Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Introduction South Asia has a long history of citizens’ mobilization in the arena between state, market, and family–civil society. Its early development was dominated by nationalist and religious movements. As Behar and Prakash (2004) note, there were three major civil society groups in British India– Christian missionaries, Indian bourgeoisie and Mahatma Gandhi initiated voluntary groups that became the heart of nationalist movement. Missionaries focused on the issues of education and philanthropy, Indian middle-class focused on urban social problems, and Gandhian groups aimed at diminishing rural poverty via self-reliance movements. Although nationalist and regional movements are still active in India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the issues of education, urban, and rural development characterize the South Asian civil society also today. The following is a concentrated picture of contemporary civil society and social capital development in the region.
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Civil Society There are numerous definitions of civil society, but here it is suitable to adopt the one that is sometimes found in the studies on South Asia: "
Civil society is as an intermediate associational realm between state and family populated by organizations, which are separate from the state, enjoy autonomy in relation to the state and are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values. (White, 1994:379)
Scholars, such as Putnam (1993) or Chandhoke (2003), sometimes extend the concept and in addition to voluntary associations even refer to civic values and trust. The last is related to the concept of ‘‘social capital’’ and discussed in the second section of the chapter. Here, the focus is on a diverse set of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements. These range from rural development and sport organizations to trade unions, church and caste panchayats (in India). A common denominator of civil society organizations (CSOs) is the autonomy from state and market. The first was especially important for Gandhian voluntary organizations in India that first opposed the British colonial authorities and later mobilized against the 18 months suspension of democracy under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Behar & Prakash, 2004). Today, there are numerous political, non-party organizations opposing statepower in the region. Some groups, such as trade unions in India, have affiliated with political parties and this, as argued by Candland and Sil (2001), has restricted their autonomy of action. In less democratic countries (e.g., Bangladesh, Pakistan) the autonomy of civil society is limited by strict bureaucratic rules. The autonomy from market has been challenged by growing number of professionalized NGOs in the region since the 1980s. Although CSOs are expected to be nonprofit, large amounts of producers’ co-operatives and service delivery oriented organizations (e.g., dairy cooperatives in Andhra Pradesh, India) operate in a certain greyzone. The small firms in the development business have received development aid in Pakistan despite lacking voluntary members and having little resemblance to traditional civil society (Blair, 2005:933). This all does not only limit autonomy, but also accountability of CSOs. The last is also challenged by expanding transnationalism and international funding of civil society in the region. Some South Asian governments have reacted to increasing dependence on foreign funding by legal actions. For instance, Thomas et al. (2008) note that India approved a
Foreign Contributions Management and Control Bill for restricting foreign contributions to local NGOs. In addition to the questions of autonomy and accountability, the strength (or size) of civil society and its relationship with democracy has been of interest for many scholars. The issue is strongly related to authors’ definition of civil society. Those arguing for the exclusion of informal associations note that India has a weak civil society, while the proponents of informal networks see it as strong (cf. Chhibber, 1999; Rudolph, 2000). In the remote rural regions that characterize entire South Asia formal organizing is difficult due to the lack of functioning infrastructure. Thus, including grass-root informal networks into the discussion on civil society is unavoidable. Scholars who define civil society as a property of a good and democratic government do not consider radical nationalist groups as a part of civil society (cf. Putnam, 1993; Chandhoke, 2003). Neglecting Hindu nationalists’ mobilization in India or Tamil Tigers’ activities in Sri Lanka leads, however, to a limited picture of civil society in the region. Therefore, it is useful to adopt the broad definition and divide South Asian civil society in three groups: NGOs, political organizations and identity based movements (cf. Alagappa, 2004).
Empirical Data NGOs and Volunteering
Estimating the size of South Asian civil society or its strength in specific countries is difficult because of the lack of regular surveys and the controversies over definitions and measurement (cf. Rao, 2005). Table 1 shows that in India the numbers vary from 30,000 (Mishra et al., 2005) to 1.2 million CSOs involving 19.2 million people (Srivastava & Tandon, 2005). Official statistics show even smaller accounts and significant intra-India variation (Mishra et al., 2005). The varying number of civil society organizations across South Asia is certainly related to the size of the countries, but refers also to political history. For instance, the majority of peace-building organizations have international character and this explains why conflict prone Sri Lanka and Nepal have the highest rate of secretariats of international NGOs per capita (Table 1, second column). The number of CSOs has also increased since the 1990s. In Nepal, the sector grew six times during 3 years–from 220 in 1990 to 1210 in 1993 (Mishra et al., 2005). In Pakistan, the increase was related to growing number of educational non-profit organizations that already form half of countries’ registered NGOs. Religious
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Civil Society and Social Capital in South Asia. Table 1 Civil society and social capital indicators in South Asia
Bangladesh India Maldives Nepal
NGOs/nonprofit organizations
INGOs per million people (2003)
Interpersonal trust (%)
Norms of reciprocitya
23,000
0.2
25
70
30,000–1.2 mil
0.2
34
67
500
0.0
47
80
3,400
0.9
27
85
Pakistan
10,000–45,000
0.2
50
76
Sri Lanka
10,000–20,000
1.1
25
63
a
Percent of respondents who answered positively to the question ‘‘If you saw somebody on the street looking lost, would you stop to help?’’ Data from Asia Barometer 2005 (see Inoguchi & Hotta 2006) Sources: Chhibber (1997:17), Gauri and Galef (2005:2047), Inoguchi and Hotta (2006), Mishra et al. (2005), Anheier et al. (2004), Report of the Asian Regional Meeting of Status and Strengthening Civil Society National Platforms (2007)
humanitarian organizations have also expanded in the region, leading to accusations that these proselytize poor and lower caste people (Thomas et al., 2008). The majority of NGOs and voluntary non-profit organizations in the region deal with the delivery of social services, mainly in relation to rural and sustainable development, education, and public health. The development oriented NGOs have gained a lot of attention because of the Nobel peace prize to professor Muhammad Yunus and the Bangladeshi Grameen Bank in 2006 (Abed & Matin, 2007). Similar microcredit associations have now been created all over South Asia. Politically Oriented Associations
The long history of nationalist movements in South Asia has inspired many politically oriented organizations. In India, it is estimated that there are about 20,000– 30,000 such movements (Shah, 2004). As noted by Misra (2007), contemporary groups combine multiple issues and environmental movements focus also on the questions of social justice and human rights. One of such movements is the Narmada River Movement in India, which has been active since the 1970s. Nevertheless, surveys show that people perceive Indian political parties and religious groups more useful for solving their problems than NGOs or trade unions (Chandhoke, 2003). The last are sometimes seen outside the civil society due to their party-affiliation, but this has changed since the 1990s when labor movement cooperated with other political groups for opposing neoliberal economic policies for instance in India (Uba, 2008). Even the influence of political groups varies across the region. For instance, farmers’ associations (kisan) have been more influential in India than in Bangladesh (Blair, 2005:931).
Identity Based Movements
The political character of South Asian identity-based groups is much related to their long-term marginalization from political and social life. The organizations range from Janajatis’ and Madhesis movements in Nepal, Dalit groups in India to Sinhala and Tamil movements in Sri Lanka (See, Shah, 2004). Dalit movements are probably the most known as they have successfully fought for the reservations of government jobs and against discrimination. Simultaneously, however, have radical nationalist movements (e.g., Hindu fundamentalists) gained popularity and is seen as a threat to democratic character of Indian civil society (Alagappa, 2004). In addition to ethnic identity, the mobilization of women’s and youth groups has also grown in the region. Women’s movements that focus on the question on violence against women have been successful in bureaucratic and legal spheres, but rarely at political arena (Basu, 2005). To sum up, one can say that there is a diverse set of voluntary organizations and vivid civil society in South Asia. The way it functions is well described by Ashutosh Varshney (2002:44): "
If what is crucial to the notion of civil society is that families and individuals connect with others beyond their homes and talk about matters of public relevance without the interference or sponsorship of the state, then it seems far too rigid to insist that this takes place only in ‘‘modern’’ associations.
Social Capital Social capital refers to relations between individuals or actors and is often measured as networks, norms, and trust (Putnam, 1993; Krishna, 2002). By facilitating
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cooperation for mutual benefit within a group it helps solving collective action dilemmas. For instance, communication and conflict resolution among Sri Lankan irrigation farmers was aided by social capital (Uphoff & Wijayaratna, 2000). Social capital can be strengthened by and harbored in formal civil society organizations, but has also an informal character. Therefore it is of particular political importance in South Asia with relatively few formal organizational structures for opponents of state power. The concept has been used to study countries, Indian states (Blomkvist, 2003; Widmalm, 2008), villages (Krishna, 2002), and small groups such as rotating credit associations (Abed & Matin, 2007). Usually it is used to study cooperation that has a beneficial outcome for society at large, such as development or democratization. But social capital also has a ‘‘dark side’’; it can be utilized by criminal gangs, terrorists, religious mobs or extremist political parties (cf. Chandhoke, 2003). Similarly to other human resources (e.g., physical capital or knowledge) it can be used for benevolent or ugly purposes. Thus, one should see social capital as an analytical, not normative, concept. The theoretical idea of social capital probably goes back to pre-modern political thought and the usage of the term has been traced to 1917 (Woolcock, 1997). The concept became popular among social scientists after Robert Putnam published a study on Italy in 1993. Taking a cue from Putnam, many used membership in formal associations as a proxy for social capital. But since relatively few citizens in most developing countries report being members in formal associations (see Table 1) the concept and theory were criticized for a ‘‘western bias.’’ Krishna (2002:4) has noted that such a critique confused the concept of social capital with some of its manifestations. Thus, in South Asia social capital manifested itself mainly in terms of informal networks, and studies showed that entire 90% of Indians can rely on one or several informal networks when needed (Agora study in Blomkvist, 2003). There are, however, regional disparities, not least in the giant – India. A study of five large Indian states showed differences in social trust from 32% in West Bengal to 75% in Uttar Pradesh. The associational membership varied from five percent in Uttar Pradesh to 51% in Kerala (Ibid.). The theory of social capital aggregates any and all relations, critics have argued. Susanne Rudolph (2000), among others, has questioned whether it is meaningful to lump all associations together into one category. One can concur with Rudolph on the theoretical importance of conceptual disaggregation depending on the purpose of the inquiry, but still relate social capital to participation in political and non-political; deliberative and interest-
oriented; hierarchical and egalitarian; or voluntary and ascribed associations and networks. Another important debate on social capital discusses the causal direction: Does social capital cause democratization or is social capital caused by healthy democratic institutions? Since most studies capture situations at one point in time the causal direction is difficult to ascertain. But Krishna (2007) was able to show over a 7-year period that the quality of government institutions did not explain changes in social capital over this period. ‘‘Traditional’’ Sources of Social Capital
People acquainted with South Asia are well aware of the social, cultural, and political importance of religious and ethnic segmentation. Some scholars consider the prevalent trust and networks within ‘‘traditional’’ communities such as castes or tribes – often called bonding social capital – negative (Woolcock, 1997). Rudolph (2000: 1766) notes that many modernization theorists in the 1960s saw ascribed (Gemeinschaft, primordial) associations as ‘‘incapable of being concerned with the common good.’’ She argues that this argument misses the point as ethnic identities such as Buddhist, Brahmin, or the Ghilzis tribe can be the result of intention as much as birth. The doye´n of Indian sociology, Andre´ Be´teille (1996), emphasizes the integrative but also hierarchical characteristics of traditional institutions of kinship, caste, and religion thus separating them from open and secular organizations congenial, in his view, to civil society. Many view social capital within segments as a potential source of influence and economic strength for a community without negative effects on other communities. Sten Widmalm (2008), for instance, shows that trust within communities acted as a ‘‘bulwark’’ against corruption on the local level in Madhya Pradesh and Kerala. Still, networks and trust within South Asia do not always translate into good relations with others. In a study of tubewell irrigation in Balochistan, Pakistan (Mustafa & Qazi, 2007: 1803) a villager is quoted: ‘‘There is conflict on communal land use . . . the other tribe’s tubewell is close to our and therefore there is conflict.’’ The civil war in Sri Lanka is a stark example of another group conflict. As Orjuela (2003: 202) puts is, the trust between the Sinhalese and the Tamils has broken down and the population has ‘‘become polarized into relatively clearly defined groups.’’ Cases such as mobilization among Indian students in the late 1990s against job reservations in the public sector, or among the Sangh Parivar (Hindu extremists) destroying the Babri Mosque in northern India show the dark side of social capital (Chandhoke, 2003). Networks and trust between
Civil Society and Social Capital in South Asia
communities, bridging social capital, is pivotal to avoid sectarian conflict and violence according to an important argument. In a major study of Hindu–Muslim relations in India, Ashutosh Varshney (2002) shows how connections and trust between these religious communities on the local level are crucial for communal harmony. Effects of Social Capital
There are studies of the potential effects of social capital on democracy, economic development, communal harmony, and local development. Pretty and Ward (2001) review summarized studies on the impact of social capital on watershed management, irrigation, micro-finance, forest management, pest management, and farmers’ research groups. They estimated that more than 200,000 local groups in South Asia were started in these sectors during the 1990s. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is known worldwide for its successful work with micro-credit institutions, utilizing local social capital as collateral. BRAC, another big Bangladesh NGO, promotes micro-credits, health, education, and job creation programs building on local social capital (Abed & Matin, 2007). In participatory forest management the most significant changes have taken place in Nepal and India. Some 250,000 farmers participate in 33,000 irrigation groups in Sri Lanka (Pretty & Ward, 2001) with increasing productivity in rice farming as one result (Uphoff & Wijayaratna, 2000 also cite studies of similar experiences in Bangladesh and India).
Concluding Assessment The nationalist movements were strong harbingers of contemporary civil society in South Asia. Mobilization of farmers’, Dalits’, tribal, women’s, and other groups has gained strength and been successful from time to time. Civil society and social capital is arguably strong in the region. This conclusion has some caveats. For long periods since independence civil society organizations have had to struggle in non-democratic contexts in several countries. Some groups have also become quite ‘‘uncivil,’’ for instance, extremist or terrorist organizations claiming legitimacy from Hinduism or Islam. Despite the large number of NGOs and other voluntary organizations, studies indicate that quite a small proportion of citizens are members. Functions usually associated with formal associations are instead performed by informal networks; social ties are often stronger and more important than in western countries. The networks are often based or have their roots in kinship, caste, or religious communities. In sum, empirical studies show a controversy: social capital in such ‘‘traditional’’ communities can be good for the larger society, but ‘‘bonding’’ social capital can also be
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detrimental for outsiders, even contributing to civil war. There are similar contradictory theoretical claims about multi-ethnic societies: contacts on the local level between the ethnic groups are important or even crucial for communal harmony, vs. the argument that such contacts will lead to friction, conflict, and even violence. This all can be explained by lacking studies attempting to compare and evaluate the meaning and impact of networks and trust within versus between communities. South Asia is a region rich in any kind of ethnic group identity, and also rich in varying development experiences – thus a fertile ground to research this question more fully. Today, there is a dearth of cross-country comparisons in the region either on the national level, or on state/province or local/ village level. This is somewhat surprising, considering the vast variation in political and economic outcomes and a similar cultural and historic background.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ BRAC ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Ethnicity ▶ Cooperatives and Employee Ownership ▶ Gandhi, Mohandas ▶ Grameen Bank ▶ Grassroots Associations ▶ Identity ▶ Peasant and Farmers’ Organizations ▶ Social Capital, Definition ▶ Social Movements ▶ Social Trust ▶ Uncivil Civil Society
References/Further Readings Abed, F.H. & Matin, I. (2007). Beyond lending: How microfinance creates new forms of capital to fight poverty. Innovations, Winter-Spring, 3–17. Alagappa, M. (Ed.) (2004). Civil society and political change in Asia. Expanding and contracting democratic space. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anheier, H. et al. (Eds.) (2004). Global Civil Society 2004, from http:// www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/Publications/Yearbooks/2004/DataProgramme2004.pdf, retrieved 15.12.2008. Basu, A. (2005). Women, political parties and social movements in South Asia. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) Occasional Paper No. 5. Be´teille, A. (1996). Civil society and its institutions. The First Fulbright Memorial Lecture, Calcutta. US Educational Foundation in India. Reprinted in Elliott (Ed.), Civil society and democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Behar, A., & Prakash, A. (2004). India: Expanding and contracting democratic space. In M. Alagappa (Ed.)Civil society and political change
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in Asia. Expanding and contracting democratic space. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Blair, H. (2005). Civil society and pro-poor initiatives in rural Bangladesh. World Development, 33, 921–936. Blomkvist, H. (2003). Social capital, civil society, and degrees of democracy in India. In C. M. Elliott(Ed.), Civil society and democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Candland, C., & Sil, R. (Eds.) (2001). The politics of labor in global age: Continuity and change in late-industrializing and post-socialist economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandhoke, N. (2003). The ‘‘civil’’ and the ‘‘political’’ in civil society. In C. M. Elliott (Ed.), Civil society and democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chhibber, P. (1999). Democracy without Associations. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Gauri, V., & Galef, J. (2005). NGOs in Bangladesh: Activities, resources, and governance. World Development, 33, 2045–2065. Inoguchi, T., & Hotta, Z. L. (2006). Quantifying social capital in Central and South Asia. Japanese Journal of Political Science, 7, 195–220. Krishna, A. (2002) ‘‘Enhancing Political Participation in Democracies: What is the Role of Social Capital?’’ Comparative Political Studies, 35, 437–460. Krishna, A. (2007) ‘‘How Does Social Capital Grow? A seven-year study of villages in India’’ Journal of Politics, 69, 941–956. Mishra, D., Biswas, S.W., & Roy, R. (2005). Governance of NGOs: Contextualizing in the Indian experience. International Journal of Rural Management, 1, 185–201. Mustafa, D., & Qazi, M. U. (2007). Transition from Karez to tubewell irrigation: Development, modernization, and social capital in Balochistan, Pakistan. World Development, 35, 1796–1813. Orjuela, C. (2003). Building peace in Sri Lanka: A role for civil society? Journal of Peace Research, 40, 195–212. Pretty, J., & Ward, H. (2001). Social capital and the environment. World Development, 29, 209–227. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton University Press. Rao, S. K. G. K. (2005) Size of the non-profit sector. Economic and Political Weekly, July, 3098. Report of the Asian Regional Meeting of Status and Strengthening Civil Society National Platforms in Asia, 13–15 March 2007, Hyderabad, India. Rudolph, S. (2000). Civil society and the realm of freedom. Economic and Political Weekly, 20, 1762–1769. Shah, G. (2004). Social movements in India: A review of literature. New Delhi: Sage. Srivastava, S. S., & Tandon, R. (2005). Non-governmental organizations: How large is India’s non-profit sector? Economic and Political Weekly, 40(9), 1948–1952. Misra, S. (2007). Spirituality, culture and the politics of environmentalism in India. Journal of Entrepreneurship, 16(2), 131–145. Thomas, G. M. (2008). Legitimacy and the rise of NGOs: The global and local in South Asia. Journal of Civil Society, 4(1), 31–42. Uba, K. (2008). Labor Union resistance to economic liberalization in India: What can national and state level patterns of protests against privatization tell us? Asian Survey, 48(5), 860–884. Uphoff, N., & Wijajaratna, C. M. (2000). Demonstrated benefits from social capital: The productivity of farmer organizations in Gal Oya, Sri Lanka. World Development, 28, 1875–1890. Varshney, A. (2002). Ethnic conflict and civic life: Hindus and Muslims in India. New Haven: Yale University Press.
White, G. (1994). Civil society (I): Clearing the analytical ground, democratisation and development. Democratisation, 1(3), 378–389. Widmalm, S. (2008). Decentralisation, corruption and social capital: From India to the West. New Delhi: Sage. Woolcock, M. (1997). Social capital and economic development. Theory and Society, 27(2), 151–208.
Civil Society and Social Capital in Southeast Asia MEREDITH WEISS University at Albany (SUNY), Albany, NY, USA
Introduction Southeast Asian regimes run the gamut from liberal and illiberal democracy to military authoritarianism and absolute monarchy. As such, generalizations regarding civil society and the generation of social capital in the region are impossible. Still, all states in the region leave at least some space for civil society (including informal opposition) and even formal opposition. These civil societies are neither homogeneous nor static. Moreover, it is not necessarily the institutionally strongest democracies that provide the broadest space for generation of social capital or collective action within civil society, though the opportunities and constraints facing citizens under a particular regime may favor or discourage particular modes of association and mobilization. While attention to civil society and social capital has increased in the region since the 1980s, these are not new phenomena. By the 1920s, at least, substantial and vibrant associational life characterized much of the region, manifested most obviously in mass-based nationalist challenges to colonial rule and postcolonial nation-building movements, in trade unions and chambers of commerce and industry, and in literary societies of various forms. Social capital, at least, accumulated through these initiatives, even if the sort of civil society associated with democratic accountability had yet fully to take shape. Among the most substantial of these early organizational forms were associations based on religion: Catholicism in the Philippines, Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhism in Thailand and Burma, and so forth. The church, mosque, or wat (Buddhist temple) itself was significant – providing education and social functions as well as straightforward devotional observance – but these lines of association were echoed in organizations from Burma’s nationalist Young Men’s Buddhist Association
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to Indonesia’s still-powerful Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah mass organizations. Moreover, informal structures, such as the Malay cooperative tradition of gotong royong, fostered local networks and built up reserves of social capital.
Civil Society While the term civil society is understood in Southeast Asia to mean much what it does elsewhere, distinct nuances bear noting. Where Southeast Asian cases diverge most obviously from prevailing definitions is in the significance of associations and networks premised on ascriptive identities (marginalized from some ‘‘mainstream’’ approaches) and in the recourse to ‘‘uncivil,’’ violent tactics on at least an occasional basis by a subset of nonstate activists in several countries. While those tactics might bar organizations from being glossed as civil society in some accounts, sometimes-violent separatist movements, underground radical leftist groups, exclusivist religious organizations and other associations not only shape state responses to civil societal activism, but themselves contribute to political life between family and state – the domain of civil society. Moreover, several less generic concepts flesh out an understanding of civil society in the region. First, scholars use a range of terms to describe the forms of democracy found in the region. While the term of art for the regime type found in Malaysia, Singapore, and elsewhere is electoral authoritarian (allowing for varying, but still constrained levels of political competition), terms from communitarian democracy to semi- or quasi-democracy are more common in standard parlance. These frameworks embody and reflect sets of assumptions regarding the polity beyond the state, in particular the relative salience of adversarial versus consensus-oriented norms and the civil liberties available to facilitate and safeguard citizens’ engagement. In addition, innovative conceptions of civil society may be noted in the region. Garry Rodan (1997), for instance, explores the concept of a civic society in Singapore, in which contributions from the public are tolerated and even solicited, but are encouraged to come through stateestablished channels and to be constructive rather than merely carping. A comparable framework, described largely in terms of predominantly-Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, is masyarakat madani, or a society modeled on that of Medina in the time of the Prophet Mohammad. Such a society, built upon Islamic principles of communal interdependence, prioritizes morality, justice, fairness, civility, and consultation rather than majoritarianism or performance-based criteria for evaluating leaders.
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Social Capital Prevailing understandings of social capital follow much the same pattern: general concordance with the wider literature, but with perhaps a more inclusive compass. Bonding social capital (among members of the same ascriptive category) tends to be stronger than bridging social capital (across categories), but the intensity of these patterns varies across states and localities, time periods, and to some extent, economic sectors and classes.
Empirical Data Attention to civil society has been most keen in relation to questions of regime change and good governance. Several states in the region have experienced civil societal movements – whether or not these have yielded substantial political change – over the past quarter-century: Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand. The appearance and success of such movements has not paralleled lines of economic development (for instance, reflecting development of a substantial middle class) or degrees of democracy, though mass activism has been salient to regime transitions, for instance in the Philippines in 1986 and Indonesia in 1998. Reflecting this variation, Alagappa (2004) offers an empirically-derived taxonomy of regimes: those with a ‘‘legitimate civil society,’’ a ‘‘controlled and communalized civil society,’’ or a ‘‘repressed civil society.’’ Southeast Asian states with legitimate civil societies include Indonesia post-1998, the Philippines, and Thailand – this category is the broadest one, although few of its members would be termed liberal democracies. States with controlled and communalized civil societies include Malaysia and Singapore. States in the region with repressed civil societies include Burma and Vietnam. Importantly, civil society may be legitimate without being terribly strong. For instance, Filipino civil society is arguably more vibrant and politically engaged than in Thailand, though both fall in the same broad category. Moreover, civil society may reinforce the formal political opposition, but is not necessarily an accurate indicator of the latter’s strength. Malaysia, for example, has more strongly institutionalized opposition parties than Singapore, though both have ‘‘controlled’’ civil societies, while Burma has strident extra-institutional political opposition on the margins of the state, but no legal space for electoral opposition. This taxonomy offers a way to circumvent less nuanced and more implicitly derogatory classifications found in much of the literature on civil society, which tends to presume a necessary conjunction with liberal democracy. In that literature, the Philippines and contemporary Indonesia are considered liberal democracies on
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the basis of their institutions and rights accorded to citizens; Malaysia, Singapore, and Cambodia would be classified as some variant of electoral authoritarian; and military-ruled Burma, absolute monarchy Brunei, and communist Vietnam and Laos are all classified as authoritarian. The literature on ‘‘Asian democracy’’ (for instance, Pye, 1985) presents a similar approach, stressing Asians’ cultural predilection for benevolent, paternalistic leadership, marked by relations of security and dependency. Such accounts leave less space for a politically-germane civil society than may in fact be found in Southeast Asia. Factors ranging from colonial legacies (British vs. American vs. Dutch vs. French rule), to internal homogeneity or heterogeneity, postcolonial economic trajectories and openness, availability of charismatic and/or competent leaders, and other factors combine with cultural ones to produce the variations in civil society and social capital that shape political forms and outcomes. Furthermore, while there may be something to the arguments of Pye and others regarding Asians’ tendency toward deference, the removal of legal curbs on the press and association in Indonesia, for instance, yielded an outpouring of criticism in the media and on the streets; public life in the Philippines is hardly calm and orderly; and critics in Burma, Vietnam, and elsewhere have been forcibly silenced rather than voluntarily mute. The sorts of civil society and popular participation supported by a regime help to determine the forms and nature of citizens’ engagement in political life. Those states with a legitimate civil society tend to have reasonably vibrant associational life, supported by legal safeguards, including freedoms of association, speech, and the press, albeit often with some limitations. Space for political opposition may still be curtailed, or the chances of a constituency’s gaining formal political power. The Philippines has arguably the most vibrant civil society and media in the region, for instance, spanning middle class, urban NGOs to trade unions with strong legal safeguards, yet political power is, always has been, and will remain for the foreseeable future concentrated among a narrow economic elite (including the church hierarchy). That disparity helps to explain the failure of significant land reform initiatives, despite decades of armed insurgency, peaceful protest, election pledges, and more. On the other hand, shifts in the space for civil society and formal opposition may move in tandem. Post-transition Indonesia, for example, has seen an increase in activism among trade unions, NGOs, and the like alongside the proliferation of political parties and the diffusion of power among them (even if New Order elites remain strong, especially at a regional or local level).
The situation in states with a controlled or communalized civil society is at least as complex. In such states, the electoral process is not meaningless: opposition parties may post some significant gains, but the political arena and civil liberties are relatively constrained and often deeply striated. Malaysia and Singapore in particular, though, challenge Western conceptions of civil society that exclude organizations based on ascriptive identities. In both states, both formal politics (government and opposition) and civil society are largely structured, in form as well as core priorities, on racial or religious grounds. Yet these arrangements are not inimical to accumulation of social capital – just more often social capital of a bonding than bridging variety. Lines of cleavage, moreover, may change over time, as from a supposedly-monolithic Malay identity toward fractured Muslim identities in Malaysia. Furthermore, even ‘‘legitimate’’ civil societies may be communal or controlled in areas, as in predominantly Malay-Muslim southern Thailand; even in these areas, civil society may still be influential. In Singapore, too, ascriptive criteria are supposed to be precluded in much of public life (for instance, political parties’ appeals), yet some civil societal organizations still tend to follow communal lines – not least government-organized NGOs (GONGOs), such as communal self-help groups. All the same, all these states also host issue-oriented segments of civil society that evade communal classification, both reflecting and furthering crosscutting identities and bridging social capital. States with repressed civil societies find the sphere ever harder to repress. Burmese activists participate in a vibrant civil society, for instance, albeit housed in Thailand, Sweden, and dissident border regions. Moreover, community welfare organizations and their ilk may be apolitical in a formal sense, but they build up social capital, providing a basis for mobilization and embodying recognition of the limited ambit of the state. In addition, organizations representing business and industrial interests (both local and foreign) may be particularly influential in politically controlled, but economically ambitious states like Vietnam. Overall, a set of propositions developed across an array of cases in Alagappa 2004 (spelled out especially in Chapters 14 and 15) capture the dynamism, variability, and impacts of civil societies throughout Southeast Asia. The volume notes the rapid growth of civil society organizations across the region since the mid-1980s, albeit with diverse and shifting compositions, resources, goals, and formal institutionalization. These civil societies both support and challenge aspects of prevailing political systems, and are themselves arenas of power, struggle, and cooperation alike. While there is no necessary or sufficient connection
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between civil society and democratic change, the former may support democracy if its dominant discourses and organizations are pro-democratic, and if opportunity structures within political society offer avenues for liberalization. While the strengthening of civil society has limited the power and reach of the state (whether through confrontational or more cooperative approaches), the state remains the most powerful institution across Southeast Asian polities, and fundamentally shapes the development and spread of civil society. Lastly, the boundary between civil society and political society is porous and imprecise; there is synergy between the development of these two spheres. Transnational dimensions of civil society, and the development of border-crossing social capital amidst heavy migration and other human flows, are critical to contemporary politics. Regional institutions like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) put some amount of pressure on internal policies of member states, or at least facilitate discussion of varying perspectives on topics such as mechanisms for safeguarding human rights. Track II and III initiatives continue to develop within those institutions. In addition, cross-border civil societal organizations are increasingly prominent in the region, for instance the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, Alternative Southeast Asian Network on Burma, Asian Network for Free Elections, Catholic and Muslim groups, Asian student associations, and more. These networks and groups provide ideas, training, resources, and validation. (Indeed, cross-border militant links are also potent, from the reach of Jemaah Islamiyah across the region to sanctuary provided Thai Muslim dissidents in Malaysia.) In the same vein, prevailing international norms may impact upon civil societies in Asia. Increasing global attention to the rights of women, for instance, has fostered improvements in women’s space for political and economic empowerment, but also a wave of legislation across the region on domestic violence, harassment, and the like, pressed by women’s groups that emerged especially in the 1980s–1990s. Similarly, growing global attention to indigenous peoples’ rights has affected local strategies and technologies, ideological and discursive frameworks, and available allies and networks. International funding only bolsters these trends.
Outlook/Concluding Assessment Contemporary studies of civil society, opposition, and political liberalization in Asia suggest two key areas meriting especial increased attention: the dynamism of institutions across the region and the ways political space is conceptualized. First, the regimes of Asia are far from static, rending civil society and political opposition moving targets as
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objects of study. For instance, the official dominance of the communist party is indubitable in Vietnam, yet the political space available in and around the party is clearly widening, not least with shifting levels of economic empowerment. A new constitution in Indonesia, new state in East Timor, continuing institutional evolution in Cambodia, recalibrations of state structures in Singapore and Malaysia, new strategies for influencing formal politics in the Philippines, ongoing insurgencies in various states, increasing inclusion of women and other categories of political actors across the region, and more in recent years are testament as well to this dynamism. It is thus critical to conceptualize democratic space as multivalent (spanning formal and informal politics, and national and local levels) and highly amorphous, as rules change, leaders change, and prevailing international and domestic norms and ideas change, with profound implications for civil societal engagement. Finally, amidst all these changes, frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing forms of social capital and mobilization also have shifted and continue to shift. Increasing scholarly attention to civil society and the refinement of critical approaches to power (for instance, feminist frameworks), have offered a more nuanced grasp of ‘‘democratic space’’: it is not just an electoral or procedural matter, but also spans civil societal organizations, from NGOs, to religious organizations, to unions, to economic associations; furthermore, social capital may foster bonds with, outside, or against state institutions. These developments are not unique to Southeast Asia, but the variability and continuing changes in regimes across the region highlight enduring themes regarding the forms, functions, and effects of civil society and social capital.
Cross-References
▶ Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Friends of the Earth ▶ GONGOs ▶ Good Governance ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Buddhism ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Christianity ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Hinduism ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Islam ▶ Philanthropy in South East Asia
References/Further Readings Alagappa, M. (Ed.) (2004). Civil society and political change in Asia: Expanding and contracting democratic space. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aspinall, E. (2005). Opposing Suharto: Compromise, resistance, and regime change in Indonesia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Bell, D., et al. (Eds.) (1995). Towards illiberal democracy in Pacific Asia. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Boudreau, V. (2001). Grass roots and cadre in the protest movement. Manila, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Boudreau, V. (2004). Resisting dictatorship: Repression and protest in Southeast Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bowie, K. A. (1997). Rituals of national loyalty: An anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press. Callahan, W. A. (2000). Pollwatching, elections and civil society in Southeast Asia. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Chua, B. H. (1995). Communitarian ideology and democracy in Singapore. New York: Routledge. Clarke, G. (1998). The politics of NGOs in South-East Asia: Participation and protest in the Philippines. New York: Routledge. Eldridge, P. (1995). Non-government organizations and democratic participation in Indonesia. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Oxford University Press. Hedman E. L. (2006). In the name of civil society: From free elections movements to people power in the Philippines. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Hefner, R. W. (2000). Civil Islam: Muslims and democratization in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heryanto, A., & Mandal, S. K. (2003). Challenging authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Jones, D. M. (1998). Democratization, civil society, and illiberal middle class culture in Pacific Asia. Comparative Politics, 30(2), 147–169. Jones, D. M., & Brown, D. (1994). Singapore and the myth of the liberalizing middle class. The Pacific Review, 7(1), 79–87. Kerkvliet, B. J. (1977). The Huk Rebellion: A study of peasant protest in the Philippines. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kerkvliet, B. J., et al. (Eds.) (2003). Getting organized in Vietnam: Moving in and around the socialist State. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Koh, G., & Ooi, G. L. (2000). State-society relations in Singapore. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Piper, N., & Uhlin, U. (Eds.) (2004). Transnational activism in Asia: Problems of power and democracy. London: Routledge. Pye, L. W. (1985). Asian power and politics: The cultural dimensions of authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rodan, G. (Ed.) (1996). Political oppositions in industrialising Asia. New York: Routledge. Rodan, G. (1997). Civil society and other political possibilities in Southeast Asia. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 27(2), 156–178. Schak, D., & Hudson, W. (2003). Civil society in Asia. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Uhlin, A. (1997). Indonesia and the ‘‘Third Wave of Democratization’’: The Indonesian Pro-Democracy Movement in a changing world. Richmond: Curzon Press. Verma, V. (2002). Malaysia: State and civil society in transition. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Walker, M. (1996). NGO participation in a corporatist State: The example of Indonesia. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California-Berkeley. Weiss, M. L. (2006). Protest and possibilities: Civil society and coalitions for political change in Malaysia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Weiss, M. L., & Saliha, H. (Eds.) (2003). Social movements in Malaysia: From moral communities to NGOs. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Yamamoto, T. (Ed.) (1995). Emerging civil society in the Asia Pacific Community: Nongovernmental underpinnings of the emerging Asia Pacific Regional Community. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Civil Society and Social Capital in the European Tradition THOMAS P. BOJE Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark
Introduction Civil society-based institutions have had a significant historical impact in Europe both on the formation of modern notions of the nation and on the creation of national identity, as well as on the definition of citizenship rights and understandings of a democratic culture. If support for citizenship rights through civic institutions – at the workplace and in public institutions – is weakly articulated, it creates a fragile democratic culture and – consequently – less comprehensive social protection. The possibility of civil society becoming a locus for democratic learning, political reflexivity and governance depends, firstly, on its specific institutional mechanisms, and, secondly, on the broader institutional configuration, which civil society forms part of. The definition of civil society used in this context is broad and comprehensive. Organized civil society includes public interest organizations, social movement organizations, churches, NGOs, and promotional associations. In research on civil society focus has primarily been on participation and nonprofit institutions. This overview is based on an understanding that civil society and citizenship rights are strongly dependent on social participation in all spheres of everyday life – from involvement in labor market, family matters and community networks to the shaping of civic, public and private institutions, and the realization of democratic rights more generally within contemporary societies. Therefore in conceptualizing citizenship and civil society the involvement of citizens has become a key issue on political and institutional agendas in recent years. The growth of interest in the concept of social and civic participation is based on experiences of deficiency in the way democratic processes function, and – consequently – a crisis of legitimacy for the modern idea of democracy. An
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additional reason can be found in the difficulties of establishing frameworks that involve citizens in strategic decision-making for the community, and in the identification and organization of services and welfare. These problems have been ascribed to the limitations of representative forms of democracy in capturing the heterogeneity, complex interests, and multiple identities characterizing groups and individuals living in the contemporary European societies.
Civil Society With the establishment of advanced economic and political integration, discussions within Europe about the role of civic institutions in the promotion of an inclusive and active citizenship have intensified. The intensified interest in civil society and its impact on active civic participation and cultural identity appeared at a time that has been marked by a number of historical developments and political crisis. These included the collapse of totalitarian regimes and authoritarian states, in Europe as well as other parts of the World, the crisis of politics, which refers to citizens’ disenchantment with politics, the crisis of representation, which refers to such issues as the dominance of executives and spin doctors, and finally the crisis of the party system as a vehicle for societal representation. These developments collectively questioned the political classes and the state institutions in Europe, and they contributed to enhancing the role of citizenship, organized civil society and active participation. Whenever a ‘‘European Social Model’’ gets mentioned, it is underlined that organized civil society and social protection has played an outstanding role in the formation of European nation-states as democratic welfare states. On the other hand in the public and scientific discourses about welfare and citizenship, the role of active citizenship, social capital, and organized civil society has often been omitted. The complementarily between public welfare institutions and civic organizations in providing social welfare is, however, important in understanding the relationship between civic participation, social capital and volunteering in the different European societies. The vibrancy of civil society thus depends upon the active participation of members of society in a variety of organizations from churches to trades unions. These represent both a bulwark against an oppressive state and also a system of representation of interests in a complex society. It is not obvious if merely being a member is sufficient or whether active membership is a condition in evaluating the strength of civil society institutions. However it is evident that the level of participation and the strength of social networks are important in both contexts. There are a number of ways in which this can be
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assessed – either through surveys analyzing the type and level of civic participation, involvement in social network or through measuring the function and coverage of civil society institutions. The role of civil society within democratic institutions can be understood in a number of ways, according to different conceptions of what a legitimate political process should be. The literature lists a number of advantages that derive from the inclusion of civil society in political processes: engagement in dialogue with civil society is seen as a viable way to enhance public participation, in the context of decreasing trust in political institutions (Putnam, 2000; Rothstein, 2001); civil society organizations can supplement political parties in informing debates and aggregating preferences; and they can take account of the increased cultural and ethnic differentiation of European countries. Civil society organizations should also be involved in the implementation of policies, because public authorities are often no longer able to deliver services that meet the needs of an increasingly differentiated population (Evers & Laville, 2004). At the EU level, the participation of civil society is said to be a useful way addressing the perceived democratic deficit of the European Union, and in this context organizations would be required to act as agents of political socialization (Carlo Ruzza, 2007). The aspiration of shaping European civil society institutions is closely related to the evolution of European citizenship rights (Janoski, 1998). On the other hand, active participation and organized civil society are not confined to interest organizations and social protection is not always a state-based issue. First of all, active participation can express itself by building and producing forms of self- and co-organized social welfare including voluntary work, that is neither exclusively state-based nor entirely a matter of the political administration and professionals. Secondly, organizations in the field of social welfare and protection are not only an outcome of participation by interest formulation but, possibly, they themselves can work as bodies that activate civic participation in various forms. Thirdly, considering social networks and their importance for social participation and the capability of building a coherent society the more informal and civic activities are just as important as the institutional type of participation. Social participation, however can take many different forms from informal relation, local social network to active participation or passive membership within formal organizations. In the East and Central European countries formal network and civil society organizations are spare. In these countries authoritarian regimes have lead to a
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strong distrust in the formalized associative life and in participation in public organizations (Wallace et al., 2004). In building up the civil society in these countries it is shown that more informal forms of social participation have played a significant role. In the Northern European countries it is on the other hand the institutionalized collective organizations which for long time have been the core element of the civil society and therefore it is through these organizations that most people are establishing their social networks.
Social Capital Researchers have identified good citizenship or civic behavior as being an important outcome of social capital. Social capital can be defined as shared norms, values, practices, and understanding that facilitate cooperation between social groups in order to pursue shared objectives. Three different dimensions are normally included in the definition: (1) social capital as investment in social relations including participation in organizations and civil society (bridging social capital); (2) participation in informal social relations and family networks (bonding social capital); (3) social capital as reflecting the general public legitimacy: trust in institutions, generalized trust; and (4) social capital as civism, civic mindedness and civic engagement (Portes, 1998; Putnam, 2000; van Oorschot & Arts, 2005). Social capital is linked to the idea of civil society, or the layer of independent organizations between the individual and the state (Cohen & Arato, 1992). It is argued that a healthy organizational life is an indicator of an active civil society, which again may help to ensure democracy and social cohesion. Several studies show that the level of volunteering and other types of civic participation is very different and have developed in different directions among the European countries (see Dekker & Broek, 1998; OECD 2001; Putnam, 2002; van Oorschot & Arts, 2005; Wallace, 2005) These variations in associational life and informal activities follow typically the different structuring of the welfare system in the European societies. What is an appropriate measure for social capital in one context may not be appropriate in others. Thus the Nordic countries tend to emerge as the ones with highest levels of social capital as measured by civic mindedness and civic participation, whilst these things are low in Southern and Eastern Europe (van Oorschot & Arts, 2005). This raises the question of whether other forms of social cohesion are evident in Eastern and Southern Europe – and other parts of the world – that may offer alternatives to formal social capital and organized civil
society. In those countries, the experiences of living in authoritarian or totalitarian regimes have, as mentioned earlier, lead to a distrust of civic organizations and the state. Yet organized civil society has been building up since the transition to democracy and now plays a certain part in their governance. This development is most obvious in the Southern countries – Spain, Portugal and Greece – but also under way in Central Europe. Oorschot et al., (2006) find in a study of social capital in Europe that the Scandinavian score highest on all dimensions measuring social capital – trust, political involvement and participation in social networks. Only in relation to informal relations to family and relatives they found a lower level of contact in the Scandinavian countries than in other European welfare systems. Wallace and Pichler (2007) show similar results in an analysis of formal and informal social capital among the EU Member States. Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands score high on all types of social capital. It concerns both close relations for friend, neighbors, and family – bonding social capital – and when it comes to participation in social network and volunteering in organized civil society – bridging social capital. In the Southern – and Central European countries the level of participation in social network and involvement in political activities score low, while some of these countries – e.g., Portugal and Bulgaria have a comprehensive informal network around family. These differences between the European countries are confirmed in Table 1 reporting result from some of the major European studies of volunteering and membership of nonprofit organizations. Using the figures from the Johns Hopkins Study of Nonprofit Organization (JHU-survey) I have found a similar pattern by comparing the European countries on two different measures – level of volunteering for nonprofit organizations and the economic importance of the nonprofit sector in the national economy (Boje, 2008). Calculated on figures for the size of the voluntary work force in the individual countries and OECD-figures on public expenditures on welfare services following pattern can be found for the relationship between volunteering and public financing of welfare services (see Fig. 1). The relationship between level of volunteering in nonprofit organizations and public financed welfare services confirms the thesis that a society with a high degree of universalism in provision of social services and high social equality also is characterized by extensive social networks, high level of institutional trust and significant level of voluntary involvement (Rothstein & Kumlin, 2005). For the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands this connection is obvious – see also Table 1. These countries have
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Civil Society and Social Capital in the European Tradition. Table 1 Membership and volunteering for a nonprofit organization in European countries in proportion of the adult population – result from recent surveys. Ranged by proportion doing voluntary work in the European Social Survey
Nation
Johns Hopkinsa Voluntary work as proportion of the economically active population
EURO-barometerb Proportion of the population who has done voluntary work in a year
EURO-barometerb membership of nonprofit organizations – 3 or more organizations
European Social Surveyc Proportion of the population who has done voluntary work in a year
Norway
5.1
–
42
37
Sweden
5.4
50
56
35
The Netherlands
5.8
48
39
29
Denmark
3.0
42
43
28
Germany
3.0
36
10
26
United Kingdom
5.6
33
12
23
Belgium
2.4
38
16
23
France
4.2
36
8
19
Ireland
2.3
41
12
16
Austria
1.1
43
13
14
Hungary
0.2
16
1
9
Spain
1.5
15
5
7
Portugal
1.2
13
2
6
Italy
1.7
23
4
5
Poland
0.2
20
2
5
Czech Republic
0.8
23
2
–
a
Johns Hopkins: Voluntary labor force (FTE) in percent of the active population in 2004 Eurobarometer: Proportion of the population who has done voluntary work in 2004 c European Social Survey: Proportion of the population who has done voluntary work for an organization in 2002/2003 b
Civil Society and Social Capital in the European Tradition. Fig. 1 The relationship between volunteering and public financed welfare services
a highly developed social welfare system and a high level of volunteering. We also find a relatively high level of public financed social services in Belgium, France and Austria but in all three countries the level of volunteering is restricted. In these countries it is an old tradition that
nonprofit organizations are involved in production of social services – elderly care and institutions for children – but the costs for providing these services are financed by the state. Furthermore these social services are primarily produced by paid labor employed by the nonprofit
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organizations and the involvement of voluntary unpaid labor is restricted. Denmark and the Netherlands represent deviant cases in different ways. Denmark is characterized by a high level of nonprofit involvement in production of social services – social services and education. A pattern which to some extent is similar to the Continental European countries. However, the level of volunteering in general is higher in Denmark than in the Continental countries, but this most concerns volunteering in cultural and recreation while Denmark has few volunteers in social service. The Netherlands combines a large nonprofit involvement in production of social services with a high level of volunteering in both social service and in the society in general. The Dutch society has a long tradition for nonprofit institutions in providing social services for children as well as for elderly – and volunteering is widespread especially among Dutch women (Boje, 2007). In the other end of the scale characterized by low level of volunteering and a low public involvement in financing welfare services we find the Southern – and Central European countries. The Southern countries are in Gallie and Paugam’s welfare typology described as a ‘‘subprotective’’ welfare system meaning a system with no or very modest social protection. In these countries social protection is primarily provided through the kinship network or by private – mostly – religious organizations (Gallie & Paugam, 2000: 5). In their analysis Gallie and Paugam uses this label on the Southern European welfare systems, but the description fits very well on the Central European countries too. Here we are talking about countries with a high level of social differentiation and large socioeconomic inequality. These are social conditions which typically are restricting creation of social capital and viability of social network and reducing the involvement in voluntary activities.
Empirical Data Most empirical studies find that the level of volunteering in all European countries is growing or at least stable while there has been a decline in the institutional membership of the more conventional nonprofit organizations like political parties, unions, charity organizations etc. (Hodgkinson & Weitzman, 1996; Rothstein, 2001). Instead we have seen a growing affiliation to grassroots organizations at community level, single-case organizations dealing with e.g., environmental issues and counseling groups where membership is not a precondition for being active participants. To give a more precise picture of the nonprofit and the voluntary activities taking place in selected European
countries we have divided the functions in four different categories (see Boje, 2008): Welfare activities: education, health, and social services. Expressive activities: culture, recreation, sport Advocacy: trade unions, business organizations and local interest organizations Political and ideological activities: political parties, religious organizations, human rights groups and environmental organizations Others: International aid organizations, philanthropy, and others. The countries included in Table 2 are representative for the four different types of relationship in Europe between level of social welfare commitment and civic involvement through volunteering for nonprofit institution shown in Fig. 1. Looking first at the paid workforce in the nonprofit sector we find that welfare activities play a dominant role in all countries included in the comparison, but most pronounced in the Netherlands and Ireland followed by Germany and Spain. Here a substantial proportion of social services for children and elderly people are provided by nonprofit organizations, which have contracts with the government and are reimbursed for producing services for children and elderly people. According to Table 2 Denmark comes close to the Continental countries with two-thirds of the paid labor force in the nonprofit sector employed in welfare services. In the other Nordic countries the nonprofit paid work force is less concentrated towards welfare production while a larger proportion of the paid nonprofit workforce is employed in advocatory activities in relation to policy organizations, professional organizations, unions, and advocacy groups. This type of institutions is part of the welfare society as pressure or supportive groups defending the interests of social groups in the cooperative Nordic democracies. Finally the Central European countries represented by Hungary are characterized by a small nonprofit sector where most of the paid work takes place in recreation and political activities. Turning to the composition of the unpaid voluntary workforce the composition is different. In the volunteer workforce the welfare services only play a minor role in the Nordic countries while this type of voluntary work is much more widespread in the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland, where large groups of women are volunteering in social nonprofit institutions providing services for children and elderly people. In all the Nordic countries unpaid voluntary work force is dominated by recreative activities and next come the advocacy and
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Civil Society and Social Capital in the European Tradition. Table 2 Paid and unpaid workforce in the nonprofit sector by type of activity in selected European countries Paid workforce Denmark
Norway
Sweden
The Netherlands
Germany
Spain
Ireland
Hungary
Welfare services
66
56
42
88
79
69
81
26
Recreative activities
7
12
27
4
5
12
6
38
Advocacy
21
17
21
5
10
13
6
29
Political activities
4
15
9
3
6
6
7
7
Other activities Total
2
0
1
–
0
0
–
–
100
100
100
100
100
100
100
100
Unpaid voluntary workforce Welfare services
16
11
10
42
16
48
52
41
Recreative activities
49
51
51
36
33
22
26
30
Advocacy
12
15
20
2
6
7
10
7
Political activities
16
23
17
20
33
23
11
22
Other activities
7
0
2
–
13
0
1
–
100
100
100
100
100
100
100
100
Total
Source: The Danish figures are calculated based on figures provided from the national population survey 2004, SFI and Statistics Denmark: Survey of National Account 2003. For the other countries it is the John Hopkins Nonprofit Sector Project.
political activities – especially in Norway and Sweden. The large proportion of voluntary activities in political and ideological activities in Germany, Spain and partly in the Netherlands can be explained by a significant amount of voluntary work in connection to religious organizations.
Outlook/Concluding Assessment The basic idea of citizens’ participation and involvement of civil society organizations coincide with the move from a government model towards a governance model. In this new model, a decentralization process is promoted and the centralized public organization is replaced by innovative forms of horizontal collaboration between public authorities and civil society institutions, and networks emerge as an increasingly significant mode of coordination. Looking at these processes it can be said that a shift from a system characterized prevailingly by government models to a more ‘‘polycentric’’ system has taken place and this shift has been supported both at national and European level with an effort to promoting inclusive decision-making processes that involve citizens actively. The main problems related to the promotion of participation are twofold: on the one hand, stereotyped interpretations of participation processes need to be overcome; on the other hand, it is of crucial importance to
understand how different types of institutions – public, for-profit, and nonprofit – practically contribute to encourage the participation of citizens and make it possible. One dimension of special importance in this context is the level of welfare commitment measured by level of universalism in access to social security and provision of social services meaning that the welfare system compensates for stratification and inequality in the individual society. A high level of governmental spending on social welfare and consequently a low level of inequality seem to facilitate higher levels of voluntary involvement of the citizens while low spending on social welfare are not necessarily compensated by higher levels of voluntary involvement in solving social problems (Salamon et al., 2004). Another important welfare dimension in determining level of voluntary involvement seems to be how the welfare system is organized. A highly organized and institutionalized welfare system tends to stimulate voluntary involvement and to increase the role of the nonprofit sector. It may be organized through the state apparatus as in the Social Democratic system or through the corporative organizations as in the Continental system. The two previously discussed dimensions concern primarily voluntary work done in an institutional frame for a civil society organization. When it comes to the other types of social capital or civic involvement – informal networks and care for friends or family members outside the household – this
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type of participation seems to be high both in countries characterized by equalized social structure such as Social Democratic welfare systems and in countries with an underdeveloped system of social protection but characterized a strong familialism in the system of social network (see Esping-Andersen, 1999; Wallace, 2005). Whilst the transition to a knowledge-based society in Europe is seen as the key factor in creating social innovation, knowledge-based growth, and greater economic integration, it may, however, also carry risks for individuals, families and communities and may result in greater social marginalization and exclusion. The strong emphasis on social capital, citizenship, and participation reflects an awareness of the increased risks in knowledge-based societies of social polarization and long-term poverty and skills entrapment, the need to promote gender equality and women’s employment and its links with social participation, the vulnerable position of ethnic minority families, the links between work, family, community, and civic organizations.
Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and the European Union ▶ Volunteering ▶ Welfare State ▶ Social Cohesion
References/Further Readings Boje, T. P. (2007). Welfare and work. The gendered organisation of work and care in different European Countries. European Review, 15(03), 373–395. Boje, T. P. (2008). Den danske frivillige nonprofit sektor i komparativt perspektiv. In F. Boje & H. Ibsen og (Eds.), Det frivillige Danmark. Odense, Denmark: Syddansk Universitets. Cohen, J., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dekker, P., & van den Broek, A. (1998). Civil society in comparative perspective: Involvement in voluntary associations in North America and Western Europe. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 9, 11–38. Esping-Andersen, G. (1999). The social-economic foundation of postindustrial economies. Cambridge: Polity. Evers, A., & Laville, J. L. (Eds.) (2004). The third sector in Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hodgkinson, V., & Weitzman, M. (1996). Giving and volunteering in the United States. Washington, DC: Independent Sector. Janoski, T. (1998). Citizenship and civil society: A framework of rights and obligations in liberal, traditional and social democratic regimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OECD (2001). The well-being of nations: The role of human and social capital. Paris: OECD.
OECD (2007). Employment Outlook 2007. Paris: OECD. Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1–24. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Putnam, R. D. (Ed). (2002). Democracy in a Flux. The evolution in social capital in contemporary societies. New York: Oxford University Press. Rothstein, B. (2001). Social capital in the social democratic welfare state. Politics and Society, 29, 1–26. Rothstein, B., & Kumlin, S. (2005). Making and breaking social capital: The impact of Welfare State Institutions. Comparative Political Studies, 38, 339–365. Ruzza, C. (2007). Multi-level governance and organized civil society. CINEFOGO Report. Denmark: Roskilde University. Salamon, L. M., Sokolowski, W., et al. (2004). Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector Vol II. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. van Oorschot, W., & Arts, W. (2005). The social capital of European welfare states: The crowding out hypothesis revisited. The Journal of European Social Policy, 15, 5–26. van Oorschot, W., Arts, W., & Gelissen, J. (2006). Social capital in Europe: Measurement and social and regional distribution of a multifaceted phenomenon. Acta Sociologica, 49, 149–167. Wallace, C. (2005). Interaction between social capital and social policy. Paper 4. European Observatory on the Social Situation, Social Cohesion, Trust and Participation. Aberdeen: Aberdeen Centre of European Social Research. Wallace, C., & Pichler, F. (2007). Patterns of formal and informal social capital in Europe. Denmark: Roskilde University Paper. Wallace, C., Haerpfer, C., & Latcheva, R. (2004). The informal economy in East. Central Europe 1991–1998. Wien, Austria: IHS sociological series no 64.
Civil Society and Social Capital in the Middle East ALAA SABER Near East Foundation, Cairo, Egypt
Introduction The thinking of civil society and social capital in the Middle East has evolved in relation with three distinct, yet overlapping, terrains of thoughts. One draws upon the deeply-rooted, religious-based traditions of charity and its expressions particularly in the private endowment systems with which the early forms of autonomous civil associations flourished in the region as early as the fifth century. The second concerns itself with the geopolitical and economic circumstances that led to the emergence of ‘‘new’’ forms of associations in the early nineteenth century, concomitant with the fade of the private endowment system and the beginnings of the state encroachment on civil associations. The third terrain of thoughts underscores the region’s social
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structure, centered on family, kinship and social networks, and its many manifestations of informal associations and determinants to the evolution of both the civil society and social capital. It is through the various encounters between these three terrains of thoughts that the literature on the subject has developed, and the different, often contradictory, viewpoints of scholars, researchers, and writers have been carried on for decades. An apparent outcome of these encounters is one impression: whereas the region is rich in terms of social capital at least from one strand of thought, the civil society does not generally mimic the Western model, at best, or weak to absent, at worst. Some scholars, probably since Weber’s time, have been intrigued by thinking and conceiving of the Middle East based on the analysis of the prevalent culture and religion, to which they attribute the weakness of civil associational life in the region. In contrast, geopolitical, and economic studies, emerged over the past few decades, contend that the state formation, nature and accompanying policy choices, the international relations, and legacies of colonialism have been the major determinants for civil society evolution and its state of affairs. Looking into the Middle East history, in its entirety, the eminent historian Fernand Braudel (1987), however, seemed to suggest that the Middle East’s ‘‘uniqueness’’ is probably owed to its history above anything else. Not for being exceedingly long, or for its mark of the first interface of humanity with civilizations and religions, but for the fact that warfare and conquests have been its inseparable companions. Endlessly renewing themselves with fleeting times of serenity in-between, wars and conquests compose an almost unaltered story for the Middle East. The Assyrians, Persians, Greek, Romans, Byzantium, Arabs, Seljuk, Mongols, Crusades, Ottoman Turks, and the European colonizing powers, all either gained dominance or waged wars in various historical periods. Such unparalleled history combined with the region’s landscape, vast stretches of empty desert separated by densely populated areas, seem to have conspired to create the perilous world of the Middle East, where insecurity and scarcity are the formidable long-lived landmarks. The region’s insecurity has certainly been the deeprunning, trans-temporal, force in setting the social structure of the Middle East into perspective. The well known Arab ‘‘tribalism’’ or ‘‘familism’’ is not a cultural trait, as Orientalists once thought, but rather a very ancient adaptive response to insecurity, under which ‘‘family’’ serves as a political resource, argues Rosemary Sayigh (1981). Whereas individual self-interest, freedom, and independence are the hallmarks of Western liberal ideologies, the kinship and family in the Arab World are cited as the
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more valid units of society by the mainstream sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. The Middle East kinship and family probably provide the element of stability, a basis for communal solidarity, that people in the region use to counterbalance the deep-seated elements of instability and insecurity. Civil society and social capital in the Middle East are the children of the region’s history and landscape. Not being well endowed by nature, argued Fernand Braudel (1992: 556), the wealth of the Middle East has been historically based above everything else on commerce and trade movement and transit. No wonder, the first civil association to encounter in the Middle East history, known as ‘‘commanda,’’ was an association of merchants to organize trade, and dates back to the fifth century. Tarek Ismail (1997: 2) recounts that the peak of such form of association was reached during the Islamic dynasty period of Abbasids, from about AD 723 to 945. The then flourishing bourgeoisie in the urban centers across the region alongside the growth in industrialization, commerce, and business activities spurred the emergence of numerous autonomous civil associations or guilds (asnaf). Associations formed during that time derived their autonomy from sovereignty of law and judiciary. Their expansion seemed part of the then thriving economy and a growing culture of knowledge that the ruling leaders laid the basis for with increasing translations into Arabic from the Greek sciences and philosophy. Fernand Braudel (1992: 160), drawing on such history, argued that one might just say of Islam the same that Max Weber’s theorized about Protestantism: ‘‘it has been suggested that Islamic law and the Islamic ideal of society shaped themselves from the very first in accordance with the ideas and aims of a rising merchant class.’’ Parallel to the associations of merchants and businesses, the institutions of endowment, awakf (plural), emerged as the more long-standing, anchor of civil life in the region from the fifth century and until the early nineteenth century. Through these institutions, the wealthy and notables withheld land, buildings, or other possessions for public benefit, financing not only public utilities, hospitals, schools, universities, infrastructure projects, houses, and research institutions, but also extended to feeding the birds, sheltering of stray animals, accommodation places for travelers, and provision of water. The institutions of endowment enjoyed both legal and financial autonomy, were managed by independent judges and solely under the jurisprudence of law. Khalid Abou El Fadl (2001) recounts that the independent institutions of juristic nature that emerged within the first 300 years of Islam seemed to have served roles so
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much as we know civil society today, mediating between the public and political elites, and between these and other social and commercial elites. These early associations suffered numerous setbacks after the Abbasids decline. The encroachment on the judiciary and legal bodies, turning the jurists into state functionaries, began with the Seljuk invasion in the eleventh century, recounts Tarek Isamil (1997: 3), and continued thereafter. The culture of knowledge and openness to scientific explorations were halted. Under the successive intrusions of the Crusades, Mongols, the environment for trade, industry, and commerce has been staggering, setting the economy into a declining trajectory. By the Ottomans’ time in the sixteenth century, the merchants, business owners, and entrepreneurs were already in lower status vis-a`-vis the military and state servants. The Ottomans’ attempts to modernize the army, agriculture, tax systems, economy, and state structure, based on the then advancing models in Europe with which trade relations were increasing, ushered in a slow process of even increasing state control. In Egypt, for instance, Mohamed Ali confiscated much of the waqf land and created in 1851 a central administration to regulate the awqaf instead of the independent judicial structures that were still in place. The assault on the private endowment system and its collapse was the most detrimental to the evolutionary process that underpinned the formation and flourishing of the early civil associations. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Middle East fell in the grips of the European colonizing powers that continued to expand state control at the expense of religious and independent judicial institutions. These were the same policies that the nationalist regimes after independence, ironically, continued to adopt. Notwithstanding the earlier associations, most scholars take the mid nineteenth century as their point of departure for the region’s history with civil society, when associations based on the European model of civil society emerged in Egypt and Lebanon (the first was the Greek Society in 1821 in Egypt). Alan Richard and John Waterbury (1990) assert that significant state and class transformation in the Middle East modern history began in the mid-to-late nineteenth century with European penetration into the Middle Eastern markets. Janine Clark (2000: 9) tells that the increasing trade relations with Europe during that period resulted in the emergence of a new bourgeoisie class of traders, merchants, and artisans, who gradually dominated the middle-class at the cost of religious clerics and wealthy families. The associations they founded, though remained charity in nature, represented a clear deviation from the earlier
forms of private endowment, and epitomized more the working class endeavors with associations. It was not long, however, before another significant shift in the character of the middle-classes across the region took root. As the colonial powers and the nationalist regimens that followed, promoted public education to provide civil servants needed to carry out their directives, Janine Clark (2000: 10–11) argued, increasing numbers of salaried employees – teachers, physicians, students, technocrats, journalists, and army officers – began to outweigh the merchants and traders and changed the outlook of the region’s middle-classes. The boundaries between the new whitecollared and the old merchant-dominated middle-classes have, however, remained highly fluid and overlapping. For the new middle-class, having little wealth yet seeking to play larger roles in their societies, ‘‘civil associations’’ were among their means to move forward. They continued to usher civil associations, particularly in response to the emerging new needs for social, education, and health services. The Middle East, henceforth, is like elsewhere: the middle-classes stood behind the formation and evolution of the civil society, and the character of the middle-classes varied over time in relation with socioeconomic circumstance and the state policies. While new classes emerged and sat to rise, older ones declined. James Bill and Robert Springborg (2000) conceptualize social structure in the Middle East as an intricate web of vertical and horizontal stratifications – those based on family and tribe (vertical stratification), and those based on class (horizontal stratification).
Civil Society Linguistically, the term ‘‘Al-ahly,’’ denoting family and relatives altogether, is widely heard in the Arab Middle East as a reference to the nonprofit sector. In Arabic language, the term ‘‘Al-ahly’’ denotes the ‘‘intimacy’’ with which philanthropic behavior of individuals and organizational practices have been culturally determined. The term captures the essence and historical underpinnings of that sector in the region, better than the term ‘‘madany,’’ which is the direct translation of the ‘‘civil’’ in English language. Although the media and the international organizations promote the latter as a substitute concept to the homegrown one, the public continues to misperceive the term as deriving from the word ‘‘city,’’ in English language. Amany Kandil (1994) coins the word ‘‘indigenous’’ as the English equivalent widely used within the Arab region. Whereas some scholars see that the more intimate connotations of the term ‘‘al-ahly’’ historically bestowed the region great advantages for a thriving civic life, Sa’ed Karajah considers that such connotations that
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give preeminence to family and clan ties stifle the development of a ‘‘civil’’ society as contemporary defined in Western terms. The Orientalist school, more vocal over many decades, draws an image of the region altogether as incompatible to civil associational life. The basic argument it presents is that the prevalent culture in the Middle East, with Islam as its principal attribute, is the prime cause for the absence of pluralist vision conducive to a thriving civil society in the region. Through the Orientalist prism, the associational forms in the region are mere expressions of patriarchal relations in Arab societies. Their attempts to align the region along one dimension, overwhelming the culture and religion with negative connotations to interpret Middle Eastern society with no regard for its political economy and the international politics, has been widely criticized. Driven by predispositions of cultural supremacy, argued Edward Said in his seminal work of ‘‘Orientalism’’ in 1978, Orientalists’ discourse was fraught with either falsely positive or beside the point conclusions. Treating culture as an unchanging construct posed in an ahistorical dimension, obscure the real dilemmas that the Middle East faces, and the possibilities for its change. Over the more recent decades, geopolitical, economic, and sociological studies began to unseat the Orientalist position, offering very different frameworks within which the dilemmas of the Middle East can be treated. For civil society, by its very nature, is rooted in its local context, the thrust of these studies is that a civil society is better understood in its own merits when born, grown, and changed over time. The unique differences between the various countries in the region receive emphasis, even calling into question the approach to the Middle East as a singular homogenous unit. Still recognizing the cultural specificities of the region, they at the same time seek to discern the origin and evolution of the institutional phenomena in the region in relation with the colonial legacies, political and ideological underpinnings of state formation and the resultant policies, and the socioeconomic realities under which civil associational life is expressed. Contrary to received cultural biases about the Middle East, these studies suggest that the weakened state of contemporary civil society in the region is ‘‘within reasons.’’ The authoritarian nature of the ruling regimes in the Middle East, the co-optation strategies and corporatist arrangements they employ, and the ‘‘rentier’’ character of the economies across the region are analyzed and cited as reasons for hindering a robust civil society to emerge. A distinguishing feature of associations in the Middle East, vis-a`-vis their western counterparts, is that they did not arise out of class conflict or scrutiny of the
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government. The degree of autonomy of civil associations is a function of how much freedom the state grants to them, rather than what they gain through confrontation and/or pressure. The reason that most discussions of civil society in the Middle East are centered on the nongovernmental and voluntary organizations, with seldom references to syndicates, labor unions, or political parties, is linked to the heavy control of the state apparatus, and legal amendments that the regimes invented to forge their hegemony. The ‘‘low-membership’’ civil associations such as NGOs are more prominent than the ‘‘high-membership’’ organizations such as the political parties. Laurie King-Irani (2000: 1) argues that although NGOs provide valuable services in diverse realms, they also tend to segment and disperse, rather than coalesce and amplify, political power. He asserts that ‘‘whereas resistance groups and popular unions of students, workers, and professionals in the 1970s arose from and reflected broadbased movements. . . . .proclaiming unabashedly political objectives, NGOs reflect the fragmentation and segmentation of a wide popular base and the de-politicization of popular discourse.’’ In a similar vein, Marzouk sees NGOs evolution ‘‘more of horizontal accumulation of organizations with little decisive effect on the established political and social landscape.’’ In Lebanon, the Lebanese writer Fawwaz Trabulsi noted that NGOs hinder the emergence and formation of effective parties since they splinter popular demands into a multiplicity of interests, which are addressed by specialist professionals, cited Laurie KingIrani (2000: 1). Algeria is the only Arab country where a legal procedure of ‘‘declaration’’ rather than ‘‘authorization,’’ suffice for civil associations to exist, a procedure that led to exponential growth of number of associations. Syria, Tunisia, and Libya are the countries where heavy constraints on civil associations are more noticeable. Compared with other Gulf States, Kuwait, contends Maha Abdel-Rahaman (2004: 81), endorses a higher degree of freedom for civil society, owing to its wider participatory political institutions, distinguishing demographic features, and the politically organized merchant elite. In general, the ad hoc manner in the implementation of the liberalization projects across the Middle East amidst the lagging-behind legislative and legal frameworks are obstacles toward the development of a strong and autonomous civil society in the region. An important thrust in the Middle East with much significant influences on civil associations has been the rise of Islamism at the turn of twentieth century. Islamism inspired, still is, a large number of NGOs. Over the past 4 decades, the proliferation of Islamic institutions across the
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region has been astonishing. Amany Kandil (1994) estimates that 43% of all NGOs in Egypt are Islamic, and regards them as the most autonomous from the state, more organized than other NGOs, the least dependent on external funding, and with wide access to volunteers. Janine Clark (2000: 12) cites an estimate of 70% of all the registered NGOs in Yemen as religiously motivated. Islamic organizations are typically more visible and play greater roles in relief and charity work, preschool and elementary education, rehabilitation of physically and mentally disabled, primary and tertiary health care, literacy, care of orphans, and women income-generation activities In the broad context of Islamism, the Islamic associations are categorized within the stratum of ‘‘moderate’’ Islamism. While some scholars view the Islamic associations as a means to provide the alienated mass majority with a community of social and moral solidarity, Janine Clark (2000: 13) offers ample evidence that these are neither embodiments of political activism nor charitable voluntary bodies, but rather part of a social movement, and reflect a larger uncoordinated network underneath. Run by and for the educated and professional middleclasses, they serve as vehicles for cross-class recruitment and/or mobilization. Rather than vertical recruitment or mobilization of the poor, she argued that they function more to strengthen the horizontal ties of trust, solidarity, among middle-class doctors, donors, volunteers, and clients.
Empirical Data The variations in size, scope, and structure of the sector in the region, reflect a wide array of historical underpinnings and policy choices that the various countries made over the past 3–4 decades. Generally, associations in the region, argued Ben Neffisa (2001: 12) are characterized with being: few in number, carry little weight, elitist, undemocratic, and marked with patronage relations with both the governments and population they serve. The traditional charitable and social service associations, often infused with religious and family overtones, dominate the sector across the region. Estimates of these traditional forms range between 30–50% in the various countries across the region. Health, education, direct assistance to the poor, and catering for the needs of orphans or disabled children, are the main vocations of these associations. The ‘‘gap-filling’’ conception seems to hold truth in the region; associations flourish where states are weak or lack popular support, like in Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan, more than in countries where governments more effectively deliver services like in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
Since the 1990s, there has been an exponential growth in the number, scope and activities of NGOs. Several separate trends in the political, social, and international arenas converged to drive this growth. One of these is the mounting pressures emanating from the international donors, financial institutions, and Western governments on the political regimens in the region to espouse the economic and political liberalization policies. Another is the declining role or withdrawal of the governments from providing several social, health, and educational services, spheres of action customarily carried out civil society organizations. The increased mobilization of resources from charitable Islamic and Christian groups, and the increased level of funding channeled to NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy groups in the region have also led to the noted growth in number of NGO. The quest for democratization, environment conservation, consumer protection, environment, micro-lending, conservation of cultural heritage, women rights, and minorities’ rights has certainly added unprecedented dimensions for the civil society in the region since the 1990s. The new associations in these fields however remain elitist in character and fragile financially and politically. Boosted by the ‘‘globalization’’ trends on the international scene, ‘‘human rights’’ is also a growing field of civil activism across the region. The ‘‘human rights’’ discourse however tends to focus on political rights, while social and economic rights are not addressed, and rely more on engaging international organizations to stand by its cause. The forerunners of human rights organizations include professionals’ organizations and trade unions. Over the last decade, Algeria witnessed the most notable growth in number of associations, 20,000, over only a 3-year span of time. Tunisia, Jordan, and Libya have witnessed a relative increase in number of association. Two thirds of the Tunisian associations however are sought as government appendages. The same goes for Libya, Morocco, and Jordan. Egypt and Lebanon are establishing new associations at a rate of 200 and 250 per year respectively. Egypt however has a low percentage of associations per number of population, 0.2 per 100,000, and 20% of all associations are placed in Cairo. Syria is where the lowest number of association is noted, Sraah Ben Nefissa (2001: 13). One trend to note in the region is the slow, but steady, increase in the use of social media and the internet by civil society groups and activists, to compose statements, distribute anonymous political messages to targeted audiences, particularly young supporters, and to mobilize followers for demonstrations. According to the UN in 2005, 31.5% of people in the region live on less than $2/day, and 23.6% lack basic health and education services. In addition, illiteracy, human
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rights, and women participation continue to pose pressing problems for the region. The UNDP Arab Human Development Report (2005: 16) was wholly devoted to assert that a better future of the Arab world is contingent on improved participation of women in the Arab societies. The studies in the Arab World showed evidence of gender bias, more notable in the lowest income quintile population where favoring men, in intra-household consumption and investment in human capital is entrenched. Generally speaking, significant progress achieved in reducing male-female disparity in accessing education, and health services. In contrast, however, women-headed households (rising is the trend) are more likely to suffer from chronic poverty than the male-headed ones. The region recorded 3.5% average economic growth rate over the late 1990s, but women share of the total labor force continues to be low, 28% in 2005. The UNDP Arab Human Development Report (2007: 3–5) tells that women don’t have equal access to employment opportunities in the formal nonagricultural sector. Major disparities in unemployment rates between males and females are noted, highest in Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain.
Social Capital The Middle East is endowed with a rich and pervasive network of family and kinship relationships, and social networks which constitute the many manifestations of social capital in the region. Nevertheless, social capital remains a contested concept in the context of the Middle East, as elsewhere. It presents a debate no less polarized than the debate on civil society. When viewed as an instrument, as Bordieu (1986) thought of it, social capital in the Middle East, where ‘‘rentier’’ type of economy is commonplace, serves as a classic case of how the privileged use it to wield power and gain economic benefits. For the less privileged, social capital then becomes a survival mechanism that they use to help themselves overcome inequalities and gain access to goods and services that are otherwise inaccessible. Diane Singerman (1997: 172) seems to confirm this view based on her research in urban Cairo. She sees that the role of the prevalent social networks at communitylevel is ‘‘to organize individual consumers and households into a more powerful, collective body, to increase access and influence of men and women in the society, over scarce private and public goods.’’ Singerman (2006) does not merely explain the prevalence of informal networks in Egypt as a cultural issue, but accounts for the ‘‘historical legacy of intentional political exclusion by the state, which benefits some of its citizens and harms others.’’ Using the case of Egypt, she notes that although one can say that social capital is plentiful in
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Egypt, ‘‘any narrative that celebrates social capital in Egypt is problematic if it minimizes the state’s role in constricting and limiting formal, legal politics to certain realms.’’ Suad Joseph (1983) mirrors this viewpoint based on her research with the working class in Lebanon; she views family networks as the resource of the popular classes to provide security where economic and political uncertainties are ever-present. The family affiliation gives individuals identity, loyalty and physical protection and the ‘‘family has become the basis for a political community for lower-class men and women.’’ Whereas Singerman and Joseph tend to view the positive role of social networks and families at the lower stratum of Middle East societies, Bill and Leiden (1984), in their analysis of family and kinship role in Middle Eastern politics, view family and kinship in the region as part of the domineering patriarchal system where unquestionable obedience of the leader is the norm, power relations are difficult to alter and the class consciousness of individuals is limited. They argue: ‘‘the family, which is the basic unit of groups in the Middle East, retains characteristics that render it more rigid and formal than most factional and non-associational groups.’’ Family, kinship and social networks in the Middle East may be viewed as attributes to what Putnam (2000) coined ‘‘bonding social capital’’ whereby intra-group ties are strengthened, more than to the development of the ‘‘bridging social capital.’’ Diane Singerman (1997) seems to suggest that social networks involve both types. She mentions that members of the informal social networks she encountered intentionally extend membership to the more powerful stakeholders such as communal and national institutions. In contrast, Khalf (1986) seems to suggest that the strong ‘‘bonding social capital’’ within the various factions and groups in Lebanon vis-a`-vis the scarcity of ‘‘bridging social capital,’’ was the nation’s predicament that led to the outbreak of civil war and the erosion of ‘‘civic ties and national loyalties.’’ In a nutshell, it is legitimate to say that social capital in the region is an abundant resource within an intricate web of social networks, family and kinship relations. In the region’s context, it maybe useful to look at social capital from Coleman’s perspective that social capital is conceptually neutral, and its use would determine its function. Most research on the subject in the Middle East is limited to analyzing the role of family, kinship, and social networks at given community-level in the creation of social capital, while the aggregate function of social capital at larger levels of nations remains unclear. The ‘‘bonding’’ dimension of social capital to cultivate reciprocity, trust, and solidarity among the
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politically excluded and marginalized communities seems more dominant and influential, than the ‘‘bridging’’ one. This may be understood in relation with the particular social structures in the region that tend to reinforce exclusive identity within a family and kin, or the fact that social capital, under the authoritarian regimens in the region, tends to lock itself within the safer boundaries of families and kin relations.
Outlook/Concluding Assessment Junctures in the realms of culture, social structure, history, and geo-polity have been influential in shaping civil society and social capital in the Middle East. Different scholars place particular emphasis on any one realm in tackling the questions that arise with Middle Eastern civil society and social capital. A trans-temporal, steadfast, and dedicated attempt to develop a comprehensive understanding of these two concepts in the context of the Middle East is yet to emerge. In contrast to the region’s distant past in the eighth to eleventh century when there were thriving and autonomous civic associations that the widespread philanthropic impulse created, the civic associational life relapsed and lost much of its ground with the continual state encroachments during the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Generally today’s civil associations in the region can hardly be seen as independent of the state, and, with the exception of few, they are rather appendages of it. In the past 5 years or so, however, growing pluralism and enlarged internet presence have distinguished civic action in the region, testifying to new assertiveness and sense of public mission in civil society. Nonetheless, governments across the region have not taken the announced reforms seriously, but only to cover up their continued oppressive policies. The weak civil society in the Arab world is causing the region its political and social ills, such as seriously severed trust relations in Arab societies between those who rule and the ruled. Taking into account the historical and current socioeconomic and political factors in the Middle East, the growth of civil society is only likely to take place with specific changes taking place. Establishing peace across the region will be conducive to the development of a vibrant civil society as was seen in post World War II Europe. In addition to this, the prospering of civil society in the Middle East will depend upon the extent to which the ruling regimes in the region can come to terms with a modernity project of which civil society is an essential element. The pace with which political liberalization programs will be carried out will determine the new territories for civil society action. Central to this in the Middle East is
whether or not Islamists can be assimilated within civil society and whether they will accept its definitions and terms of references. Moreover, the future of civil society will largely depend on the extent to which the full potential of women in the region can be realized and reconcile the conflicting demands that modernization pursuits places on women against the more conservative cultural heritage in the region. Finally, civil society in the Middle East will only grow if the economies will advance in ways that move away from the ‘‘rentier’’ model, provide opportunities for the low-income population to move upward, achieve higher levels of living standards and income levels.
Cross-References
▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Coleman, James Samuel ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Human Rights ▶ Non-governmental Organizations, Definitions and History ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Islam ▶ Philanthropy in the Middle East ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Wakfs (Muslim Charitable Foundation)
References/Further Readings Sayigh, R. (1981). Roles and functions of Arab women: A reappraisal. Arab Studies Quarterly, 3, 258–274. Abdelrahman, M. (2004). Civil society exposed (pp. 79).Cairo, Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press. Abdullahi An-Na’im. (2000). Problems of dependency: Human Rights Movement in the Arab world, an interview. Middle East Report, No. 214, 30(1), 20–23. Ben Nefissa, S. (2001). NGOs, governance and development in the Arab world. UNESCO, Management of Social Transformation (MOST), Discussion Paper No. 46, Volume 4, Number 15, p. 12. Bill, J., & Springborg, R. (2000). Politics in the Middle East (5th ed.). New York: Longman. Bill, J. A., & Leiden, C. (1984). Politics in the Middle East (2nd ed.). Boston: Little, Brown. Bordieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood. Braudel, F. (1993). A history of civilization (p. 62). New York: Penguin Books. Braudel, F. (1992). Civilization and capitalism, 15th-18th century (Vol. 2, p. 556). Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: The Wheels of Commerce, University of California Press. Clark, J. (2000). Islam, charity, and activism (pp. 9). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Civil Society and Social Capital in the United States Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94(Suppl.), S95–S120. El-Karanshawy, H. Introduction. In Philanthropy in Egypt (1st ed., pp. xx). Center for Development Services. From the Editor (2000, November). Middle East Report, 214, 1. Ibid, p. 17. Ismael, T. (1997). Civil society in the Arab world: Historical traces, contemporary vestiges. Arab Studies Quarterly, 19(1), 2. Joseph, S. (1983, February). Working-class women’s networks in a sectarian state. American Ethnologist, 10, 1–22. Kandil, A. (1994). Features of NGOs in the Arab world. In S. Ben-Nafissa, & A. Kandil (Eds.), NGOs in Egypt. Cairo, Egypt: Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. Kandil, A. (1995). Civil society in the Arab world. Cairo, Egypt: CIVICUS (Arabic Document). Karajah, Sa.’ (Ed.) (2007, April). Civil society in the Arab world: the missing concept. The International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, 9(2), 4. Khalf, S. (1986). Lebanon’spredicament (pp. 14). New York: Columbia University Press. Khalid Abou El Fadl. (2001). Conference of the books: the search for beauty in Islam (pp. xvi). Washington, DC: University Press of America. Marzuk, M. (1997). The associative phenomenon in the Arab world: Engines of democratization or witness to the crisis? In D. Hulme & M. Edwards (Eds.), NGOs, states, and donors too close for comfort. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ‘‘Middle East Report’’: From the Editor, Spring (2000), Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), Inc., Washington, DC, November 214, p. 1. Millennium Development Goals Report for the Arab Region. (2005). UN Commission for Western Asia, 2005. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Richard, A., & Waterbury, J. (1990). A political economy in the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Western Press. Singerman, D. (1997). Avenues of participation (p. 172). Cairo, Egypt: The American University of Cairo Press. Singerman, D. (2006). Restoring the family to civil society – Lessons from Egypt. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 2(1), 17. The Arab Human Development Report (2005), United Nations Publications. Amman, Jordan: National Press. The World Bank. (2007). Middle East & North Africa, Gender Overview (pp. 16–17).
Civil Society and Social Capital in the United States CARL MILOFSKY Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA
Civil society refers to a realm of informal social networks, associations, community structures, and social movements in which processes of community and political action occur (Hunter & Milofsky, 2007; Seligman, 1992; Shils, 1991, 1997). It lies between the intimate spheres of family and
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other private activities, on one hand, and the formal organizations of the state, of the economy, and of large, paid-staff nonprofit organizations on the other (Billis, 1993; Lohmann, 1992; Smith, 1997a, b). It is both a location for certain kinds of social life and an attitude towards or a process for interacting – people choose to be civil. Civil society is hard to observe directly. It is based on relationships that often are transient, associations that are never formally constituted and whose activities often are ambiguously defined, and attributes of space like physical neighborhoods that promote an active local social life. Civil society is essential to social action and political participation in a democratic social order. Social capital is a parallel concept referring to the stock of network connections, reciprocal exchange relationships, and arrangements of trust and collective action that allow groups to transcend individual self-interest and undertake community action (Putnam, 1997, 2000; Schneider, 2006a, b). Social capital is not automatically present in a community or social system and we may characterize it as significantly present or relatively absent. Dense network ties produce trusting relationships, rich opportunities for exchange and personal gain, and community benefits that cannot be produced solely from individual, self-interested action (Coleman, 1994). Civil society is thought to be critical for democratic governance to function effectively and for states to have legitimacy with citizens. Democracy refers to political systems based on free elections that result in nonconflictual regime changes, an array of personal freedoms, rights, and social benefits guaranteed by government, and participation by citizens in the processes of governance, policy formation, and program implementation. For such a system to work well individual citizens and the institutions of the state must be linked to each other through intermediate structures. Intermediate entities allow the expression of group interests that originate at the lowest level of society and are channeled upwards (Dahl, 1961, 1981; Warren, 2001). Meanwhile they allow for information, news, and political interpretations to be channeled downwards from the level of elites to the grassroots. Civil society is the realm of intermediate entities and relationships that allows this vertical traffic of information, interests, and influence to happen (Berger, 1977; Calhoun, 1992; Couto, 1999).
Civil Society in Europe While civil society is essential for democracy, there tends to be a sharp difference in the way its role is conceived between Europe and the United States. In Europe one finds a distinction made between representative
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government and civil society influences on government. Elected representatives make legislative decisions with a measure of insulation from the public. In the United States there is an expectation that governance will be based on pluralism. This refers to competition between interest groups to directly influence the decision-making of elected representatives. In the parliamentary systems of government that prevail in Europe there generally are many political parties and small citizen interest groups tend to be affiliated with different parts of a highly segmented or divided political system. Elected representatives are given the power to make political decisions and there tends to be some resistance to granting influence in the political system to autonomous, private citizens groups. Citizens are thought to have a direct relationship to the state. Although there has been growing acknowledgement in Europe of the importance of a ‘‘civil society sector’’ often comprised of locality-based organizations, there also tends to be distrust of private special interest groups thought to be centers of elitism and reactionary sentiments. In this framework, civil society organizations are most important when they are social change-oriented political and identity movements.
Civil Society in the United States The expectation in America is that lobbyists and pressure groups will play an important role in policy formulation, in passing legislation, and in the political process generally. Of course, the most effective lobbying groups are likely to represent industries and other financially wealthy elements of society. To counterbalance them, the interests of the working and middle classes can only be represented if there exists a large number of citizens’ groups that voice concerns, challenge official actions, and have the potential to use the voting process to reward or punish politicians. A market in influence drives political decision-making. Votes and political legitimacy with the population are the primary currency. Politicians are viewed as pragmatic actors whose decisions are based on perceptions of the public mood and also in terms of their calculations of how support lines up on the different sides of an issue. Ideology and rational decision making take a back seat to the management of a chaotic, unpredictable, interactive process of politics (Lindblom, 1980). The system is anchored in an expectation that Americans will be involved in many associations in the normal course of their community and civic life. There is a perception that the United States is a ‘‘society of joiners’’ and that compared to other societies a higher proportion join informal groups than happens elsewhere (Tocqueville,
2004; Warren, 2001). An important engine of this activism is the pluralism of American society. In contrast to Europe where nations long had traditions of ethnic and religious homogeneity, the United States have had a national self-image as a society made up of many discrete groups that compete both for the benefits of public life and for ideological dominance. The futility of any single group emerging as a dominant elite has led to an expectation of pluralism. One aspect is recognition that there will be many different ethnic and identity groups that exist and must be tolerated as partners in the processes of community and politics. A second aspect is that these groups will express their distinctive viewpoints in more or less forceful and effective ways. They will compete for resources and political approval and the political system cannot keep them out of participation. These are civil society organizations and there is an expectation that American governance will include a substantial element of participatory democracy. Elected leaders may think they can follow the European principle of representative democracy and ignore the public will that is expressed through civil society organizations. Doing so, however, politicians may soon find that they are being chased from office.
Associational Life For the pluralist model of democracy to be effective a high percentage of citizens must participate in a variety of associations since these make up the understory of the political flora. Social scientists have long expressed concern that the richness of informal involvements and of social networks is on the wane (Kornhauser, 1959; Stein, 1960). Social theory tells us that this is a predictable consequence of the migration of people from rural to urban areas and the growing centrality of globalization in both world and personal affairs. As citizens become more geographically and socially mobile, as electronic media rather than direct face-to-face communication dominate our private lives, and as political life comes to be centered on professionals, associational networks and the trust and activism they breed – the quality we call social capital – declines (Aronowitz, 1996; Putnam, 1997; Skocpol, 2003). This theory about democratic decline directs our attention to the reality that associational memberships and civil society are comprised of a system of informal relationships. These exist in communities, in families, and in the spaces between major, formal institutions like bureaucratized social service institutions, businesses that make up the economy, and the formal elements of government. Three elements are primary. The first is the nature and
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quality of local community life. The second has to do with the intensity and extensiveness of family life. The third has to do with horizontal and vertical linkages that exist via associational memberships between localities and other communities and voluntary systems (Putnam, 2000). Horizontal linkages are those that cut across community boundaries (Warren, 1963). Through these, individuals have relationships that tie separate and perhaps competing communities together. Vertical linkages are those that tie individuals in the locality to regional and national systems of organization and power (Hunter, 1993; Milofsky, 2006). Social life in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America was built around geographically defined communities (Rae, 2005). Secondary organizations – the term William Lloyd Warner gave to local associations (Warner & Lunt, 1942) – were fundamental to community dynamics. Many industries were locally owned and economic institutions were integrated with community structures. Informal political, religious, and fraternal were intertwined through a system of strong network ties. Enduring relationships anchored in families, ethnic identification, and residential stability provided the context for personal social lives. Local associations provided entertainment in the form of activity clubs and they also provided venues in which the social processes of community life could be played out. Leaders of local chapters traveled to regional and national meetings of fraternal societies and through these experiences they gained knowledge and experience about civic leadership. They also provided channels of information and influence. Regional and national leaders could inform local communities about important social and political developments through their leaders. Leaders in turn could tell officials working at higher levels of social aggregation about local concerns and also could develop influence to bring resources back home. Secondary organizations were voluntary social groups created as a penumbra around the primary organizations and institutions of the community. Men’s and women’s clubs that were part of congregations are among them. Unions were part of this system. Book clubs, sports clubs, and hobby clubs were included. Local civic boards and associations were significant. Tocqueville (2004) viewed America as an associational society because these informal clubs were everywhere in local communities. Primary sources of entertainment and with identity and economic opportunity tied to affiliations one had with church and ethnic clubs participation seems to have been high. Community life also seemed to involve a physical presence on the streets where shops, parks, and cramped housing
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created a social flow and a non-intimate sense of connection, membership, and mutual responsibility that contemporary urban planners recognize and appreciate. A series of macro-social changes undermined this community system between the 1930s and the 1970s. Local businesses were gradually sold out to national corporations. The emergence of multinational corporations and the globalization of both product sales and labor markets gradually led to the failure of local heavy industries in many towns and urban neighborhoods. Meanwhile the inflation of educational credentials led young people to seek careers based more on credentials than on strong network ties. People became geographically mobile to follow jobs at the same time that numerous influence transformed a society anchored in local social life into an integrated national system. World War II played a role. The Interstate highway system played a role. Television and computers played a role. Rapid air travel played a role. Lives became less defined by membership in strong, locality-based social groups and more by individual choices and private entertainments. These processes are responsible for the perceived thinning of civil society and the decline in social capital (Putnam, 1997, 2000). One of the important manifestations of this change in community life was a dramatic decline in church participation during the 1960s. Students of religion have made much of the decline in religiosity in this period and the increase in church participation that followed in the 1990s. The 1960s decline also is one of the clearest indications we have that community life was experiencing a deep transition. Churches had been a venue for the enactment of community social processes and they also were engines for producing a penumbra of associations that both carried out church business and provided a scaffolding upon which local civil society could build. The decline of churches was both a cause and a consequence of the decline of informal community social life. As churches shrank in numbers they generated fewer informal ties. Thinner social networks meant people did not seek out the kind of social world churches provided (Cnaan, 2006).
Nonprofit Organizations The decline of intense local community life manifested fundamental changes in the way Americans lived in neighborhoods and families but it is best to see this as a process of change rather than as a process of decline. The way Americans conceived of communities and acted within them was changing. One of the most important changes was in the realm of helping and in the provision of social services. In earlier times informal relationships played an essential role in helping the disabled and the
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needy survive with independence in their neighborhoods (Klinenberg, 2002; Sampson, 2003). Similarly local fraternal societies provided economic assistance and social guidance to residents. These associations and social ties represented a social treasury by which social capital was stockpiled, trust was built, and problems were solved. The War on Poverty and programs associated with it (Marris & Rein, 1967; Moynihan, 1969) recognized that community decline also meant that basic social supports for the poor had disappeared. New programs were required to bring community members into governance structures. They also were defined and funded using a new method for distributing money: categorical grants. The previous generation of social services had often been provided through large bureaucratic organizations that had considerable decision-making autonomy and whose offices were tied to the political structure of local government. New programs were initiated at the federal level and were rationally designed to target and solve particular local problems. The classic, enduring example is Headstart providing early childhood education to poor families with a model that included education for the parents who would be included in the program. The program itself would build community and the vehicle for doing this was a new, small nonprofit organization. The War on Poverty lasted less than 5 years. Its legacy was a policy device by which distant policy planners with resources at their disposal could target specific problems at the local level, channel funds to an autonomous organization, and then develop stringent administrative and professional controls on practices. Federal government programs adopted this model for funding all manner of programs and grant-making foundations followed suit. Entrepreneurs at the local level enthusiastically pursued opportunities by incorporating local nonprofit organizations and securing grant funding that would pay for their activities. Between 1960 and 1980 the number of new nonprofit organizations grew exponentially from a national total of about 300,000 to over 900,000 (Weisbrod, 1988). The explosive growth of the nonprofit sector has been one of the significant societal changes of the last halfcentury. It would be an exaggeration to credit that growth just to the introduction of categorical grants programs and the experience of the War on Poverty. Whatever the reason nonprofits expanded an important consequence is that governments around the world have moved away from direct service provision and instead have attempted to ‘‘privatize’’ services. Salamon (1987) calls this ‘‘third party government’’ as, increasingly, traditional governmental functions have been taken over by a third party,
by nonprofit organizations. Among nonprofit organizations that are formally incorporated and that employ paid staff about 60% if their resources come directly from government (the percentage varies depending on which of the major institutions in the nonprofit sector we focus upon).
Nonprofit Organizations and Civil Society In the United Kingdom nonprofit organizations (called voluntary organizations) tend to be equated with civil society organizations. In the United States this equation has been challenged. Critics claim that the growth of the nonprofit sector has undercut the structure of informal associations that comprises civil society. The counter perspective is that new modes of political participation and advocacy action have evolved with the development of the nonprofit sector. Political representation is less anchored in local community participation and activity. We may argue, however, about whether democratic governance has become less effective as civil society advocacy has become couched in large, professionalized institutions. Decline of Democracy
Skocpol (2003) tells us that networks of local associations historically influenced political decision making via hierarchical chains that linked local fraternal society to regional and national bodies within an organization. The associations were built around a variety of social movements at the community level. Leaders of local associations made connections with leaders outside their home communities as they participated in conventions and meetings that took them away from home. This is the classical pluralist idea where local concerns and interests were passed up the organizational hierarchy while policy actions and political interpretations developed at the state or national level were passed down the system. Meanwhile being given organizational responsibilities and managing the challenges of the offices local society leaders developed civic skills that helped them move into broader political leadership roles. Participation and relationships that cut across community boundaries were fundamental to pluralistic, democratic politics in Skocpol’s eyes. Two changes have altered this dynamic. The first is development of new organizational technologies that allow national movements to draw resources from local communities without at the same time creating autonomous local organizations. Financial disconnection from local chapters has profound consequences. We may look at an organization like the YMCA (Zald, 1970) as an organization in the old mold where an international movement led to the
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formation of local chapters. Local chapters took instruction from the national body and may have received resource support in the beginning years so a local chapter could get going. Over time the local might become stronger and was more economically successful. When this happened there was pressure to contribute to the national both to support their training and administrative efforts and to help fund new or less financially successful chapters like those serving poor neighborhoods. Locals might resist these demands or making contributions they might insist on more controls over program decisions important to local chapters. This was productive tension because it forced local and national bodies to seriously engage each other, to maintain strong communications, and to negotiate around mutually significant issues. This dynamic has been changed by new social movements that combine an ideological commitment to a cause with arguments that identity changes are an important part of political change. Ideological movements like the National Organization for Women or pro-life and pro-choice abortion related organizations (Milofsky, 1997; Staggenborg, 1991) were in the vanguard that were able to create national offices that drew on local fundraising without depending on strong local organizations to raise funds. In turn there has been no need for national organizations to form exchange relationships with local chapters and a national elite of advocacy organizations has emerged that is disconnected from local movements. Instead there is a professionalized network of national social movements whose leaders influence political decision-making with little connection to local settings (Aronowitz, 1996). The second dynamic that concerns Skocpol is the replacement of local community organizations with small nonprofits run by professionals and funded by the government. In earlier days we might imagine a process where community members would recognize that some local situation has become a problem that demands action. Community members would come together to create shared awareness of the difficulty, form an association to voice their concerns, contact, and pressure government to take action, and receive resources to deal with their concerns (Milofsky, 2008). Some of these local movements might mirror national movements as was the case with temperance organizations in the early twentieth century or women’s shelter organizations between 1970 and 1980 (Loseke, 1992; Stark & Flitcraft, 1996). They all were fundamentally amateur operations with strong voluntary components. Privatization of government and creation of the new nonprofit regime has led to a process where government
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responds to protest by creating programs and hiring protest leaders as administrators (Milofsky, 2008; Piven & Cloward, 1979). This blunts protest because leaders who once challenged government now must defend government programs to former movement members. This is important because significant new resources are likely to become available for dealing with a problem movement leaders have deep concerns about. At the same time government definitions of the situation come to dominate making change-oriented practices difficult to sustain. Liability and professionalism concerns, for example, made impossible for battering shelters to retain the highly participatory and egalitarian style they established in the early years of that movement. Proliferation of small nonprofits also exhausts the capacity of communities to mobilize resources and provide organizational leaders. Each nonprofit organization needs a board of directors and these individuals are the ones who would have been civil society leaders in the past. Local organizations almost always are short of funds so the energies of board members are directed at carrying out continual small fundraising drives. Meanwhile organizational mission, program focus, and procedural requirements are all defined by funders. The result is that tremendous community energy goes into maintaining the fleet of small nonprofits in a community at the same time that civic leadership and the capacity to define new community problems is deflected into routine management business in these organizations. Political energy is neatly defused and government increasingly is run by a professionalized class disconnected from community life. Formalized Civic Capacity
The matrix of informal social relationships and trust – social capital – that existed early in the twentieth century has declined dramatically or disappeared. With it has gone the system of public representation and citizen involvement in participatory organizations and movements envisioned in pluralist democratic theories. However, this has happened substantially because society and the way we have lived our lives has changed. Putnam’s (1997, 2000) account suggests that the decline arises because citizens lives have become more private and people are less interested or involved in civic affairs (Foley & Edwards, 1997). In the nineteenth century world Skocpol describes transportation and communication were difficult and localities operated as self-sustaining systems that were loosely tied to the larger society. Today the populace is a more educated populace. Television and Internet communications allow instant, in depth, widespread sharing of news and ideas. The Interstate highway system and
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efficient air travel allow citizens in the smallest hamlets to travel widely and directly experience problematic social conditions. Small town residents can discuss problematic social conditions with knowledgeable cosmopolitan residents of other places who witness them first hand. Even international immigrants arrive, settling in new homes with detailed knowledge about travel, communications, and training to secure jobs in a new country (Levitt, 2001). Functional conditions that pushed people into intense, interactive, local community lives no longer exist. Political participation also has changed. An educated and informed populace that is well connected to communication systems can take ideas and issues formulated at the national level and apply them locally without the intermediate layers of association that Skocpol finds so important. Internet chat groups and mobilization networks are not only effective at raising funds but they also foster social relationships that are intense but not local. The 2008 presidential election showed that Internet mobilization can effectively lead to new, local community organizations that have great electoral power. We are seeing experimental efforts to use the combination of Internet mobilization and local organization to sample public opinion at the local level shaping national policy. An ideology of professional management has permeated national and local nonprofit organizations so that critical advocacy efforts generally are oriented towards maintaining stability in the existing social and political system (Aronowitz, 1996). This makes it extremely difficult for outsider social movements to influence the political system. At the same time the growth of the nonprofit sector has built a system with a permanent organizational presence where a concern with social and political issues is maintained and always present. In an earlier age political pressure would wax and wane depending on the accidents of history and public interest in political issues. There also would be geographic variation in terms of whether political movements could develop since organizational talents and political resources were not equally available in all communities. Today nonprofit organizations and movements retain a national presence because they are able to build a strong resource base and maintain a continual lobbying presence. Meanwhile, unlikely social services that respond to outsider critical groups (shelters for battered women and AIDS service organizations are important examples) exist in the smallest, most socially and politically conservative towns (Milofsky, 2008). For movement leaders concerned with effectively dealing with their core issues, it is more important to have broad coverage and reliable funding than it is to worry
about the stifling of movement energy that comes from state funding and administrative control. Furthermore the proliferation of small nonprofit organizations operating at the community level systematically pulls citizens into board and staff roles so that vast numbers of people are being trained to think in systematic organizational terms. One consequence is that when new issues or projects come along and citizens become interested and involved in developing an initiative there is high likelihood that civic organizational skills will be easy to recruit. People know how to write grants, organize fundraisers, create competent accounting records, and conduct strategic planning. These skills may be directed at creating public protest movements or they may be used to create new organizations that thrive with little funding or public visibility but with great passion. The pet rescue movement is an example of a large scale, enduring, voluntary effort carried out with passion and commitment by citizens but that has little connection to the political system. Movements like this one suggest that civil society is alive and well in America but that its form and processes have significantly changed over the last half-century.
Conclusion Social capital is comprised of networks, associations, and cross-community connections. Civil society allows this social treasury to be directed at recognizing and solving social and political problems have been transformed. These are essential qualities that must be present for pluralistic democracy to function in a society. The nature and importance of civil society tends to be different in Europe and the United States. The United States is fundamentally pluralistic in its ethnic makeup, its religious orientation, and its expectations about how political decisions will be made. Grass roots, participatory movements are expected to be active parts of the governmental decision process in a way that often is not expected in Europe. Despite these expectations the social quality of communities has changed in the last century so that social capital, understood as a dense system of social relationships at the local community level, is thinning. With the decline of social capital there is a perception that effective pluralistic democracy also is on the wane. While there may be fewer and less vital social relationships in today’s society compared to 50 years ago the emergence of the nonprofit sector on a large scale now plays an important role in giving civil society vitality. The nonprofit sector provides a permanent presence for many social service and social action agendas. There is concern that the professional quality of these organizations and their dependence on government and foundation funds
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causes nonprofit organizations to undercut social activist movements. At the same time, these organizations provide a consistency of services across society and a systematic mobilization of citizens as board and staff members of small, lightly funded organizations that gives civil society vitality. There has been dramatic social change in the way social participation and representation are organized in America. It is not clear that the new system is less effective or dynamic in terms of representing the public will.
Cross-References
▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in the European Tradition ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ Nonprofit Organization ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Skocpol, Theda ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Movements ▶ Third-Party Government ▶ YMCA
References/Further Readings Aronowitz, S. (1996). Against the liberal state. ACT-UP and the emergence of postmodern politics. In The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism (pp. 125–144). New York: Routledge. Berger, P. L. (1977). To empower people: The role of mediating structures in public policy. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. Billis, D. (1993). Sector blurring and nonprofit centers: The case of the United Kingdom. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 22(3): 214–157. Calhoun, C. (1992). The infrastructure of modernity. Indirect social relationships, information technology, and social integration. In H. Haferkamp & N. J. Smelser (Eds.), Social change and modernity (pp. 205–236). Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cnaan, R. A. (2006). The other Philadelphia story. How local congregations support quality of life in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Coleman, J. S. (1994). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology Supplement, 94, S95–S120. Couto, R. A. (1999). Making democracy work better: Mediating structures, social capital, and the democratic prospect. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dahl, R. A. (1961). Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1981). Democracy in the United States. Promise and performance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Foley, M. W., & Edwards, B. (1997). Social capital and the political economy of our discontent. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(5): 668–677.
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Hunter, A. (1993). National federations: The role of voluntary organizations in linking macro and micro orders in civil society. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 22(2): 121–136. Hunter, A., & Milofsky C. (2007). Pragmatic liberalism. Constructing a civil society. New York: Palgrave McMillan. Klinenberg, E. (2002). Heat wave. A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kornhauser, W. (1959). The politics of mass society. New York: Free Press. Levitt, P. (2001). The transnational villagers. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lindblom, C. E. (1980). The policy-making process. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lohmann, R. A. (1992). The commons. New perspectives on nonprofit organizations and voluntary action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Loseke, D. R. (1992). The battered women and shelters. The social construction of wife abuse. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Marris, P., & Rein, M. (1967). The dilemmas of social reform. New York: Atherton. Meyerson, M., & Banfield, E. C. (1955). Politics, planning, and the public interest; The case of public housing in Chicago. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Milofsky, C. (1997). Community organizations and the new politics. In J. Stanfield (Ed.), Social justice philanthropy. Research in social policy (Vol. 5, pp 139–168). Milofsky, C. (2006). Small towns and mass society. In R. Cnaan & C. Milofsky (Eds.), Handbook of community movements and local organizations (pp. 60–73). New York: Springer. Milofsky, C. (2008). Smallville. Institutionalizing community in twentyfirst century America. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Moynihan, D. P. (1969). Maximum feasible misunderstanding. New York: Free Press. Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1979). Poor people’s movements. Why they succeed, how they fail. New York: Vintage Books. Putnam, R. D. (1997). Bowling alone: Democracy in America at century’s end. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–79. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York/London: Simon & Schuster. Rae, D. (2005). City: Urbanism and its end. New Haven: Yale University Press. Salamon, L. (1987). Partners in public service: The scope and theory of government-nonprofit relations. In W. W.Powell (Ed.), The nonprofit sector. A research handbook (pp 99–117). New Haven: Yale University Press. Sampson, R. J. (2003). Neighborhood-level context and health: Lessons from sociology. In I. Kawachi & L. F. Berkman (Eds.), Neighborhoods and health. (pp 132–146). New York: Oxford University Press. Schneider, J. A. (2006a). Social capital and welfare reform: Organizations, congregations, communities. New York: Columbia University Press. Schneider, J. A. (2006b). Small nonprofits and civil society: Civic engagement and social capital. In R. Cnaan & C. Milofsky (Eds.), Handbook of community movements and local organizations (pp. 74–88). New York: Springer. Seligman, A. (1992). The idea of civil society. New York: Norton. Shils, E. (1991). The virtue of civil society. Government and Opposition, 26, 3–20. Shils, E. (1997). The virtue of civility. Indianapolis, IN: The Liberty Fund. Skocpol, T. (2003). What we have lost. In Diminished democracy (Chap. 6, pp 221–253) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Smith, D. H. (1997a). The rest of the nonprofit sector: Grassroots associations as the Dark Matter ignored in the prevailing ‘‘Flat Earth’’ maps of the sector. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 26, 114–131.
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Smith, D. H. (1997b). Grassroots associations are important: Some theory and a review of the impact literature. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 26, 269–306. Staggenborg, S. (1991).The pro-choice movement. Organization and activism in the abortion conflict. New York: Oxford University Press. Stark, E., & Flitcraft, A. (1996). Women at risk. Domestic violence and women’s health. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stein, M. R. (1960). The eclipse of community. An interpretation of American studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tocqueville, A. de. (2004). Democracy in America (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). New York: Library of America. Warner, W. L., & Lunt, P. S. (1942). The status system of a modern community. New Haven: Yale University Press. Warren, M. E. (2001). Democracy and association. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Warren, R. L. (1963). The community in America. Chicago: Rand McNally. Weisbrod, B. A. (1988). The nonprofit economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zald, M. N. (1970). Organizational change: The political economy of the YMCA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Civil Society and Social Capital in West Africa EBENEZER OBADARE University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
Introduction In order to understand the evolution of civil society in West Africa, particularly how the concepts of civil society and social capital are understood there, it seems necessary to place the subregion in a sociohistorical context. There is a fairly established, and not entirely irrational, tendency among historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to analyze West Africa as a unitary geographical, economic, and political space. This is due to several factors. One is that long before colonial interruption and the process that eventuated in the creation of today’s postcolonial states, a tradition of sustained interregional migration and trade had fostered something approximating a pan-regional consciousness (Adamu, 1978; Manuh, 2006; Lovejoy, 1980). Created in 1975, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was, in a way, an institutional symbol and expression of this history of continuous economic, cultural, and political interaction. Second, in the modern era, and linguistic differences notwithstanding, the subregion has been notably porous in terms of the circulation of cultural forms and political phenomena. One illustration is the way in which popular agitation for sovereign national conferences in the
Francophone speaking parts of the subregion (starting with the successful example of the Republic of Benin in 1990) managed to percolate to the Anglophone parts, though with varying degrees of success. Part of the explanation for this, apart from the intangible but largely predictable process whereby social and academic concepts are dispersed, is the presence across the subregion of what appears like a common postcolonial political culture, especially in terms of the profound alienation between the governing classes and the citizenry. This relationship (or the absence of one in a majority of cases) is clearly the norm, whether in the examples of relatively stable countries like Senegal and The Gambia, or others like Nigeria and Ghana where the military class was once (touch wood) a disruptive force. Consequently, one goal of civil society groups has been to reconfigure the political culture by working towards greater political accountability on the part of the national ruling elites. While mobilization to hold ruling elites to account is clearly of historical vintage, going as far back as the nationalist agitation for independence from colonial rule, the same is not true of the terminology – civil society – that is now commonly used to describe both the groups and activities involved. Civil society did not become pandemic in West Africa until the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was an important phase in the political evolution of West African societies. Beginning with Ghana in March 1957, West African countries had gradually thrown off the yoke of French, British, and Portuguese colonialisms, enthroning leaders who promised that everything was possible once the political kingdom had been wrested from the hands of the colonial oppressors. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, after more than 3 decades of putative political independence, there was clear frustration at the failure to translate hard-earned political freedom into economic liberation. This was despite the fact that, in the immediate aftermath of independence, many West African countries had posted consistently high growth rates, sometimes (as in the case of Cote d’Ivoire) as high as 10% per annum (Olukoshi, 2004). Such was Cote d’Ivoire’s upward mobility that, at a point, its capital, Abidjan, in a significant testament to its prosperity and homely serenity, was dubbed ‘‘the Paris of Africa.’’ Just as in other parts of the continent, this ascent did not last. By the late 1980s, much of the entire subregion was caught up in a spiral of economic downturn, one that the political leadership (instructively, in a majority of cases, the same leadership that had wielded power since independence) showed little imagination in responding to. The implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) at the instance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank did nothing to stem the
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downward spiral. By deepening popular immiseration, SAP actually made individual political regimes even more unpopular, leading to an often bitter social ferment which saw student associations, religious groups, trade unions, women’s groups, professionals, the media, and sundry civic associations literally take up arms against the state. Although the contexts and contents of these popular movements varied from country to country, the broad aims were to remove unpopular leaders (military or civilian) and to undo the pauperizing economic policies that, in the view of many, seemed to have been codified by the philosophy of Structural Adjustment. It was the rump of these popular movements that, starting from the late 1980s, assumed the mantle of civil society.
Civil Society As suggested above, the discourse of civil society in West Africa emerged in the context of radical sociopolitical fermentation. The most common understanding of civil society is of the welter of civic associations and activities that occupy the space between the national state and economy on the one hand and people’s daily lives on the other. The essential notion, as Goran Hyden once surmised so pithily, is ‘‘to cater for those whose place at the state table is not reserved’’ (Hyden, 1997: 27). Understandably, therefore, there is a primarily political understanding of civil society, in that it is seen as that aspect of general society that exists to rein in an often overbearing, if not apathetic, state, while ensuring in the process that the same state is constantly reminded of its responsibility to the poor and marginalized. Because of this, across West Africa, civil society and civil society organizations are more often than not part and parcel of the wider discourse of liberal democracy. Perhaps owing to the specific circumstances in which civil society entered the general vocabulary, they (civil society organizations) are expected to act as the linchpin of democratic agitation, which is eventually expected to be translated into economic, that is, bread and butter, terms. Non governmental organizations (NGOs) are the most visible contemporary expression of this yearning. Functioning as what David Lewis refers to as ‘‘wider institutions of transnational governmentality’’ (2002: 9) they have been an integral part of the social, economic, political, cultural, and reproductive spheres in West Africa since the mid 1980s. The earliest ones in Nigeria, to take an example, were established in the 1980s to fight for the rights of women, the poor, the disprivileged, and (political) prisoners. Nigeria’s oldest civil, gender, and human rights advocacy groups, like Women in Nigeria (WIN), the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (NADL) the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO), the Committee for the Defence
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of Human Rights (CDHR), and the Constitutional Rights Project (CRP) were all established between 1983 and 1990 (Akinrinade, 2004). Since the early 1990s, and in a seeming irony, there has been an explosion in the number of such NGOs, in part because the economic and human rights situations they set out to campaign against have actually worsened in tandem with the increase in the number of groups campaigning against them, and partly because international human rights and development groups have often provided generous funding for them. At the end of the 1990s, in a country of 10 million people, at least 200 NGOs were officially registered with Burkina Faso’s NGO Monitoring Office, the Bureau de Suivi des NGOs (IDEA, 1998). Due to their visibility and relative access to resources, NGOs have been at the forefront of both the promotion of the idea of civil society and the calculation of an agenda for it. In this, they have been more successful than not because of their links with the media, the business class, and the intelligentsia. Indeed, the most successful NGOs usually comprise individuals from various social spheres. Their modest successes notwithstanding, NGOs have not been without their critics. Some of the accusations leveled (sometimes legitimately) against them are: that for groups intent on promoting democracy, they are all too often rigidly hierarchical; that they are mostly urbanbased, steering clear of the hardships in the rural areas; that they are politically and culturally disembedded; and that they rely too heavily on external grants for their sustenance. The harsher criticisms relate to their perception as vehicles of elite accumulation (the late Nigerian Afrobeat musician and social activist, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, dismissed NGOs as ‘‘En j’iwo,’’ meaning ‘‘you are stealing money’’) (Obadare, 2007) and serious skepticism about their capacity (especially in the case of development NGOs) to deliver on promises of economic prosperity. Ultimately, many see them as nothing more than a dubious ruse to preserve elite dominance of politics in developing countries. While the jury is still out on some of these allegations, there is no denying that a focus on the shrubbery of NGOs has tended to obscure scrutiny of, and interest in, the general landscape of civil society. As suggested earlier, part of the blame for this diversion should go to NGOs themselves, though they have been unable to abolish the fact that a tradition of organizing civically is a recurrent thematic in West African history right from precolonial times. Such associations include hometown associations, trade guilds and business unions, development associations, women’s associations, and peasant groups, all collectively testifying to the vitality, complexity, and robustness of social life in various local communities (Honey & Okafor, 1998).
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Depending on locale, these associations served different kinds of roles, but most significantly, they provide(d) spaces for sociability for members and oases of support amid allpervading material austerity. In rejecting the tendency in contemporary civil society discussions to ‘‘primordialize’’ these associations, Meagher (2005) has emphasized one of their most significant attributes, particularly in precolonial West Africa, which is their embeddedness across kinship, ethnic, and religious cleavages. This rejection itself is important because it goes to the heart of critical debates on the meaning and possibility of civil society in non-Western contexts. In West Africa, as in the rest of the continent, the much theorized segmentation between ascriptive groups and voluntary associations (Rosenblum & Post, 2002) has little or no empirical substantiation. On the contrary, recent civil society activism across the subregion has drawn equally from both founts.
Social Capital In contemporary West Africa, social capital as a concept has none of civil society’s ubiquity. Social capital owes its recent revival to the work of scholars like James Coleman (1990), Robert Putnam (1993, 2000), and Francis Fukuyama (1995) respectively. The core proposition in the discourse of the idea of social capital can be summarized as follows: ‘‘Societies work best, and have always worked best, where citizens trust their fellow citizens, work cooperatively with them for common goals, and thus share a civic culture’’ (Rotberg, 2001: 1). Outside of this safety zone, the larger world of the social capital debate is disputed territory. A persistent source of tension is the difficulty involved in separating social capital from other kinds of capital, for example economic capital or human capital (Ostrom & Ahn, 2003). In addition, there are different forms of social capital (for instance scholars distinguish ‘‘bridging’’ from ‘‘bonding’’ social capital). Also, it is not entirely clear how social capital works, and under what conditions it becomes productive, as the theory goes, of ‘‘goods’’ like civil society, economic growth, and political stability. Finally, while it is generally agreed that social capital may not necessarily be continuous; there are no clear guidelines as to how and under what circumstances specific forms of social capital may freeze, or what becomes of such societies, and how they are to rebuild social capital. Because of this, and particularly for African societies, mainstream emphasis on the ‘‘modernizing’’ potential of social capital can often seem like the definitional equivalent of having a gun pointed at one’s head, in which case the stark choice is either to do as one’s assailant dictates, or risk serious harm. But not all societies are like Western
societies (in any case not all Western societies are alike), and the expectation that political systems whose patterns of state evolution, elite formation, and civic engagement are different than the West’s will evince similar social capital seems a tad unfair. So, what is to be done? How can social capital be rescued from its apparent conceptual straitjacket? How can it be employed to provide illumination in societies and political cultures that operate according to different social and cultural logics? Some scholars have suggested using social capital as ‘‘a metaphor’’ rather than ‘‘a theoretical proposition,’’ and ‘‘to describe empirical realities rather than directly to use or refute the available theory’’ (Rotberg, 2001: 5). For those who adopt this approach, the key issues for (West) Africa will then be: What kinds of social capital have respective societies accumulated right from the precolonial period through to the present era? How do these forms of social capital help us to understand the political culture that has emerged there? As said earlier, there exists among different societies across the subregion (as in the rest of the continent) a rich and deeply-rooted tradition of both intra- and inter- communal cooperation. This is shown in the existence of a wide variety of mutual aid groups, age-related groups, kinship, and lineage groups, religious associations, associations that operate strictly along gender lines, and thrift and credit unions, etc. Through these associations, ‘‘norms and normative codes through which people are made accountable and responsible to other members of society’’ (Hann & Dunn, 1996: 20) are generated. They (civic associations) also draw philosophical breath from a cultural code in which ‘‘notions of moral obligation and interpersonal accountability’’ (Kelsall, 2008: 627) are highly privileged. In closing this section, it is important to put on record two phenomena which, in recent times, have put this cultural code and the people’s sense of collective solidarity under profound stress. One is the economic crisis which has been on the ascendance since the early 1980s, an adverse consequence of which has been massive social destabilization due to mass rural–urban migration. Another effect is the erosion of the basic trust that has always characterized interpersonal relations in many of these communities. Second, sporadic sectarian violence involving adherents of opposing religious groups, in particular Christian and Islamic groups, have created mutual distrust.
Empirical Data Events in the political and economic spheres have dictated the nature of activities engaged in by civil society groups in various West African countries. Since analysis of individual countries is impracticable in an essay of this nature,
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the appropriate focus should be on some commonalities. For the sake of expediency, the focus here is on the political sphere. Within the past 2 decades, the cause ce´le`bre for civil society groups across West Africa has been the expansion of the public space and the inauguration of pluralist ethos. As noted earlier, the Francophone countries could be said to have made the first tentative steps in this direction, though in general, all the countries in the subregion were impacted in one way or the other by the logic of the global Third Wave of democratization. Since independence in the 1960s, basic political power had been exercised by members of a narrow elite (civilian or military) in various West African countries, with some of them becoming in the process reluctant emblems of personalist hegemony. Examples are Benin Republic, Togo, and Cote d’Ivoire, where Mathieu Kerekou, Gnassingbe Eyadema, and Houphouet Boigny respectively held on to the reins of power for several decades, often at exorbitant social costs. In these and many other countries, the repression of civil society activity had led to a contracting of the public space, which also meant significant civic atrophy. For civil society groups in the different countries, the Third Wave of democratization was a crucial window, particularly as many of them could readily count on moral and financial support from various western countries and institutions. This was the social backcloth to the remarkable explosion of civic, human rights and community based associations, voluntary associations, and student and youth groups across the subregion in the early to mid 1990s. Nigeria is a case in point. In a report prepared in 2000, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), noted that in the decade of the 1980s, more civic organizations were registered than in any other period in the postindependence history of the country. Unsurprisingly, a high percentage of NGOs currently in existence were registered during that period. Predicated on an existing culture of communal organizing which has been noted earlier, and radicalized by the charged political atmosphere (and a worsening political climate), the groups campaigned vigorously for an end to military dictatorships, the termination of personalist rule, and in places like Benin Republic, Mali, Nigeria, and Cote d’Ivoire, a sovereign national conference with a mandate to rewrite the political destinies of the respective countries. At the apex of the surge in Nigeria was the Campaign for Democracy (CD), an umbrella body for other pro-democracy groups. In addition to pro-democracy groups, NGOs flourished in many other aspects of social life, including education, conflict resolution, health and reproductive rights, women’s rights, the environment, and economic rights.
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As said before, the agenda of these groups was usually determined by the character of the regime in place and fallouts from the political sphere. Thus, for civil society groups in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, mobilization has been directed at bringing the fratricidal violence in the respective countries to an end. The example of Liberia, where a trans-ethnic and trans-religious coalition of women’s groups was crucial to the peace process is particularly instructive. In a way, it provides an apt summary of the countless struggles for peace, democracy, and social justice engaged in by different groups across the subregion. It is also a measure of how much the public space has been opened up in the last 2 decades to include marginalized groups like women. However, important as these groups, particularly development and human rights NGOs, are, it is grossly misleading to equate their apparent density with either an effective civil society, or a vibrant public sphere. We have already noted some of the problems with NGOs in particular. Furthermore, as argued elsewhere (Obadare, 2005), an extensive network of civic associations hardly translates into democratic vitality. The reason is that associations themselves come in various ideological colors – some are progressive, and most are not. Indeed, organizations within civil society may well frustrate democratic aspirations. The more significant conceptual caveat is that the notion of civil society ought to be seen as transcending associations; that is, it is not difficult to imagine nonorganized ways through which ordinary people in West Africa variously engage with, resist, defy, and oppose the state. For example, scholars like James Scott (1990) and Alex Thomson (2000) have documented various creative means (the ‘‘hidden transcripts’’) by which the subordinate classes across Africa hold their own in the face of state repression or apathy. Such means, like ridiculing of state officials through different traditional media (Olukotun, 2002), remain valued by groups and cultures in the subregion.
Outlook/Concluding Assessment There exists in West Africa a robust and deeply embedded associational culture. This culture predated colonial rule, and arguably subtended the nationalist agitation for independence in the 1960s. The emergence of a new generation of ‘‘modern’’ NGOs in the last 2 decades has introduced a new dimension to this culture. It would seem therefore that civil society has two faces (the ‘‘traditional’’ and the ‘‘modern’’) as Ndegwa (1996) seems to argue for the whole of Africa. In fact, the emergence of the discourse of civil society and the popularity of the idea can be traced to the emergence and social visibility of these NGOs. The space for their emergence and
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subsequent success was made possible by a coincidence of state failure and the global shift toward liberal democratic principles. It is arguable that in the aftermath of this fortuitous conjuncture, the usual penchant of regimes in the subregion for ‘‘systematic destruction of broad-based autonomous social organizations’’ appears to have been tamed somewhat (Reno, 2005, 139). Yet, the outlook remains grim, especially if we are to judge by recent events in Guinea where, in December 2008, the military returned to power following the unexpected demise of President Lansana Conte after. What this suggests is that, though there are tangible gains to be pointed out as a result of the liberal fermentation of the 1990s, such gains remain fragile indeed. That being the case, civil society organizations would appear to have their work cut out for them.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Action ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Southern Africa ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in East Africa ▶ Civil Society: Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society Theory: Walzer ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History
References/Further Readings Adamu, M. (1978). The hausa factor in West African history. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press. Akinrinade, S. (2004). On the evolution of civil society in Nigeria. In M. Glasius, D. Lewis, & H. Seckinelgin (Eds.), Exploring civil society political and cultural contexts (pp. 141–148). New York: Routledge. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: The Free Press. Hann, C., & Dunn, E. (Eds.) (1996). Civil society challenging western models. London: Routledge. Honey, R., & Okafor, S. (Eds.) (1998). Hometown associations indigenous knowledge and development in Nigeria. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Hyden, G. (Spring 1997). Civil society, social capital, and development: Dissection of a complex discourse. Studies in Comparative International Development, 32(1), 3–30. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) (1998). Democracy in Nigeria Continuing Dialogue(s) for Nation-Building International Capacity-Building Series 10. Burkina Faso. Kelsall, T. (2008). Going with the grain in African development? Development Policy Review, 26(6), 627–655. Lovejoy, P. E. (1980). Caravans of kolat the hausa kola trade, 1700–1900. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press.
Manuh, T. (Ed.) (2006). At home in the world? International migration and development in contemporary Ghana and West Africa. Ghana: SubSaharan Publishers. Meagher, K. (2005). Social capital or analytical liability? Social networks and African informal economies. Global Networks, 5(3), 217–238. Ndegwa, S. N. (1996). The two faces of civil society: NGOS and politics in Africa. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Obadare, E. (2005). Second thoughts on civil society: The state, civic associations and the antinomies of the public sphere. Journal of Civil Society, 1(3), 267–281. Obadare, E. (2007). Religious NGOs, civil society and the quest for a public sphere in Nigeria. African Identities, 5(1), 135–153. Olukoshi, A. (2004). Towards the restoration of a social state in Africa. In A. Triulzi & M. C. Ercolessi (Eds.), State, power, and new political actors in postcolonial Africa (pp. 249–271). Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrnelli. Olukotun, A. (2002). Traditional protest media and anti-military struggle in Nigeria, 1988–1999. African Affairs, 101(403), 193–211. Ostrom, E., & Ahn, T. K. (Eds.) (2003). Foundations of social capital. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Putnam, R. (1993). Civil society traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Reno, W. (2005). The politics of public intellectuals under Abacha and after. In J. I. Guyer & L. Denzer (Eds.), Vision and policy in Nigerian economics: The legacy of Pius Okigbo Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press. 129–147. Rosenblum, N. L., & Post, R. C. (Eds.) (2002). Civil society and government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rotberg, R. I. (2001). Social capital and political culture in Africa, America, Australia, and Europe. In R. Rotberg (Ed.), Patterns of social capital stability and change in historical perspective (pp. 1–18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thomson, A. (2000). Introduction to African politics. New York: Routledge.
Civil Society and Social Inequality THOMAS KLIE Zentrum fu¨r zivilgesellschaftliche Entwicklung, Freiburg, Germany
Introduction At a time when social inequalities are on the increase both within nations and in the relations between poor and rich countries, the notion of civil society has become a matter of particular interest in national as well as supranational debates. However, this coincidence tends to engender mistrust whenever countries or supranational bodies pin their hopes on the civil society (or the ‘‘global civil
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society’’) as a resource in the creation of a fair and just world in the age of globalization. At the outset of debate, after all, globalization was associated with the hope that it would lead to a liberal, democratic, and just world order. There is an expectation that with the emergence of a global civil society, a more emancipated world order would be created. The liberal, cosmopolitan idea of a global civil society refers to the widening, deepening, and accelerating global interconnectedness and interdependence. Many normative international theorists insist that an emerging global civil society would reconstitute the positions of power and authority in international society. Yet not only governments are shaping the international society. In fact, a growing number of internationally operating NGOs, global civic networks and global social movements are influencing (inter-)national decision-making and the agenda of world politics. The concept of civil society always contains a visionary core that is essential for every national and supranational society or association of countries (Kitamura, 2005). Albeit all liberality that is inherent in the concept of civil society, the notion of social inclusion and of societal commitment to make social inequality an issue and to tackle it is also part of this vision.
Definition Following Hradil (2001), the definition of social inequality is addressed whenever some individuals regularly receive more of a society’s valuable commodities than others on the basis of their position within the social fabric. Valuable commodities, in this respect, are regarded as goods commonly perceived as precious and thus capable to determine life conditions. For instance, money, permanent employment, education, social participation, health, or power can be rated as valuable commodities. However, not all advantages and disadvantages, not all betterments and degradations can be referred to as manifestations of social inequality, but only those distributed in a socially structured, comparatively permanent and generalisable way. Their connectedness to relatively constant societal ties and positions distinguishes social inequalities from other forms of diversity (Hradil, 2001, S. 29). Social inequality exists (and has existed) in all known contemporary and historical societies and is, even though it may appear naturally, always a socially constructed fact (Greiffenhagen, 2002). Premodern explanation patterns interpreted social inequality often as a fact of nature or as a divine concept. Aristotle, for example, explained slavery with the natural fact that some individuals are born for
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subjection, others to rule. From ancient Greece to the caste system in India, (social) inequalities were perceived as natural. Equality as a political aspiration was not expressed until Rousseau’s disquisition about the causes and principles of inequality or with Karl Marx’s ‘‘programme on equality.’’ Social and political effects of social inequality were made subjects of sociology, political science as well as of social philosophy. The macroeconomic effects of uneven distribution are disputed. In the economic-political debate, they are associated with a positive function, since social equality would disable competition and thus neutralise personal accelerating incentives. In public health contexts, social inequality within nations can systematically be put into a relation with the society’s state of health and the prevalence of chronic diseases. The perception of an uneven distribution is interpreted as a factor of societal destabilization (Sen, 1997). Particular manifestations of social inequality can be most diverse. Admission to health care services or different shares in the increasingly important access to water can be as important as access to knowledge, education, or money. In civil society contexts, social inequality comes to be an issue in various respects. In the Latin American emancipation movements of the last century’s sixties and seventies, social inequality was one of the core topics. The confrontation with social inequality in a less political sense is the self-chosen purpose of civil society organizations throughout. And finally, however, civil society organizations with their distinctive middle-class orientation might conserve social inequalities in industrialized countries.
Key Issues Empirically, one can identify a tension between civil society and social inequality in several respects: ● On a global scale, it becomes evident that in the age of globalization, the gap between poor and rich countries is increasing parallel to the international discourse in civil society. In the shadow of globalization, it also comes into notice that according to Paul Collier (2007) the ‘‘bottom billion,’’ i.e., the countries that miss out in the process of globalization, are mainly those lacking what is usually associated with civil society: Protection of human rights, tolerance, democratic participation, renunciation of violence and sustainable economic action in ecological, social, and economic respects, etc. The emancipatory power of civil society is yet based on cultural and political preconditions and on education – elements that especially the losers of globalization lack of. Nevertheless,
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hardly any official objectives for development aid or scientific cooperation are made without claiming that civil society structures are to be enhanced. Democratically ‘‘not sufficiently’’ legitimated governments are to be controlled and in a sense of good governance, corruption-tending political and economic elites should be confronted with controlling elements. ● It is not just the gap between thriving and ‘‘losing’’ countries, basically between North and South that is widening. The gap between the poor and the rich within the industrialized world is widening, too – thus creating losers under the globalization winners. Moreover, on the respective national levels one may critically identify that civil society-related types of voluntary commitment, of NGO activities and of democratic participation can lead to exclusion mechanisms (Brooks & Geer, 2005): People with low education or income and typically people with a migration background are clearly among the groups less represented in the participation in civil society contexts. Individuals with a migratory background are as excluded from civic involvement as people from social strata with poor education or a low degree of participation are (Gensicke et al., 2005). In a civil society, essentially interpreted as the ‘‘third sector’’ or the area of NGOs, lower social ranks and disadvantaged milieus are less represented. Furthermore, it becomes evident that in those fields of commitment associated with the civil society, bonding effects can rather be identified than bridging effects (Putnam, 2001). This holds likewise true for the relationship between generations (senior citizens tend to help senior citizens while younger people tend to help younger people) as for milieus: Emerging solidarity often operates from a particular social origin back into the same milieu. Hence, effects of exclusion rather than inclusion can be observed as developments in the domain of voluntary action and NGOs.
Future Directions and International Perspectives It is a question whether civic involvement with its emphasis on the middle-class (Gensicke, 2006) is dividing the society but also how this can be tackled and how alliances between generations and different milieus can be created. It becomes evident that those social strata displaying less commitment are confronted with the dilemma that they lack both material and nonmaterial resources to get involved in civil society – and that for this very reason, they fail to access socially, integrative, and occupationally relevant learning processes. At best, a civilisation of charity in national and international contexts can be
ascertained: Altruism is being civilized in the discourse of civil society. It strongly reflects a sociological interpretation and motivation patterns in a sense that a not socially integrative society is neither safe nor does it grant freedom to its members. Despite all integrative power that goes with civil society as a general concept, there is a danger that a simplified understanding of civil society as civic commitment for common welfare purposes and as the level of NGO activities (Salamon et al., 2003) may divide society and that it may promote exclusion rather than inclusion of groups exceptionally threatened by marginalization. Adhering to the opinion that the vision of an international civil society as a perspective for more justice in the world does not have an alternative, this will have implications on a normatively and strategically fixed concept of civil society. This implies a tradition of critique introduced from the civil society that was time and again of highest historical significance, like for example in the democratic emancipation movements in South America in the twentieth and twenty-first century or in Europe during the nineteenth century. New social movements and NGOs like the worldwide open platform of the World Social Forum (WSF) stand in this tradition. The World Social Forum has become a place and a process where diverse movements and groups promoting alternatives to corporately led globalization have come together to clarify the collective aims and identities and to forge new international partnerships. Despite the wide range of groups and interests, there is a common call for a more democratic and equitable global order. The WSF-process is, like the civil societies it consists of, fraught with tensions and uncertainties as well as possibilities. It represents an international civil society that advocates the vision of a global civil society beyond the limits of national concepts (Smith et al., 2007). On the respective national level it does not suffice to equate civil society with the third sector and NGOs. The NGOs themselves pursue their particular interests and it should not be delegated to them to deal with state failure, effects of global economic developments or structural changes in the welfare system. A multidimensional concept of civil society could not only grasp civil society as an area between state and market that is autonomously organized by the citizens but also as a conception of society that accepts the interdependence of societal sectors as the basis of all activities (including state-run actions). It would understand civil society activity as a mode of interaction in a sense of fair and negotiation-oriented action with gradual integration of civil society preconditions into the particular system logic including normative implications like human rights, tolerance, or the state monopoly on the legitimate
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use of physical force. Such a civil society will make social inequality and its minimization its central concern. This holds true both on a national level (regarding the fact that civil society can guarantee participation in society and contribute to social inclusion) and on an international level (since civil society is not only created and defended locally, but reflects the responsibility for consequences of own actions in other parts of the world). This insight applies for states as well as for corporations, for NGOs and for the citizens. A civil society discourse not accepting social inequality as an essential concern and not reflecting the effects of commitment in civil society regarding the impending aggravation of social inequality does not satisfy the normative preconditions of a civil society. The liberal-cosmopolitan idea of global civil society requires new agendas towards international ethics. There is awareness that the benefits of globalization are not equally distributed and that this inequality is a threat to the vision of a global civil society. It is clear that globalization has not only created one world but has also created a divided world. It is nowhere near that all people are included in a global civil society. Many are left outside its boundaries and remain excluded. Even though global civil society is flourishing, it is clear that it is divided. Global civil society, which could promote global democracy and justice, bears an essential, significant meaning. Nevertheless, in practice it is a contested idea. Despite of being normatively ideal to reflect a global public sphere, it can include others only to a certain extent. This problem results in an idea of global civil society being controversial in terms of an ethical evaluation. The more this idea emphasizes the principle of the inclusion of people as global citizens, the more the idea disregards the limits of inclusion of marginalized people (Brooks & Geer, 2005).
Cross-References ▶ Altruism ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Good Governance ▶ INGOs ▶ Social Movements ▶ World Social Forum
References/Further Readings Brooks, D., & Geer, J. G. (2005, September). Incivility, negativity, and campaigns. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Omni Shoreham, Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, from http://www. allacademic.com/meta/p41527_index.html; 06/30/2008 Collier, P. (2007). The bottom billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Gensicke, Th. (2006). Bu¨rgerschaftliches Engagement in Deutschland. Das Parlament, with the Supplement Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 12, from http://www.das-parlament.de/2006/12/beilage/002.html; 20.03.2006 Gensicke, Th., Picot, S., & Geiss, S. (2005). Freiwilliges engagement in Deutschland 1999–2004: Ergebnisse der repra¨sentativen Trenderhebung zu Ehrenamt, Freiwilligenarbeit und bu¨rgerschaftlichem Engagement. Carried out by TNS Infratest Social Research on behalf of the Federal Ministry for family affairs, senior citizens, women and youth, from http://www.bmfsfj.de/Kategorien/ Forschungsnetz/forschungsberichte,did = 73430.html; 06/27/2008 Greiffenhagen, M. (Eds.) (2002). Handwo¨rterbuch zur politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Hradil, S. (2001). Soziale Ungleichheit in Deutschland. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Kitamura, O. (2005, March). Global civil society in a world of difference: Inclusion, justice and international ethics. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, from http://www.allacademic. com/meta/p69697_index.html; 06/27/2008 Nolte, P. (2003). Zivilgesellschaft und soziale Ungleichheit. Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, 16(2), 38–45. Putnam, R. D. (2001). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. London: Simon & Schuster. Salamon, L. M., Sokolowski S. W., & List, R. (2003). Global civil society. An overview. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, from http://www.jhu.edu/ccss/publications/ pdf/globalciv.pdf; 06/27/2008 Sen, A. K., & Foster, J. E. (1997). On economic inequality. Oxford: Clarendon. Smith, J. et al. (2007, August). The world social forums and the challenges of global democracy (With updates on the Recent US Social Forum). Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, TBA, New York, from http://www.allacademic.com/ meta/p177724_index.html; 2008–07–21
Civil Society and the Elderly JU¨RGEN KOCKA, KAI BRAUER Social Science Research Center, Berlin, Germany
Introduction Due to an increasing life expectancy and low birth rates the share of the elderly of the population is increasing in many countries. In Germany, the share of those aged 60 or older amounted to 14.6% in 1950 and 23.6% in 2000, and is estimated to be around 40% in 2050 (StBA, 2006). The equivalent values for the same years in the United States are 12% (1950) to 16% (2000) and 27% in 2050, while in Europe they are 12% (1950) to 20% (2000) and 35% in 2050. The worldwide share of persons over 60 has grown from 8% in 1950 to 10% in 2000 and will more than double to 21.5% by 2050 (UN, 2006). The share of the
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elderly who are (no longer) part of the labor force has been increasing in many countries in the past decades, especially where social security systems make possible the transition to retirement without impoverishment. As an average of all OECD countries the labor force participation rate of 55–64-year-olds was only 54.2% in 2006 – with big differences in rates between countries (OECD, 2006). Only 8% of the 65–69-year-olds in Europe were gainfully employed (Eurostat, 2006), whereas in the United States the labor force participation rate of people over 65 increased from 12% in 1998 to 16% in 2008 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008). The following questions with regard to civil society arise from the increase in life expectancy, the lengthened life time after the employment phase, and the increased share of the elderly: To what extent can the elderly contribute to strengthening and activating civil society through their civic engagement? To what extent can civic engagement contribute to societal inclusion and to the enrichment of the life of the elderly after they exit from the labor force? To what extent can the increasing need to take care of the elderly be dealt with in civil society; to what extent can civic engagement, in this respect, supplement the family- and kin-based networks as well as professional assistance? To what extent do civic groups and activities contribute to protecting the basic rights of the elderly and struggle against or prevent their discrimination? One has to look at the extent, the preconditions, and the consequences of civil engagement for the elderly. This relates to the debates about ‘‘productive aging’’ (Butler & Gleason, 1985), about services that the elderly perform for the community, and about the inclusion and well-being of the elderly – in each case through civic engagement.
Definition The category of ‘‘the elderly’’ or ‘‘the aged’’ is generally determined by age, but there is no common or general definition. Thus Paul Baltes referred to 60 as the beginning of the ‘‘third age’’ and 80 as the beginning of the ‘‘fourth age’’ (Baltes & Smith, 1999). In the literature dealing with the labor market, persons older than 50 or 55 already belong to the group of ‘‘older employees.’’ Studies of old age generally begin with this group, and sometimes even with younger groups. In most countries, the beginning of retirement is determined to be 65. For this reason this figure is frequently used as the beginning of the phase of old age, as in Burgess (1960). Surveys show the popular view of the beginning of old age as between 70 and 75 (Kohli & Ku¨nemund, 2002: 98). As the agerelated decline in performance, engagement, and health varies enormously, definitions that are oriented on
biological age have to be viewed critically (see Neugarten, 1982). In view of the increasing differences between the elderly, Bill Bytheway (2005a, b) sharply criticized the use of upwardly open age group definitions because they suggest a homogeneity between 50-, 60-, 70-, 80-, or 100-year-olds which obviously does not exist. When aging in civil society is discussed in the following article, less thought is given regarding age groups beyond a certain numerical age and more regarding social groups that normally find themselves in the post-occupational phase. Thus, a qualitative criterion is used that is based on the trichotomy of the life course which has emerged as typical for modern societies. However, the sharp distinction between the phase of employment and retirement – still a useful heuristic tool for analyses – has become more fluid in recent development and is predicted to become more gradual in the future. The following definition is found in an amendment to the Older Americans Act of 2005: ‘‘The term ‘civic engagement’ means an individual or collective action designed to address a public concern or an unmet human, educational, health care, environmental, or public safety need.’’ This refers to ‘‘voluntary work,’’ work not for wages or for individual profit (Anheier & Salamon, 1999). It distinguishes between formally organized civic engagement (community organizations, parties, unions) and informal civic engagement (neighborhood, peer group, family). The elderly surely make their greatest contribution to society within the family by looking after their grandchildren and supporting their adult children or taking care of their spouses or other relatives. These familyrelated activities will not be discussed in the following sections. Rather, the discussion will deal with the civic engagement of the elderly outside their families: activities in civil organizations, networks, and initiatives of civil society.
Key Issues Civic Engagement of the Elderly
It was long believed that old age was naturally accompanied by a retirement from gainful occupations and public life. This was explicitly formulated by Cumming and Henry (1961) as disengagement theory: ‘‘The elderly disengage from productive social roles in order to relinquish these roles to younger members of society. As the process continues, each new group moves up and replaces another, which, according to disengagement theory, benefits society and all of its members.’’ This implies that, in addition to gainful employment, the elderly also relinquish civic engagement to the younger generations and that this is in
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accord with societal succession arrangements. This does appear to hold true to a certain extent, as most studies actually show a decline in engagement with increasing age. For example, the intergenerational volunteering survey of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) shows that volunteering increases with age up to about 65 and decreases thereafter (Harootyan & Vorek, 1994). Volunteering tends to decline most clearly among the very old, typically for those beyond the age of 75. One argument against the simple assumption of a voluntary withdrawal of the elderly in the sense of the disengagement theory is the observable strict correlation between withdrawal and poorer health, because this holds true for all age groups (Erlinghagen & Hank, 2006). Health status has a powerful effect on volunteering. This explains part of the observable withdrawal of the elderly from volunteering. It is also noticeable that the engagement of the elderly is highly variable and has increased noticeably in some countries in the past decades. Clear increases in the engagement of persons older than 65, were documented in the AARP survey in some American states starting in the 1960s and going on into the 1990s (Chambre, 1993). On the basis of German surveys it has been shown that volunteering rates increased between 1999 and 2004 from 26% to 30% among those aged 60 and older and from 31% to 37% among those between 60 and 69 years (Gensicke, 2006). With data from the German Aging Survey no differences between rural and urban regions in the intensity of engagement of elderly are proven (Scherger et al., 2004). We also have to take into account the fact that the amount of the engagement of the elderly is highly variable. According to a survey of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006, the active elderly reported an average of 2 h of engagement weekly. But 10% reported more than 10 h. Furthermore, it shows that multiple activity is widespread. Elders are often involved in several formal and informal activities. In the Commonwealth Productive Aging Study (Caro & Bass, 1995) four areas were surveyed: gainful employment, voluntary engagement, informal long-term home care, and looking after grandchildren. Three quarters of the people between 65 and 74 are active in at least one of these areas, a third of them in two or more areas. An international comparison of the amount of participation is generally doomed to failure due to the available data, differing definitions, and measuring methods. The fact that regional differences are important was shown by Putnam (2000) and a comparative study of 10 European countries (SHARE). According to the
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definition selected in this study, around 10% of the Europeans between 65 and 75 did voluntary work or the like (Bo¨rsch-Supan et al., 2005). At the same time a strong North–South divide was revealed. This share is highest in the Netherlands – it is over 25% there – followed by the Scandinavian countries. In Spain and Greece, on the other hand, less than 4% of the people older than 50, do volunteer work. Whether this is due to institutional reasons or whether one must look for explanations in the area of culture or modernization theory will have to be investigated further. In contrast to the widespread ‘‘crowding out’’ assumptions, which proceed from the assumption of a decline in civic engagement in view of large welfare state expenditures, the reported evidence seems rather to indicate the opposite (‘‘crowding in’’): The voluntary engagement is greater in European countries with a well-developed social welfare system and a high level of social services than in countries that are poorer in these respects. The newest research has not confirmed the disengagement theory. The elderly do not necessarily withdraw from voluntary work after going into retirement. On the contrary, they sometimes even participate to an increasing extent in clubs, neighborhood associations, and civic groups. With more exact measurement, a slight increase is seen in the rate of engagement directly after the transition to retirement that only declines with increasing age. This supports approaches that see in civic engagement a compensation (Baltes & Baltes, 1990) for the loss of activities at the workplace. The research also shows, though, that persons who were civically engaged in earlier years exhibit a higher probability of also being active in retirement than those who had no experience with civic engagement in younger years (Smith, 2004; Erlinghagen & Hank, 2006). Productive aging has to be learned and prepared for in early stages of the life course. Effects of Engagement on the Elderly
The data of the European Social Survey show that traditional volunteer work in associations and organizations, namely in sports clubs, social clubs, churches, and religious groups, as well as in welfare organizations, constitutes the most common form of civic engagement for the elderly. The engagement of the elderly in neighborhood and citizens’ initiatives, but also in senior citizens’ cooperatives and self-help initiatives appears still to be relatively marginal. However, out of all age groups, people over 60 express the strongest political–public interest. In political parties, which suffer from a lack of younger members in many countries, people between 65 and 75 are the most willing to accept an honorary office.
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This is an area that is varied and capable of development. Much is in fluctuation. Engagement in clubs, initiatives, and self-organized institutions offers the chance for meaningful activity, for retaining and developing competencies, for self-affirmation, social recognition and inclusion – precisely for the life phase after full gainful employment. Also contacts with people in other age groups could arise from this. In contrast to the many forms of gainful employment with their hard discipline and heteronomy, taking over civic activities is usually possible in smaller, variable amounts – depending on the capabilities and preferences of the elderly persons (Kocka, 2007: 359–360). Much speaks for the fact that civic engagement and the well-being of the elderly correlate. But it is often difficult to determine whether one is dealing with selection effects or whether the well-being of the elderly was improved through engagement. When comparing, among those 70 and older, inactive persons and those who had volunteered more than 100 h per year, after 7 years of clinical findings did not show significant differences (Lum & Lightfood, 2005). But the civically active elderly assessed their state of health to be significantly better than the inactive group did. This is evidence for the fact that civic engagement cannot clinically slow down the process of aging, but has a positive effect on the general well-being. At the same time the type of civic engagement is important. Analysis of the data from SHARE for Europe has shown that voluntarily performed services go together with an increase in well-being particularly when these services have a high degree of societal recognition (Wahrendorf et al., 2006). Governmental Promotion of the Engagement by the Elderly
Policy can make it easier to use the potential of the engagement of the elderly. The United States, where the Older Americans Act (OAA) has provided the administrative support for the engagement of the elderly since the 1960s, is considered to be the forerunner in this respect. A starting point for this can be found in the Foster Grandparent Program (FGP) that was launched 1965 as a pilot program designed to engage people over 60 with some income limitations in community service. The Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973 (amended in 1999) improved the legal and financial basis for such programs like the Senior Companion Program (SCP). It was meant to expand the role of low-income older volunteers who provide person-toperson services. The program Senior Corps, that expressly pursued an intergenerational approach, resulted from the linkage of the FGP and the SCP. It supported preferentially
older people (as mentors) and younger people (as their pupils). It sought to use the specific capabilities and life situations of the different generations, so, for example, the support by the younger elderly in the care of the oldest groups. Along with two comparable programs (AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America) Senior Corps finally became part of the newly formed Corporation for National and Community Service (NCS). NCS brings the wide range of domestic community service programs under the umbrella of one central organization. Thus a complex system of governmental promotion of civic engagement has come into being in the United States, which is designed to alleviate societal injustices and is based on voluntary participation. Volunteers in the NCS receive some financial support for living expenses. This fact is occasionally criticized, because of the perforation of the border between gratuitous volunteering and low-wage jobs (Bass, 1995; Martinson & Minkler, 2006; Moody, 2001). This criticism is answered by the argument that engagement has positive effects for those who practice it voluntarily and in a selfdetermined way, and that poorer people cannot be included in the system of civil society without financial support, which is exactly what the programs of the NCS aim at. As it is well documented, the socioeconomic status has a strong influence on the likelihood of engagement (Tang, 2008). Voluntary organizations are therefore advised to facilitate older adults from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in taking volunteer roles. In most European countries such promotion is limited to general tax deductions for financial contributions to nonprofit organizations, for the establishment of foundations, and similar engagement. There are various programs for the elderly in some European countries. The EU also promotes voluntary engagement in the course of its efforts to integrate the elderly more strongly into the labor market. The specific promotion of engagement beyond the pension age is, however, just beginning. Financially securing the subsistence in old age is one of the central governmental responsibilities in many European countries, especially in Scandinavia and Germany. The result of this is a generally high level of integration of the elderly in the social welfare system, especially through universal health insurances (Leisering & Leibfried, 1999). But additional programs for promoting the civic engagement of the elderly were initiated in recent years. Bottom Up: The Nonprofit Organizations of the Elders
In an international comparison, a connection is also seen between the extent of engagement of the elderly and the existence of organizations that represent the interests of
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the elderly in regard to old-age policy. As Erlinghagen and Hank (2008) have shown, the civic engagement of the elderly is comparatively low in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. Organizations for the elderly are also hardly known or insignificant there. On the other hand, the lobbies for policy for the elderly are influential in northern Europe, especially in Great Britain. Age Concern, an umbrella organization for more than 350 initiatives in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, has a turnover of over £80 million yearly through donations and nonprofit activities (Annual Report, 2007) and attempts to influence laws to protect the rights of the elderly. In Europe, Great Britain with Age Concern and other initiatives is considered to be the forerunner. Even the British organizations cannot match the attainments of the American lobbies for the elderly, though. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) with 30 million members is the largest independent (nonprofit, nonpartisan) organization in the United States. It is not the only representation of the elderly in the United States. It competes with the Alliance for Retired Americans (ARA), which emerged from the National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC), and the American Seniors Organization (ASO), which is close to the Republican Party. In the struggle for members and influence these organizations attain a high level of activation. The organizations are capable of influencing political decisions. This goes together with the fact that there is no other country with a stricter safeguarding of the basic rights of the elderly than the United States. Laws against age discrimination in gainful employment, e.g., the AntiDiscrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) which was passed in the 1970s and the formidable Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), offer effective protection and participation regulations for elderly jobseekers which also have an effect on the area of civic institutions. Through the establishment of the National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA) and the Administration on Aging (AoA) within the US Department of Health and Human Services, effective governmental institutions were created which did not supersede the work of the many civic institutions, but apparently motivated it. In addition to the mass organizations already mentioned (AARP, ARA, ASO), there are also a multitude of nongovernment, nonprofit organizations that perform practical work for the elderly and are active in different task areas. Here it is important to mention the American Society on Aging (ASA), the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE), the Elvirita Lewis Foundation (ELF), and the National Council on the Aging (NCOA). In addition to these organizations that work for the elderly and
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against ageism in general there are also organizations that represent specific groups of the elderly. The most well-known are surely the Older Women’s League (OWL), the National Caucus on Black Aged (NCBA), the National Association for Hispanic Elderly (NAHE), and the National Senior Citizen’s Law Center (NSCLC), a nonprofit group of attorneys, which legally represents the elderly poor. The impulses to protect the rights and the standing of the elderly emerged originally from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The vast governmental funding for research into old age – and thus enlightenment – has surely also had a supportive effect. The National Institute on Aging alone has a yearly budget of US $1 billion at its disposal. Its founding director Robert N. Butler is considered to be the inventor not only of the concept of ‘‘productive aging’’ but also of the concept of ‘‘ageism’’ (Butler, 1969; Brauer, 2008). With his work he strengthened the basis of the struggle against age discrimination, which a large number of organizations are now devoted to. Today, Butler is the president of the most internationally important nonprofit organization devoted to fighting ageism: the International Longevity Center (ILC) in New York (www: www.ilcusa.org).
Future Directions The civic engagement of the elderly has grown considerably in the past decades. Much indicates that it will grow further. It has gained importance in the course of demographic change. On the one hand, the increasing number of active elderly and those who could be activated in the future represents a large resource for strengthening civil society. The civic engagement of the elderly can also contribute to meeting the ever-increasing need to supplement professional care institutions and family care-givers in regard to care for the frail elderly. On the other hand, various types and amounts of civic engagement after the phase of gainful employment – after the exit from the labor force – offer the elderly the opportunities for meaningful activity, for social recognition, for intergenerational contacts, for life enrichment. The promotion of civic engagement of the elderly is increasingly being seen as a political objective. High social welfare standards and governmental activities for the elderly tend to support their civic engagement. Societies in which the civic engagement of the elderly is supported by political means and in which the elderly find organizations that protect them as a group from discrimination and in which they can represent their group interests will probably see increasing rates of engagement in the future. This strengthens their productivity.
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Cross-References
▶ AARP ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civic Action ▶ Corporation for National and Community Service ▶ Volunteers
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. K., & Salamon, L. M. (1999). Volunteering in cross-national perspective: Initial comparisons. Law & Contemporary Problems, 62, 43–65. Baldock, C. V. (1999). Seniors as volunteers: An international perspective on policy. Ageing & Society, 19, 581–602. Baltes, P. B., & Baltes, M. M. (1990). Psychological perspectives on successful aging: The model of selective optimization with compensation. In P. B. Baltes & M. M. Baltes (Eds.), Successful aging: Perspectives from the behavioral sciences (pp. 1–34). New York: Cambridge University Press. Baltes, P. B., & Smith, J. (1999). Multilevel and systemic analyses of old age: Theoretical and empirical evidence for a fourth age. In V. L. Bengtson & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), Handbook of theories of aging (pp. 153–173). New York: Springer. Bass, S. A. (Ed.) (1995). Older and active. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bo¨rsch-Supan, A. (2005). A new comprehensive and international view on ageing: Introducing the survey of health, ageing and retirement in Europe (SHARE). European Journal of Ageing, 2, 245–253. Brauer, K. (2005). Bowling together: Clan, clique, community und die Strukturprinzipien des Sozialkapitals. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu¨r Sozialwissenschaften. Brauer, K. (2008). Ageism in aging societies: Ein ‘‘natu¨rliches’’Problem? In K. S. Rehberg (Ed.), Die Natur der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M./ New York: Campus. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2008). US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (data.bls.gov/PDQ). Burgess, E. W. (Ed.) (1960). Aging in Western societies. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Butler, R. N. (1969). Age-ism: Another form of bigotry. The Gerontologist, 9, 243–246. Butler, R. N., & Gleason, H. P. (Eds.) (1985). Productive aging: Enhancing vitality in later life. New York: Springer. Bytheway, B. (2005a). Ageism. In M. L. Johnson, P. Coleman, & V. Bengtson (Eds.). The Cambridge handbook on age and ageing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bytheway, B. (2005b). Ageism and age categorization. Journal of Social Issues, 61(2), 361–374. Caro, F. G., & Bass, S. A. (1995). Dimensions of productive engagement. In S. A. Bass (Ed.). Older and active (pp. 204–216). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chambre, S. (1993). Volunteerism by elders. past trends and future prospects. The Gerontologist, 33, 221–228. Cumming, E., & Henry, W. E. (1961). Growing old: The process of disengagement. New York: Basic Books. Erlinghagen, M., & Hank, K. (2006). The participation of older Europeans in volunteer work. Aging & Society, 27, 567–584. Eurostat (2006). Eurostat news release 129/2006 (29 September 2006). Gensicke, T. (2006). Freiwilliges Engagement a¨lterer Menschen im Zeitvergleich 1999–2004. In T. Gensicke, Freiwilliges engagement in Deutschland 1999–2004 (pp. 265–301). Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag fu¨r Sozialwissenschaften.
Harootyan, R. A., & Vorek, R. E. (1994). Volunteering, helping and gift giving in families and communities. In V. L. Bengtson & R. A. Harootyan (Eds.). Intergenerational linkages: Hidden connections in American society. New York: Springer. Kocka, J. (2007). Chancen alternder Gesellschaften. Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift fu¨r europa¨isches Denken, 61, 357–361. Kohli, M., & Ku¨nemund, H. (2002). La fin de carrie`re et la transition vers la retraite – Les limites d’aˆge chronologiques sont-elles un anachronisme? Retraite et Socie´te´, 36, 81–107. Leisering, L., & Leibfried, S. (1999). Time and poverty in Western welfare states. United Germany in perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lum, T. Y., & Lightfoot, E. (2005). The effects of volunteering on the physical and mental health of older people. Research on Aging, 27, 31–55. Martinson, M., & Minkler, M. (2006). Civic engagement and older adults: A critical perspective. The Gerontologist, 46, 318–324. Moody, H. R. (2001). Productive aging and the ideology of old age. In N. Morrow-Howell et al. (Eds.), Productive aging: Concepts and challenges. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Neugarten, B. L. (Ed.) (1982). Age or Need? Public Policies for Older People. Beverly Hills: Sage. OECD – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2006). OECD Employment Outlook 2006: Boosting jobs and incomes, from www.oecd.org Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Scherger, S., Brauer, K., & Ku¨nemund, H. (2004). Partizipation und Engagement a¨lterer Menschen im Stadt-Land-Vergleich. In G. Backes et al. (Eds.), Lebensformen und Lebensfu¨hrung im Alter (pp. 173–193). Opladen: VS. Smith, D. B. (2004). Volunteering in retirement: Perceptions of midlife workers. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 33(1), 55–73. StBA – Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland (2006). 11. Koordinierte Bevo¨lkerungsvorausberechnung – Annahmen und Ergebnisse. Wiesbaden. Tang, F. (2008). Socioeconomic disparities in voluntary organization involvement among older adults. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 37, 57–75. UN – Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (2006). World population prospects: The 2006 revision, from esa.un.org/unpp Wahrendorf, M., Siegrist, J., & von dem Knesebeck, O. (2006). Social productivity and well-being of older people – Baseline results from the SHARE study. European Journal of Ageing, 3, 67–73.
Civil Society and the European Union BEATE KOHLER-KOCH Universita¨t Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
Introduction Research on civil society and the European Union (EU) has become a growth industry and it reflects both a growing presence of organized civil society in EU affairs
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and rising expectations in the democratic virtues of a European civil society. From the very beginning, a core question has been, if civil society can enhance the democratic quality of the EU. In spite of this common interest, the concept of civil society is highly ambiguous, which makes it difficult to put the different strands of thinking together. Scholars are attached to their own research agenda and those who are primarily interested in the constitutionalization of the EU (Fossum & Trenz, 2006) will take a different stance from those who take up the issue of relocation of social activism (Ruzza, 2004) and those who want to know how the involvement of organized civil society in EU governance affects the democratic legitimacy of the Union (Greenwood, 2007; Kohler-Koch, 2007). This article will try to make sense of the various meanings of civil society in the context of the EU, explore key issues such as the influence of civil society organizations on EU policies, the involvement of civil society in the shaping of Europe, the contribution to democratic legitimacy, and it will also indicate future directions both in real-world developments and in research.
Definition There is ample evidence to support the observation by Finke (2007: 20) that two scholars who refer to civil society and the EU may not necessarily mean the same thing and that this is even more obvious when political activists talk about civil society. The observer is faced with a puzzling variety of meanings, which are, more often than not, only implicit because many authors shy away from giving a precise definition. Kohler-Koch (2009) has argued that ‘‘it is difficult to agree on the political role and the democratic credentials of civil society in the EU not just because the concept of civil society is ambiguous but also because civil society is linked to different images of the nature of the European polity.’’ Is the EU a political community in the making or rather a persistent supranational polity or just a system of multilevel governance? From the perspective of an emergent political community the constitutionalization of Europe is closely linked to the image of civil society as the embodiment of the EU’s social constituency. European citizenship has conferred civil rights on the European people and is embodying a common European identity. Civil society, however, does not emanate from the rights of individual citizens, but from a communicative process, which forms an imagined political community. In this line Trenz (2009) has defined European civil society as a discursive formation within the public sphere. This selfascription among active citizens, ready to line up with
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others, conveys an image of civil society with strong positive connotations. It is a one in all representation of the active citizenry, which gives legitimacy to those who speak as representatives of civil society. Civil society as such, however, has no actor quality. Actor quality comes with organized civil society. When the EU is taken as a supranational polity, civil society is seen as comprising a multitude of associations that connect the realm of the political with the social. With an ever-expanding membership and a constant deepening of its competence, the EU is in need of public support. Organized civil society is said to represent the diversity of interests, value preferences, and tastes; civil society organizations (CSOs) are functioning as intermediaries and are thus complementing the democratic input of the European Parliament and the member state governments. By inserting ideas from the grassroot level and by bringing the wealth of citizens’ knowledge to the decisionmaking process, organized civil society is expected to contribute not only to the input, but also to the output legitimacy of the EU system. The democratic potential of organized civil society is a core concern for all those who see the EU as a political system with state-like features. Scholars who approach the EU from a policy-analysis perspective are mainly interested in the functioning of this system of multilevel governance. The ‘‘governance turn’’ in EU studies has drawn attention to the cooperative forms of policy making involving both public and private actors in the common effort to attain problem-solving efficiency. The introduction of new modes of governance such as the ‘‘open method of coordination’’ (OMC) has underscored the importance of civil society actors, but CSOs also figure prominently in the traditional setting of European law-making. Sabel and Zeitlin (2008: 276) have argued that CSOs have the capacity ‘‘to generate novel possibilities for consideration’’ by bringing in their unfiltered experience. They are an asset in a system of multilevel governance geared at joint problem solving. The governance approach has not developed a coherent concept of civil society; rather CSOs are seen as individual participants in an open process of policy deliberation. These different images of the Union have a strong imprint and can explain why scholars have difficulties to speak to each other. The variety of definitions adds to the confusion. The hypothesis that the meaning of civil society can be reduced to just two basic conceptions has been tested in a survey among academics who have published works on civil society and the EU. The correlation between the agreement scores for different definitions supports a dual image of civil society. Kohler-Koch and Quittkat (2009: 16–17) have called it a ‘‘social sphere
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approach’’ locating civil society in the sphere of social interaction and a ‘‘governance approach,’’ which is focused on civil society organizations articulating and representing the interests of a constituency.
Historical Background The different images of civil society have surfaced in different periods of the integration process. Organized civil society has a long history in the European Communities. From the beginning, the support of societal forces was considered to be indispensable for creating a new Europe. However, as long as European integration was mainly an effort to build a common market, relations with civil society was limited and targeted at market actors. With the surge of policy regulations extending beyond the free movement of goods and services set off by the Treaty of Maastricht in the early 1990s, public interest associations and social movement coalitions increasingly turned to Brussels and joined the already large constituency of interest groups.
Key Issues Interest Politics by Organized Civil Society
EU scholars interested in politics and policies of the European system addressed the newcomers from the perspective of interest group research. Accordingly, the focus was on the collective action problem of societal interests, on biased representation, and on access and influence. Not civil society, but organized civil society was at the fore and this also reflected the self-ascription of the groups, which had a substantial interest in more environment-, consumer-, and human rights-friendly EU policies. The question raised by Balme and Chabanet (2002: 21) ‘‘who is profiting from Europe?’’ moved to center stage. It instigated detailed policy studies investigating the lobby impact of economic interest groups as compared to the impact of groups representing diverse interests. Notwithstanding differentiations due to varying factors such as actor constellations, issue salience, and context conditions, research findings tell a consistent story: Public interest groups have become organized at EU level, they have gained access to policy makers, have had an impact on the setting of the political agenda but have largely failed to shift policy outcomes in their favor. De Bie`vre (2008: 4) argues that this weakness does not result from a lack of presence or a lack of expert knowledge, ‘‘but may well be explained by their lack of resources to diminish or enhance the chances of political actors to be reelected or reappointed.’’ This creates an implicit link between CSO performance and the potential resonance in a
wider European public, which up to now is an underresearched field. Although the resource-influence-driven approach is still prominent in comparative politics, an explicit civil society discourse gained ground. It emanated from the increased relevance of other forms of collective actions, such as social movement activities and political contestations (Imig & Tarrow, 2001) and also from growing concerns about the transformation of civil society and democracy in the process of European integration. For Ruzza (2004: 1) the relocation of social activism to the Community level has manifold consequences for civil society. By introducing a sociological approach he draws attention to the importance of cognitive factors and the relevance of framing and communication for the flow of ideas from social movement coalitions to European governance. Ruzza (2004: 180) argues that the field of advocacy coalitions in Brussels ‘‘(. . .) is in part informed by bureaucratic politics, but also by an attempt to legitimize the project of European construction – (. . .) – and by joint engagement in promotional causes with social-movements representatives.’’ These insights have spurred the interest in the polity dimension of civil society engagement, above all in the potential of organized civil society to support the democratic legitimacy of the EU. Opening the EU to Civil Society
The White Paper on European Governance (Commission, 2001) made public that the EU was concerned about the declining permissive consensus among European citizens. It set the frame for the present EU–society relations. The ‘‘involvement of civil society’’ became the ‘‘ide´e directrice’’ and with it the principle of participation was put first. Accordingly, not only directly affected stakeholders, but also civil society organizations representing general interests, usually figuring as NGOs, were to be involved in the dialogue on Europe. Good governance characterized by openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness, and coherence was put on the agenda and EU institutions, above all the European Commission, became engaged in participatory engineering. The efforts resulted in what Kohler-Koch and Finke (2007: 212) have classified as a participatory consultation regime. Standard operation procedures were established to increase transparency and new instruments such as online consultations were designed to augment inclusiveness by lowering the thresholds for access. Observers agree that EU institutions have become more dedicated than ever before to give CSOs and citizens a voice; consultations are addressing a wider public and the new instrument of online consultations has multiplied since the turn of the millennium from less than
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a dozen to 100 and more in recent years and has attracted large numbers of respondents. The strategy of involving civil society has cumulated in institutionalizing a ‘‘civil dialogue’’ in the Constitutional Treaty. The mushrooming of societal interests in Brussels and the civil dialogue is, however, only part of the picture. It is worth mentioning that in the same time period, expert groups have increased considerably and the CSOs, especially public interest organizations, are in a minority. Furthermore, the handling of EU–society relations is far from uniform. In their survey study Fazi and Smith (2006: 35) found that the Commission ‘‘is generally perceived as the most pro-active institution,’’ the European Parliament is seen ‘‘to be particularly open to NGOs and their concerns,’’ whereas the Council ‘‘is often depicted as the most closed institution.’’ The expectation that new modes of governance, such as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), would be more open to societal actors than the Community method of law-making and that it would bring local civil society into the multilevel system of EU governance, did not materialize. In her literature review Kro¨ger (2008) reports that the participation of CSOs in OMC was for the most part marginal and did not encourage open deliberation. And the striking evidence of an exceedingly poor involvement of CSOs in the new member states draws attention to the underlying power relations. Bo¨rzel (2009: 266) points out: ‘‘State actors themselves see their weakness as a major obstacle for cooperation with non-state actors.’’ EU–society relations also vary across policy fields and administrative departments. Even though the involvement of organized civil society is accepted in principle, some General Directorates are pace-setters and others are laggards. In the field of third world development, in employment and social affairs, and also in public health and consumer protection, Commission services have in many ways even supported the formation of interest groups. They have also pushed for institutionalized cooperation among groups by granting access selectively and by designating quasi-official functions to CSO alliances; they used CSOs as service providers and, last but not least, as public relations platforms. Bauer (2002: 388) has called this Commission –civil society relation ‘‘lobby sponsoring.’’ A similar critical view relates to funding. As Greenwood (2007: 343) has pointed out: ‘‘Virtually every one of an estimated constituency of 300 citizen interest groups organized at EU level receives EU funding.’’ The Commission and influential public interest groups have justified funding ‘‘to counterbalance existing power imbalances within society’’ (The Social Platform, 2006). Funding
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was decisive both in promoting the representation of public interests and in aggregating the multiplicity of (small) groups in networks and umbrella organizations. Eight such networks constitute the Civil Society Contact Group, which, in their own understanding, represents the rights and value-based NGO sector and looks after common institutional interest such as a fair representation in the EU ‘‘civil dialogue’’ or in the various dialogue and advisory groups of the Commission. Did funding and ‘‘lobby sponsoring’’ curb the autonomy of civil society organizations? Empirical analysis gives evidence that European CSOs are quite unyielding but in the pursuit of their substantive interests they have the tendency to advocate ‘‘European solutions’’ and as a result support the Commission and the EP in their strive to gain more competence. Therefore, the promise of ‘‘involving civil society’’ has not bridged the gap between Europe and the people, but rather sponsored a Brussels-based CSO elite working in the interest of deeper integration. Civil Society a Remedy to the European Democratic Deficit?
When trying to assess the democratic value of civil society engagement, we have to take into account that normative benchmarks vary by theoretical approach. Theorists of liberal democracy will rank equal representation, effective participation, and political accountability first. From this perspective, civil society involvement will enhance the democratic quality of EU governance when it contributes to giving citizens a voice, to redressing biased representation and to exerting a citizen watchdog function so as to hold decision makers accountable. Notwithstanding the Commission’s recent efforts to becoming more open, inclusive, and participatory, equal representation has not been achieved. Even the easily accessible online consultations show asymmetries: market-related organizations such as business and professional associations are far more numerous than general interest organizations. Equally pronounced is the distortion in territorial representation: The old and large EU member countries are overrepresented when compared to the smaller member states and the recent accession countries. However, it is worth noting that CSOs from Central and East European countries feel well represented by their EU-level confederations. The presence in numbers is a proxy and not a reliable indicator for democratic participation. The relevant criterion ought to be what Dahl called ‘‘effective participation’’: having impact on output. Civil society groups have increased pressure to put in place an efficient and effective dialogue and joined forces with responsive Commission
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departments to review and monitor CSO involvement. As a result, the Commission administration is easily reached while the influential scientific and comitology committees are largely off limits; they still lack transparency and members are recruited without civil society overview. Accountability is a strong mechanism to make participation effective. The principle is well acknowledged in the EU, but accountability relations do not necessarily involve civil society. The European Parliament renders account to the European electorate and the Council – apart from legal accountability – is not accountable collectively yet each government is subject to domestic accountability. The Commission, due to a lack of resources and legitimacy is more reliant on the input of societal groups and consequently more receptive to the call for civil society accountability. As part of an improved consultation procedure the Commission has committed itself to provide feedback and give reasons why relevant positions have or have not been taken on board. A synthesis report following consultations is now common, but not a universal practice. The legal obligation of transparency, the requirement to submit impact assessments on major policy initiatives, the pledge to provide road maps to better track the consultation and decision-making process, and the above-mentioned feedback procedures are stepping stones to accountability. However, all these procedural innovations do not institutionalize accountability in the strict sense. The Commission is not subject to any legally binding obligation to account for its decisions, and the political commitment to do so is at the discretion of the Commission. Furthermore, the readiness of the Commission to render account is constraint by institutions: The Commission is a strong player in the EU decision-making process because the Council and the European Parliament act on its proposal; in order to keep this strong position the Commission has to retain autonomy and should not be forced to negotiate with tight hands. Hence, it is in the logic of the system that civil society cannot exact accountability by imposing consequences on the Commission. Civil society can neither exert legal nor political sanctions, and soft sanctioning by blaming and shaming has limited impact since publicity is limited. Thus, when assessing the role of CSOs from the perspective of liberal democracy we see improvement but the system does not live up to given normative standards. The picture looks different though not brighter when looked at from the perspective of deliberative democracy. In recent years, the discourse on EU–civil society relations was heavily influenced by normative theories advocating deliberative democracy as the best suited model for organizing democracy beyond the nation state. The benefits of deliberation and the potential contributions of civil
society organizations to enhance the epistemic quality of decisions are well argued in theory (Eriksen & Fossum, 2000). The findings from empirical research, again, are sobering. Instruments of participatory engineering aiming at directly involving citizens, such as ‘‘citizens’ forums’’ or ‘‘Cafe´ debates,’’ reach only small groups and at best raise awareness for European issues in a very small sector of society. The new consultation instruments, which are the most open such as online consultations and public hearings provide no space for deliberation (Hu¨ller, 2008). Only a few privileged Brussels NGO networks and CSO umbrellas enjoy continuous and face-to-face working relations with EU institutions, which are a prerequisite for deliberation. Furthermore, these deliberations hardly reach beyond Brussels. Numerous case studies support the assessment by Dabrowska (2007: 299) that the intensified exchange of views between EU institutions and NGOs do not ‘‘support the emergence of a larger engaged public and deliberation in the general public sphere.’’
Future Directions Summing up we can conclude that the positive connotations of civil society have spurred a participatory discourse and that the dedication of the EU to involve civil society has resulted in a consultation regime that is more open, transparent, and inclusive than ever before. ‘‘Values- and rights-based’’ groups have become more prominent but effective participation in terms of impact on outcome is still biased. High hopes in the amelioration of the European democratic deficit did not materialize. Rather, participation centered on organized civil society is instrumental to ‘‘better legislation’’; it motivates CSOs to professionalize and act as efficient advocates. The recent shift in the official EU terminology from civil society to stakeholders is indicative of this more output-oriented approach. The future of civil society in the EU will be closely linked to the Europeanization of national civil societies. The Europeanization of national civil societies still is under-researched and taking into account the vast differences in civil society cultures across member states it is not possible to draw any general conclusions. Furthermore, country-specific studies (Saurugger, 2007) have highlighted the ‘‘differential impact’’ also on national non-state actors. Warleigh’s (2001) pessimistic assessment that the elite character of European CSOs is hardly reconcilable with a socializing function has so far not been contested. When taking a bottom-up view both detailed case studies (Bozzini, 2007) and comparative surveys underline the distance of national and local CSOs to ‘‘far away’’ Brussels. To make matters worse, as van Deth (2008: 342) has pointed out: ‘‘A bottom-up flow of
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engagement is unlikely to emerge because attitudes towards Europe and the EU are relatively weak particularly among those citizens who are active in voluntary associations at the local level.’’ What is missing above all is a theoretically convincing approach to isolate those variables, which might explain the Europeanization of civil society. The accession process opened windows of opportunities in the applicant countries for a strengthening and orientation of civil society toward Europe. According to Bo¨rzel (2009: 288) ‘‘The EU has developed a sophisticated tool box to strengthen the capacities of non-governmental actors; but it is largely geared towards making EU policies more effective.’’ From this perspective the EU policy-induced Europeanization would be tantamount to the dissemination of a functional understanding of civil society. It has to be seen if the ‘‘civil society-democracy’’ rhetoric may have a compensating effect. Because of the paucity of comparative research we also do not know if a reorientation of civil society actors toward norms and patterns of behavior classified as European is spreading. Cram (2006: 242) draws on the concept of ‘‘banal nationalism’’ and argues that with the daily practice of involvement the EU ‘‘is becoming enhabited’’ and will slowly be taken as the normal environment in which civil society actors operate.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Civic Partcipation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Good Governance ▶ Interest Politics ▶ Non-Governmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Participation
References/Further Readings Balme, R., & Chabanet, D. (2002). Introduction. Action collective et gouvernance de l’Union europe´enne. In R. Balme, D. Chabaner, & V. Wright (Eds.), L’action collective en Europe/collective action in Europe (pp. 21–120). Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Bauer, M. (2002). Limitations to agency control in European Union policy-making: The commission and the poverty programmes. Journal of Common Market Studies, 40(3), 381–400. Bo¨rzel, T. (2009). After accession: Escaping the low capacity trap? In T. Bo¨rzel (Ed.), Coping with accession to the European Union. New modes of environmental governance in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe (pp. 264–290). London: Palgrave. Bozzini, E. (2007). Why to get involved in Brussels? A cross-sectoral and cross national comparison of the involvement of civil society organisation in EU policy processes, CINEFOGO Mid Term Conference,
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Roskilde (Dk), 1–3 June 2007, from http://cinefogo.cuni.cz/index. php?&id_result=20036&l= 0&w=15&id_out=82; 02/19/2009 Commission. (2001). European governance – A white paper. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, COM (2001) 428 final, from http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/com/2001/ com2001_0428en01.pdf; 02/19/2009 Cram, L. (2006). Inventing the people: Civil society participation and the enhabitation of the EU. In S. Smismans (Ed.), Civil society and legitimate European governance (pp. 241–259). Edward Elgar: Cheltenham. Dabrowska, P. (2007). Civil society involvement in the EU regulations on GMOs: From the design of a participatory garden to growing trees of European public debate? Journal of Civil Society, 3(3), 287–304. De Bie`vre, D. (2008). Assessing interest group politics in EU governance. In B. Kohler-Koch, D. De Bie`vre, & M. Maloney (Eds.), Opening EU-governance to civil society. Gains and challenges (pp. 1–8). Mannheim: CONNEX Report Series Nr. 5. From http://www.mzes. unimannheim.de/pjojekte/typo3/site/fileadmin/BookSeries/Volume_ Five/Introduction_I_DDB.pdf Della Sala, V., & Ruzza, C. (Eds.) (2007). Governance and civil society in the European Union: Exploring policy issues (Vol. 2). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eriksen, E. O., & Fossum, J. E. (Eds.) (2000). Democracy in the European Union: Integration through deliberation. London: Routledge. Fazi, E., & Smith, J. (2006). Civil dialogue: making it work better. Study commissioned by the Civil Society Contact Group. From http://act4europe.horus.be/module/FileLib/Civil%20dialogue%2C %20making%20it%20work%20better.pdf; 19/02/2009 Finke, B. (2007). Civil society participation in EU governance. Living reviews in European governance. From http://www.livingreviews.org/ lreg-2007–2; 19/02/2009 Fossum, J. E., & Trenz, H. J. (2006). The EU’s fledging society: From deafening silence to critical voice in European constitution-making. Journal of Civil Society, 2(1), 57–77. Greenwood, J. (2007). Organized civil society and democratic legitimacy in the European Union. British Journal of Political Science, 37(2), 333–357. Imig, D., & Tarrow, S. (2001). Contentious Europeans: Protest and politics in an emerging polity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Hu¨ller, T. (2008). Demokratisierung der EU durch Online Konsultationen? Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, 21(2), 73–82. Kohler-Koch, B. (2007). The organization of interests and democracy in the European Union. In B. Kohler-Koch & B. Rittberger (Eds.), Debating the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (pp. 255271). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Kohler-Koch, B. (2009). The three worlds of European civil society. Policy and Society, 28(1), 47–57. Kohler-Koch, B., & Finke, B. (2007). The institutional shaping of EUsociety relations: A contribution to democracy via participation? Journal of Civil Society, 3(3), 205–221. Kohler-Koch, B. et al. (Eds.) (2008). Opening EU-governance to civil society. Gains and challenges. Mannheim: CONNEX Report Series Nr. 5. http://www.mzes.unimannheim.de/pjojekte/typo3/site/fileadmin/BookSeries/Volume_Five/CONNEX%20Report%20Series_Book %205.pdf Kohler-Koch, B., & Quittkat, C. (2009). What is civil society and who represents civil society in the EU? – Results of an online survey among civil society experts. Policy and Society, 28(1), 11–22. Kro¨ger, S. (2008). Nothing but consultation: The place of civil society in EU policy-making across policies. European governance papers
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(EUROGOV) No. C-08-03. From http://www.connex-network.org/ eurogov/pdf/egp-connex-C-08-03.pdf; 02/19/2009 Maloney, W., & van Deth, J. (Eds.) (2008). Civil society and governance in Europe: From national toward international linkages? Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Ruzza, C. (2004). Europe and civil society. Movement coalitions and European governance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ruzza, C., & Della Sala, V. (Eds.) (2007). Governance and civil society in the European Union: Normative Perspectives (Vol. 1). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sabel, C., & Zeitlin, J. (2008). Learning from difference: The new architecture of experimentalist governance in the EU. European Law Journal, 14(3), 271–327. Saurugger, S. (2007). Differential impact: Europeanising French nonstate actors. Journal of European Public Policy, 14(7), 1079–1097. Smismans, S. (2006). Civil society and legitimate European governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Steffek, J. et al. (Eds.) (2007). Civil society participation in European and global governance: A cure for the democratic deficit? London: Palgrave Macmillan. The Social Platform. (2006). Communication: selling Europe or opening Europe? – Response of the platform of European Social NGOs to the White Paper on a European Communication Policy. Platform of European Social NGO’s. From http://www.socialplatform.org/module/ FileLib/EN-ResponseWhitePaperonCommunication.pdf; 02/19/2009 Trenz, H. J. (2009). European civil society: Between participation, representation and discourse. Policy and Society, 28(1), 35–46. Van Deth, J. (2008). European civil society: The empirical reality in the multi-level system of the EU. In B. Kohler-Koch, D. De Bie`vre, & W. Maloney (Eds.), Opening EU-governance to civil society – Gains and challenges (pp. 326–348). Mannheim: CONNEX Report Series Nr. 5. From http://www.mzes.unimannheim.de/pjojekte/typo3/site/ fileadmin/BookSeries/Volume_Five/Chapter14_van%20Deth.pdf Warleigh, A. (2001). Europeanizing civil society: NGOs as agents of political socialization. Journal of Common Market Studies, 39(40), 619–639.
Civil Society and the Media ARVIND RAJAGOPAL New York University, New York, NY, USA
Introduction It is safe to say that all civil societies are mediated by technologies and organizations of mass communication, and that they are encountered largely as the outcomes of such mediation. Questions of civil society in relation to ‘‘the media’’ thus not only raise issues of infrastructure and liberal institutions, but as well about the dispersal and transformation of civil society as it is mediated within and across nations across the world. This dispersal has resulted in a range of forms, so that in assessing their
differences we are led once again to the question of how civil society is mediated.
Definition Civil society is not a preexisting entity. Distinguished from the state of nature and as well from community, i.e., what Tonnies called gemeinschaft, it is an artifact of modernity. For G.W.F. Hegel, the most influential writer on the subject, civil society was envisaged as Sittlichkeit, a form of collective ethical existence transcending mere individualism on the one hand, and primordialism on the other, enabled by voluntary associations outside the state that were spared the burden of political struggle, with citizens engaging in pursuits that were not only based on selfinterest, but went beyond them (1991: PR }182–184; }238; }235–236). The assumed unit of civil society, the autonomous individual who can freely enter or leave any association, and is unconstrained by ascribed characteristics, is clearly a theoretical category. But ‘‘theory is the norm, and reality is the exception’’ when discussing civil society, Marx wrote (1978: 44). Invocations of civil society form part of a mission of improvement, fulfilling the promise of Enlightenment. As such the concept is oriented to an indefinite future; the aspiration it entails is more important than the reality meant to be transformed.
Historical Background Emerging amidst Enlightenment polemics against the ancien regime, ‘‘civil society’’ was designed to demarcate a dimension of human interaction independent of theological or monarchical influence, whose existence was beyond doubt and drew on the natural inclination for commerce and conviviality. Neither civility nor sociality were new words, but Diderot’s Encyclope´die claimed ‘‘civil society’’ as a novel term, and as divinity on earth, as it were (1751–1761: 251; cited in Baker, 2002: 86). Civil society thus arrives in the modern era as theological, feudal and other forms of power give way to the dominance of a new kind of power that presents itself as liberal, secular and enlightened. Civil society is the domain where this new kind of state power is exercised, although it is not coterminous with the state; rather it is distinct and irreducible to it. The work of mediation is thus at the origin of civil society. An example that will illustrate the point. In Kant’s well-known essay on the subject, he defines Enlightenment as a people’s overcoming of their self-incurred tutelage, and proposes a compact between the Prince and his subjects. In return for good governance and a gradual increase of liberties, the people are to offer obedience and the responsible exercise of their freedom of opinion (http://www.
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english.upenn.edu/mgamer/Etexts/kant.html. Accessed January 11, 2009). As subjects are educated into the desired norms of citizenship, the achievement of civil society is meant to be defined by an internalization of the protocols of political authority. Civil society can hence be understood as the medium for the liberal state to regulate people and things, and arrange them in the most mutually convenient and efficient ways; Michel Foucault has for instance, made this argument (2008: 295). To pose the question of civil society in relation to ‘‘media’’ is thus to examine an already mediated reality. Further, just as the story of the modern state is not one of ‘‘withering away,’’ as envisaged by Karl Marx as well as by some conservative thinkers, quite the contrary, ‘‘media’’ too as complexes of material and symbolic practices are not vanishing mediators, but entities that visibly grow in size and influence, while becoming increasingly difficult to separate from the reality they convey. Hence their prominence today draws attention to the mechanisms by which civil society is sought to be achieved, and the political alliances, calculations and strategies surrounding these mechanisms. Such an approach has the advantage of sidestepping the received teleological view where civil society is understood purely as a space of freedom and individual self-actualization, as opposed to the state, which in the anti-absolutist tradition of European political thought, is perceived as a domain of unilateral power and an instrument of subjection (Kaviraj, 2002: 287–323). Print media for example were seen by absolutist state authorities as potentially subversive and requiring to be censored, while emergent middle classes embraced them as instruments of emancipation, and as means for creating public spheres that could exercise a rational-critical force on existing political authority (Habermas, 1989; Calhom, 1993). It should be noted that the very same middle classes, as they came to power, endorsed the maintenance of strict controls over communications in the colonies, while pronouncing values of enlightened and transparent governance. Their justification was one familiar from the history of absolutism, namely that their subjects were not ready, and that the colonial state fulfilled a custodial role in preparing the natives for self-governance. Colonial civil society was thus marked by a paradox: it defined itself as modernizing but maintained itself as racially exclusive and insular. Colonial use of modern print media tended to reproduce this mystification, although divisions of language and dialect complicated it. The transparency of modern communications arrived in the colonies as a mystique of alien power; anticolonial nationalists responded with counter-mystification,
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presenting indigenous culture and communication as superior, distinguishing their nation as cause for mobilization (Chatterjee, 1993).
International Perspectives Around the world, where civil society has been sought to be created, it has taken shape as an explicit project of political mediation and as a condition and a platform for the nation-state’s goals of modernization. State intervention is seen not as interference but as an indispensable requirement. Accordingly, mass media begin to be seen as porous transmission devices for the right kind of political will, instruments that in the service of the proper authorities, can produce positive effects (Rajagopal, 2001). This helps to explain how in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the wave of decolonization accompanying it, there was immense optimism about the effects of mass media, as being reliable signs and stimulants of modern civil society. Mass media were thought to enhance secular forms of socialization, modes of interaction reliant on the impartial circulation of information and argument, not dependent on rank or on status, and hence devoid of prejudgment or prejudice. As such they were understood to be reliable means for achieving an enlightened gesellschaft, forms of association that were individualistic, but not too much so, means of enhancing social participation but voluntarily. To quote an influential statement from the period: ‘‘In our time. . .the spread of empathy around the world is accelerating. The earlier increase of physical experience through transportation has been multiplied by the spread of mediated experience through mass communication. . . . [N]o modern society functions efficiently without a developed system of mass media. . . . [T]he conditions which define modernity form an interlocking ‘system.’ They grow conjointly, in the normal situation, or they become stunted severally’’ (Lerner, 1958: 52, 55). Much like grafts from a tree, mass media were thought for awhile to reproduce trunk and branch of western civil society where they were transplanted. Seen not simply as technologies of governance but as radiators of pro-social values and replicators of modernity, the media were believed to promote empathy, and thus to educate people out of tradition and into ‘‘mobile personalities,’’ capable of shifting across contexts and roles as required. The optimism about the media involved a peculiar amnesia, given the experience of Fascist propaganda, and Allies’ own instrumental uses of mass media in mobilizing support for the war effort. In fact there has tended to be a cycle of optimism about the utopian effects of a given mass medium, turning into pessimism, only to be revived by the
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combination of a new communication technology and political opportunity. Its latest variant applies to the internet and the possibility of a new information revolution and a (new) global civil society in the post Cold War context.
Future Directions There is no question today that, with the spread of technological communications, the question of how voluntary associations between individuals are mediated, i.e., what kinds of civil society formations may take shape, has become an increasingly complex one. Those living in different countries and in widely divergent circumstances may now interact with each other and not only with other citizens in the locality or region they live in. Fleeting gestures and momentary impulses can be invoked, multiplied and consolidated through incremental acts such as text messages and clicks on the internet to create civil society formations that straddle any constituted legal authority, and gather enormous force. Activists in new social movements mobilize such means, expressing ethical stances in response to issues where the political agencies required to effectively intervene may not always exist yet, such as global warming or world peace (Devji, 2005). Two contrasting examples will indicate how if civil society used to be considered the matrix within which communications media were assigned defined and subsidiary roles, in the context of a globalizing civil society, crisscrossing lines of influence between national civil societies, local and global media can be discerned. A 2008 Fox Studios film, Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle) showed how the American television program ‘‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,’’ when transposed to India was no mere game show. When a Mumbai-based chai [tea] delivery boy is within reach of the prize, he is taken to police custody and tortured, his offence being that he knows more than his social betters in the show. If the gesture of the game show is to bring an audience member on screen, the film brings the society around the chai-wallah as well into view and shows the dense networks of iniquity and suffering around him, not usually seen on TV. The message might be that as Western media culture alights in India, it can create opportunities for individuals, while acknowledging the immense struggle and suffering all around them. Of course one can point to other cases where spectacular suffering is visited on classes of people or even on nations, say in Gaza, or in Darfur in Sudan, and despite saturation media coverage from the top down, no respite ensues. Bottom-up examples where the media are used to open up spaces in civil society for the poor and marginalized can also be adduced. In early 2008, victims of the
1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, together with some of their supporters, about 50 in all, embarked on a march, to New Delhi to place their demands for relief and rehabilitation before the Prime Minister. The 800 km journey went through scores of villages and towns. Amenities were scarce en route. Small towns were the worst in offering access to toilets, and running water and electric power were intermittent where they were available. One convenience, however, was never in short supply. Every few miles there was a wireless transmission tower; at every point during the march cell phone signals were available, and press releases could flow to the news media with little interruption (Bala Kailasam, personal interview, November 2008). Basic needs of the Indian population are not met, and infrastructure for basic sanitation and well-being is inadequate. Meanwhile select aspects of the national communications infrastructure have grown exponentially, granting traction not only to commercial operations and public institutions, but also to campaigns seeking publicity and support. It was not only grassroots activists from Bhopal that were involved in this effort. A worldwide network of activists and supporters distributed YouTube video clips, photos and stories from the march. As the gas victims went on hunger strike and were thrown into jail after they arrived in New Delhi, their allies not only in India but as well in countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States were gathering signatures for petitions, sending faxes and making phone calls to the Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi, urging that the gas victims be treated fairly (see www.bhopal.net for details). The disproportionate development of communications thus leads not simply to faster and more efficient information exchange, but as well, to greater demands for participation in civil society, and increasing challenges to the existing terms of social inclusion and exclusion. The virtual publics formed by mass mediation challenge the publics of regional and nationalist imaginaries, with the resulting contradictions resolved through the contingencies of political struggle. Media publicity does not always signal the existence of civil society but can be used to respond to its absence, without, of course, any guarantee that the standards of civil society will then be applied to the situation publicized. This may be because local authorities are recalcitrant and the major powers are unwilling to force given outcomes.
Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civil Society and Culture
Civil Society History I: Antiquity
▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society and Social Inequality ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Kant ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Global Civil Society
References/Further Readings Baker, K. (2002). Enlightenment and the institution of society: notes for a conceptual history. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil society: History and possibilities Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(pp. 84–104). Calhoun, C. (Ed.) (1993). Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chatterjee, P. (1993). The nation and its fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Devji, F. (2005). Landscapes of the Jihad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Diderot, D., & d’Alembert, J. L. R. (Eds.) (1751–1761). Encyclope´die ou Dictionnaire raisonne´ des sciences, des arts et des metiers, par une socie´te´ des gens de lettres (Vol. XV). Paris: Briasson. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–79 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Habermas, J. (1989). Structural transformation of the public sphere (T. Burger, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) Elements of the philosophy of right (H. B. Nisbet, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1784). From http://www.english.upenn.edu/mgamer/Etexts/ kant.html Accessed January 11, 2009. Kaviraj, S. (2002). In search of civil society. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil society: History and possibilities Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(pp. 287–323). Khilnani, S. (2002). The development of civil society. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil society: History and possibilities Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(pp. 11–32). Lerner, D. (1958). The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press. Marx, K. (1978). On the Jewish question. In R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader. New York: W.W. Norton. Rajagopal, A. (2001). Politics after television: Hindu nationalism and the reshaping of the public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Civil Society History I: Antiquity GA´BOR MOLNA´R University of Kaposva´r, Kaposva´r, Hungary
Main Characteristics of the Period Although the term ‘‘civil society’’ is an ancient coinage, its meaning has since undergone such a great change that it is not self-evident to talk about civil society (in the modern
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sense of the word) concerning antiquity without reservation. However, as will be clear later, the old and the modern usages are not totally unrelated, and it may prove to be illuminative of the understanding of present-day civil societies to look for ancient counterparts. General Economic and Political Conditions
Throughout this entry antiquity will be understood as classical antiquity, that is, the Greco-Roman world, covering the time span from ca. 600 BCE to 476 CE. All ancient societies were more or less complex agrarian (or pre-industrial) societies organized politically in states. Since the economic integration of larger areas was extremely difficult due to the underdeveloped technologies of agricultural production and transportation, they could only be integrated by force. This brought into existence empires with rather weak and dysfunctional state structures, which, paradoxically, forced them to be extremely oppressive and exploiting towards their subjects as well as imperialistic towards their (smaller) neighbors. The only viable alternative to the militarily patchedup empire, under pre-industrial circumstances, was the small state, especially the city-state comprising an urban centre and a modest rural hinterland. Hansen (e.g. 2006) introduces the concept of ‘‘city-state culture’’ for historical regions unified by a common culture (language, religion etc.), but divided into several city-states. These cultures were usually unexampled among pre-industrial societies in many respects: they were more urbanized, economically more market-oriented, and politically more democratized. In the above sense, archaic and classical Greece was indubitably a city-state culture before the rise of Macedonia as was Italy before the rise of Rome. The highly diversified world of the several hundred Greek and Italian city-states has often been compared to a great laboratory experimenting with politics. The solutions ranged from monarchies (either traditional kingships or charismatic tyrannies), via different forms and degrees of oligarchic constitutions (rules of a few men selected either by birth or by wealth) to democracy. At the latter extreme, the classical Athenian democracy was practically the only state before modernity which allowed its citizens extensive political participation (albeit they formed a minority of the population). However, after falling prey to the Macedonian Empire, the Greek citystates merged into the conglomerate of Hellenistic monarchies, whereas Rome, originally one Italian city-state among others, grew into an empire by conquering and annexing the whole Mediterranean Basin, Greece and a great part of the Hellenistic East included. This in turn inevitably resulted in the change of the original republican – in fact
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highly oligarchic – regime, which had become ineffective and unstable, into monarchy. Micro-social Relations
The low level of economic integration and the fragility of state structures in pre-industrial societies gave special weight to self-help groups organized upon (real or fictitious) kinship, locality, professional, or even voluntary basis such as the extended family, the ‘‘clan,’’ guild-like or religious associations. Two special forms of enduring personal relationships deserve mentioning, both of which were reciprocal in exchanging goods and/or services. One (much more characteristic of the Roman society than of the Greek) was patronage, an asymmetrical relation between a member of the elite, the patron, and a man of lower socio-economic status, the client. The other, called ‘‘friendship,’’ obtained between the members of the elite (that is, between peers or roughly peers) and typically had a political character. Culture and Religion
All the societies concerned can be regarded as developed high cultures characterized by an advanced level of literacy (alphabetic writing, relatively great number of literate persons) and a polytheistic religion, without a segregated priestly caste monopolizing religious knowledge and practices, which demanded from its followers not so much emotional devotion or dogmatic commitment as the accomplishment of certain public or private rituals (‘‘civil religion’’). Devotional religiousness was mainly a private business (mystery cults, early Christianity) either tolerated or persecuted by the authorities, up to the late antiquity, when Christianity became the official state religion of the Empire.
Key Developments The Ancient Conception of Civil Society
The modern term ‘‘civil society’’ goes back to the Latin societas civilis coined by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero (1999: 21). This in turn is the equivalent (possibly the translation) of the Greek term politike koinonia (‘‘political community or partnership’’), a central notion in Aristotle’s political philosophy, because the Greek word politike derives from polites (‘‘citizen’’), whereas the Latin civilis from civis (‘‘citizen’’ again), and the meanings of koinonia and societas also overlap partly. This equivalence may be striking to the modern reader since the common denominator of modern definitions of civil society, no matter how different they are otherwise, is exactly the opposition between civil society and the state.
For Aristotle and Cicero, however, ‘‘civil society’’ was but another aspect of the (city-)state (polis or civitas). They conceived of it instead in opposition to those who were, although living under the supremacy of the state, excluded from participation in politics: the noncitizens (women, minors, resident aliens, and slaves). Both in Politics, and in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1984: 1987 and 1833, resp.) regards political community as the supreme community which embraces all the rest – and not only extensionally. It aims at the highest and most authoritative good of all: good (that is, ethically valuable) life. As Ehrenberg (1999: 9ff.) notes, Aristotle acknowledges more than Plato the multiplicity of the spheres people live in, embodied in the most diverse kinds of social organizations. And yet he subordinates them totally to the most comprehensive one, political community. It is ‘‘by nature clearly prior to’’ both the individuals and to any particular associations of individuals because it alone is self-sufficing. For Cicero (ibid: 18) the commonwealth is based on ‘‘agreement on justice and community of interest’’: it is thus a societas (‘‘partnership’’) of citizens, and law is ‘‘the bond of civil society’’ (ibid: 21), making a certain equality of rights necessary even for the rather antidemocraticminded Cicero. The above-mentioned divergence from the modern approach was first noticed by Thomas Hobbes in Chapter 21 of Leviathan, and elaborated later by Benjamin Constant in a lecture on ‘‘The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns’’. The liberty of the ancient Greeks and Romans, they explained, was not the freedom of particular individuals to resist their own representative or to do as they please in their private life, but that of the commonwealth to act collectively. The individual’s freedom accordingly consisted solely in the right to take part in this collective decision. Although clearly oversimplified (the beneficiary of ‘‘good life’’ and ‘‘equality in law’’ is after all the individual), this distinction captures something of a real difference between typical ancient and modern attitudes towards the state. Different senses of civil society can be distinguished along these lines. While in the classical conception civil society was, to use Ehrenberg’s (ibid: xi) wording, ‘‘the politically organized commonwealth’’ itself, one modern understanding (the apolitical one) regards civil society organizations as voluntary associations of private individuals in pursuit of private goals either approved of or tolerated or even – a controversial point perhaps – banned by the state. Another modern approach (the political one) sees in them agencies keeping the state under control, preventing, or combating its antidemocratic distortions.
Civil Society History I: Antiquity
However, it might be possible to discern a common element between the ancient view and the political version of the modern conceptions: it is the civic responsibility and courage to stand up for liberty against powers whatsoever endangering it – be they other states, the citizens’ own state alienated from them either in a representative democracy or in a dictatorship or any other authorities and vested interests. Furthermore, at a more abstract level, the feature of self-motivated activity within a nexus or group of individuals striving partly for common goals is shared even with the less politicized modern understandings of civil society. Ancient Antecedents of Modern Civil Society
Modern definitions of civil society typically demarcate it from the spheres of the state, the market and the family. It is worth examining those social institutions in ancient society the modern counterparts of which are generally regarded as constituents of civil society. The most conspicuous such entities are voluntary associations. In accordance with the aforesaid demarcation, the following criteria seem to be applicable to ‘‘filter out’’ the equivalents, or antecedents, of modern civil society associations in the ancient world: (i) Nongovernmental (and nonmunicipal) – therefore, e.g., the priestly colleges of the Roman state religion cannot be reckoned among them, nor the municipal districts (demes) of Athens (ii) Nonprofit – this excludes economic enterprises such as the societies of public contractors (however, for a liberal position ranking market organizations with civil society, see Long’s (1998) analysis of Athenian democracy) (iii) Non-kin – as against both real and fictitious kinship groups such as the Roman gentes or the Greek phratries Such voluntary associations had various forms in antiquity and can best be categorized on motivational grounds, although different objectives were often interwoven. In modern terms, there were (a) Professional associations: colleges of craftsmen, millers, merchants etc. protecting common interests – however, they generally maintained the cult of the patron deity as well, may have functioned as burial associations, the colleges of craftsmen or clothmakers also as local fire brigades (b) Social clubs: for men’s common meal and socializing (c) Benefit societies: most typically funeral associations for mutual aid to secure worthy burial
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(d) Private religious associations: to maintain the cult, and possibly the temple, of some deity (e) Political clubs: mostly of members of the upper strata Emperor Justinian’s Digest (47.22.4) preserved a law attributed to the Athenian law-giver Solon (c. 594 BCE) which guaranteed certain autonomy to private associations – provided that their internal regulations did not clash with the laws of the city-state. This short text shows, so to speak, the concept of social organization at the moment of birth. For lack of a general name, it enumerates endlessly and disorderly the specific kinds of associations: demes, phratries, naval, ritual, devotional, burial, dining, and trading societies, even plunderer companies. It treats them, however, legally as alike. The list also suggests that, as Jones (1999: 30ff) calls attention, in democratic Athens modern dichotomies such as public–private or voluntary–nonvoluntary (consequently the criteria (i)–(iii) above) are less important, forming not so much alternatives as continua. Social associations were used as subsidiaries of direct democracy. The Romans subjected the associations growing both in number and in diversity to more extensive legal regulation, ordaining e.g. state authorization. Political clubs and certain foreign religious associations (e.g. the Christian communities until 313 CE) were declared ‘‘illicit colleges.’’ It is usually supposed that the Roman Empire was suspicious, or even hostile, towards voluntary associations in general. For example, in a famous letter to the Bithynian governor Pliny the younger (Epist. 10.34), Emperor Trajan ‘‘disadvises’’ the organization of a fire brigade in a local town lest it turn spontaneously into a political club. However, as Arnaoutoglou (2002) has recently argued, the real targets of the bans on associative life, issued quite regularly according to literary and inscriptional sources, were not the well established colleges, but rather those amorphous social gatherings of the character of civil disobedience that emerged from time to time in a province. This, on the other hand, means that these colleges did not function as civil society institutions in the political sense of controlling the state. Small wonder because their internal organization usually epitomized the hierarchical structures of Roman magistracy and they were often patronized by members of the elite. Patronage became the general model for unequal relationships as the Roman society grew larger and more differentiated – especially when the institution of collective patronage (of a college, a town or even of a conquered province) by some influential men evolved. The patron–client system was a rather ambivalent phenomenon with regard to civil society. On the one hand, it
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partly occupied in ancient societies the place, and fulfilled some of the functions, of a modern civil society. Structurally, it was distinct from the family, the state and the market as much as it was possible under pre-modern circumstances. Functionally, it helped exchanging services and goods on a reciprocal, although asymmetrical basis; it accumulated social capital and contributed greatly to the stability of the society by integrating a considerable part of the masses to the more organized upper part of the society. On the other hand, it could rightly be regarded as an ‘‘anti-civil society phenomenon,’’ by which the political establishment could keep the whole society under control. It produced legitimacy and social capital for the elite (in exchange of their ‘‘charity’’ activity), integration happened ‘‘from above’’ in clusters, transforming vertical social conflicts between social strata or classes into horizontal conflicts between rivaling political cliques. To sum up, whereas Athenian direct democracy was inclined to make voluntary associations instrumental to itself, oligarchic and monarchic regimes tried to keep them apolitical, and even so under social and political control. As for charity, community patronage and patronage of art, they were generally not practiced by voluntary associations in antiquity; rather they were the duties, and politically profitable privileges, either of the wealthiest individuals, or of the state. Private charitable foundations (pia causa) came into being only in the late Christian era. Preconditions of Modern Civil Society
The period of classical antiquity was in many ways formative for the making of modern societies. Here only some of the most important ancient developments can be touched upon that proved to be essential for the formation of present-day civil societies.
– The democratic/republican political institutions that came into being at Athens and at Rome, together with the concomitant – although not always sympathetic – political and social philosophy, have become constant sources of paradigm and stimulation for political action and thinking since the Renaissance. The modern ideas of active citizenship and civil society (as a reservoir of spontaneously acting associations) have, as already indicated, their origins in Greece. Similarly, the ancient Greek debate culture immortalized by the Platonic dialogues (in a somewhat distorted way though) can rightly be considered the archetype of the Habermasian public sphere as the community of ‘‘publicly reasoning private individuals.’’ – The rather complex postconventional legal system and the corresponding legal science the Romans developed
became the basis of the common legal tradition in continental Europe (‘‘civil law’’) and influenced to some degree the common law legal systems, too. Through them it has acquired global significance in modern times, and present-day civil society organizations, either national or international, would obviously be inconceivable without this sophisticated legal environment. – A certain moral universalization taking place in the multicultural worlds of Hellenism and Roman Empire (e.g., the concepts of humanity and cosmopolitanism in Stoic philosophy, the extension of the concept ‘‘neighbor’’ beyond the compatriot in early Christianity or possibly in Hellenistic Judaism) is one of the main historical sources for the motivation, either in a religious or in a secularized form, of modern, especially international, humanitarian activities. – The early Christian Church that can be conceived of as a network of voluntary associations has permanently served as a paradigm for later religious movements seeking spiritual renewal either within or outside traditional churches, but also for other civil society movements. – Literacy in the developed form characteristic of the Greco-Roman world was an indispensable factor both in calling into being the above mentioned achievements and in preserving them – if not as living realities, at least in the cultural memory of later societies, making thereby the phenomenon of ‘‘renaissance’’ possible (most importantly the Carolingian and the Italian Renaissances).
International Perspectives Although the Greek and the Roman sociocultural worlds became more and more fused after the Roman military conquest of Greece accompanied by the Greek cultural conquest of Rome, there were nevertheless differences between them that retained their importance. At the micro-social level, Roman social relations were generally more authoritarian in nature than Greek ones. This manifested itself in the familial relationships (the Roman father’s almost unlimited rights over even his adult sons) as well as in the pervasive phenomenon of patronage. With an elite well integrated through kinship, friendship and patronage networks, and lower classes integrated to the elite through patron–client bonds more tightly than to one another, this became an obstacle for a democratization process similar to the one at Athens. At the macro-social level, the difference in the respective colonization strategies deserves special attention:
Civil Society History II: Medieval Period
a Greek mother-city typically established independent colonies in distant foreign lands, whereas Rome set up colonies in an already annexed territory (preferably contiguous with the earlier Roman lands) and the colonists retained a kind of second-rate citizenship. This strategy led naturally to the emergence of a large empire, rendering even the earlier, restricted forms of popular participation in politics impossible.
Cross-References
▶ Charity, History of ▶ Civil Society Theory: Aristotle ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Hobbes, Thomas ▶ Philanthropy, Ancient
References/Further Readings Aristotle (1984). The complete works (Vol. 2). Barnes, J. (Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Alfo¨ldy, G. (1988). The social history of Rome. London: Routledge. Arnaoutoglou, I. N. (2002). Roman Law and collegia in Asia Minor. Revue Internationale des droits de l’Antiquite´ XLIX, 27–44. Cicero (1999). On the commonwealth and on the laws. Zetzel, J. E. G. (Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crone, P. (1989). Pre-industrial societies. Oxford: Blackwell. Ehrenberg, J. (1999). Civil society. The critical history of an idea. New York/London: New York University Press. Finley, M. I. (1983). Politics in the ancient world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garnsey, P., & Saller, R. (1987). The Roman empire. Economy, society and culture. London: Duckworth. Hansen, M. H. (2006). Polis. An introduction to the ancient Greek citystate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, N. F. (1999). The associations of classical Athens. The response to democracy. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kloppenborg, J. S., & Wilson, S. G. (Eds.) (1996). Voluntary associations in the Graeco-Roman world. New York: Routledge. Long, R. T. (1998). Civil society in ancient Greece: The case of Athens. http://www.lewrockwell.com/long/long9.html; 09/27/2008. Wallace-Hadrill, A. (Ed.) (1989). Patronage in ancient society. London/ New York: Routledge.
Civil Society History II: Medieval Period FRED POWELL National University of Ireland-Cork, Cork, UK
Introduction The medieval world spans the period between the end of antiquity, symbolized by the Barbarian sack of Rome in 410 AD, and the advent of the Renaissance approximately
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a millennium later. It is widely represented as a distinctly Western phenomenon, since the Eastern Roman Empire survived at Constantinople, until it was overwhelmed by the Turks in 1453. While the medieval world is directly associated with the advance of Christendom, Islam played a defining role in its inception, according to historian Henri Pirenne, whose controversial thesis argued that the real break with antiquity did not occur until the seventh century and was due to the rapid and unexpected expansion of Islam, through its conquest of south-eastern Turkey, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, and southern Spain. Consequently, Western civilization was pushed northwards to France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Western Germany, central and northern Italy, and northern Spain. The popes changed their political allegiance to the secular powers to the north, breaking classical civilization’s geographical link with the Mediterranean, the cultural and economic hub of the Roman Empire. A new civilization was born. Impoverished, agrarian, and backward, it was the first Europe. Charlemagne (742–814), crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800, became its iconic symbol-consolidating Christian culture in the West.
Main Characteristics of the Period Medium Aevum, ‘‘the Middle Age,’’ defined in Christian cosmology a temporal space between Christ’s first and second coming. The chivalry of knights, the feudal structure that bound the nobility to the land, along with the serfs who cultivated the soil, and the cloistered monks and nuns, became the cultural symbols of this ‘‘Middle Age.’’ It had a sense of immobility, in which social change occurred at a glacial pace, if at all. The seigniorial presence of God in the form of the Roman Catholic Church provided the cosmological explanation for a world defined by hierarchy and inured to change. The pope stood at the spiritual top of the pyramid of power, encroaching into the temporal domain. The resulting struggle for supremacy turned into the Investiture Contest, when Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), promulgated 27 propositions in his Dictatus Papae (the Pope’s Supremacy). This tension between the spiritual realm (papal power) and the temporal sphere (secular power) dominated the political landscape of the medieval world. The philosopher Augustine of Hippo had laid down the political principles of medieval society in his great work Civitas Dei (City of God), commenced in 413, 3 years after the sack of Rome. It was completed 13 years later. In this major philosophical work Augustine sets out the basis of a Christian civil society. At the core of his thinking is a duality based upon the idea of two cities, an
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earthly city (Civitas Terra) and the City of God (Civitas Dei). The use of the word civitas or city is influenced by the classical political formation of city state and should be understood as a form of governance or polis. The relationship between church and state is defined by the superiority of ecclesiastical authority in Augustine’s dualism. Divine law transcended secular power. Christian civil society is based upon the premise of human frailty embodied in the doctrine of the Fall of Adam and Eve, i.e., original sin. Human sin makes political autonomy and individual choice impossible, according to Augustine’s world view. It produced a hierarchical order in which war, property, slavery, and the state provide the pillars of political society. While the Church asserted its supremacy over the secular sphere, it enjoined the faithful to accept the state’s authority in their daily lives. The reality of civil society in practice was often very different to its theological conception. But there was an overarching sense of Christian Commonwealth that defined civil society as a political and social construct.
Key Developments As the Middle Ages progressed towards the Renaissance the ideas of antiquity in the form of neo-Aristotelianism began to reshape political thought, allowing more space for secular civil society to reassert itself and break with the theological fusion between ecclesiastic and secular spheres. Christianity began to be challenged by classical ideas and values. Ironically, the rediscovery of the classical texts of Plato and Aristotle was achieved by Arab and Jewish scholars and subsequently taken up by Christian philosophers. Averroes (1126–98) was the most famous of Arabian philosophers. He became the key commentator on Aristotle’s work, reintroducing rationality in his doctrine of Universal Reason and denying the immortality of the individual soul. His work was later condemned by Pope Leo X. Maimonides (1135–1204), a Jewish philosopher and physician, whose career was spent in the Islamic world, also played a key role in the rediscovery of Aristotelianism. In turn, their spirit of enquiry and zest for knowledge found its counterpart in the West in the twelfth century awakening. The University of Paris became the center of intellectual dissidence, led by Peter Abelard (1079–1142). Abelard, historically famed for his romantic relationship with Heloise, became the champion of critical ideas, leading him to be denounced by the church as a heretic and corrupter of youth. His intellectual legacy was to force the church to reconcile reason with belief – a task undertaken by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Aquinas’ major work Summa Theologica reconceptualized the philosophical basis of Christianity in a vast synthesis which sought to incorporate Aristotelian
scientific rationalism into the philosophical canon of Christianity. In doing so, it unleashed civil society from the dogmatic constraints of Augustinian orthodoxy. As medieval society slowly began to transform itself from an agrarian rural society into an increasingly urban world, the complexities of civil society demanded a philosophy that could negotiate Aristotle’s idea of political community, based upon the city state. Aquinas sought to provide the necessary intellectual pluralism and respect for political diversity in his Christianized Aristotelianism. Politics was no longer simply the product of sin, resulting from the Fall. European civil society had begun a slow progression towards the secular sphere that was to open the road to democracy and the right to association as the basis of modern civilization. Culture, Civility and Manners
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) exposed the venality of papal power in his immortal work, the Divine Comedy (1309– 1320). His poetry was to once again place culture on the agenda of civilization. The Divine Comedy is an authentically medieval masterpiece that draws upon the traditions of antiquity, astrological folklore, coupled with Arab and Jewish philosophical influences. It recounts Dante’s journey through hell and purgatory and finally paradise. His work sparkles with the influence of heretics and dissidents of his times. But it also symbolizes the reemergence of cultural life in the mainstream of European civil society. The Roman concept of societas civilis, based upon civility, informed the twelfth century awakening. Manners and tastes became culturally significant, as the contors of a European civilization began to take shape. Norbert Elias (1897–1990) in his monumental study The Civilising Process (2000) has provided a historical account of the meaning of civility (or civilite´), which he observes during the Middle Ages was popularly regarded as the difference between ‘‘Latin Christendom’’ and paganism. He argues that the concept of civility was an expression and symbol of a social and cultural formation, embracing the various nationalities that composed the First Europe. A shared language in Latin was a key prerequisite to a sense of sociocultural unity. Also essential were the psychic structures that moulded shared social attitudes regarding violence, sexual behavior, bodily functions, table manners, and forms of speech. These were the cultural ingredients of a civilized society and unsurprisingly first emerged at the top of the social hierarchy in courtly etiquette. The Angevin court of Eleanor of Acquitane (1122–1204), at Poitiers, became the chief academy in Europe for instruction in the arts of civility, which included music, poetry, and courtly love and etiquette. Women’s role as the arbiters of civility critically shaped
Civil Society History II: Medieval Period
civil society in Medieval Europe, in terms of tastes and manners. It provided the civilizing processes for the development of a civil society that was shaped by a secular humanist world view, beyond the theocratic gaze of the male ecclesiastical authorities.
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Charity defines the care of the poor in civil society as a Christian duty. In its idealized form, charity is presented as an individualistic and altruistic act, as a private affair between two parties, the benefactor and the beneficiary. In Christian cosmology, redemption was possible through charity, however venal the life. Ontologically, charity balanced the venal and acquisitive in a moral and social compact with God. Justice was divinely ordained through divine law. The philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, defined the Christian principles of charity ordering them into seven ‘‘spiritual aids’’ and seven ‘‘good works.’’ The spiritual aids included: consule (counsel), carpe (sustain), doce (teach), solare (console), remitte (rescue), fer (pardon), and ora (pray). Added to these seven spiritual aids were seven ‘‘good works’’: vesto (clothe), poto (to give water), cibo (feed), redimo (redeem from prison), tego (shelter), colligo (nurse), and condo (bury). The recipients of charity varied greatly from the poor, the homeless, the hungry, the sick, and dead to the imprisoned. The exercise of charity defined virtue in a Christian civil society. Medieval society had a simple Christian view of the world based upon faith in God, where the pious worked together to ensure protection, healing, and redemption.
Celibacy was accompanied by fasting, in the belief the abstinence made the ‘‘soul’’ pure. In this rarefied world many of the most intellectually able and idealistic men and women of their age sought to retreat from the ‘‘barbarism’’ of everyday medieval life. Albeit, there were important exceptions. Irish monasticism was imbued with missionary zeal. The Irish monk, St. Columban (543– 615), established monasteries in France and Italy. While preaching against the inequities of the age, Columban sought to impose a particularly rigorous form of Christianity on Europe, often coming into conflict with the secular authorities, which he did not hesitate to rebuke. Monks were not simply evangelists. They were also scholars. There was a two-way traffic across Europe. When life became too dangerous in continental Europe, monastic scholars sought refuge in Cornwall on the southern English coast, the Hebrides in isles north of Scotland and Ireland. In 550 some 50 scholars fled from Europe to Cork on the Southern Irish coast, where they founded a seat of learning. Another Irish monk, St. Columba (563–597) established a monastery on Iona in Scotland that was to prove the centre of Celtic Christianity where the Book of Kells was produced before being returned to Ireland. This tradition of monastic scholarship maintained on the furthest reaches of Western Europe spread eastwards as the dangers of the early Middle Ages eased. Monastic scriptoria became centers for the preservation of both religious and philosophical ideas that underpinned European civilization, albeit they were deeply conservative and traditionalist in their philosophical speculation, being guided by the doctrines of the Church.
Monasticism, Asceticism, and Virtue
Monasticism and Civil Society
Those seeking Christian perfection joined monasteries, which were viewed by the laity as symbols of human virtue embodied in the ascetic life. Albeit the monasteries did not always abide by those ideals. Within the seclusion of the monastic life, the secular world was regarded as remote and venal. Monastic was derived from the Greek work monachos, meaning solitary. While the pope and episcopacy were engaged in a struggle for power within the secular sphere, the monastic tradition abjured these worldly concerns under the influence of eastern ascetics. Monks, nuns, and hermits from the fifth century began to appear in scattered settlements throughout Europe, where monasticism took a communal form as opposed to the solitary nature of eastern asceticism. The word religio was employed to describe the life of an ascetic who had entered the religious life in a convent or monastery. These ascetics in the West, like their counterparts in the East, regarded themselves as the true custodians of Christianity. They lived a celibate life from the beginning, emphasizing the importance of the spiritual over the bodily desires.
Monasteries were, however, not simply a refuge for ascetics and scholars from an otherwise ‘‘barbarous’’ world. They were also an important social experiment that provided a form of civil society, often in the midst of chaos. The monastery formed a complex micro-society enmeshed in the wider society outside it. The great abbeys of France, such as Cluny (910), Clairvaux (1115), and Fonte´vraud (1099) typified the emergence of the monastery as a major European institution. The Royal Abbey at Fonte´vraud, located on a seminal site in French and English history, where Kind Henry II, Queen Eleanor of Acquitane and their son Richard I, Coeur de Lion, are buried, epitomized the social, political, and civic significance of the religious institution. Founded by a Breton monk at the end of the eleventh century, Fonte´vraud abbey was composed of both monasteries and nunneries but also institutions for the sick, lepers and reformed prostitutes, several of which are still extant, including the leprosarium of St. Lazare. Over this large complex an abbess presided at its head, normally drawn from the
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ranks of the royalty or nobility and often a widow, ensuring wisdom and experience as a condition of appointment. Eleanor of Acquitane rejected the position of Abbess of Fonte´vraud. As the most significant female personage of her age, whose name was synonymous with civility, courtly etiquette, and political power, Eleanor’s association with the role of Abbess of Fonte´vraud is testament to both its importance and the connection between monasticism and civil society. Monks and clerics were often the only medical practitioners in medieval society. According to Roy Porter (1999), the Benedictine monks made the care of the sick their primary concern, making monasteries the key medical centers in Europe prior to 1300. Monasteries provided infirmaries for the sick and cultivated herbs for their curative properties. They were not simply a refuge for ascetics but also for the poor, sick and outcasts of society. The significance of the monastery in European civil society during the medieval period cannot be overstated. Its communal form in Western Europe made it a centre for civil society. While the monks formed a discrete microsociety, they also interacted with the outside world through preaching, learning, and healing. In the late middle ages, monasticism went into decline. The onset of the Reformation led to the suppression of monasteries, notably in Protestant countries such as England. Their role in civil society as the center of communal activity in a largely rural society also began to be challenged by the emergence of urban life.
International Perspectives While the medieval world was a predominantly rural society locked into feudal structures that bound the mass of the population to the land, the emergence of cities and towns in embryonic form began a process of change. Walled cities and towns reflected the dangers and insecurities of medieval life. By the twelfth century the process of urbanization was clearly visible – led by the Italian cities of Venice, Pisa, Genoa and Florence. Other parts of Europe followed suit such as Paris and London, as well as Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent in Flanders. New class structures emerged with burghers providing a commercial class that rivalled the aristocracy in terms of wealth, influence and power. Florence stands out as a city of virtuosity in the arts, commerce, and a thriving civil society. In 1300, its population stood at 95,000. Smaller than Milan, Venice, and Genoa, Florence nonetheless had a magnetic attraction for the young, who gravitated to it from rural areas. They included artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci and Desiderio da Settignano but also artisans, notaries, and public officials.
Florentine civil society rested upon the guild system that facilitated the popolo minuto (citizenry) to form associations for their economic and political advancement. It achieved its apogee in the in the unsuccessful Ciompi Revolution in 1378. While the Ciompi Revolution failed to achieve democracy, it did represent the assertion of guild power and its extension from the professions to artisans, shop keepers, and labourers. Merchant guilds were now complemented by craft guilds. The guilds not only afforded their members political and economic power but also social protection and mutual aid. The guilds controlled the cities’ 200 factories. They overlapped with civic government but also contested for power with it. In this sense, guilds provided the basis of a civil society that was independent of the city state, the commercial aristocracy, and the Church authorities, who aligned themselves with the ruling oligarchy. With urbanization emerged not only the political challenge to the medieval order represented by the Ciompi Revolution in 1378 but also a resurgence of humanism. Florence was also a center of vibrant intellectual life. While Paris was the university center of intellectual dissidence during the Middle Ages, Florence produced the humanistic revival that was to undermine the medieval world view fundamentally. Niccolo` Machiavelli is widely regarded as the first genuinely modern thinker because of his denial of Divine Law. The custodian of Divine Law was the Catholic Church. Born in Florence in 1469, Machiavelli proved himself to be a consummate statesman, diplomat, and writer. In the Age of Discovery he travelled widely, observing contemporary civilization with a keen humanist eye. Yet, he learned to bend to the will of his political masters, surviving torture to end his life as a man of letters. His death in 1527 left a unique legacy. He is best remembered for The Prince, based upon the life of Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentino and illegitimate son of the corrupt Pope Alexander VI. Published in 1532, The Prince has been condemned over the centuries as a diabolical work bordering on the sacrilegious. Pope Clement VIII was the first to condemn this study of the nature of elite politics as the naked pursuit of power. Since then Machiavellianism has become a byword for the corrupt use of power. The conventional interpretation of The Prince is evidenced in Chapter XVII entitled ‘‘Cruelty and Compassion and Whether it is Better to be loved than feared, or the Reverse.’’ Machiavelli declares with surrealistic irony: "
Cesare Borgia was accounted cruel; nevertheless, this cruelty of his reformed the Romagna, brought it unity, and restored order and obedience. On reflection, it will be seen that there was more compassion in Cesare than in
Civil Society History II: Medieval Period
the Florentine people, who, to escape being called cruel, allowed Pistoia to be devastated. So a prince should not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal. By making an example or two he will prove more compassionate than those who, being too compassionate, allow disorders which lead to murder and rapine. These nearly always harm the whole community, whereas executions ordered by a prince only affect individuals. (Machiavelli, 1961: 95)
In The Prince, ‘‘virtue’’ is equated with the capacity of a person to achieve success and fortune as an individual, whether by justice or deceit and cruelty. Borgia learnt to his cost that fortune can be fickle and cruel (‘‘the wheel of fortune’’). The Prince is essentially a democratic statement of power. Machiavelli regarded monarchy as an inferior form of government, only necessary when the people lacked the virtue to form a republic. In The Discourses (1518) Machiavelli sets out the requirements for good governance, the need for strong military defence and the role of religion as subordinate to the State: "
But as regards prudence and stability, I say that the people are more prudent and stable, and have better judgement than a prince; and that it is not without good reason that it is said ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’; for we see popular opinion prognosticate events in such a wonderful manner that it would almost seem as if the people had some occult virtue, which enables them to foresee good and evil.
Machiavelli, in turning the medieval view of church-state relations on its head, likens virtue in the body politic to a healthy lifestyle in the individual. These qualities of vigor and sacrifice equate with a virtuous political life that makes people free. It is this willingness to subordinate private egotistical advantage to the public good that defines the virtuous society. The idea that power is divinely ordained is, therefore, rejected by Machiavelli. He reconfigures the exercise of power in purely secular terms. A view that enraged the Pope but was the mark of his humanism and Western Europe’s intellectual liberation from the cosmic hegemony of Christian theology. In the Renaissance thought of Machiavelli is born the idea of human beings becoming moral actors in their own personal and political struggle to transcend fate as given – the external Christian view that ‘‘God is in his heaven and all is well with the world.’’ Here the germ of the idea of civic virtue in modern life was born. Hope displaced fate. Virtue became a human quality and stratagem. As art freed itself from the celebration of the divinity of God to focus on the beauty and passion of
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humanity, so humans beings began to think differently about their world and how they could change it for the better. Gone was the illusion that power is divine. This was the death knell of medievalism. Medieval civil society was based upon a Christian ethic. It rested upon the view that the Church was superior to the state. Humanity was ontologically defined by the Fall as innately sinful, necessitating the predominance of divine law over secular sphere. But this Christian view of the world was constantly challenged by the secular sphere, both politically and culturally. A Christian civil society flourished in the medieval world in which charity was viewed as the highest virtue. Monasticism in Western Europe embodied the principles of religious virtue in institutional form through its care of the sick and outcast population. But a more secular version of civil society emerged in the twelfth century awakening, beginning in the pursuit of civility in the social and cultural life of elite courtly society. Urbanization gave secular civil society a further impetus in which the populo minuto (citizenry) began to contest for economic and political power. Machiavelli was to strip the vale of legitimacy from the divine law and papal authority. His critique proved to be the defining statement of modernity, in which medieval Christian civil society was consigned to historical oblivion. Yet its legacy is a powerful one representing a (albeit temporary) triumph of Jerusalem over Athens and Rome, of faith over reason.
Cross-References
▶ Charity, History of ▶ Civil Society History III: Renaissance ▶ Civil Society Theory: Aristotle ▶ Religious Orders
References/Further Readings Davies, N. (1997). Europe: A history. London: Pimlico. Ehrenberg, J. (1999). Civil society: The critical history of an idea. New York: New York University Press. Elias, N. (2000). The civilizing process. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, P. (1998). Cities in civilization. London: Phoenix Giant. Heer, F. (1974). The medieval world: Europe from 1100–1350, London: Cardinal. Machiavelli, N. (1961). The prince (originally published in 1532). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Machiavelli, N. (1970). The discourses (originally published in 1531). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pirenne, H (1968). Mohammed and Charlemagne (originally published in 1939). London: Unwin. Porter, R. (1999). The greatest benefit of mankind: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present. London: Fontana Press. Reader, J. (2004). Cities. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
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Civil Society History III: Renaissance
Civil Society History III: Renaissance CURTIS SARLES New York University, New York, NY, USA
Main Characteristics of the Period The Renaissance is a time when the intellectual community of Europe rediscovered the works of classical philosophy and early Christianity, and took their originality and greatness as a source of inspiration. This era saw the founding of the humanities in their contemporary form, and was propelled forward by a creative tension between the glorification of God and the glorification of humankind. The era yielded some of Europe’s greatest artists, political thinkers, and religious dissidents. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, in Florence, the movement spread throughout Italy and much of Europe, extending to the Nordic countries and as far east as Poland. It arose out of an intellectual climate in which religious scholars engaged in doctrinaire disputes over the interpretation of sacred texts, and seldom bothered to take a fresh look at the texts themselves. To wrest itself from this mire, the city-states of Italy enlisted the help of Byzantine and Muslim scholarship, which had engaged energetically with original texts while the Western tradition languished. As the paintings of da Vinci and Michelangelo show, the Renaissance shifted Europe’s attention toward the lot of humanity. Once the humanities emerged, the beginnings of social scientific inquiry followed suit. Critical engagement with authority figures within church and state had momentous consequences for European social life. Criticism of the Catholic Church led to the Protestant Reformation. And once this Church lost its monopoly over religious life, European states gained a newfound autonomy that proved destabilizing. Renaissance thinkers often advocated for a strong, centralized monarchy, and their arguments helped usher in the period of absolutist government. Yet the Renaissance spirit of rational-critical inquiry outmatched even absolute monarchy, which eventually gave way to republican and democratic politics. Many features of Renaissance social life vanished long ago, but the principle of critical inquiry it inspired lives on. Thus while scholars generally deem the Renaissance a cultural period that concludes with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the notion of Renaissance involves the rebirth of critical inquiry, and consequently the birth of modern life.
Key Developments This was a crucial time for reflection on the optimal relationship between state authority and private life. Whereas the beginning of the Renaissance was marked by the political fragmentation of feudalism, political thinkers of the period began to question a political system that led to constant tension between neighboring city-states, and thus advocated for larger political entities that would win the loyalty of their citizens. The words used to describe civil society shifted during the Renaissance, as important translations of Aristotle appeared and scholars used the terms from these translations to refer to contemporary phenomena. Cohen and Arato point out that Aristotle’s politike koinonia, a political community with a unifying ethos, was translated into Latin (the language of scholarly discourse during the Renaissance) as societas civilis, but societas civilis was applied to entities such as empires that could have no unifying ethos. Societas civilis was also equated with res publica and used to revive republican thought during the period. On this sense, societas civilis brought up a dualism, but it was not the familiar opposition between state and society. Instead, it was an opposition between the crown and the estates of the realm: the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. The era of absolute monarchy in Europe saw an end to the distribution of power between the sovereign and the estates of the realm, as monarchs sought to monopolize power. It was at this moment that societas civilis could take on the current meaning of ‘‘civil society’’ as opposed to ‘‘state.’’ Shifting from language to material practice, everywhere wealth was a precondition for the development of civil society institutions. Those who could generate surplus, and therefore support leisurely pursuits such as art and higher education, tended to be successful business people. The city-states of Italy were strategically positioned between the luxury goods providers of the near and far east, and the voracious European market. The wealth they amassed through trade with these regions gave private people room to maneuver, to win favorable treatment from the state, to occupy positions within the state, and to critique both particular state policies and the system of city-states more generally. Civilized Comportment
While wealth was a prerequisite to the emergence of civil society as a counterbalance to the state, the constant feuding of prominent families provided motivation for reforming political life. The commercial class stood to benefit from increasing political stability. As Muir (1999) shows, public religiosity, juridical practice, and
Civil Society History III: Renaissance
refined manners all contributed to the pacification of public life. Religious life in the Renaissance had major secular consequences. In Venice, which was precocious in its elimination of political violence, a patrician in each neighborhood was given the responsibility to create and maintain public shrines to the Virgin Mary or a patron saint. As a result of its public religion initiatives, public space in the city became sanctified, and thus imbued with (antiviolent) religious sentiment. Potential criminals might not hesitate to harm other citizens, but doing so in front of the Virgin or patron saint appears to have given them pause. The obvious impracticality of blanketing the countryside with such images highlights the urban character of Renaissance civil society. Widespread literacy, which made informed debate possible, was another essential precondition for the emergence of civil society. The spread of juridical culture helped to valorize literacy by making people dependent upon literate notaries. These professionals traveled from town to town, writing up the formal terms of dowries, apprenticeships, business contracts, and wills. This formalization of social relations aided in creating an autonomous public capable of concerted action outside of the state. Whereas scholars have devoted disproportionate attention to Florence in the study of Renaissance humanism, England has received the most attention for the formation of a literate public. Habermas (1989) chronicles the formation of a public sphere in England, an educated segment of the population that convened in locations like coffee shops to debate political issues, disregarding their differences in status and wealth. The high point of this rational-critical debate occurred in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, but literacy itself began to expand beyond a small intelligentsia during the Renaissance, as movable type print made mass publication possible. Also, long before the French Revolution and the industrial revolution, there was a revolution in manners that influenced all of Europe’s subsequent political development. This revolution ties together many of the threads in the formation of civil society. The escape from violence was a key component in the transformation of manners. Thus, the writer Mario Savorgnan taught his children to avoid retaliation for physical violence, thereby escaping the cycle of violent feuds into which so much of Europe was embroiled. Erasmus’s Manners for Children and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier were major texts that instilled sober, moderate, peaceful conduct.
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Toward Nationalism
In addition to the private conduct that helped to make civil society possible, scholars of the Renaissance began to criticize Europe’s political fragmentation. The scale of political organization contributed to the formation of civil society. When scholars of the modern period refer to civil society, they usually have in mind the civil society of a national state. Renaissance Europe, of course, was divided into a much larger number of smaller states. The presence of innumerable city-states and principalities allowed families to gain undue political influence, and these families feuded incessantly. Political thinkers of the Renaissance sought to reduce this factional violence by invoking overarching symbols of unity. The most famous was Machiavelli, who deplored the constant state of warfare into which his native Florence had fallen. Machiavelli’s book The Prince has become renowned for the ruthlessness he advocates in the face of internal dissent, but the reader must also keep in mind that all of Machiavelli’s recommendations were made in the name of national unity. Eventually, he hoped, the Italian peninsula might become a single nation. And national unity, he believed, would bring domestic peace and prosperity. The Prince was written as a book of advice for Lorenzo de’ Medici, prince of the principality of Florence. And while there is little evidence that Medici took any of Machiavelli’s advice, the work is remarkably prescient. Political leaders, in the years since its publication, have tended to become much less concerned with familial conflicts, and much more so with winning the loyalty of the populace. And while few would opt for a return to the constant feuding of the early Renaissance, it is possible to criticize Machiavelli for disregarding the autonomy of civil society. In his analysis, the public appears as putty in the hands of the prince, rather than esteemed participants in the political process. As such, The Prince is an uncomfortable anticipation of plebiscitary, representative government. In his other major work, the Discourses, Machiavelli sets forth his views on the prospect of republican government, wherein power is distributed amongst the citizens rather than concentrated in the hands of a sovereign. Machiavelli believes that republics are the most stable form of government in the long run, as they are not so dependent on the judgment of a single individual. Nonetheless, in cases of emergency, he argues that it is necessary to defer to the judgment of a sovereign. Like so many cultural practices of the Renaissance, political thought had its roots in Florence and spread out to the rest of Europe. Among the most important writers to receive Machiavelli’s work was the French scholar Jean Bodin, whose Six Books of the Commonwealth
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sought to find a basis for political order in an era when the supremacy of the Catholic Church could no longer be taken for granted. Writing in the sixteenth century, Bodin opposed Machiavelli’s advocacy of ruthless statecraft, and founded his political thought on the sanctity of the family and the authority of the sovereign. Moreover, Bodin broke from the tradition of justifying policies in terms of the proper relationship between church and secular ruler. Instead, he sought to establish policies that would benefit the commonwealth for its own sake. Like Machiavelli, Bodin ends up advocating a political system wherein individuals other than the sovereign have little influence over the form and policy of the state, also known as absolute monarchy. Both theorists recognize the freedom of a private sphere, a sphere wherein individuals are free of the constraints of the state, but they conceive of it in purely negative terms, regarding it as apolitical. Joining Machiavelli and Bodin in the absolutist tradition is Hobbes, whose 1651 work Leviathan seeks to justify an absolute sovereign in terms of a population’s right to freedom from ‘‘wounds, and chains, and imprisonment.’’ Like Machiavelli, Hobbes’s first concern is to avoid civil war, though he bases this concern in the English Civil War and not warring Italian city-states. Hobbes, however, distances himself from the contingencies of the present and argues that a primordial state of ‘‘war of all against all’’ justifies the existence of a powerful central state. Hobbes is less historically specific than Machiavelli, and while scholars of the present often take this as a weakness, notions of a primordial ‘‘state of nature’’ proved highly influential upon subsequent political theorists who took as their object ‘‘human nature’’ (e.g., Rousseau) or the notion of a ‘‘social contract’’ justifying the existence of the state (e.g., Locke). Yet the less attention these theories gave to historical specificity and the more they posited a hypothetical contract between state and humankind, the more they neglected the possibility of citizens influencing the state through their concerted action. The political thought of the Renaissance can appear as bleak, as negating the individual’s right to participate in the political process, but this is so only from the point of view of the present. When these authors wrote, universal adulthood suffrage was unheard of. Reflection on democracy involved considering the proper balance between the monarch and other political elites. By reviving this mode of thought, the political thinkers of the Renaissance prepared the ground for modern republican thought. Heroic Individualism
A decisive turning point occurring during the Renaissance was the glorification of the individual person.
Hence, the Renaissance made possible Albrecht Du¨rer’s self-portrait, a type of painting that did not exist in medieval times. In political theory, too, the individual took on new importance. Medieval political theorists had encouraged political actors to embody the values of Stoicism or Christianity. In contrast, theorists of the Renaissance urged the individual to rise up above the conditions of the age (which might be corrupt or fragmented) to create the best possible polity. Thus The Prince is not a call for despotism, but instead an appeal for the individual to promote the welfare of the people through the exercise of virtu, or excellence. Conversely, Machiavelli and Guicciardini held that the individual can only become virtuous by taking part in the formation of policy; their theories are equally relevant to princes and ordinary citizens.
International Perspectives As explained above, the prominence of absolutist rule during the Renaissance limited the forms of activism available to non-state actors. Nonetheless, international variation in forms of civil society emerged during the period. Under absolutism, the sovereign not only upheld the law, but also took on the obligation to promote the people’s welfare. Thus, the state took an increasingly active role in foundations established by citizens, ranging from educational institutions to shelters for the sick and the poor. Moreover, the continental states took a more interventionist path than the English state. Many foundations began as institutionalized offerings to the dead, a tradition that changed wherever the Protestant Reformation took hold. The Reformation generated increasing opposition to prayers for the dead, and Protestants took on a more worldly orientation to their lives. The states in which Protestants dwelled, however, differed in the degree to which they intervened in the activities of foundations. What the English called ‘‘charitable foundations’’ were known as ‘‘public foundations’’ on the European continent, and continental states tended to manage them more actively. Whereas the Prussian state helped to manage foundations, the English state only intervened to stop the abuse of trust. These differences in the degree of state intervention persist to the present day, suggesting that the varieties of welfare capitalism were in place even before the industrial revolution. Was the Renaissance the Prototype of the Modern?
Those who lived in the Renaissance did not know it by this name, as it was the nineteenth century historian Jacob Burckhardt who first postulated a rebirth of classical greatness spreading outward from fourteenth century
Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment
Florence in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt argued that modern cultural and political forms originated in this period, a position that has been roundly criticized since. One line of argument against Burckhardt is that viewing the Renaissance as the prototype of modernity mistakes the part for the whole. Republican thought, for instance, was never fully extinguished in Europe, and regarding the Renaissance as its source neglects its predecessors along with the abundance of non-republican political theory produced at the time. Absolutist thought, for instance, predominated at the time, whereas modern political theorists often seek to break with monarchy and other forms of traditional rule. Another line of critique holds that Burckhardt neglects major innovations that took place in Europe prior to the fourteenth century, such as the twelfth century construction of the Cathedral of Chartres. Burckhardt’s critics can amass volumes of data to support their position, but, like the resplendent works of Michelangelo and da Vinci, the notion of Renaissance refuses to disappear. Political thinkers continue to draw inspiration from the new forms of inquiry that emerged in fourteenth century Florence. In a sense, however, it is only fitting that Burckhardt’s thesis should be subjected to endless controversy, as Renaissance, at its core, is critical engagement with the works of humanity, aimed at improving upon what has gone before.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History of ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society in the European Tradition ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society, Antiquity ▶ Civil Society, Definitions of and Approaches ▶ Civil Society II: Medieval Period ▶ Civil Society IV: Enlightenment ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Hobbes, Thomas ▶ Political Society ▶ Public Sphere
References/Further Readings Aron, R. (1965). Main currents of sociological thought (Vol. 1). New York: Basic Books. Black, A. (2003). Guild and state: European political thought from the twelfth century to the present. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Bodin, J. (1955). Six books of the commonwealth. Oxford: Blackwell. Burckhardt, J. (1990). The civilization of the renaissance in Italy. New York: Penguin Books.
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Calhoun, C. (1992). Introduction. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Calhoun, C. (2002). Civil society/public sphere: History of the concept. In N. Smelser & P. Baltes (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. New York: Elsevier. Castiglione, B. (1959). Book of the courtier. New York: Doubleday. Cohen, J., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coing, H. (1981). Remarks on the history of foundations and their role in the promotion of learning. Minerva, 19(2), 271–281. Erasmus, D. (2008). A handbook on good manners for children. London: Preface. Erasmus, D. (1942). The praise of folly. New York: W. J. Black. Ferguson, A. (1966). An essay on the history of civil society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ferguson, W. (1962). Europe in transition, 1300–1520. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ferguson, W. (1948). The renaissance in historical thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hobbes, T. (1998). Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luther, M. (1961). Selections from his writings. New York: Doubleday. Machiavelli, N. (1984). Discourses. New York: Penguin Books. Machiavelli, N. (1985). The prince. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mann, M. (1984). The autonomous power of the state: Its origins, mechanisms, and results. Archives Europe´ennes de Sociologie, 25(2), 185–213. Montaigne, M. (1958). Complete essays. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. More, T. (1975). Utopia. New York: Norton. Muir, E. (1999). The sources of civil society in Italy. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29(3), 379–406. Pocock, J. (1975). The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Skinner, Q. (2004). Visions of politics, Volume 2, Renaissance virtues. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, D. (1997). Chaucerian polity: Absolutist lineages and associational forms in England and Italy. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press.
Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment FRED POWELL National University of Ireland-Cork, Cork, Ireland
Introduction The Enlightenment represented a rupture in Western civilization. It is often viewed as an epistemological break with the past, in which human beings cast off the yoke of religious cosmology and embraced a new world of science, research, and civility. Historically, the Enlightenment period encompasses the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sociologically, it is synonymous with the emergence
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of modernity. But it was not simply an epistemological rupture with the past, in which a belief in scientific progress replaced religious verities. The Enlightenment also represented a profound change in human consciousness that produced the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789). Absolutism was replaced by republicanism and democracy. Economic liberalism, based upon the free market, was also a product of the Enlightenment. A public sphere emerged in the form of civil society. It was defined by the right to associate freely as citizens as a basic precept of democratic society. This public sphere was political but it was also social and cultural in character. New mental and moral sensibilities redefined human beings relations with nature and each other. The practical realities of this civilizational reconfiguration appeared in an outpouring of new political and social ideas, assisted by the emergence of a mass print media culture and a vigorous coffee house society. Outside this thriving public sphere were the poor. Enlightenment society unsentimentally applied reason to the regulation of the poor. This produced a system of public charity that transformed its eschatological meaning into a secular system of social control.
Main Characteristics of the Period The Enlightenment is often called the Age of Reason. The philisophe (philosophers such as Montesquieu [1689–1755], Voltaire [1694–1778], Diderot [1713–1784] and Rousseau [1712–1778]) became the interpreters of the Enlightenment. As such it represented a development beyond the medieval preoccupation with faith. While the Renaissance had restored humanism to European civilization, the seventeenth century Wars of Religion were a reminder that faith still set the cosmological agenda. The key metaphor for the Enlightenment was ‘‘light’’ provided by reason. Light facilitated an escape from the darkness of religious belief – the light of reason! The French called the Enlightenment movement the Sie`cle des Lumie`res. In Germany it was called the Aufklarung. Americans called it ‘‘the Great Awakening.’’ For the British there was some uncertainty that there was an Enlightenment at all. However, key Enlightenment thinkers were British, notably John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776). Reason was an essential part of Britain’s preoccupation with scientific discovery that drove its prodigious eighteenth century industrial revolution. Ultimately, the Enlightenment was not a movement but a way of thinking that permeated all societies in Western civilization. The Enlightenment, as interpreted by the philisophe, viewed itself as a return to classical civilization based upon the ascendancy of reason. Humanism was reborn.
Democracy looked back to the ancient Athens of Pericles (490–429 BC) for its inspiration. The grandeur of Rome provided the model for a classical cultural and architectural revival. In an Enlightenment world, where skepticism, empiricism, and a belief in progress shaped the age, human beings believed that reason had freed them from traditional forms of authority, whether religious (the church) or political (monarchical absolutism). The triumph of reason over tradition promoted a belief in the political and civil rights to liberty and equality that underpinned democracy and civic virtue, the core elements of the modern governance. This was the context in which the idea of civil society flourished both amongst scholars and in the public mind. The Scottish philosopher and historian, Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) published An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1766). His central theme was the fluctuating historical influence of civic virtue in shaping society. He argued the case for subordinating the private to the public in the greater interest of society. He was influenced by Machiavelli’s idea that human societies had to make a choice between virtue (the common good) and fortune (individual interest). Ferguson was concerned that the pursuit of self-interest in a market society over the common good weakened civic virtue. He contributed to raising public interest in civil society. Similarly, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) addressed the idea of civil society. In his Philosophy of the Law, first published in 1821, Hegel produced a seminal statement in which he sought to theorize the relationship between civil society and the modern state. In Germany the state was to keep civil society closely within its grasp because of unease about its political potential. However, Hegel’s legacy to civil society is fundamental because he identified within modern society a public sphere distinct from the state. Hegel had also located civil society within the realm of politics. Democracy would be its midwife, albeit not in Prussia, where Hegel had to carefully balance the realities of monarchical absolutism against the liberating potential of civil society. Nonetheless, Hegel’s legacy to the theorization of civil society is fundamental. The debate about civil society in modern social and political thought started in the Old World but quickly crossed the Atlantic to the New World of the American Colonies. Essential to the widening of the debate was Tom Paine (1737–1809), raconteur, polemicist, and commoner, who dominated progressive political thought in Britain, France, and America during the age of revolutionary struggle against absolutist tyranny in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In his highly influential
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pamphlet, Common Sense, published in 1776, Paine introduced the term ‘‘civilized society’’ as a natural and potentially self-regulating form of association, counterpoised to ‘‘government,’’ which was, in his view, at best a necessary and artificial evil. While Paine was vague about what precisely he meant by civil society, he popularized the values and ideas that shaped this alternative view of the world, where active citizens freely associated in pursuit of liberty and equality. His publication The Rights of Man during 1791–92 provided a template for modern democratic civilization. Paine’s final great work The Age of Reason, in which he propounded his views on religion, alienated him from Washington and many of his supporters. But no one better epitomized the spirit of the times in thought and action. Roy Porter (2000: 452) describes Paine as ‘‘the chief oracle of enlightened philosophy.’’ The Rights of Man became the core revolutionary text of its day. In it Paine argued that all men and women are born equal, with equal rights. This became the basis of civil rights, which is today called human rights. Paine viewed civil society as the basis for the realization of equal rights for all citizens. He embraced a radical philosophy of equality in which a welfare state would be constructed that would provide: a right to poor relief; universal elementary education, family allowances for children under 14, old age pensions, maternity benefits, funeral allowances, work experience for training young people and public works for the unemployed. In order to pay for his welfare state, Paine advocated cuts in military expenditure and a system of graduated income tax. His message anticipated the social democratic politics of the twentieth century, in which a social state fused with civil society in the interests of deepening democracy through the pursuit of equality.
Key Developments The Enlightenment was quintessentially a battle of ideas carried out within civil society through the print media and in the emerging public sphere of a coffee house society. The pamphlet emerged first as an agitational instrument, followed by the mass circulation press that created a political public, deeply engaged in discussing the great political issues of the day. The print boom also began to reshape popular tastes and manners by discussing social and cultural issues. The idea of community moved beyond locality to embrace shared interests and identities that transcended the limitations of space. Enlightenment society was a thoroughly modern civilization in terms of communication through the medium of print. During the seventeenth century the pamphlet emerged as a potent agitational instrument. John Milton’s
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(1608–1672) Aeropagitica, published in 1644, was a powerful critique of censorship and a lofty defence of the freedom of the press. In the following century the pamphlet became one of the most widely employed modes of political debate by political and philosophical commentators including Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Voltaire (1694–1778) and, of course, Tom Paine, who emerged as a political agitator without peer. Many of these critical voices, which used parody and satire to promote skepticism in the popular imagination, experienced imprisonment and exile. But nothing could halt the print boom. In Britain, the annual sale of newspapers in 1713 was 2.3 million. By the 1770s, there were 9 London dailies and 50 provincial weeklies with a circulation of 12 million. By 1801, newspaper circulation in Britain had risen to 16 million. The flamboyant figure of John Wilkes (1727–1797) became synonymous with the battle for press freedom in Britain, which he waged through his journal North Briton. For his relentless attacks on the government, Wilkes was sent to the Tower of London but released on a writ of habeas corpus because he was an M.P. (Member of Parliament). The French Revolution in 1789 inspired the modern newspaper with both news coverage and discussion. Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794) emerged as the greatest journalist in revolutionary France. In Paris alone there were 500 newspapers in 1792, and approximately 1,400 in France between 1789 and 1792. But after the 18th Brumaire and the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte, censorship, and control of the press became systemic. The link between democracy and press freedom was fundamental. Civil society flourished in a democracy, where there was freedom to associate and communicate. When these freedoms were suppressed, as in Germany and Russia, civil society was driven underground in the form of Masonic lodges and secret societies that promoted a culture of conspiracy and political intrigue. In more democratic societies, a flourishing civil society congregated and communicated in clubs, societies, and associations for a myriad of purposes: social, cultural, scientific, economic, humanitarian, as well as political. Coffee house society became a metaphor for this new mass culture. The British coffeehouse of the eighteenth century and the cafes of the great European cities, such as Paris and Vienna, epitomized this new civil society which became a space between the private and the public spheres. In this convivial atmosphere a conversational democracy took shape that sparkled with new ideas, driven by modernism’s impatience for change. Whether artists, political radicals or writers, there was a shared sense of destiny being created in this social space, where
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democratic and revolutionary ideas took shape – of counter-publics, where seditious gatherings could discuss the de-traditionalization of society, politically, socially, and culturally. The Enlightenment had produced a civil society led by ideas where philosophy became a popular preoccupation. The poor were excluded from this world of bourgeoisie civil society. Enlightenment civil society marked the advent of a secular moral sensibility based on the work ethic which invested poverty with a new meaning in society and conferred on the poor the status of deviant. The distinction between the impotent and able-bodied poor was made by contemporaries and has been a pivotal consideration in the historiography of social policy. Underneath the surface distinction between impotent and able-bodied poor lay a more fundamental process of categorization bringing a new rationality to bear on the management of the poor as a whole. It encompassed: vagrants; syphilitic and orphan children; the sick, aged, infirm, and insane who collectively were perceived as a problem population of socially and economically useless individuals. A new style of social control emerged during the Enlightenment, based on the systematic regulation of poverty. The effective organization and financing of this burgeoning apparatus of charity necessitated the growing involvement of the state in the social arena. This process took place through the transformation of the institution of charity into a means for enforcing a system of values based on the work ethic. Moral responsibility for poverty was displaced from the rich onto the poor. Poverty was turned into a social issue and charity the instrument of its regulation. The Enlightenment was an increasingly secular age where the religious values of the middle-ages waned with other medieval institutions. Reason replaced belief as the arbiter of social values. In the provision of charity, science was substituted for sentiment. It was a new world where generosity had no place and compassion no role. The logic of charity was turned on its head. Mutual aid, provided outside the context of the prescribed institutional norms of organized charity, became subversive. Even the sick, as objects of medical experimentation, contributed to supporting the new order where entrepreneurial medicine held sway. Meanings and values attached to customary forms of helping were undermined in a society where the eschatological purpose of charity was spurned by contemporaries.
International Perspectives The relief of the poor had moved towards the sphere of secular morality, which was less concerned with the
transcendent and more preoccupied with preservation of public order and the promotion of the work ethic. The new mentalite´ involved a much different concept of charity. It was to crucially shape the nature of social policy in early modern Europe. The secular ideology which infused charity in early modern Europe was reflected in the emergence of public charity. The term public charity was employed a system midway between private initiative and the state. The regulation of the health of the population best exemplified this process in action. The emergence of the medical charities coupled with the expansion of the apparatus of government was essential to this development, including: infirmaries, lying-in hospitals and asylums, as well as foundling hospitals for syphilitic and unwanted children. The development of medical charities during the eighteenth century can be attributed to a number of factors. The advancement of medicine at this time conferred a new-found social significance and economic importance on the ideas, activities, and pronouncements of doctors. Medicine played a key role in the emergence of an incipient knowledge regarding the causes, scale, and effects of disease, which entered in to the field of public discourse. But the advancement of medicine and expansion of medical charities in early modern society devolved on more fundamental socioeconomic interests. First, during the Enlightenment period a mercantilist view of the population growth, concerned with fostering the health of the labor force, was dominant. It was not until the late eighteenth century that the negative Malthusian view of population growth came to be reflected in social policy and the problems of a labour surplus began to be addressed (see below). Positive attitudes towards population growth heightened public awareness of the importance of hygiene and health services in combating disease. Second, while disease was primarily experienced by the poor it did not respect class boundaries. Once they had contracted disease, the rich, paradoxically, proved less resistant than the poor. Consequently, the control of infection, notably contagious diseases, was recognized as being in the interests of society as a whole. Third, experimentation on the poor ultimately benefited the rich, since it allowed for the scientific advancement of medical knowledge. The medical charities involved a high degree of class interest. Public charity created widespread opportunities for employment and corruption through the misappropriation of funds. But medicine had found a crucial role in the governance of society. Public health provided the state with the opportunity of extending its power into the regulation of social life. The emergence of the concept of public charity, forging a partnership between the State and the
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voluntary sphere, opened up boundless new possibilities for the accretion of power over the toiling masses. The movement towards the segregation of the victims of physical diseases was paralleled by the development of facilities for ‘‘lunatics and idiots.’’ The treatment of the insane has been a major focus for the attentions of social control theorists. In 1967, the publication of Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation laid the groundwork for subsequent scholars. In this study he argued that the insane were the archetypal outcasts. The import of Foucault’s argument was that madness in the Age of Reason came to be perceived as a fundamental social threat requiring the erection of a barrier between the insane and the rest of humanity. The asylum became the instrument for the exclusion of those deemed to be mentally ill or intellectually disabled from the rest of the population. The Old English Poor Law introduced in 1601, according to Piven and Cloward (1971: 130) ‘‘was based on several key principles: that relief should be a local responsibility; that relief allowances should be less remunerative than wages (the principle of ‘less eligibility’), and that ‘settlement’ in the local community should be a prerequisite for aid.’’ By the late eighteenth century the political climate had altered. In response to the challenge from the spread of revolutionary ideology and popular unrest, a more liberal administration of the Old English Poor Law had developed on the basis of local initiatives in the mid-1790s. This was known as the Speenhamland system. It permitted large-scale outdoor relief to the ablebodied poor financed by the imposition of a labor rate. The Speenhamland system was in essence a stop-gap response to a temporary political threat to the hegemony of the ruling order. It conferred on the poor a basic right to a subsistence living in the community. In the long-term it did not provide a viable scheme for capital, because it was necessary to alter the mercantilist emphasis on settlement, if the growing demand for urban industrial labor was to be met. Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which contended that the prosperity of a nation depends upon its capital. A poor law system designed to curtail the mobility of labor had become increasingly anomalous in the age of the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, the Speenhamland system was believed to encourage population growth. This was irrational according to the political economists of the late eighteenth century, who advocated a prudential check on population and opposed statutory support for the poor, i.e., the right to poor relief. Even before the political challenge posed by the French Revolution had receded a debate about the fundamental principles upon which the English Poor Law rested had
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commenced. In this debate the pessimistic theory of Malthus (1796) that the multiplication of population always outstrips food production was to the fore. Malthus’ pessimism was complemented by Adam Smith’s (1776) theory of a ‘‘wages fund’’ which asserted that there was a fixed percentage of the national income available for wages. It was subsequently supported by Ricardo’s (1819) ‘‘Iron Law of Wages’’ which contended that wage payments above the market level in the long term operated to the detriment of the poor since higher wages would encourage excessive population growth leading to greater levels of misery. These classical economists presented their arguments as being informed by reason, regardless of the human consequences. While Malthus and Ricardo envisaged abolition as the ultimate goal of poor law reform, another exponent of classical economic theory, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), believed that the ideological position of this group could be reconciled with the concept of relief. He advocated in his Pauper Management Improved, first published in 1797, a system whereby England’s 250 Houses of Industry would be brought under a system of centralized control and subject to rational administrative principles. These proposed penitentiaries for the poor (workhouses) were to prove decisive in shaping the Government’s response to the Poor Law reform debate in England and became a model for the rational management of the poor in the industrial world. This was the Enlightenment’s legacy to the poor. Civil society during the Enlightenment flourished in a world that had cast off the constraints of religion. Reason became the intellectual faculty that opened people’s minds to new possibilities, politically, culturally, and socially. Democracy became a reality through the emergence of a mass print media culture and a popular coffee house society. The intellectual ideas of the philisophe reshaped human consciousness, creating a society that was informed by reason and secular values. This was to prove a liberating experience for a bourgeoisie society that redefined itself in terms of modernity and democracy. However, for the poor the experience was very different. A system of public charity emerged. It redefined the meaning of charity eschatologically, instituting it as a system of social regulation midway between the state and voluntary associations.
Cross-References
▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Charity, History of ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society Theory: Ferguson ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel
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▶ Civil Society Theory: Montesquieu ▶ Civil Society Theory: Paine ▶ Civil Society Theory: Rousseau ▶ Hume, David ▶ Locke, John
References/Further Readings Anheier, H., & Seibel, W. (2001). The non-profit sector in Germany, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Archambault, E. (1997). The non-profit sector in France, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Davies, N. (1997). Europe: A history, London: Pimlico. Ehrenberg, J. (1999). Civil society: A critical history of an idea, New York: New York University Press. Foucault, M. (1967). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason, London: Tavistock. Keane, J. (1996). Tom Paine: A political life, London: Grove Press. Paine, T. (1969). The essential Tom Paine. New York: Mentor. Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. (1971). Regulating the poor. New York: Vintage. Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world. London: Penguin. Powell, F. (2007). The politics of civil society. Bristol: Policy Press. Seligman, A. (1992). The idea of civil society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Civil Society History V: 19th Century ARND BAUERKA¨MPER Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Main Characteristics of the Period In the late eighteenth century, monarchical absolutism was increasingly questioned and under attack. As Enlightenment spread from its first strongholds in France and Britain to most regions of Europe, a new intelligentsia emerged. Its members assembled in clubs and associations, which thus became pillars of the nascent civil society. It was based on deliberation in literary circles and increasingly public discourses that challenged the claims of political rulers to initiate and control discussions ‘‘from above.’’ At the same time, the Freemasons, which had originated in England in the early eighteenth century, expanded considerably throughout Europe. Contrary to clubs and learned societies, they attempted to evade political supervision by meeting secretly. Thus, Freemasons entertained an exclusive rather than public discourse (Hoffmann, 2001: 267). Industrialization, too, gradually undermined the absolutist state. Beyond the strata of artisans and merchants, the new bourgeoisie promoted industrial production in manufactures and factories.
The dynamics of commercial and industrial growth gradually loosened the shackles of mercantilist economics. Monarchical rule was also shaken by the revolution of 1848–1849. Although it was finally suppressed in France, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire, in particular, the revolutionary upheaval deeply shattered the existing monarchies throughout Europe. Ultimately, absolutism was not to recover. The revolution also fuelled political and social mobilization and led to the expansion of public spheres which had received considerable impetus from the enlightened discourse. Even in the period of restoration from the late 1840s to the 1860s, political and social mobilization in Western and Central Europe did not come to a standstill. It was in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, however, that industrialization entered a new stage in the advanced European countries. Whereas coalmining, steel production and textile industry receded, chemicals, electronics, and engines became the new leading sectors of industrial development, especially in Germany and the United States of America, but also in Britain and France. The merger of companies and economic concentration led to the expansion of industrial plants, raised the social status of the bourgeoisie and lent them increasing political power. Moreover, a new group of managers emerged who were responsible for the daily operation of the industrial plants. Not least, bureaucratization gave rise to an expanding stratum of clerks, in state authorities as well as in factories. Not least, growing functional differentiation in society and economics led to an increase in the number of professionals (like doctors, architects, and lawyers). On the other side of the social ladder, skilled and unskilled labor expanded. Altogether, feudal status hierarchies were replaced by a class society characterized by growing social polarization. Nevertheless, recent research has demonstrated the resilience of the nobility and the gentry in Central European states like Germany and the Hungarian territories, but even in industrial England. The German Junkers, for instance, represented the persistence of the old (often local) large landowners, who continued to be influential elites, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, where they largely maintained their political power and social prestige in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were not able to stand the tide of democratization which went hand in hand with increasing political participation and the formation of modern parties in the latter half of the nineteenth century. From the 1830s onwards, electoral reforms had undermined the seemingly omniscient power of absolutist rulers. The ‘‘subscriber democracy’’ (Nord, 2000: XVI, XXVIII), which was based on procedural rules and established
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democratic politics as an ensemble of everyday rituals and practices, gradually replaced autocratic, paternalist rule and reduced the power of traditional honorary elites. Yet almost exclusively proprietors (e.g., of houses and other premises) were allowed to vote in major European states like Britain. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, electoral reforms also extended to the rising middle classes of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. Yet it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that large sections of the working classes were given the right to vote. Like the middle-classes, they had to stand the proof of ‘‘respectability.’’ Moreover, women continued to be excluded from the electorate. They were also heavily disadvantaged in social advancement and prevented from taking up careers in academia and the economy. Thus, mass electorates emerged in Europe as late as the interwar period. In the 1920s, too, a full-fledged consumer culture emerged in the United States and western and central Europe, before the Great Depression gave rise to economic deprivation, social dislocation and political extremism from 1929 to the mid-1930s.
Key Developments Following the emergence of clerics and court consultants in the Middle Ages as well as the rise of humanist scholars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European Enlightenment was taken up and at the same time promoted by a new group of intellectuals in the late eighteenth century. These hommes de lettres were mostly no longer tied to state administration and assembled in scholarly or literary associations (socie´te´s de pense´e and socie´te´s litte´raires, respectively). Freemasons, too, adopted enlightened ideas and founded lodges throughout Europe. In the early 1780s, about 700 lodges had been established in Europe and North America. Freemason associations counted 100,000 members in France alone in 1793 (Budde, 2002: 632; Sdvizˇkov, 2006: 39). Apart from associations and clubs, new publications like encyclopaedia also contributed to the rise of public spheres. In the early nineteenth century, civil society was largely a vision of free deliberation. Beyond the realm of ideas, concepts, values, and norms, civil society was increasingly an ensemble of social groups and values mainly directed against state control. As a social formation, it was initially represented by urban citizens as well as the emerging intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the middle classes as well as skilled laborers increasingly adopted the ideas and values of civil society, such as self-reliance, individual independence, tolerance, mutual trust and political freedom. Yet this set of values was marred by contradictions,
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as universalistic ideals coalesced with the vested interests of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Social equality, for instance, largely remained a promise throughout the nineteenth century, as the marginal role of the working classes and the subordination of women in the expanding pockets of civil society clearly demonstrate. Altogether, civil society was carried and supported by social groups that were united by their opposition to state control and supervision. They also adhered to common cultural values, cultivated a particular lifestyle centred on the family and shared an often strong distain for the lower classes. Its foundation of property and education (Bildung) lent civil society its exclusive character, quite apart from the persistence of the ancien regime and semifeudal rule, particularly in Eastern Europe. Not least, associations and clubs proved to be ambivalent and even ambiguous with regard to civil society. Although contemporary observers like Alexis de Tocqueville who published his two-volume travelogue on the United States in 1835 and 1840, respectively, contended that associations were the indispensable pillars of American democracy, they were by no means universally inclusive. On the contrary, some clubs and organisations like the Freemasons strictly controlled the entry of new members (Hoffmann, 2001). In a similar vein, not all associations promoted or even shared the basic tenets and values of civil society. As chauvinism spread in the late nineteenth century, for instance, nationalist pressure groups rejected political freedom and tolerance in favour of a strong state. Even liberal elites, which fundamentally supported democratisation, upheld social demarcations, reinforced ethnic cleavages and fuelled nationalism (Hoffmann, 2003). Nevertheless, civil society unfolded its considerable attraction across boundaries and borders. In the nineteenth century, philanthropic societies were transformed into associations that concentrated on the furtherance of certain issues. Thus, movements protested against vivisection and slavery, promoted the rights of women and advocated peace. Workers’ associations also sprang up. In order to mobilize support for their specific concerns they agreed on cross-border cooperation. Philanthropic associations and literary circles had started to engage in crossborder and intercultural communication, before International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) emerged in the nineteenth century (Baker, 2001). As a movement deeply rooted in European Enlightenment as well as in the culture of the Quakers, the ‘‘British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society,’’ which was founded in 1839, has been designated the first organization of this type. Thus even a global civil society gradually appeared on the horizon. As economic and social problems and disruptions like the
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depression of the 1870s increasingly transcended national borders, international solidarity and the formation of crossborder networks of civil society gained momentum. Simultaneously, the formation of modern nation-states and the emergence of territorially-bound political governments also furthered activities by actors of civil society extending beyond borders. Thus, the number of registered INGOs increased from 1874 to 1914 from 32 to as many as 1.083 (Keane, 2003: 44–50; Anheier et al., 2001: 4). The social foundations of civil society also expanded. Beyond the educated, professional bourgeoisie (Bildungsbu¨rgertum, i.e., educated persons like doctors, professors, and lawyers) and the economic bourgeoisie (Wirtschaftsbu¨rgertum, i. e., entrepreneurs and managers), the universalistic values of civil society were also adopted by middle and lower classes in the late nineteenth century. Bourgeois culture also proved to be attractive beyond the realms of particular social groups. In Western and Central Europe, in particular, skilled laborers imitated bourgeois family life, respect for work and education, the values of personal autonomy, individual achievement and success as well as a style of life that was strongly influenced by clubs, associations, and communication in public spheres (Kocka, 1997: 501f.). The working classes, however, selectively appropriated this particular culture, as they fused it with their traditional lifestyles. As a social formation, civil society was by no means homogeneous. Social differences and cultural distinctions separated the economic and educated bourgeoisie, professionals, and the middle classes of the artisans, clerks, and civil servants. Moreover the gulf between males and females closed only gradually at the end of the nineteenth century. The geographical divide between Western and Eastern Europe as well as between the western and nonwestern world has to be taken into account, as well.
International Perspectives In Tsarist Russia, for example, enlightened ideas had been taken up by Peter I and Catherine II in the late eighteenth century, before pockets of civil society emerged in the latter half of the following century. Yet public activities and civic mobilization were largely restricted to some cities, where merchants and entrepreneurs gave donations for public purposes. Although these activities were not completely free from vested (economic, social, and political) interests, the nascent bourgeoisie promoted education, initiated associations and promoted public deliberations and discourses. At the same time, daily newspapers gave rise to local public spheres in urban society. Citizens were also politicized. After the first duma (parliamentary assembly) had been installed after the revolution of 1905,
the scale of social and political participation widened. Thus, noble self-administration, which had been institutionalized in the zemstva from the 1860s onwards, was reinforced as much as the local public spheres in major cities. State control and Tsarist power diminished. Yet there was no society beyond mere sociability, before the Bolsheviks dispossessed and disempowered the bourgeois and educated strata that had supported the values and structures of civil society before November 1917 (Hausmann, 2000; Hildermeier, 2003). In Britain, bourgeois entrepreneurs had ascended from the early nineteenth century onwards. Although the gentry and nobility retained strong positions in Britain, their political clout had gradually diminished by the late nineteenth century. In France, feudal rule was largely abolished by the Revolution of 1789. Contrary to England, however, the first French Republic continued to rest on strong state authority and an extensive public administration. Bureaucratic traditions were even more influential in Germany where the Bildungsbu¨rgertum commanded a particularly high social prestige. The important rule of civil servants in this group reflected the persistence of the particular political power and social prestige of state bureaucracy. Civil society therefore remained weaker in Germany than in Western Europe, but it was stronger than in the East European territories, particularly in the Habsburg, Tsarist, and Ottoman Empires. Yet the German bourgeoisie was increasingly challenged by the rising working class in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Not least, the resilience of the semifeudal rule by noble landowners in the countryside restricted the political influence of the educated and economic bourgeoisie as much as the relatively early expansion of the franchise. Altogether, the development of civil society in nineteenth century Germany represented the transitory and fragmentary character of civil society, both as an ideal and a social formation, in Germany. This deficiency was to intensify in the early twentieth century. But it was nationalist associations that were to contribute to the downfall of the Weimar Republic. Associational militancy had turned against democracy and key values of civil society (Berman, 1997; Nord, 2000: XV, XVI, XXIII, XXXI).
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Freemasons ▶ INGOs ▶ Social Movements ▶ Quakers
Civil Society History VI: Early and Mid 20th Century
References/Further Readings Anheier, H., Gladius, M., & Kaldor, M (2001). Introducing civil society. In H. Anheier, M. Gladius, & M. Kaldor (Eds.), Global civil society 2001 Oxford: Oxford University Press.(pp. 3–22). Baker, K. M. (2001). Enlightenment and the institution of society: Notes for a conceptual history. In S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil society. History and possibilities Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(pp. 84–104). Bauerka¨mper, A. (Ed.) (2003). Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft. Akteure, Handeln und Strukturen im internationalen. Frankfurt/ Main: Vergleich. Berman, S. (1997). Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. World Politics, 49, 401–429. Budde, G. -F. (2002). Denn unsere Bruderliebe soll ihn leiten. Zum Zusammenhang von Ku¨nstlerexistenz und Freimaurertum bei Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Historische Zeitschrift, 275, 625–650. Conze, W., & Kocka, J. (Eds.) (1985). Bildungsbu¨rgertum im 19 Jahrhundert. 2 Teile. Stuttgart. Gamm, G., & Putnam, R. (1998). The growth of voluntary associations in America 1840–1940. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29, 511–557. Gosewinkel, D. (Eds.) (2004). Zivilgesellschaft – national und transnational. Berlin: Edition Sigma. Hall, J. A., & Trentmann, F. (Eds.) (2004). Civil society. A reader in history, theory and global politics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hausmann, G. (2000). Die wohlhabenden Odessaer Kaufleute und Unternehmer. Zur Herausbildung bu¨rgerlicher Identita¨ten im ausgehenden Zarenreich. Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas, 48, 41–65. Hettling, M. & Hoffmann, S. -L. H. (Eds.) (2000). Der bu¨rgerliche Wertehimmel. Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts. Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hildermeier, M. (2003). Traditionen aufgekla¨rter Politik in Rußland. Historische Zeitschrift, 276, 75–94. Hoffmann, S. -L. (2001). Internationalism and the quest for moral universalism. German Freemasonry 1860–1914. In M. H. Geyer & J. Paulmann (Eds.), The mechanics of internationalism. Culture, society, and politics from the 1840s to the first world war Oxford: Oxford University Press.(pp. 259–284). Hoffmann, S. -L. (2003). Democracy and associations in the long nineteenth century: Toward a transnational perspective. Journal of Modern History, 75, 269–299. Jessen, R., Reichardt, S., & Klein, A. (Eds.) (2004). Zivilgesellschaft als Geschichte. Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden. Keane, J. (1998). Civil society. Old images, new visions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keane, J. (2003). Global civil society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kocka, J. (Ed.) (1985). Arbeiter und Bu¨rger im 19. Jahrhundert. Varianten ihres Verha¨ltnisses im europa¨ischen. Vergleich: Munich. Kocka, J. (Ed.) (1987). Bu¨rger und Bu¨rgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert. 15. Beitra¨ge: Go¨ttingen. Kocka, J. (1997). The difficult rise of a civil society: Societal history of modern Germany. In M. Fulbrook (Ed.), German history since 1800. London. Kocka, J., & Mitchell, A. (Eds.) (1993). Bourgeois society in 19th-century Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lundgreen, P. (Ed.) (2000). Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Bu¨rgertums. Eine Bilanz des Bielefelder Sonderforschungsbereichs (1986– 1997). Go¨ttingen. Morris, R. J. (1983). Voluntary societies and British urban elites 1780– 1850: An analysis. Historical Journal, 26, 95–118.
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Nord, P. (2000). Introduction. In N. Bermeo & P. Nord (Eds.), Civil society before democracy. Lessons from nineteenth-century Europe. Lanham. Reichardt, S. (2004). Civil society. A concept for historical research. In A. Zimmer & P. Eckhard (Eds.), The future of civil society. Wiesbaden. Ryan, M. P. (1999). Civil society as democratic practice: North American cities during the nineteenth century. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29, 559–584. Schulz, A. (2005). Lebenswelt und Kultur des Bu¨rgertums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Munich. Sdvizˇkov, D. (2006). Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz. Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der Gebildeten in Europa. Go¨ttingen. Trentmann, F. (Ed.) (2000). Paradoxes of civil society. New perspectives on modern German and British history. New York: Berghahn Books. Wehler, H. -U. (1987). Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 2: Von der Reforma¨ra bis zur Industriellen und politischen Deutschen Doppelrevolution1815–1845/49. Munich. Wehler, H. –U. (1995). Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 3: Von der Deutschen Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs 1849–1914. Munich.
Civil Society History VI: Early and Mid 20th Century THOMAS DAVIES City University, London, UK
Main Characteristics of the Period Introduction
This article examines the evolution of civil society during the first half of the twentieth century. This is a topic that is in need of more extensive research. Despite the centrality of civil society to key developments in the period, it has received inadequate attention from historians of the era. In addition, despite the period’s critical place in the intellectual history of civil society, notably in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, empirical civil society in this era has received comparatively little attention from contemporary specialists on the topic. As this piece will highlight, civil society in the first half of the twentieth century witnessed some of its most remarkable achievements, and also underwent developments that provide unique insights into its nature. During this period, the boundary between governmental and nongovernmental – and between civil and ‘‘uncivil’’ – associational activity was often particularly blurred. Owing to the constraints of a brief article, this piece can consider only a limited sample of countries and movements. Main Characteristics
The international history of the first half of the twentieth century is commonly characterized as the era of the two
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World Wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. The period is equally notable for the intense ideological contestation that developed after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 and the advent of the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany in 1933. In addition, whereas the period is said to have begun without any government conforming to present-day standards of democracy, it has been estimated that by 1950 one third of the population of the world lived under democratic rule as understood today (Freedom House, 1999). At the same time, European colonialism became increasingly challenged, culminating in the success of the Indian independence campaign in 1947. The world’s first comprehensive intergovernmental organization, the League of Nations, was established in 1919 and was succeeded by the United Nations in 1945. The period concluded with the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s. Civil society was both shaped by and helped to shape all of these developments.
Key Developments and International Perspectives Given the variations between different regions of the world, it is difficult to generalize about the evolution of civil society as a whole in this period. Nevertheless, the overall development of civil society internationally in the first half of the twentieth century may be divided into several phases. The first phase, from the onset of the twentieth century until the First World War, witnessed the continuation of nineteenth century expansion and differentiation. The First World War brought with it a contraction of civil society activities, but also sparked the creation of new and reinvigorated associational life in its aftermath. The 1920s and early 1930s were for much of the world an era of unprecedented expansion in civil society activity, but this was followed by a period of contraction in the later 1930s and during the Second World War. Finally, while civil society recovered and expanded in parts of the world after this conflict, the onset of the Cold War ensured that this was only partial. Before the First World War
The opening of the twentieth century witnessed in general continuation of the expansion of civil society that had taken place in the nineteenth century. In Europe and North America, where civil society was arguably most developed, associational life is said to have experienced a ‘‘fourth surge’’ between 1890 and 1910. By the turn of the century in Great Britain the number of voluntary associations was expanding more rapidly than the population, while in the United States up to one fifth of men belonged to fraternal lodges, and in continental Europe an estimated 45,000 associations had been established in France,
and 60,000 in the Austrian Hapsburg Empire (Hoffmann, 2006: 61–63). The political conditions for associational activity in continental Europe improved during the first decade of the twentieth century: the 1901 Associations Act abolished legal restrictions on the right of association in France and the 1908 Reich Association Law permitted cross-regional associational activity in Germany. Developments such as these helped accelerate existing trends such as the increasing participation in associational life of previously marginalized groups including Catholics, national minorities, women, and the working class. Each of these groups created organizations not only for the advancement of their rights, but also for their own leisure, philanthropic, and other varied activities paralleling those of the elite. While many of the best-known of these organizations had already been founded in nineteenth century, the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed innovations such as the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the United States in 1909. During this period, Russia also experienced growth in associational life, especially after the 1905 revolution and an (albeit restrictive) associations law the following year. Russian civic activity tended to be dominated by elite organizations such as businessmen’s clubs. The same was true in China, where ‘‘professional associations’’ (fatuan) became increasingly common after 1903. In Japan, too, professional associations expanded in number thanks to the growth of the ‘‘new middle class.’’ In all of these countries, Christian-led groups such as the Young Men’s Christian Associations, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Salvation Army played an important role, and established some of the earliest branches of ‘‘Western’’ international nongovernmental organizations in these countries. On the other hand, developments such as the Boxer rebellion in China in 1900 reflected a growing reaction to Western influences such as these. The trend in South Asia was not dissimilar, where the number of indigenous associations grew in this period, which witnessed the creation of the region’s first formal trade unions and the launching of the Muslim League in 1906. However, Europeans continued to dominate civic life in this region, and associational activity was much less substantial there than in the period following the First World War. The same was true of much of the Middle East, although some countries such as Egypt had developed over the course of the nineteenth century a variety of nongovernmental groups including professional associations, women’s organizations and labour unions operating under conditions affording relatively considerable freedom of association.
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In Latin America, the onset of the twentieth century witnessed an expansion in the number of labor unions and professional associations, which joined the community associations, support groups and Catholic organizations that had developed during the nineteenth century. Variations within the region persisted, with civil society in countries such as Argentina and Colombia more advanced than in Brazil and Mexico. In Sub-Saharan Africa, too, the general trend of expansion was experienced, with preexisting self-help networks along clan, family, and neighborhood lines becoming increasingly joined by civil society organizations set up by European colonizers, often to address problems caused by colonization. At the global level, the transnational dimension of civil society may also be seen as having continued to grow, with internationalist activities peaking with the mass petitions and transnationally coordinated activism that took place at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. Notable international organizations that emerged in this period include the International Federation of Trade Unions set up in 1901, as well as some of the earliest Latin American international nongovernmental organizations. The development of international associations culminated in the establishment in 1907 of an international nongovernmental organization of international nongovernmental organizations: the Union of International Associations. However, at the same time as internationalism in Europe flourished, so too did nationalism. As Michael Howard (1978: 72) argued, internationalists in 1914, ‘‘hypnotised by the apparent transformation of warmongering capitalists into a strong force for peace,. . . underestimated the true dangers: those arising from forces inherent in the states-system of the balance of power which they had for so long denounced, and those new forces of militant nationalism which they themselves had done so much to encourage. It was these which combined to destroy the transnational community they had laboured to create.’’ The Era of the Two World Wars
It has been common to view the period from the First World War to the Second as one during which associational activity stagnated, or even declined, especially in Europe and North America. This viewpoint may be supported if a comparison is made between the extent of civil society in 1920 and that in 1940 (Gamm & Putnam, 1999). However, such a perspective neglects the important changes which civil society underwent in this period, as well as the remarkable expansion in associational life that took place during the 1920s and early 1930s before the Great Depression and the proliferation of authoritarian governments reversed this trend.
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Some of the most significant changes to civil society in this period were a consequence of the First World War. While the immediate impact of this conflict was a considerable diminution of associational foundations and activities, the war also led many civic leaders to reorganize and refocus associational life. In the case of the peace movement, for example, weaker preexisting organizations became surpassed by a variety of more vigorous new organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, established in 1915, and the movement for the creation of a League of Nations. The establishment of such an organization in 1919 was not the only significant apparent achievement of nongovernmental campaigning to follow the First World War: pressure from workers’ organizations contributed towards the foundation of the International Labor Organization in 1919; women’s suffrage groups saw the enfranchisement of women in Germany, Great Britain, the United States and twenty-five other countries in 1918– 1921; and the temperance movement witnessed the implementation of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. Throughout much of the world, the 1920s and early 1930s saw the expansion of civil society activities on an unprecedented scale. In Western Europe and North America, after a temporary reduction in the rate of foundation of voluntary associations during the First World War, many new associations emerged during the 1920s. Notable examples included new humanitarian assistance organizations such as Save the Children, founded in London in 1919, and new advocacy groups such as the first US gay rights organization, the Society for Human Rights, established in Chicago in 1924. Associational life also became better coordinated through national bodies such as Great Britain’s National Council for Voluntary Organisations, established in 1919. In central and eastern Europe, where the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire left a large number of newly independent democracies, preexisting ethnic national associations were joined by a wide range of new societies. Thus by 1932 in Hungary alone, one third of the population belonged to a total of 14,365 associations (Kuti, 1993: 4). In Russia, also, the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 initially brought with it an active civic life in some areas such as the workplace and revolutionary arts. In much of the Middle East, the aftermath of the First World War and the decline of the Ottoman Empire were accompanied by new opportunities for associational activity. As Ibrahim (1995: 36) has argued, ‘‘new civil organizations. . . . thrived in the interwar period (1918– 1939). The embryonic new middle class was the backbone of these civil organizations,’’ Islamic, Arab nationalist,
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left-wing, and liberal. However, there were considerable variations within the region, such as the contrast between relatively thriving Egyptian civil society and the limited scope for voluntary associations in Morocco and Lebanon under French administration. Anti-imperial movements gained strength in the Middle East in the 1920s, reflected for instance in the Syrian revolution of 1925–1927. From a global perspective, possibly the most influential independence movement developed in India, particularly after Gandhi’s return in 1915. Beyond the independence movement, Gandhian voluntarism with its emphasis on empowerment and societal transformation was to have immense influence on Indian associational life in general. India also experienced major Muslim mass mobilizations in the early 1920s, in the form of the Khilafat movement. The development of movements against colonial exploitation extended to Africa, too, in the 1920s, with notable examples including the Butaka movement in Uganda and the Kikuyu Central Association in Kenya. The period after the First World War also witnessed the reinvigoration of Chinese nationalism after May Fourth 1919. In China in the 1920s, David Strand (1993: 58) has argued that ‘‘a similar public sphere [to that in eighteenth and nineteenth century European cities] was developing in Beijing . . . it had intellectual salons as well as locality inns (huiquan) with their locality clubs (tongxianghui), merchant and craft guilds, bathhouses, restaurants, teahouses, brothels, public parks, pavilions, and temples which functioned as mini-convention centres for guilds and political groups. These social organizations and spaces hosted and housed a lively associational and public life.’’ Across the East Sea, civic activity also became increasingly diverse in 1920s Japan, where organizations representing groups such as women and the working class overcame aspects of their previous marginalization: achievements included universal manhood suffrage in 1925 and repeal of a 1900 law banning female participation in public meetings. Steps towards Asian regional international nongovernmental organizations took place in the years following the First World War, such as the All Asian Women’s Conference in India in 1931. The transnational dimension of civil society also became increasingly global, with the establishment of branches beyond Western Europe and North America of secular international nongovernmental organizations such as those of the labor and women’s movements. In addition, the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization provided new opportunities for transnational associations, with the representatives of trade unions standing on an equal footing with representatives of governments at the International Labor Organization.
As with civil society within many countries, transnational civil society expanded at an unprecedented rate after the First World War: twice as many international nongovernmental organizations were founded in the 1920s as in the entire nineteenth century. Transnational civil society also became more diverse, with some of the earliest human rights and environmental international nongovernmental organizations being established, including the International Federation of Human Rights and Birdlife International in 1922. Just as national coalitions of a range of civil society actors became increasingly common within countries, so too did transnational coalitions at the global level. Movements that had already had considerable successes in respect of their primary objectives, particularly the women’s suffrage movement, turned their attention to forming broad transnational coalitions for internationalist causes. Thus, for example, international women’s organizations claiming to represent 45 million women formed a Disarmament Committee of Women’s International Organizations in 1931 to promote disarmament. This particular cause was to attract widespread attention in the late 1920s and early 1930s, mobilizing a coalition of actors as varied as Rotary International, the International Federation of Trade Unions, the International Council of Women and the Communist International, and a huge range of other nongovernmental groups jointly claiming to represent a combined membership as high as half the population of the world (Davies, 2007). Cross-movement coordinated activism on this scale at both national and international levels reflected the development of ‘‘mass politics’’ in the period between the two World Wars. Cultural commentator Valentine Cunningham argued that never before, ‘‘not even in the Victorian age of great cities had people been so conscious that modern industrialized, urban life was mass life. . . . Inescapably, the post-First-World-War sensibility had to grasp that it was an age of mass-production, massdemonstrations, mass-meetings, mass sporting occasions, mass-communications, mass armies, a time when things would be done in, and to, and for crowds’’ (cited in Richards, 2006: 376). The Communist International (or Comintern), an international organization set up in 1919 for the purpose of uniting the international Communist movement under Soviet control, was keen to exploit this, and a major feature of late 1930s politics was a range of front organizations uniting a broad variety of bourgeois and socialist groups such as the International Peace Campaign and the World Committee against War and Fascism. This latter organization’s name indicates the orientation of these fronts, and highlights the way in which civil
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society became torn between the political extremes of the period. At the other extreme was fascism, a movement that also briefly flirted with the creation of an ‘‘International’’ in the mid-1930s, but which was unable to follow the Communist example. It has been argued that, just as the Bolshevik revolution emerged from a sector of civil society, so too did fascism. As Hoffman (2006: 83) has claimed: ‘‘the Nazis conquered German civil society from within’’ having penetrated German associational life (which at the beginning of the 1920s had been predominantly liberal or socialist) with a network over 1,400 local clubs (Chickering, 1992: 318). With the ascent of authoritarian forms of government during the 1930s, the last third of the period between the two World Wars saw the contraction of civil society. Even in countries that retained liberal forms of government, the Great Depression brought with it a reversal of the earlier expansion, although it did bring demand for greater welfare provision and some new groups such as unemployed workers’ organizations. In countries where fascist governments took power, however, private associational activities were actively suppressed. In Germany, for example, the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung brought the nonprofit sector under party control. In Japan, the military dictatorship succeeded in disbanding nearly all autonomous associations and absorbing them into state-run organizations in the 1930s. In countries that became the victims of fascist expansionism, including China and central and eastern European countries, associational life was also forced into retreat. Elsewhere, civil society came under pressure from different forms of authoritarianism. For example, in Stalin’s Soviet Union by the end of the 1930s virtually all associational life had been brought under the control of the state. In Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the scope for associational activity was also reduced. And in Latin America civic groups became increasingly subjected to ‘‘controlled inclusion’’ by the state, following such developments as the military coups in Argentina and Brazil in 1930 (Hall, 1995: 257). From the Second World War to the Cold War
The defeat of the axis powers in the Second World War may be seen as having provided an opportunity for civil society to regain its strength after the downturn of the 1930s. The reestablishment of democratic institutions in Germany and Japan brought with it the possibility of revitalized associational life in these countries. In much of Asia and later Africa, the apparent success of the Gandhian movement in India in 1947 provided
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inspiration for anticolonial movements, and achievement of independence from colonial rule widened the scope for civic activity in several countries. At the transnational level, the establishment of the United Nations, with its recognition of nongovernmental organizations in Article 71 of its Charter, provided a hospitable environment for transnational associations, and the aftermath of the Second World War stimulated the creation of well-known international nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam and CARE International, founded in 1942 and 1945 respectively. However, in many ways civil society arguably failed to recover fully from the triple blows of the Great Depression, the rise of authoritarianism and the Second World War in the decades immediately following that conflict. The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s was one of the principal reasons for this. Divisions within formerly united civic groups – notably the international trade union movement which split in two in 1949 – both reflected and exacerbated this new form of international conflict. The solidification of the Eastern bloc from 1948 ensured that civil society remained relatively repressed in much of central and eastern Europe. The Communist victory in China in 1949 brought with it the closure or subsuming of much of the voluntary sector in statecontrolled ‘‘mass organizations.’’ Beyond the Communist bloc, civil society was arguably stunted, too. In parts of the Middle East, private associations were inhibited by the development of populist Arab regimes in the 1950s, and in much of South America policies of ‘‘controlled inclusion’’ continued. In Western Europe, the increasing welfare role of the state after the Second World War in countries such as France and Great Britain restricted in some ways the scope for voluntary sector activities. Midcentury, therefore, civil society was somewhat underdeveloped, with much its contemporary ascent to emerge from events later in the twentieth century.
Conclusion The first half of the twentieth century was one of the liveliest and most varied periods in evolution of civil society. A wide range of significant developments took place, such as increasing national and international coordination of civil society organizations, and the spread of a wide range of third sector activities throughout much of the world. The period also highlights the remarkable ways in which civil society organizations and governments have interacted, both to the advantage and detriment of civil society, as well the ways in which civil society may have contributed towards its own demise. With its rich history, this period merits greater attention than it has hitherto received.
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Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History of ▶ Charity, History of ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society History V: Nineteenth Century ▶ Civil Society History VII: Late 20th and 21st Century ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci ▶ Civil Society, Violence and War ▶ Labor Movements/Labor Unions ▶ National Council of Voluntary Organisations ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Professional Associations ▶ Salvation Army ▶ Save the Children ▶ Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom ▶ World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement ▶ YMCA
Ibrahim, S. E. (1995). Civil Society and the Prospects for Democratization in the Arab World. In A. R. Norton (Ed.), Civil Society in the Middle East (Vol. 1, pp. 27–54). Leiden: E. J. Brill. Iriye, A. (1997). Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore/ London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kaviraj, S., & Kilnani, S. (Eds.) (2001). Civil Society: History and Possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuti, E. (1993). Defining the Nonprofit Sector: Hungary. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. Morris, R. J. (1990). Clubs, Societies and Associations. In F. M. L. Thompson (Ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (Vol. 3, pp. 395–443) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, M. (2006). The Popular Front. In G. Martel (Ed.), A Companion to Europe, 1900–1945 (pp. 375–390). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Salamon, L., & Anheier, H. K. (Eds.) (1993). Working Papers of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. Strand, D. (1993). Protest in Beijing: Civil Society and Public Sphere in China. In R. V. Des Forges et al. (Eds.), Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989 (pp. 53–86). New York: SUNY. Tarrow, S. G. (1998). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
References/Further Readings Chickering, R. (1992). Political Mobilization and Associational Life: Some Thoughts on the National Socialist German Workers’ Club (e.V.). In L. E. Jones & J. Retallack (Eds.), Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany (pp. 307–328). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, T. R. (2007). The Possibilities of Transnational Activism: The Campaign for Disarmament between the Two World Wars. Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. Davies, T. R. (2008). The Rise and Fall of Transnational Civil Society: The Evolution of International Non-Governmental Organizations since 1839 (City University Working Papers on Transnational Politics). London: City University Department of International Politics. Des Forges, R. V. (1997). States, Societies, and Civil Societies in Chinese History. In T. Brock & B. M. Frolic (Eds.), Civil Society in China (pp. 68–98). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Freedom House. (1999). Democracy’s Century: A Survey of Global Political Change in the Twentieth Century. New York: Freedom House. Gamm, G., & Putnam, R. D. (1999). The Growth of Voluntary Associations in America, 1840–1940. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29(4), 511–557. Garon, S. (2003). From Meiji to Heisei: The State and Civil Society in Japan. In F. J. Schwartz & S. J. Pharr (Eds.), The State of Civil Society in Japan (pp. 42–62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Guan, L. H. (2004). Civil Society in Southeast Asia. Singapore: ISEAS. Hall, J. A. (1995). Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, J. A., & Trentmann, F. (Eds.) (2005). Civil Society: A Reader in History, Theory and Global Politics. Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan. Hoffmann, S. L. (2006). Civil Society (Studies in European history). Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan. Howard, M. (1978). War and the Liberal Conscience. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Civil Society History VII: Late 20th and 21st Century ARND BAUERKA¨MPER Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Main Characteristics of the Period In the literary circles and Masonic lodges of European Enlightenment, a transnational civil society had gradually evolved from the late eighteenth century onwards. These groups had been inspired by the promises of freedom universal citizenship and the concept of basic human laws. Several decades later, the off-springs of these philanthropic societies concentrated on the furtherance of particular issues. In order to mobilize support for their specific concerns, they even agreed on cross-border cooperation. Ultimately, the first International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) were founded. As a movement deeply rooted in European Enlightenment as well as in the culture of the Quakers, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (established in 1839) has been designated the first organization of this type. Civil society gradually reached global dimensions, although it did not spread evenly and continuously. Economic and social problems enhanced international solidarity and cooperation. Thus, cross-border networks of civil society expanded. The formation of modern
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nation-states and territorially-bound political governments also propelled actors of civil society to extend their activities beyond borders. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the formation of the workers’ movement, the quest for peace and the advocacy of women’s rights, in particular, became important pillars of civil society. Yet this process was halted by the First World War, which largely destroyed the vibrant civil society networks. Despite organisations like the League of Nations and the pan-European movement of the interwar years, civil society suffered another setback with the rise of fascism, Nazism and authoritarian dictatorships in the interwar years and in the Second World War. After 1945, however, the legal and social foundations of civil societies have broadened substantially. While this process was most pronounced in western democracies during the Cold War, it also reached the Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, where civil society advanced to a crucial normative platform for dissidents and protest movements (Miszlivetz, 1999). This dynamics marked a new stage in the development of transnational networks. It was the foundation of the United Nations, above all, which marked the final institutionalisation of INGOs as political actors transcending the confines of the nation-states. In its Article 71, the Charta of the UN granted them the legal status as consultative institutions of United Nations Economical and Social Council (ECOSOC). The creation of the European Union finally provided an important framework for the rise of INGOs on a European-wide scale (della Porta & Kriesi, 1999; Marks & McAdam, 1999). Their activities have been supported by an emerging transnational public sphere which has gradually evolved in Europe, the United States and (to a lesser extent) beyond as a framework for dealing with national issues. Although even the European public sphere is still decentralized and by no means uniform, civil societies have been tied together by INGOs. The increase in cross-border travelling and in economic as well as personal exchange between Europeans since the 1950s has reduced tensions and differences (Kaelble, 2001: 150–183). Yet due to the lack of social mobilization for Europe and the resilience of autochthonous traditions in nation-states and regions, a full-fledged European civil society has not appeared on the political horizon. Paradoxically, it was the Cold War which triggered off a notable increase in the number and scope of the actors of civil society. On the one hand, the escalating arms race with the frightening prospect of a nuclear war invigorated the European peace movement in the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, both superpowers utilized grass-roots
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social movements in Europe as their allies in the overarching conflict of the Cold War, which profoundly shaped domestic politics and social relations. By contrast, grassroots protest against social and political stagnation erupted in western states in the late 1960s (Josselin & Wallace, 2001: 6; Evangelista, 1999; Parkin, 1968). The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of the new social movements, which have been defined as a ‘‘sustained challenge to power holders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those power holders by means of repeated public displays of that population’s worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment’’ (Tilly, 2003: 247; also see Khagram et al., 2002; Rucht, 1994; Smith & Johnston, 2002). Addressing both local and global problems, these movements have worked on fields as diverse as environmental issues, developmental policies, human rights, workers’ issues, feminism, nuclear disarmament and consumers’ rights. As grass-roots organizations, all these movements share a sceptical attitude to the modernization process. They are also characterized by organizational structures based on densely interconnected networks and a membership consisting of the relatively highly educated middle classes. The ‘‘global associational revolution’’ of the 1990s, in particular, has caused an unprecedented expansion of the non-profit sector, which has become a significant economic force (Salamon et al., 1999: 4). At present, the influence of social movements on politics can hardly be overestimated, as their sheer number indicates. In the field of environmental politics alone, there is an estimated number of 100,000 NGOs (Wapner, 1996: 2). However, civil society associations and the non-profit sector have emerged most strongly in the western world, whereas their formation and expansion has proceeded at a slower pace in the developing countries.
Key Developments Civil society has increasingly regained the transnational momentum that it had achieved before the First World War. The number of registered INGOs had increased from 1874 to 1914 from 32 to as many as 1,083 (Anheier et al., 2001: 4; also see Keane, 2003: 44–50). It was after the Second World War, however, when the number of International Non-Governmental Organizations under the umbrella of the Union of International Organizations (established in 1909) exploded. The growth amounted to 230% from 1960 to 1988. The number of these organizations steeply rose in the course of the 1990s. Thus, as much as about one quarter of the 13,000 INGOs registered in 2000 had been founded in the preceding decade. Organizational structures as well as strategies of
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social and political mobilization have changed considerably in the last few decades. Instead of formal and hierarchically structured institutions, more loosely organized cross-border social alliances and networks have allowed a flexible adaptation to rapidly changing needs. Moreover, civil society activists have inaugurated new forms of activities. Apart from meetings, demonstrations, resolutions, and appeals, international non-governmental organizations have increasingly been engaged in political lobbying and in monitoring official policies. Most importantly, new topics have risen to the political agenda since the 1960s. Whereas demands for female suffrage and temperance, for instance, are – at least in Europe – no longer viable issues, problems like human and citizens’ rights, disarmament, environmental damage, enduring poverty in the developing states of the ‘‘Third World’’ and migration have increasingly received political attention and thereby triggered off the formation of new civil society organizations. Thus, a transatlantic movement for nuclear disarmament emerged after British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein had published their famous manifesto in 1955. The Pugwash Committee on Science and World Affairs, as it came to be known, was established by Joseph Rotblat, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Transnational actors and scientific networks even succeeded in putting pressure on a political system as secretive as the Soviet Union (Evangelista, 1999). In the field of security politics, common norms and beliefs fostered the emergence of a cross-border social movement. Although many peace movements and groups were profoundly influenced by the global confrontation of the Cold War, the search for choices beyond and beneath the bipolar confrontation inspired the activities of peace activists. In their view, peace had become a transnational issue mainly because of the obvious threat of a nuclear war, which would have devastating consequences for human life on Earth. Transnational orientations in the protest movements against war, namely the movement against the First Gulf War in 1991, suggest that anti-war groups have increasingly become globalized. However, whereas the pictures of the war were similar all over the world, the forms of mobilization and organization of the protests markedly differed. As has been aptly emphasized, the ‘‘translation of global social processes still passes through a powerful filter of national political cultures and opportunity structures’’ (Koopmans, 1999: 69). The women’s movement was propelled by a ‘‘second wave’’ in the 1970s, the UN decade of women. The programme for social action, which was drafted at the EU summit in 1972, also played a central role. The promotion
of women’s interests and concerns thus became an official policy of the European Commission. Feminism organised itself around new objectives. Thus, the programmatic scope of women’s movements was increasingly extended in order to tackle global issues. This change, in turn, encouraged female activists to adopt new organizational structures and procedures. Loose networks and low political leverage have become the principal features of globally-oriented women’s activists. Their groups have also adopted sophisticated and politically credible critical stances on economic developments in recent decades. Women’s activists have even been able to put pressure on the World Bank. At the same time, the global interconnections between feminist movements have given rise to new conflicts. The integration of formerly excluded women from ‘‘Third World’’ states, for example, has nourished cultural misunderstanding and rows about the aims and strategies of contemporary feminism (Diamond, 1998; O’Brien, 2000: 33; Ashworth, 1982). Since the Second World War, the social and political context of the international workes’ and trade union movements, too, has changed considerably. Their traditional orientation towards the nation-states as well as the bipolar confrontation of the two superpowers, which utilized the workers movement in their ideological struggles, undermined the internationalist claims of the workers’ representatives. The fight between the Sovietdominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the strongly anti-communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), for instance, absorbed considerable political power and administrative capacities. In recent years, workers’ organizations have been faced with new problems. In particular, their entrenched traditions of international unionism have inhibited necessary structural reforms. Moreover, unions are still deeply embedded in domestic political structures. This dependency has impeded the formation of crossnational coalitions. Not least, the shift in employment towards non-unionized labour has significantly contributed to the decrease in trade union membership on a global level (Josselin, 2001). The dwindling attractiveness of trade unions has resulted above all from their hierarchical structure. The ICFTU, which had been joined by 136 states by 1996, coordinates the work of different International Trade Secretariats, which are continuously involved in negotiations with employers. These secretariats are closely affiliated to national or regional trade unions. Due to their strong bonds to the nation-states, groups that are connected to the new social movements cannot be integrated into the hierarchical structure of the secretariats. Working at the grass-roots level and often connected
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to other social movements, they are reluctant to cooperate with the established hierarchies of the transnational workers’ movement (O’Brien, 2000: 73ff.; della Porta & Kriesi, 1999: 19).
International Perspectives In recent scholarship, the transnational extension of civil society has received increasing attention (see, e.g., Keane, 2003; Anheier et al., 2001). The analytical scope in studies published in the last few decades, however, has been largely confined to Europe. By contrast, the colonies and – after their liberation – the new states of the ‘‘Third World’’ have received little attention (van der Linden & van Voss, 2002). The demise of the colonial empires – which ultimately gave rise to the new paradigm of ‘‘postcolonial’’ history –, the end of the Cold War, and the growth of critical literature on globalisation inspired scholars to study ‘‘transnational’’ developments. Focussing on how members of the formerly excluded and underprivileged strata of the population in the ‘‘Third World’’ were mobilized in order to gain influence, a new normative notion of ‘‘transnationalism’’ has entered academic discourse. Thus, scholars have stressed the ‘‘new qualities’’ and ‘‘new realities’’ of a transnational system, which is based on migrants’ identities across and beyond national borders. These increasingly dense crossborder networks have occasionally even allowed migrants to negotiate with national governments about their legal status. Yet inhabitants of ‘‘Third World’’ states have accepted and simultaneously subverted the hegemonic West European and North American political culture in processes of hybridization and diffusion. This transformation underpins the subversive, normative aspects of the emerging transnational culture (Clifford, 1999; Fawcett, 1999; Glick Schiller, 1996; Gupta, 1992; Olwig & Sorensen, 2002). Yet the values, structures and social bases of civil society have varied according to specific contexts. In India, for instance, actors of civil society have not primarily opposed state authorities (contrary to the European Continent), as power had never been highly centralised and not reached absolutist rule. On the contrary, political authority has been segmented. Moreover, post-colonial elites that had been educated in western states have taken up concepts of civil society and initiated associations. These orientations and activities, however, have not intruded into the countryside and reached peasants. As they live in a ‘‘world of more complete commitments,’’ they do not appreciate social individuation. Moreover, they lack the skills of association. Nevertheless, the imposition of civil society ‘‘from above’’ has contributed to the gradual dissolution of caste barriers and begun to break up the isolation ob the
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‘‘untouchables.’’ The varied nature of global civil society has been demonstrated in studies which have concretely reconstructed the social practices of specific actors in particular constellations, including their world-views, interpretations and appropriations of civil society (Kaviraj, 2001: 309, 311, 314ff., 317, 319; Pernau, 2007: 57, 62 Pernau, 2008). In the Arab states, for instance, networks of civil society advocates that have emerged from the nineteenth century onwards have been strongly tied to the changing triangular relationship between the nationstate, secular institutions and the Muslim community, the umma (Hamzawy, 2003: 10–46). Like in India, civil society in China lacks an uncompromising stance towards state authorities. On the contrary, political rulers have alternatively furthered or restricted the emergence and expansion of public spheres and civil society, the gongmin shehui (‘‘society of public people’’). The term accentuates the responsibility of citizens for public goods and obliges them to decent behaviour. After the movement for ‘‘self-empowerment’’ (ziqiang) had encouraged civic mobilization and the demand for ‘‘self-administration’’ (zishi) had spread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the profound transformation of the Communist regime after Mao Zedong’s death (1976) has resulted in the emergence of new civic associations that initially took root in the cities. Yet these groups have largely remained linked to state authorities. The violent suppression of the students’ protest movement in June 1989 has even reinforced these bonds. In this political and cultural context, leaders and members of civic associations increasingly strive for selforganization and at least partial individual autonomy. Not least, they pursue goals transcending vested interests. As such, these groups advocate and promote civil society. Yet its independent institutional base is still weak, although the internet has provided new opportunities to voice demands for a civil society. It has also given rise to a critical public sphere. Yet the prevailing ideal of ‘‘harmony’’ has restricted pluralism and banned conflicts. It has also safeguarded the control of the mighty bureaucracy. Under these conditions, the scope of action for the proponents of an autonomous civil society has remained limited in China. Not least, the non-governmental organizations operating in the country have themselves preferred professionalism and planned campaigns at the expense of spontaneous grass-roots activity (SchmidtGlintzer, 2008: 127, 132, 144, 151, 171ff., 175ff., 186; Heberer, 2006: 20–26; Kuhn & Wie, 2007: 43–49). In the contemporary world, civil society has largely emerged as an antidote to a global economy and to omniscient political power. It has also been furthered as a
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palliative against failed states. In a world, in which nationstates are increasingly losing control over global actors like Transnational Cooperations (TNCs), organized crime, terrorism and threats like environmental pollution and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, only a ‘‘transnational society’’ seems nowadays capable of solving these problems (Albrow, 1996; Appadurai, 1998: Castells, 1999; Ruggie, 1998; Sassen, 1996). ‘‘Civil society’’ as a panacea foralmost all global problems has assumed almost utopian qualities, especially in times of financial turbulences and anxieties of economic slump. It serves as a catch-all-phrase for answers to a new political reality (Held, 1995). Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether civil society is the much-desired ‘‘‘middle way’ between sole reliance on the market and sole reliance on the state . . .’’ (Salamon et al., 1999: 5).
Cross-References
▶ Anti-Slavery International ▶ Civil Society: 19th Century ▶ Harmonious Society ▶ INGOs ▶ Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) ▶ Quakers ▶ Union of International Associations ▶ United Nations (UN)
References/Further Readings Albrow, M. (1996). The global age. State and society beyond modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Anheier, H., Glasius, M., & Kaldor, M. (Eds.) (2001). Introducing civil society. Global civil society 2001 (pp. 3–22). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, A. (1998). Modernity at large. Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ashworth, G. (1982). The United Nations ‘‘Women Conference’’ and international linkages in the Women’s Movement. In P. Willets (Ed.), Pressure groups in the global system. The transnational relations of issue-orientated non-governmental organizations. London: Frances Pinter. Castells, M. (1999). The rise of the network society. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Clifford, J. (1999). Diasporas. In S. Vertovec & R. Cohen (Eds.), Migration, diasporas and transnationalism (pp. 215–251). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. della Porta, D., & Kriesi, H. (1999). Social movements in a globalizing world: An introduction. In D. della Porta, H. Kriesi, & D. Rucht (Eds.), Social movements in a globalizing world (pp. 3–22). Houndmills/Basingstoke/London: Macmillan. Diamond, M. J. (Ed.) (1998). Women and revolution: Global expressions. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer. Evangelista, M. (1999). Unarmed forces: The transnational movement to end the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fawcett, J. (1999). Networks, linkages, and migration systems. In S. Vertovec & R. Cohen (Eds.), Migration, diasporas and transnationalism (pp. 16–25). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., & Blanc-Szanton, C. (Eds.) (1993). Towards a transnational perspective on migration. Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Gupta, A. (1992). The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism, Cultural Anthropology, 7, 63–79. Hamzawy, A. (Ed.) (2003). Normative dimensions of contemporary Arab debates on civil society. In Civil society in the Middle East. Berlin, Germany: Schiler. Heberer, T. (2006, December 4). China – Entwicklung zur Zivilgesellschaft? Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung ‘‘Das Parlament’’, 49, 20–26. Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the global order. From the modern state to cosmopolitan governance. Cambridge: Polity. Josselin, D. (2001). Back to the front line? Trade unions in a global age. In D. Josselin & W. Wallace (Eds.), Non-state actors in world politics (pp. 169–186). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Josselin, D., & Wallace, W. (Eds.) (2001). Non-state actors in world politics: A framework. In Non-state actors in world politics (pp. 1–20). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaelble, H. (2001). Europa¨er u¨ber Europa. Die Entstehung des europa¨ischen Selbstversta¨ndnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Kaviraj, Sudipta (2001). In search of civil society. In: S. Kaviraj & S. Khilnani (Eds.), Civil Society. History and Possibilities Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 287–323). Keane, J. (2003). Global civil society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khagram, S., Riker, J. V., & Sikkink, K. (Eds.) (2002). Restructuring world politics: Transnational social movements, networks and norms. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Koopmans, R. (1999). A comparison of protests against the Gulf War in Germany, France and the Netherlands. In D. della Porta, H. Kriesi, & D. Rucht (Eds.), Social movements in a globalizing world (pp. 57–70). Houndmills: Macmillan. Kuhn, B., & Wie, W. (2007). Civil society and the internet in the P.R. China. Beijing, China: Tsinghua University. van der Linden, M., & van Voss, L. H. (2002). Introduction. In L. H. van Voss & M. van der Linden (Eds.), Class and other identities. Gender, religion and ethnicity in the writing of European Labour History (pp. 1–39). New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Marks, G., & McAdam, D. (1999). On the relationship of political opportunities to the form of collective action: The case of the European Union. In D. della Porta, H. Kriesi, & D. Rucht (Eds.), Social movements in a globalizing world (pp. 97–111). Houndmills: Macmillan. Miszlivetz, F. (1999). Illusions and realities. The metamorphosis of civil society in a new European space. Szombathely, Hungary: Savaria University Press. O’Brien, R., Goetz, A. M., & Scholte, J. A. (2000). Contesting global governance: Multilateral economic institutions and global social movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olwig, K. F., & Sørensen, N. N. (Eds.) (2002). Mobile livelihoods: Making a living in the world. In Work and migration. Life and livelihoods in a globalizing world (pp. 1–19). London: Routledge. Parkin, F. (1968). Middle class radicalism: The social bases of the campaign for nuclear disarmament. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pernau, M. (2007). Gab es eine indische Zivilgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhun¨ berlegungen zum Verha¨ltnis von Globalgeschichte und hisdert? U torischer Semantik. Traverse, 14(3), 51–67. Pernau, M. (2008). Bu¨rger mit Turbane Muslime in Delhi in 19. Jahrhundert. To¨ttinger, Germany: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht.
Civil Society in Post-Conflict Scenarios Rucht, D. (1994). Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen. Deutschland, Frankreich und USA im Vergleich. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Campus. Ruggie, J. G. (1998). Constructing the world policy. London: Routledge. Salamon, L. M. (1999). Global civil society. Dimensions of the nonprofit sector. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. Sassen, S. (1996). Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, J., & Johnston, H. (Eds.) (2002). Globalization and Resistance. Transnational Dimensions of Social Movements. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Schmidt-Glintzer, H. (2008). Kleine Geschichte Chinas. Munich, Germany: Beck. Smith, J., & Johnston, H. (Eds.) (2002). Globalization and resistance. Transnational dimensions of social movements. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Tilly, C. (2003). Agendas for students of social movements. In J. A. Goldstone (Ed.), States, parties, and social movements (pp. 246– 256). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics. Wapner, P. K. (1996). Environmental activism and world civic politics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Civil Society in Post-Conflict Scenarios DENISA KOSTOVICOVA London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Introduction The civil society plays a variety of roles in the complex task of peace building in the aftermath of conflict in the global age. On the one hand, civil society’s post-conflict roles correspond broadly with numerous and competing definitions of civil society. On the other hand, they match a wide range of tasks assumed by post-conflict peace builders. Thus, civil society conceptualized in terms of buoyant non-state sphere reinforces democratization in the Tocquevillian tradition; the creation of social capital in Putnam’s sense is conducive to development, and civil society as a space of civility and tolerance echoing Habermas’ thinking is deemed to be an answer to sectarianism. In sum, both scholars and practitioners of post-conflict peace building alike consider development of civil society critical to sustainable peace. Acknowledging the definitional elasticity of civil society, as well as problems arising from it, they have been preoccupied with the questions concerning the modalities of external support to, and impact on, local civil society with the aim of effective promotion of peace. Consequently, the question why
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civil society may not be a priori conducive to post-conflict peace building has been all but marginal in the scholarship on the subject. However, civil society’s contribution to undermining peace and stability is an integral part of its complex interaction with the post-conflict context. Such contradictory dynamics can be appreciated from the vantage point of reconsidering the notion of ‘‘civil,’’ while addressing the conceptual and policy challenges of ‘‘uncivil’’ society. It is also inseparable from the understanding of the new nature of conflict in the age of globalization that blurs the line between conflict and peace, state, and society, as well as local and transnational.
Definition The post-conflict in the global context can at best be defined as an absence of bloodshed. Silent guns and discarded machetes usher in the peace that is underwritten by the continuation of the conflict dynamics in the form of exclusive identities, economic informality, and weak states. The persistence of ideas, actors, and structures, which originate in war, in the post-conflict context can be attributed to novel ways of warfare in the age of globalization elaborated in the ‘‘new wars’’ literature. While there is disagreement among scholars over the most appropriate name (whether they should be called ‘‘new,’’ ‘‘postmodern,’’ ‘‘post-nation-state’’ wars, etc.), there is a consensus, albeit with emphasis on various aspects, that contemporary wars are different from those fought in the heyday of the nation-state (Muenkler, 2005). These wars are different insofar as neither the political, economic, nor security dimensions can be accounted for without reference to globalization. Kaldor (2006) has argued that identity and violence of the new wars, which primarily targets civilians, cannot be divorced from the nature of war economies. Privatization of violence reflects the erosion of the tax base of a state unable to cope with the global economy, and translates into recourse to privatized military groups that employ pillage, looting, extortion, and robbery as the main source of funding for their activities and also as their motivation. Contributors to the ‘‘greed or grievance’’ debate have highlighted the economic benefits of violence. In new wars, according to Duffield (2000), the politics of violence and profit merge, while globalization allows the warring parties to develop their own means of economic sustainability by plugging into parallel and transborder links for survival. The implications for post-conflict are manifold. Insofar as new wars are about state fragmentation, the emerging new statelets are entirely legitimized by exclusive identities. This strategy is construed to conceal their dysfunctional character. These states are weak, and, as such, are
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inadequate providers either of public goods or national cohesion. Further, new wars remove a clear distinction between the state and the society. The two are connected by political, economic, and ethnic networks motivated by the spoils of war. Ultimately, their nation-stateness is underwritten by a paradox. Ideologically, they premise the achievement of nationhood on the separation of the inside and the outside. But, functionally, they have been thoroughly transnationalized, with cross-border links annulling this separation. Such a reordered post-conflict context conditions civil society’s contribution to peace building.
Key Issues The Case for Civil Society
The post-conflict entails the recovery after a breakdown of state and society, as both are left fractured in the wake of new wars. Therefore, the aim of civil society strengthening in post-conflict is to support the reconstruction of state and society at the same time. It is also envisaged to act as a bridge between the two, providing a critical source of legitimacy for the state. Politics of Identity in the Conflict Aftermath
New wars construct illiberal and exclusive identities through violence, intimidation, and expulsions, rather than the other way round (Kaldor, 2006). Multiethnicity has been the target of ethnic cleansers from the Balkans to the Caucasus and Africa. Territories may have been homogenized, but a degree of ethnic diversity, nonetheless, still remains. At the same time, the post-conflict is defined by structural and societal ethnification. External conflict resolution and post-conflict institution-building strategies, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, have been informed by management rather than by removal of difference. With the state implicated in the ideology of ethnic exclusion, civil society has provided an alternative route for restoring cross-ethnic trust and coexistence. As a space blind to ethnic difference and a fertile ground for cross-ethnic links, civil society has been envisaged as a corrective to the institutionalization of ethnicity. In addition, its engagement in bringing about justice in the wake of war crimes and mass human rights violations is part and parcel of building an inclusive society. Civil society groups have challenged the ‘‘ideological denial’’ of past atrocities (Cohen, 2001), such as the exposure of the Serbian state’s involvement in the killing of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica by a local civil society activist. The debate about appropriate transitional justice mechanisms, including trials, truth commissions, reparations, etc., is paralleled by a discussion about the type of civil
society actors who are most suitable to the task, distinguishing between Western-style NGOs and local initiatives, best illustrated by gacaca courts of community justice in post-genocide Rwanda. Civil society’s involvement in establishing a sense of justice as a foundation for peace and reconciliation has also contributed to other pillars of peace building, such as the respect of the human rights, the rule of law, and the return of refugees. Post-Conflict Democratization
In the aftermath of democratic breakdown that accompanies conflict, the restoration of democracy is a process involving procedures, values, and actors. In this undertaking, civil society’s role is critical in consolidating and deepening the democracy. The holding of the first postconflict multiethnic elections, often under some form of international oversight, marks only a start of democratization. A key challenge for young post-conflict democracies is to move from a formal democracy or ‘‘electocracy,’’ characterized by the existence of competitive multiparty elections, to substantive or consolidated democracy that assumes the guarantees of political, social, and economic rights as well as belief and acceptance of peaceful arbitration of conflict according to the agreed norms. Civil society is a bearer of the democratization project. It forges accountability between an often unaccountable, unresponsive, and corrupt post-conflict state and the citizens, while helping democracy mature by holding the state in check through advocacy, articulation, and representation of a multitude of interests. By giving voice to marginalized groups, like women or minorities, civil society brings about a profound transformation of the public sphere. In sum, the conceptual linkage between the strengthening of civil society and democracy translates into donors’ policy of support to the building of civil society in the post-conflict setting. Post-Conflict Governance
Closely related to democratization, and more specifically, to civil society’s role in reconstitution of legitimate political authority in the post-conflict, is the area of governance. Governance is distinct from government insofar as it is preoccupied with the manner of governance as opposed to the actions of ruling. According to Brinkerhoff (2007: 18), ‘‘[g]overnance is about the relationships between state and society.’’ Such a conception of governance goes beyond the technocratic nature of public administration and economic resource management and incorporates its sociopolitical dimension. In the postconflict environment, the aspiration to good governance is directly linked to capacity building. The concept of
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capacity denotes the ability to function effectively based on the availability of human expertise, which is also affected by the material conditions. Mass displacement and dispersal, often of best-qualified segments of population, and widespread destruction of infrastructure, including administrative buildings, is one of the features of new wars. A broad conceptualization of governance emphasizes the role of civil society and its interaction with state structures, whether they are national, regional, or local. To the extent that the core functions of governance in post-conflict societies are assuring security, achieving effectiveness, and generating legitimacy (ibid: 4–7), their substance, viability, and validation depend on the public participation and public dialogue. Therefore, civil society, as a monitor of policies and services, provided not just by national and local governments but also by a variety of external actors involved in post-conflict rehabilitation, as well as a pool of expertise on policy issues, has been significant for shaping governance outcomes, although, on its own, insufficient in many countries. The interactive understanding of ‘‘good governance’’ depends on civil society, that is an integral part of accountability mechanism. At the same time, civil society has been a welcome resource for addressing the capacity deficit in post-conflict context by providing staff for government departments or training for public administrators. Development and Peace Building
The ‘‘developmentalist’’ approach to the post-conflict peace building correlates the outbreak and recurrence of conflict to the persistence of poverty and inequality. Economic recovery from conflict encompasses competing aims of emergency assistance, rebuilding of infrastructure, and creation of a sound economic system to support long-term development. The economic recovery is simultaneously determined by the system preceding the conflict as well as transformations introduced during the conflict itself. New wars create war economies, with legacies for post-conflict characterized by the persistence of informal economies, predatory elites, patronage networks, and integration in global illicit flows. In the post-conflict context of high unemployment when formal economy is but at a standstill, the inherited clandestine structures are able to offer an instant and effective way of addressing the vital question of livelihood, as illustrated by the control of poppy production by former tribal warlords in rural Afghanistan. It may be counterintuitive that resourceendowed war-torn areas be stuck in the cycle of poverty, underdevelopment, and conflict. The so-called ‘‘resource curse’’ argument posits that the access to oil or diamonds, as in Iraq and Sierra Leone respectively, is not necessarily
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a guarantee to prosperity, equitable welfare, and even sustainable peace. Most often than not, this access gives rise to rent seeking rather than a productive economy, that perpetuates and exacerbates inequities at the root of the conflict. On the one hand, the political economy of postconflict reconstruction ought to heed the reproduction of inequalities and cleavages that initially sparked the conflict. On the other hand, it ought to simultaneously tackle the structures created through the war that adjust quickly to the dynamics of peace with the effect of distorting and subverting local and external efforts at putting the economy on its feet. Lastly, development is not a discrete area of the post-conflict efforts, and a narrow economic focus as a ‘‘stay-in-your lane’’ policy is bound to be ineffectual. The dismantling of war economies depends on advances in other areas, particularly, institution building, good governance, and rule of law that reinforce the economy-oriented effort and vice versa. Besides economic dislocation associated by war and flourishing of criminal economy there are also elements of imaginative enterpreneurial activity that survive the conflict. Civil society has an important part in such a holistic approach to development, while its roles and input change in accordance with the priorities and aims of a particular stage or aspect of economic post-conflict recovery. Responding to the breakdown of state and its functions in the immediate conflict aftermath, local and international NGOs have been able to quickly address the most urgent needs, such as food and medicine provision, or house and school reconstruction, thus carrying on their humanitarian engagement from the conflict period in a modified form. Moving on from the immediate relief stage, civil society’s role becomes that of a monitor, advisor as well as an actor in the execution of economic policy. The participatory approach to development that civil society ensures is ultimately aimed at socially inclusive development, particularly important in the post-conflict when simple projects such as road or bridge reconstruction as well as complex ones such as privatization may entrench ethnic divisions. Civil society’s contribution to sound economic policy is part and parcel of conflict prevention and building of sustainable peace. In the practice of post-conflict reconstruction there is an evident emphasis on NGOs as service providers. NGOs are viewed as potential efficient providers of social services and channels of international assistance because of their alleged distinct value orientation as compared to the public and private sector. They are perceived as low cost, participatory, flexible, innovative, and they have the ability to reach the most vulnerable.
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Accordingly, initiatives, such as those by local microcredit NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have been able to reinforce several post-conflict development aims, including employment, ethnic reconciliation through integration of the displaced, and reinforce state capacity through tax collection. Local and transnational civil society has also been an important partner in addressing the dynamics that allow the perpetuation of war economies and clandestine structures. The creation of the oversight mechanisms for the revenues from the Doba-region oil fields in wartorn Chad and its spending aimed at boosting government capacity and revenue management or the establishment of international certification scheme for rough diamonds such as the Kimberley process are illustrative. Lastly, civil society has been a vocal critic of the neoliberal orthodoxy which underpins external economic assistance, and its counterproductive impact in the post-conflict context that exacerbates poverty and stimulates shadow economies (Pugh, 2005). Marginalization, if not a complete removal of informal clandestine structures, is a necessary building block of peace. Therefore, civil society’s criticism of the developmental paradigm that provides an opportunity for these structures is a contribution to transforming a war economy into a peace economy. The Case for Caution
The recognition of a diversity of civil society roles in the overlapping areas of sustainable peace building in the postconflict is offset by the appreciation of limitations and constraints on civil society’s achievements. The post-conflict political landscape has been transnationalized within the scope of ‘‘shadow’’ or regressive globalization. At the same time, it has been positively globalized as well. Civil societies in post-conflict zones, in particular, are intertwined in multidimensional partnerships including international organizations, international NGOs, international financial institutions, foreign governments, as well as national and multilateral development agencies. Consequently, critical assessment of civil society in post-conflict is inseparable from the analysis of interaction between global forces, be they negative or positive, with the local conditions. Nonetheless, for the sake of analytical clarity, the case for caution regarding the limits of civil society’s contribution to advancing post-conflict reconstruction agenda will be addressed from the vantage point of external interventions and civil society in the local context. External Assistance and Its Contradictions
Reflecting on outside efforts to construct civil societies, Howell and Pearce pointed to the challenge concerning politics of definition and choice. External donors, they
argue, operate with ‘‘a narrower slice of the civil society cake’’ (2001: 114) than the plurality of non-state associational forms would allow. As a result, using the limited criteria of ‘‘nonprofit’’ and ‘‘nongovernmental,’’ they bias the selection of groups and constrain the choice. This line of criticism in the literature has been echoed in terms of NGO-ization of civil society with a twofold consequence. On the one hand, it has led to the cloning of local civil societies in a form of Western-style NGOs. On the other hand, it has overlooked a variety of traditional grassroots institutions, networks, practices, and actors, whose engagement could potentially be more conducive to the advancement of the aims of post-conflict reconstruction. Pouligny cites the contribution of mediums and healers (kruu and ruup) in reintegration of displaced people and refugees in Cambodia (2005: 502). Proliferation of NGOs, typical in post-conflict settings, has in many ways been counterproductive. The dependence on external donors for their existence, programs, and activities has directly undermined civil society autonomy and even its capacity. Under pressure to win funding, local NGOs uncritically adopt the donors’ agendas, which weakens their own capacity to develop their own solutions to problems they are facing (Howell & Pearce, 2001: 119–121). This issue is closely related to a short-term nature of financing. Many NGO’s are project based, and often disappear from the scene until the opportunity for the next one arises. The lack of their specialization is another side effect (World Bank, 2005: 12–15). The question of capacity also impacts on institution building. With externally funded higher salaries, the NGO-sector has attracted well-qualified individuals, who contribute to the internal brain drain. Instead, of working in the local civil service or the education system, professionals often prefer jobs as drivers or interpreters in NGOs and INGOs. The dependence of local civil society on external funding also affects the ability of civil society to be a pillar of accountability and an instrument of state legitimation critical to the post-conflict state reconstruction. Seen as being in the ‘‘pockets of international donors,’’ CSOs are derisively dubbed as ‘‘grantoids,’’ i.e., grant-eaters, or ‘‘peace-profiteers,’’ whose multiethnic activism is perceived as being induced by financial reasons rather than value orientation (Kaldor et al., 2007: 111). Consequently, the externally funded civil society becomes alienated from the grass roots, and forfeits the claim to hold the state accountable on behalf of the bottom-up. Ultimately, the external dependence of civil society results in the instrumentalization of civil society. Howell and Pearce note, civil society is ‘‘reduced to a technical
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exercise of coordination, cooperation, and joint effort, depoliticised and neutralized’’ (2001: 117). It becomes a means to an end, which can be democratization, economic growth, etc., rather than an end in itself. As a consequence, civil society loses its critical edge (ibid: 118). With it, civil society loses its credibility to be the voice and the agent of empowerment of the grass roots, as well as a corrective and counterweight to the weak post-conflict state. Critical assessments of external civil society building pave way for conceptual and practical avenues leading to qualitative improvement in the outside engagement and its effect. By contrast, critical analysis of civil society in the local post-conflict contexts reveals a ‘‘dark side’’ of civil society that is anything but conducive to peace and stability. It raises a conceptual question that does not have to do with ‘‘how’’ but with ‘‘whether’’ civil society can be a partner in peace building. Civil Society in the Local Context
The appreciation of civil society contribution to the outbreak of conflict in the first instance and to the perpetuation of identities, ideologies, and structures that undermine post-conflict reconstruction challenge the notion of civility, understood in terms of tolerance, in conceptualizing civil society. In this sense, pluralism inherent in the concept is turned on its head, and denotes the presence and endorsement of extreme, illiberal, and exclusive ideas and interests by non-state actors. These can be Westernstyle NGOs; religious groups; traditional social formations such as clans, tribes, and kinship groups; voluntary associations, etc. New wars in the age of globalization, by and large, owe their ferocity and brutality to the bottom-up nationalism, which is conveniently manipulated by state structures. The examples of the Belgrade-based Serbian Association of Writers and the Radio Te´le´vision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in Rwanda, both of which played an important role in constructing hatred toward the ethnic ‘‘other’’ and moderates belonging to one’s group in their respective environments, are telling. The path to war and wars themselves have led to diversification of civil society actors involved in violence and extreme ideologies that legitimize it. Therefore, private militias, paramilitary groups, local criminal gangs, transnational diasporas, exclusively oriented charities and NGOs, groups at home and abroad using modern media including satellite broadcasts as well as websites, epitomize new wars. Whether these are extreme members of the Tamil or Croatian diaspora, Serbian war criminal Arkan’s ‘‘Tigers,’’ or Sierra Leone’s ‘‘West Side Boys,’’ all of them are part of society, but not of one that is nonviolent and tolerant.
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Post-conflict reconstruction takes place in the framework of a war–peace continuum since peace after a new war is its continuation by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz. The ‘‘dark side’’ of the civil society landscape provides ample evidence of such continuation. Postconflict civil society is a site of vigorous contestation of identity politics, pitting liberal groups advocating reckoning with war crimes and extreme groups promoting their denial couched in the language of victimization. Yet, at the same time, civil societies in multiethnic contexts, as in Kosovo or Sri Lanka, remain ethnically segmented and unable to meaningfully bridge the sectarian divide. The perpetuation of exclusive identities at the grass roots is a major obstacle to the democratization project. At the same time, the penetration of the state by shady ethnic and transnational networks, rooted in war economies, sabotages the goals of good governance, rule of law, and development. Civil society nominally loses is autonomy from the state by nurturing the relationship of patronage with the corrupt elites and political parties. However, in actual fact, it effectively constitutes itself as a parallel site of power and authority. Likewise, its actors can provide an outright alternative to state, as illustrated by the provision of a minimum wage for coca pickers and pensions for retired guerrilla by Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia (FARC). Such positioning of civil society in relation to the state in need of reconstruction identifies civil society as a structural impediment to peace-building enterprise. However, the separation of civil society’s adverse effect on post-conflict reconstruction into structural versus ideological is artificial. The case of ‘‘ethnic privatization’’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina exemplifies the linkage between ‘‘technical’’ issues of governance and rule of law with exclusive identity politics.
Future Directions Civil Society in Post-Conflict: A Verdict?
The analysis of civil society in the post-conflict while taking into account the complex legacy of conflict in the global age and multiple aspirations of post-conflict peace building defies a singular verdict. Just as the analysis of a variety of contributions as well as limitations does not warrant uncritical enthusiasm regarding the positive contribution of civil society to post-conflict peace building; there is no room for its outright dismissal even though civil society can be the spoiler of post-conflict recovery. The critique of external civil society-building efforts with all their counterproductive consequences ought to take into account a weak and dysfunctional post-conflict state. Not only can it not provide the enabling structure for
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existence and flourishing of civil society, as it does in established democracies, it also often perceives and treats civil society as a rival. Consequently, it obstructs civil society activities and its expansion through regulation, while discrediting the NGOs ideologically as Western ‘‘imports’’ and ‘‘mercenaries.’’ With post-conflict civil societies vitally dependent on external support, the preoccupation of scholars and practitioners concerning modalities of assistance to effectively and constructively contribute to post-conflict reconstruction through civil society building including the openness to the diversity of local grassroots organizations has been a worthwhile effort. However, it also requires further understanding of ‘‘uncivil society’’ and its expansion in the post-conflict. In particular, more research is needed to generate understanding of its interaction and interference with peace building. The study of mechanisms utilized by ‘‘uncivil’’ society to achieve legitimation in local contexts, and effective ways of challenging such a distorted appropriation of the concept of civil society is long overdue. The success of post-conflict reconstruction is dependent on mutually supportive state and civil society building. The asymmetric prioritization in either area is conducive neither to democracy nor to peace. The transnational post-conflict setting is permeated by forces both of progressive and regressive globalization. The ultimate challenge after a war and bloodshed is to create, expand, and reinforce the space of civility and tolerance. This cannot be accomplished satisfactorily, especially from the outside, without local knowledge and information, whose ultimate authority and conduit is local civil society in the variety of its forms.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society, Violence and War ▶ Good Governance ▶ Government–Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Identity ▶ NGOs and Socio-Economic Development ▶ NGOs and Sustainable Development ▶ Peace and Conflict Resolution Organizations ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Uncivil Society
References/Further Readings Brinkerhoff, D. W. (2007) Introduction – Governance challenges in fragile states. In D. W. Brinkerhoff (Ed.) Governance in post-conflict societies: Rebuilding fragile states (pp. 1–21). London/New York: Routledge. Cohen, S. (2001) States of denial: Knowing about atrocitities and suffering. Cambridge: Polity; Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Duffield, M. (2000). Globalization, transborder trade, and war economies. In M. Berdal & D. M. Malone (Eds.) Greed and grievance: Economic agendas in civil wars (pp. 69–89). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Howell, J., & Pearce, J. (2001) Civil society and development: A critical exploration. Boulder, CO/London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Kaldor, M. (2006) New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity. Kaldor, M., Kostovicova, D., & Said, Y. (2007) War and peace: The role of global civil society. In M. Kaldor Global civil society 2006/7 (pp. 94–121). London: Sage. Muenkler, H. (2005). The new wars. Cambridge: Polity. Pouligny, B. (2005). Civil society and post-conflict peacebuilding: Ambiguities of international programmes aimed at building ‘‘new’’ societies. Security Dialogue, 36(4), 495–510. Pugh, M. (2005). The political economy of peacebuilding: A critical theory perspective. International Journal of Peace Studies, 10(2), 23–42. World Bank (2005). Engaging civil society organizations in conflictaffected and fragile states. Report No. 32538-GLB. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank.
Civil Society Indicators and Indexes V. FINN HEINRICH Transparency International, Melville, South Africa
Introduction For most of its history, the concept of civil society has been confined to the realms of political theory and philosophy. From the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment via Gramsci’s cultural hegemony perspective to the revival of the term by Eastern European dissidents in the 1980s, civil society was always used in the context of imagining a normative ideal-type society. In addition, these various philosophical traditions differed quite strongly in their definition of the concept and its boundaries, leading commentators to lament the conceptual confusion around the term and questioning its usefulness for contemporary sociopolitical analysis (Knight & Hartnell, 2001; Grimond, 2002). Given this ideological and normative baggage, the operationalization of the concept for empirical research – a necessary prerequisite for the development of indicators and indices – is an extremely challenging undertaking. In fact, the applicability and relevance of civil society for empirical–analytical research is a contested issue: while there are scholars who regard the term as an essentially normative and theoretical construct (Tester, 1992; Foley & Edwards, 1998), there is a growing number of researchers who contend that civil society can and should be added to the repertoire of
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macro-level concepts used for sociopolitical analysis (Edwards, 2004: vi; Anheier, 2004). However, those looking for empirical data on civil society are likely to be confronted with a gaping hole. Due to the tendency of official statistical agencies to be preoccupied with either state or private sector institutions, the third sector – which is often used synonymously with civil society – largely remained empirical terra incognito (Anheier, 2004: 11). As a consequence, up to the end of the twentieth century one does not find any explicit quantitative empirical work under the rubric of civil society. This has changed quite profoundly because of a number of special research projects dedicated to analyzing ‘‘real existing civil societies,’’ and due to several attempts at conceptualizing and measuring the concept by scholars working in the empirical–analytical research tradition.
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Definition While it is not a standing term used in the social sciences, civil society indicators can be defined as specific measures of pertinent aspects of the phenomenon, which lend themselves to operationalization and measurement and to tracking changes over time. A good indicator should meet the SMART standard, i.e., it should be (analytically) sound, measurable, accessible/available, relevant, and timely. A civil society index is a composite indicator, which combines the individual indicators (or variables) in a single measure. For the development of indicators and indices, an underlying theoretical framework which helps the researcher define and select the relevant indicators and organize them in a way that accurately reflects the assumptions about their interrelationships is of crucial importance.
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Historical Background Up to the 1970s, social science data were highly skewed toward economic issues. Despite the emergence of a social indicator movement in the 1970s, empirical information on civil society has remained scarce. The only quantitative aspect of civil society which has been covered by largescale international surveys for several decades is the extent of the population’s participation in voluntary organizations. When in the late 1990s civil society became one of the key buzzwords among the international policy and development community and academics alike, the dire state of civil society data triggered the establishment of a substantive number of international research projects on civil society and related issues. The following projects are the most widely known: ● Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (http://www.jhu.edu/cnp/), which analyzes the
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scope and economic contributions of the nonprofit sector in more than 40 countries. The project is also working with the UN statistical division to introduce basic indicators on the nonprofit sector in the official reporting system of national statistical agencies. CIVICUS Civil Society Index Project (www.civicus.org) – a participatory and multi-method approach to assess the state of civil society in more than 50 countries. Global Civil Society Yearbook (http://www.lse.ac.uk/ Depts/global/researchgcspub.htm), published by the London School of Economics, charts key themes and challenges for global civil society in an annual publication. Civil Society and Governance Programme at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex (http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/civsoc/), which from 1998 to 2001 examined civil society’s relations with government in 22 predominantly developing countries. Citizens and Governance Project, run by the Commonwealth Foundation in 2000 (http://www. commonwealthfoundation.com/uploads/documents/ cg_global_synthesis.pdf), which used a participatory methodology to investigate people’s conceptions of a good society and the role of civil society in governance in Commonwealth countries. ARVIN Tool (http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/ESSD/ sdvext.nsf/PrintFriendly/C386845885F530EB85256 EA700 64EB14?Opendocument) developed by the World Bank, which seeks to assess the enabling environment for civic engagement and has been applied in a number of developing countries. USAID NGO Sustainability Index for Eastern Europe and Eurasia (http://www.usaid.gov/locations/ europe_eurasia/dem_gov/ngoindex/), which has been generated annually since 1998 by USAID to assess the sustainability of the NGO sector in the region. World Value Survey (http://www.worldvaluessurvey. org/), a large-scale international public opinion survey, which includes questions on civic participation. The survey data forms the basis for a number of crossnational indices on civil society and social capital (e.g., Norris, 2002; Howard, 2003).
Key Issues As a consequence of the increasing availability of crossnational data on civil society assembled via the projects listed above, as well as of the growing attention by comparative social researchers to issues of conceptualization, a vibrant debate about how to conceptualize, operationalize,
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and measure civil society has ensued (e.g., Heinrich, 2005; Anheier, 2005; Sokolowski & Salamon, 2005; Howard, 2005; Kubik, 2005). Conceptualizing Civil Society
Civil society is clearly one of the most contested and most challenging social science concepts to conceptualize and measure. On a basic level, one can distinguish between normative–theoretical approaches to civil society, which are preoccupied with developing a vision for what civil society should be like and empirical– analytical perspectives, which focus on analyzing real existing civil societies. A second distinction can be made between conceptualizations of civil society treating the phenomenon as synonymous with a ‘‘good society’’ and those defining it as a distinct sphere or sector within society at large (see Table 1). Almost all studies which employ indicators and indices fall into the lower right-hand box in Table 1, with the notable exception of Putnam’s civic community index, which measures the ‘‘civicness’’ of an entire community as opposed the characteristics of the nonprofit/ civil society sector within a community (Putnam, 1993). Civil Society’s Boundaries: However, within the dominant empirical-analytical approach to the civil society sphere/sector, there is considerable diversity in terms of defining civil society’s boundaries (extension) and core dimensions (intension). Regarding the extension of the concept, two different approaches can be distinguished. First, the structural-operational definition, which focuses on the following key characteristics of organizations to classify them as part of civil society: organized, private, nonprofit-distributing, self-governing, and voluntary (Salamon & Anheier, 1997). Second, a functional approach which puts emphasis on the nature of the activities performed in civil society, which are usually defined as the expression of interests in the public sphere (Heinrich, 2004, Uphoff & Krishna, 2004). The choice of ‘‘function versus form’’ concept has important downstream implications for the development of indicators. For example,
Civil Society Indicators and Indexes. Table 1 Civil society concepts Normative– theoretical Property of society (a ‘‘good society’’) Object within society (sphere/sector)
Empirical– analytical
while the structural-operational definition leads to a focus on organizational indicators, the latter approach implies a wider perspective, also including nonorganized civic behavior. Civil Society’s Core Dimensions: A further key conceptual choice concerns the identification of civil society’s core characteristics, which are to be operationalized and measured via specific indicators. Here, the lacking consensus around the term’s core meaning and the underdeveloped body of theorizing on civil society have proven to be crucial impediments for the development of a widely agreed operational concept. While a common operational concept is lacking, there is broad agreement about the multidimensional nature of civil society, requiring a composite index approach involving multiple indicators. As regards the key dimensions of civil society, recent research has identified a convergence toward a twodimensional conceptualization of structural and cultural features which mirrors a similar emerging orthodoxy in the social capital literature (Heinrich, 2005; Van Deth, 2003). While the structural dimension, which examines the extent of civic participation as well as the key features of organized civil society, is well-established in the literature, the cultural dimension is a rather new addition and remains still underdeveloped in terms of operational tools and measures. These cultural facets relate to the norms, values, and interests expressed in civil society; by focusing on the content of civic activities they complement the structural dimension, which is mainly concerned with the quantity and form of these activities.
Civil Society Indicators
There is a wide range of different civil society indicators in use, which can be classified according to their data type and data sources. On the one hand, there are objective indicators which use information obtained from official statistical agencies or public opinion surveys. Some examples are: ● Share of paid employment in nonprofit sector (Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project) ● Percentage of population who is a member of at least one voluntary organization (World Value Survey) ● Percentage of people who trust others (LSE Global Civil Society Index) On the other hand, there are subjective indicators which involve an intermediary step between the raw data and the indicator score. This step is usually undertaken by experts, who assign the indicator score based on the
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available information and based on their own knowledge. There is an extensive range of subjective indicators, primarily generated by USAID’s NGO Sustainability Index and the CIVICUS Civil Society Index. Civil Society Indices
Due to improved data availability, there are a growing number of composite indicators on civil society. The following indices are available for a substantive number of countries: 1. The Global Civil Society Index developed by the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project at Johns Hopkins University (Salamon & Sokolowski, 2004) 2. The Civil Society Strength Index developed on the basis of the CIVICUS Civil Society Index data (Heinrich, 2008) 3. LSE’s Global Civil Society Index (Anheier & Stares, 2002), which measures the extent to which a country’s civil society participates in global civil society 4. USAID’s NGO Sustainability Index for post-Communist Europe and Eurasia 5. Marc Howard’s measure of organizational memberships (Howard, 2003) 6. Pippa Norris’ Social Capital Index (Norris, 2002: 150–151) Research by the author has found moderately strong correlations among the first four indices, while the latter two measures, which rely on a limited number of indicators based on the World Value Survey, often yield substantively different results from the other indices (Heinrich, forthcoming). However, in general and different from composite measures in many other areas of the social sciences, such as democracy, there are considerable differences in individual country ratings and rankings across the entire range of civil society indices. To illustrate this with an example: The Czech Republic occupies a low position on Howard’s measure and the Johns Hopkins Index, a medium position on Norris’ Social Capital Index, but a relatively high ranking on the Civil Society Strength Index and the LSE index. These substantial differences cannot be attributed solely to the different sample compositions, but are likely to be a consequence of the vastly different operationalizations, scarce data as well as the limited validity of the available data sources. Operational concepts range from using organizational membership as the sole indicator of civil society (Howard), to a focus on economic features (Johns Hopkins Index) or the NGO sector (USAID), while operationalizations which span civil society’s multilevel nature of micro-level (individual behavior), meso-level (organizational characteristics) and macro-level (organized civil
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society) are rare (Heinrich, forthcoming). In addition, each index is plagued by a specific set of validity concerns, such as the subjectivity of expert assessments (CIVICUS, USAID), the doubtful cross-cultural validity of public opinion surveys (Howard, Norris, LSE), or the existence of a large gap between concept and indicator, such as in the case of the Johns Hopkins Index, which uses primarily economic indicators to measure the sociopolitical concept of civil society.
Future Directions Empirical research on civil society has grown significantly since the turn of the millennium. The initial approach of using organizational membership as the sole indicator for civil society has been superseded by multidimensional composite indicators, which are designed to capture the various facets of this complex macro-phenomenon. However, in general, civil society indicators and indices are still a nascent area of research which has to rely on imperfect measures and limited data sources. Future research should focus on a number of key challenges. First, existing indices rarely cover more than 50 countries with a strong overrepresentation of OECD countries. Thus, the development of larger and more globally representative datasets remains a key task for the future. While the process of including economic data on the nonprofit sector in the official reporting by statistical agencies is certainly an important step forward, the political, social, and cultural aspects of civil society are likely to remain outside of the remit of statistical agencies and therefore require additional private efforts to data collection. Second, the cultural dimension of civil society remains underdeveloped, conceptually as well as empirically: How civil societies differ in terms of the values, norms, and interests they espouse and promote is a question that has not been addressed by the scholarly community and for which valid indicators remain scarce. Third, developers of civil society indices need to pay more attention to their underlying concepts. Too often, the concepts of civil society, social capital, third sector, and associational life are conflated even though they relate to substantively different phenomena. In addition, researchers should specify which specific characteristic of civil society they intend to capture with their measure, since notions of civil society’s strength, sustainability, quality, or capacity – while related – imply different choices in terms of the selection of indicators. Last, but not least, since the scholarly community is still far from having established a widely
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accepted composite measure of civil society, ongoing engagement among researchers involved in the crucial, yet highly complex, task of measuring civil society is likely to be key to advancing the field.
Uphoff, N., & Krishna, A. (2004). Civil society and public sector institutions: More than a zero-sum relationship. Public Administration & Development, 24(4), 357–372. Van Deth, J. W. (2003). Measuring social capital: Orthodoxies and continuing controversies. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 6(1), 79–92.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society, Definitions of and Approaches ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Values
References/Further Readings Anheier, H., & Stares, S. (2002). Introducing the global civil society index. In H. Anheier, M. Glasius, & M. Kaldor (Eds.), Global civil society yearbook (pp. 241–254). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anheier, H. K. (2004). Civil society: Measurement, evaluation, policy. London: Earthscan. Anheier, H. K. (2005). Measure for measure: A commentary on Heinrich and the state of civil society indicators research. Journal of Civil Society, 1(3), 241–246. Edwards, M. (2004). Civil society. London: Polity. Foley, M. W., & Edwards, B. (1998). Beyond Tocqueville. Civil society and social capital in comparative perspective. American Behavioral Scientist, 42, 5–20. Grimond, J. (2002). Civil society. The Economist, The World in 2002. London: The Economist. Heinrich, V. F. (2004). Assessing and strengthening civil society worldwide. A project description of the CIVICUS civil society index: A participatory needs assessment & action-planning tool for civil society. Johannesburg: CIVICUS. Heinrich, V. F. (2005). Studying civil society across the world. Exploring the thorny issues of conceptualization and measurement. Journal of Civil Society, 1(3), 211–228. Heinrich, V. F. (2008). What makes civil society strong? Measuring and analysing the strength of civil society across the world. Ph.D. thesis. Hagen: Fernuniversita¨t Hagen, forthcoming. Howard, M. M. (2003). The weakness of civil society in post-Communist Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, M. M. (2005). Conceptual and methodological suggestions for improving cross-national measures of civil society: Commentary on Heinrich. Journal of Civil Society, 1(3), 229–234. Knight, B., & Hartnell, C. (2001). ‘Civil society – Is it anything more than a metaphor for hope for a better world?’ Alliance, 6(4), 16. Kubik, J. (2005). How to study civil society: The state of the art and what to do next. East European Politics & Societies, 19, 105–30. Norris, P. (2002). Democratic Phoenix. Reinventing political activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work – Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Salamon, L. M., & Anheier, H. (1997). Defining the nonprofit sector. A cross-national analysis. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Salamon, L. M., & Sokolowski, S. W. (2004). Measuring civil society: The Johns Hopkins Global Civil Society Index. In: M. Salamon & S. W. Sokolowski (Eds.), Global civil society. Volume 2. Dimensions of the nonprofit sector (pp. 61–92). Bloomfield: Kumarian Press. Sokolowski, W., & Salamon, L. (2005). Mirror, mirror on the wall? Commentary on Heinrich. Journal of Civil Society, 1(3), 235–240. Tester, K. (1992). Civil society. London: Routledge.
Civil Society Theory: Aristotle MARTY SULEK Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, Farmland, IN, USA
Aristotle’s Life Aristotle (384–322 BCE) is one of the most important philosophers of antiquity, and a founding figure of Western philosophy. A student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle founded the Lyceum, one of the earliest and most influential philosophical schools of the ancient world. By some accounts, he also invented political science as a distinct academic discipline (Strauss, 1978: 21). There is a rich biographical tradition on Aristotle in ancient sources, of which Du¨ring (1957) provides a useful scholarly inventory. One of the most extensive extant ancient accounts is provided by Diogenes Laertius (‘‘DL’’) in the fifth book of his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, written sometime in the second century AD. In the introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Politics, Lord (1984) also provides a speculative biography, extrapolated from the biographical record, that traces the philosopher’s likely, though for political reasons never explicitly stated, political activities. Aristotle was born in 384 in Stageiria, a Greek colony on the Chalcidice peninsula, on the Gulf of Strymon, in the northern Aegean Sea. He remained a citizen of Stageiria his entire life, despite living elsewhere for most of it. Later in life, he performed great services for his home polis, including drafting its written code of laws. His mother, Phaestis, originally hailed from Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, and his father, Nicomachus, was an Asclepiad, retained as court physician by King Amyntas II of Macedon. Aristotle thus received his early education in an aristocratic setting at the Macedonian royal court. His mother died when he was still very young, and his father died when he was ten. Thereafter, he was brought up under the guardianship of Proxenus of Atarneaus, the husband of his sister, Arimneste. At the age of 17, Aristotle moved to Athens to pursue his advanced education. He may have initially enrolled in
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Isocrates’ oratorical school, as evinced by his keen interest in deliberative and forensic rhetoric and logic. The fact that Plato was away in Sicily in 367 would support this thesis. In any event, Aristotle likely enrolled at Plato’s Academy fairly soon after his arrival in Athens. It is commonly held that he studied there continuously until Plato’s death in May of 347; DL, on the other hand, cites sources contending he seceded from the Academy while Plato was still alive. Chroust (1967) offers a plausible scenario in which Aristotle likely left Athens in the autumn of 348, due to anti-Macedonian sentiment among the Athenians arising from events of the Olynthian War earlier that year. Around the same time, Aristotle successfully petitioned the king of Macedon, Phillip II, to restore Stageiria, which the Macedonian army had destroyed during the conflict. In any event, Plato was succeeded as head of the Academy by his nephew, Speusippus, which may or may not have contributed to Aristotle’s move to Asia Minor shortly thereafter. At the invitation of Hermias, the ‘‘tyrant’’ of Atarneaus, Aristotle and another fellow alumnus of the Academy, Xenocrates, relocated to Assos; a polis located in the Troad, the peninsula situated along the southeast shore of the strategic Dardanelles Straight. Hermias had studied at the Academy in his youth, where he first met Aristotle. He went on to found a respectable sized kingdom encompassing the regions of Aeolis, the Troad and Mysia, which he carved from out of the border regions of the then decaying Persian Empire. Under the patronage of Hermias, two other Academy alumni – Erastus and Coriscus – had established a school in Assos. Hermias would thus appear to have been assembling a circle of prominent Platonic philosophers, possibly to act as advisors, emulating a long Greek tradition of political leaders employing wise counsel: from Agamemnon with Nestor and Odysseus, to Pericles with Anaxagoras and Protagoras. While living as a guest of Hermias, Aristotle married his host’s adopted daughter or niece, Pythias (who is also described as Hermias’ concubine by some of DL’s sources). She bore Aristotle a daughter whom they also named Pythias. During that time, Aristotle conducted research on botany and zoology on the nearby island of Lesbos along with his pupil, Theophrastus, who was also an alumnus of the Academy. After Hermias was captured while attempting to put down a rebellion, and was tortured and killed in 342/1 by the forces of the Persian King Artaxerxes III, Aristotle fled to Mytilene on Lesbos. The following year, he was invited by Philip II to tutor his son, Alexander III, then age 13, who would go on to become Alexander the Great. At age 16, Alexander was appointed regent of Macedon while his father was away conducting a
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military campaign against Byzantium. Aristotle, released from his teaching obligations, retired to Stageiria. After the death of Phillip in 336 and Alexander’s ascension to the Macedonian throne, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded his own school the following year. It was named the Lyceum after the precinct it occupied, which was dedicated to Apollo Lyseius and the Muses, and was located northeast of Athens, just beyond the city walls. There, Aristotle rented some buildings, including a gymnasium, and equipped the new school with a large library and natural history museum, toward which Alexander reputedly contributed 800 talents (the modern equivalent of approximately US$240 million). Aristotle presented his lectures on the walkways [perı´patos] that ran through the Lyceum’s tree-lined groves, which led to its members being called Peripatetics. During Aristotle’s second stay in Athens, his first wife died. He lived thereafter with Herpylis of Stageiria, who bore him a son, Nicomachus, after whom his most definitive ethical treatise, Nicomachean Ethics, is named. Aristotle continued teaching at the Lyceum until Alexander’s death in 323, after which Athens led an unsuccessful Greek revolt against Macedonian rule, known as the Lamian War. During the war, which lasted a year, the Athenians proceeded to persecute anyone connected with Macedonian rule. Aristotle, a close associate of the Macedonian court and a critic of democracy, was, like Socrates before him, prosecuted for impiety; in this case, in connection with a poem he had composed years before honoring Hermias. Remarking that he would not allow Athens to ‘‘sin twice against philosophy,’’ (Marcianus, Vita Aristotelis 41) he instead withdrew to his mother’s family’s estate at Chalcis, where he died a year later of an intestinal disorder (although some of DL’s sources claim he drank poison). Upon Aristotle’s death, he was succeeded as head of the Lyceum and the Peripatetic school of philosophy by his old pupil and friend, Theophrastus.
Aristotle’s Writings After Aristotle’s death, the manuscript originals of his treatises and other unpublished works were bequeathed to Theophrastus and remained at the Lyceum as his property. Both Strabo (Geography 13.1.54) and Plutarch (Sulla 26) record that Theophrastus willed his library, or that portion of which included his and Aristotle’s writings, to a certain Neleus, who transported it to Scepsis in Asia Minor. There it was hidden in a cellar by Neleus’ heirs, where it lay neglected and forgotten until the beginning of the first century BCE, when it was discovered and purchased by Apellicon, a rich book collector and Aristotle enthusiast. He brought it back to Athens and attempted to
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repair the damaged manuscripts by filling the gaps in the texts, but only succeeded in producing an edition ‘‘full of errors.’’ After the Roman conquest of Athens in 86 BCE, Apellicon’s collection was acquired by Sulla, the Roman statesman and general, who brought it to Rome, where it eventually came into the hands of Andronicus of Rhodes. Andronicus edited and, around AD 30, published the definitive ancient editions of the works of both Aristotle and Theophrastus, along with extensive commentary on the authorial authenticity of each work. This edition is the source from which all surviving manuscripts of Aristotle ultimately derive. The definitive modern edition of Aristotle’s works in Greek was published between 1831 and 1837 by August Immanuel Bekker, from which the standard page references to his works are derived. Aristotle’s writings fall into two broad categories: published works [ekdedome´noi lo´goi] almost none of which have survived, and lecture notes [akroatikoı` lo´goi] derived from the manuscripts willed to Theophrastus. DL, writing in the second century AD, identifies 156 titles attributed to Aristotle totaling 445,270 lines. Unfortunately, only a small fraction, currently comprising 48 titles, have survived to the modern period, including some likely pseudonymous works. Of the surviving manuscripts, only Athenian Constitution, discovered in 1890 on two Egyptian papyri, is thought to derive from his published works. Almost all of Aristotle’s extant works, then, are notes and treatises not originally intended for publication. These surviving works may be arranged into five categories, according to the subjects they address: logic, metaphysics, natural science, ethics/politics, and rhetoric/poetry. This article is, of course, primarily concerned with his works on ethics and politics, the most important of which are Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and the Athenian Constitution.
Aristotle on Civil Society Before examining how Aristotle’s ideas relate to civil society, it is useful to first review what, exactly, is meant by ‘‘civil society’’ in modern parlance. Contemporary conceptions of civil society may be arranged into three distinct, but mutually supportive, categories encompassing: associational life, the public sphere, and the good society (Edwards, p. 91). ‘‘Associational life’’ theories, primarily found in the social sciences, define civil society as a function of the various organizations that constitute the voluntary, non-profit sector. ‘‘Public sphere’’ theories, by comparison, view civil society as the site of public debate – including independent media, civic forums, or even just plain talk among citizens – where consensus is
forged through open-ended discussion of issues of public concern. ‘‘Good society’’ theories, finally, view civil society as a normative concept describing the type of society in which people would (or should) ideally like to live as free and reasonable citizens. Aristotle addresses all three modern conceptions of civil society in his extant works: associational life is primarily dealt with in Politics and Athenian Constitution (‘‘AC ’’), the public sphere as an arena of debate in Rhetoric, and the ideal of the good society in Politics. Aristotle’s Politics actually forms the second part of a single treatise, of which Nicomachean Ethics (‘‘NE ’’) is the first. In NE, Aristotle examines what he considers the highest good of human life: namely, the happiness attained through striving for excellence [areteˆ]. Politics, on the other hand, primarily examines which political regimes are most conducive to their citizens’ pursuit of excellence. Aristotle defines areteˆ as the attainment of a virtuous mean between two extremes of bad behaviour (1106b). The preeminent classical virtue of courage [andreiooˆ] is thus defined as the mean situated between the extremes of fearfulness or lack of confidence, and excessive fearlessness or rashness. Failure to attain this virtuous mean can thus lead to the vices of either cowardice or foolhardiness. Aristotle, along with many other Greek thinkers, posits free will as a precondition of virtue. In contrast to modern notions, though, he defines voluntary action [hekousios praxeis] both in terms of the absence of coercion, as well as full knowledge of one’s actions (1110a); for it would be absurd to refer to an action as voluntary, he goes on to argue, when it results in consequences unintended by the acting agent (1111a). Aristotle describes seven major and six minor virtues in NE, the major ones being: courage [andreiooˆ] (1115a), moderation [soˆphrosuneˆ] (1117b), generosity [eleutherioteˆs] (1119b), magnificence [megaloprepeia] (1122a), magnanimity [megalopsuchia] (1123b), and justice [dikeˆ] (1129a), plus a range of intellectual virtues (1138b-1152b) corresponding to the classical virtue of wisdom [sophia]. Aristotle’s taxonomy of areteˆ contrasts in interesting ways from earlier Homeric conceptions, where it is primarily associated with personal talents. In the Iliad, likely written in the first half of the eighth century BCE, areteˆ is defined in terms of courage (11.760, 11.90, 13.275, 14.117, 22.268), strength (8.535, 22.242), speed (20.411), talents generally (15.642), and horsemanship (23.571). The virtue of gods (9.498) and the speed and mettle of horses (23.276 & 23.374) are also mentioned. In the Odyssey, likely written in the latter half of the eighth century, areteˆ is also employed to describe courage (12.211), including how Odysseus vies in courage with his father
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(24.515), but it also encompasses a much wider array of virtuous behaviors. It describes the qualities of ‘‘wily’’ Odysseus (4.725, 4.815, 18.205), his faithful wife, ‘‘heedful’’ Penelope (2.205, 18.251, 19.124, 24.193, & 196), and the foremost among her ‘‘haughty’’ suitors (4.629, 21.187), their talent for war craft in particular (22.244). Areteˆ is used a number of times in an abstract sense, with no reference to any particular person or quality (8.237, 8.240, 8.244, 8.329, 8.329, 14.402, 17.322). It is also used in a rather novel fashion, finally, to describe success (13.198) and the good leadership under which a people prosper (19.114). Conceptions of areteˆ evolved considerably further by the fifth century BCE, reflecting significant developments in Greek society as a whole. Protagoras, the greatest sophist and reputed teacher of virtue in the classical age of Greece, defined areteˆ primarily in terms of courage [andreiooˆ], wisdom [sophia], justice [dikeˆ], moderation [soˆphrosuneˆ], and piety [hosioteˆs] (Plato, Protagoras, 329c–e). Socrates presents a remarkably similar description of areteˆ in his enumeration of the virtues of the citizens of the perfectly just polis, although he drops piety (Plato, Republic, Bk IV, 427e). Aristotle also excludes piety from his list of the virtues in NE, but notably adds the qualities of generosity, magnificence, and magnanimity. Generosity or ‘‘liberality’’ [eleutherioteˆs] is derived from the word for freedom [eleutheros], and is etymologically related to eleutherios, meaning to speak or act like a free man. Magnificence [megaloprepeia] is defined as generosity on a grand scale, and is derived from the word prepoˆ, meaning to be conspicuously fitting. Magnanimity or ‘‘great-souledness’’ [megalopsuchia], finally, is proper pursuit of the great honors associated with public service (cf. Plato, Republic, Bk III, 402b). Among the minor virtues, Aristotle also includes a ‘‘virtue concerned with small honors’’ (1125b) that bears the same relation to generosity that magnanimity bears to magnificence. The Greek conception of areteˆ thus substantially evolved from the eighth to the fourth centuries BCE. In the archaic period, it initially defined excellences such as courage, strength, and skill, the benefits of which are largely confined to the person possessing them. By the classical age, though, its meaning had expanded to include public virtues, such as piety and justice, that emphasized one’s obligations to others, such as the gods and one’s fellow man. This latter, public-spirited conception of areteˆ receives its most sophisticated expression by Aristotle, who emphasizes the crucial importance of voluntary public service, both great and small, to the formation of excellence in human character, and thereby to both the experience of pleasure and the attainment of
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happiness. By dropping piety and adding generosity, in tandem with the virtue concerned with small honors, Aristotle’s conception of areteˆ also aptly reflects both the secularizing and democratizing trends current in Greek society during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Politics [Politikoˆn] contains Aristotle’s most definitive theoretical treatment of the concept of civil society. In fact, the nature of civil society forms the very essence of the subject addressed by the treatise, which opens with the introductory observation: "
Every state [po´lin] is as we see a sort of partnership [koinoˆnı´an], and every partnership is formed with a view to some good [agathou] (since all the actions of all mankind are done with a view to what they think is good). It is therefore evident that, while all partnerships aim at some good, the partnership that is the most supreme of all and includes all the others does so most of all, and aims at the most supreme of all goods; and this is the partnership entitled the state [polis], the political association [koinoˆnı´a he politikeˆ]. (1252a)
Aristotle’s conception of political association, or koinoˆnı´a he politikeˆ, is roughly synonymous with the modern theoretical notion of civil society (Lord, 1987; Kumar, 1993). Aristotle is the first political thinker to employ the term politikeˆn koinoˆnı´an in a technical sense, to describe a particular socio-political phenomenon. Plato employs the phrase only once in his authentic works (Alcibiades I, 125e), but with nothing approaching Aristotle’s theoretical intent or precision; koinonı´a is prominent, though, in the definition of politeı´a formulated by Platonists in the late fourth century BCE Academy (Plato, Definitions, 413e). As Aristotle conceives it, every individual pursues what they consider good, and enters into partnerships with others they believe to hold similar conceptions of the good in order to further that end. The political association, in turn, channels these collective pursuits to serve the common goal of attaining the good society; in the same way that an architect directs the activities of various tradesmen in order to construct a sound building, that being the supreme goal that determines their activities. Aristotle employs two interrelated methodologies in Politics to develop his theoretical understanding of political association: analyzing the composite whole by breaking it down into uncompounded elements; and studying its origins and early development (1252a). The oldest and most fundamental partnership in civil society is the union of male and female, brought about by natural instinct for the continuance of the species. With the addition of children, other family members, and servants or slaves, this union
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becomes a household [oikı´a]. The partnership of several households, in turn, forms a village [koˆmeˆ], while the partnership of several villages results in the city-state [po´lis]. Hence, Aristotle concludes, the polis exists by nature, as it constitutes the end or purpose for which the other forms of partnership exist (1252b). Elsewhere, he mentions several other forms of association prevalent in ancient Greek society that contributed toward the feeling of friendship [philı´a] between members of the political partnership [politikeˆn koinoˆnı´an] (1281a), including: clans [genoˆn], brotherhoods [phratrı´ai], and clubs for sacrificial rights and social recreations [thysı´ai kaı` diagoˆgaı` toyˆ syzeˆn] (1280b); tribes [phyla`s] and demes [deˆmoys] (1300a); and political clubs [etairioˆn airoyˆntai] (1305b). Man is, by nature, a political animal, Aristotle asserts, and ‘‘a man who is incapable of entering into partnership [koinoˆneıˆn], or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state [po´lioˆs], so that he must be either a lower animal or a god.’’ (1253a) Aristotle derives additional evidence for the intrinsically political nature of human beings from the fact that we are the only animal to employ speech, or logos, which ‘‘is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and wrong’’ (ibid). Besides distinguishing humans from the other animals, then, speech also grants us our unique ability to perceive and communicate what is ‘‘good and bad, right and wrong, and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household [oikı´an] and a city-state [po´lin]’’ (ibid). Precisely because of the unique moral and political capacities of human nature, it is particularly necessary to habituate people to virtue through participation in civil society. For just as ‘‘man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice’’ (ibid). Civil society thus plays a crucial role in directing the polis, as ‘‘the decision of what is just, is the regulation of the political partnership [politikeˆs koinoˆnı´as]’’ (1253b). Every partnership is composed of two elements: that which commands, and that which obeys (1254a). Aristotle considers slavery a natural condition of human existence, but condemns the conventional practices of legal slavery (1255a). A conventional or legal slave is someone enslaved by force, whether through capture in war or by defaulting on debts secured by their personal freedom. A natural slave, on the other hand, is someone incapable of exercising reason and foresight, usually due to excessive slavishness toward their passions. In modern parlance, this might mean people incapable of acting in their best interest due to mental or physical defect, such as
compulsive behaviors. A natural master, on the other hand, is someone capable of acting not only in his own best interest, but also in the best interests of those under his command. In this sense, then, there is a ‘‘certain community of interest and friendship [even] between slave and master in cases when they have been qualified by nature for those positions, although when they do not hold them in that way but by law and by constraint of force the opposite is the case’’ (1255b). Aristotle strongly advocates the institution of private property in Politics, and condemns the communal ideals expressed in Plato’s political philosophy as unworkable. In Plato’s dialogue, Republic [Politeia], Socrates argues that, in order for a polis to be perfectly just, all property must be held in common, at least among the members of its ruling class. Aristotle challenges this assertion, countering that ‘‘it is better for possessions to be privately owned, but to make them common property in use’’ (1263a). In other words, it is preferable for property to be privately held, but for its owners to make it available for public use, in accordance with the precepts of public virtue. Aristotle’s justification for private property is primarily based upon the pleasure that possession of things gives the possessor. Selfishness and covetousness are justly condemned, he argues, but since the love of self and possessions is so deeply rooted in human nature, it is better to moderate and harness this powerful instinct, rather than simply trying to deny it. Furthermore, ‘‘to bestow favours and assistance on friends or visitors or comrades is a great pleasure, and a condition of this is the private ownership of property’’ (1263b). Not only does property give its possessor pleasure, then; it also forms a precondition to the development of important forms of virtue. Aristotle concludes that, while legislation proposing the abolishment of private property and the holding of all things in common ‘‘has an attractive appearance, and might be thought to be humane [phila´nthroˆpos];’’ in fact, the precise opposite is the case (ibid). The key to knowing a polity, for Aristotle, is understanding the nature of its ruling class or political regime. Following Plato, he categorizes regimes according to the proportion of the citizenry that compose the ruling class, and whether they rule corruptly or virtuously. A corrupt regime rules in its own interest, to the detriment of those ruled, while a virtuous regime rules in the best interests of the polis as a whole. Thus, when one man rules for his own benefit, it is termed tyranny [tyrannı´s], whereas when he rules for the benefit of the polis, it is termed kingship [basileı´a]. Similarly, when a small group of individuals, usually composed of the wealthy, rule for their own benefit, it is termed oligarchy [oligarchı´a]; whereas when
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a small group, chosen for their political virtue, rule for the benefit of the polis, it is termed aristocracy [aristokratı´a]. When the political class is composed of a majority of citizens who rule for the benefit of the many, but to the detriment of a minority, finally, it is termed democracy [demokratı´a]; while when the multitude govern, but with a view to the advantage of all, ‘‘it is called by the name common to all the forms of constitution, ‘constitutional government’ [politeı´a]’’ (1279a). Aristotle’s conception of constitutional government more closely approximates mixed government, where all citizens have the right to participate in political rule, but only a small minority of notables [gnoˆrimoˆn] possessed of both wealth and public virtue choose to do so. Aristotle places a low value on political innovation and a correspondingly high value on regime stability. He warns against habitual recourse to civil war as a means of correcting political imbalance, as through it ‘‘the bonds of civil society [politikeˆn koinoˆnı´an] are loosened.’’ (1272b) He devotes considerable analyses to the causes of the transformation of one type of regime into another. Radical democracy, for instance, tends to degenerate into tyranny, given the inherent political dynamic of demagogues among the masses. Aristotle advocates the creation and maintenance of what he terms a ‘‘middle class [me´soˆn]’’ (1295b) as an antidote to the political instability that plagued the regimes of his day; a rather innovative idea in the context of the political philosophy of his time. A middle class would, he thought, tend to balance the conflicts that inexorably arise between aristocratic or oligarchic elites, and the larger, poorer, and less educated masses of the citizenry. Aristotle’s call for the creation of a middle class may be seen to stem from reasoning similar to that he employs to describe the virtues, as a mean between two extremes of behavior. He also likely derived much inspiration for the idea of a middle class from the ruling practices of Phillip II of Macedon (Lord, 1984: 6). Aristotle concludes Politics with an unfinished consideration of the constitution of the ideal polis. He differs somewhat from Plato in his approach, striking more of a compromise between the ideal and what is practically possible. He does closely follow Plato, though, in placing a strong emphasis on the need for public education, given its importance to both the attainment of virtue and political cohesion, for: "
inasmuch as the end for the whole state is one, it is manifest that education [paideı´an] also must necessarily be one and the same for all and that the superintendence of this must be public [koineˆn], and not on private lines, in
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the way in which at present each man superintends the education of his own children, teaching them privately, and whatever special branch of knowledge he thinks fit. (1337a)
Significantly, both Aristotle and Plato practiced what they preached in this regard, and created the schools they called for in their political works. The Academy and the Lyceum were not quite the public educational institutions they had in mind, though; rather, these schools were constituted as private, religious societies, given the considerable political restraints they faced. Athenian Constitution (‘‘AC ’’) is one of the most important surviving accounts of the operations of the Athenian polis, and contains valuable information on the legal status of its private associations organized to serve public purposes. An entire class of legal action considered by the public law courts, for instance, concerned ‘‘friendly society business’’ [eranika`s] (LII.3); i.e., the regulation of social, religious, and beneficent associations. AC was originally one of 158 constitutional histories of various Greek polies assembled by Aristotle, likely in association with students at the Lyceum. This collection also likely formed the third part of a work of which NE and Politics are the first two, given the references to such a collection at the end of NE (1181b). The high degree to which Aristotle derived his political theories, as expressed in Politics, from empirical research is apparent from AC. It is also a valuable supplement to other ancient political histories of early Athens; particularly that of Herodotus, with his overtly democratic sympathies. In Aristotle’s view, Solon’s greatest political reform was not the introduction of written laws, but rather the reform of debtor law to prohibit loans secured by the borrower’s personal freedom (VI.1). He also casts the ‘‘tyrant’’ Peisistratus in a much more favorable light: praising him personally as mild [praos], philanthropic [phila´nthroˆpos] and popular [eˆthei] (XVI.2&8); describing his rule as being much more moderate [metrı´oˆs] and constitutional [politikoˆs] than tyrannical [tyrranikoˆs] (XVI.2); and comparing his reign to the golden age of Kronos (XVI.7).
Aristotle’s Modern Relevance Aristotle may be seen to have exercised a decisive influence on modern political thinkers and ideas across the political spectrum: from Locke’s justification of private property as an aspect of natural law, to Marx’s critique of civil society as the site of class warfare, to Mill’s refined version of utilitarianism, to Nietzsche’s fundamental distinction between master and slave moralities. Despite the
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undeniable significance of his ideas to the development of modern political thought, though, Aristotle is largely ignored by contemporary social science. Since at least the late Renaissance, when Galileo famously chided his contemporaries for believing the testimony of Aristotle more readily than the evidence of their own eyes, Aristotelian philosophy has been indelibly linked with the dogmatic, premodern thinking that was superseded by the more skeptical methodologies of empirical science. It didn’t help matters that Aristotelian science was pronounced the official dogma of the Catholic Church, after St. Thomas Aquinas’ successful synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology in the thirteenth century. As has been demonstrated above, though, Aristotle was eminently empirical, methodical and, yes, even critical in his approach to political science. Aristotle’s scientific method has often been criticized for employing teleological principles to construct theories explaining natural phenomena; i.e., positing that telos, or the end or goal of a thing, causes its development. This approach has been rendered implausible since at least Darwin, whose findings in regards to evolution have been interpreted by some as meaning that nature is best understood as a blind and random evolutionary process, utterly lacking any ultimate end or goal. However deficient teleological principles may be in the natural sciences, though, it is not quite so clear how irrelevant they are to the social sciences. To this day, civil society organizations are legally defined and organized in terms of the ends they serve, as defined by their mission, which purportedly directs and determines their activities. It would still seem to make sense, then, to employ teleological principles in studying these organizations. Aristotle is also sometimes criticized for dwelling on the outdated notion of the polis in his political writings, particularly when supra-political entities, such as kingdoms, empires, and federated leagues of polies, had existed for centuries prior, and were on the political ascendancy in his day. These criticisms aren’t heard quite as much since civil society groups overthrew the seemingly permanent regimes of the communist bloc, and the academic study of civil society came back into vogue. As Aristotle himself points out, he purposely focused his investigation on the polis because it is the smallest self-sufficient political unit capable of realizing full human potential (1252b). As Aristotle himself might have remarked, all politics is local; all else is ephemeral. Aristotle’s political thought is bound to sound heretical and even contradictory to modern ears. He considers politics an outgrowth of human nature; whereas postmodern thinkers generally follow Hegel’s view of society
as an artificial construct, unfolding within the realm of history and freedom, in counter-distinction to nature. Aristotle advocates the value of personal freedom and the practice of civic virtue, but believes that inequality and slavery are a natural aspect of the human condition. He calls for the creation and maintenance of a middle class to help ensure political stability, but advocates disenfranchising the merchant and artisan classes that could make the middle class a real economic possibility. Despite the dissonance between modern ideals and Aristotle’s political thought, prominent ‘‘Neo-Aristotelian’’ ethicists such as MacIntyre (1984) point to the continuing relevance of his rational, secular analysis of moral issues, firmly rooted in the fundamentals of human nature and experience, and advocate a return to an updated version of his virtue ethics. The particular value of Aristotle’s ideas to contemporary political thought is the unique perspective he brings, unclouded by modern normative assumptions that sometimes obfuscate human nature. The proverbial Achilles heel of modern social science is that the observations it gathers and interprets, in accordance with its empirical method and modern ideals, are generally limited to a relatively narrow sample of contemporary behaviors, from which it then extrapolates to construct theories with implicit claims to universality. This is an untenable epistemological position for which Aristotle’s political philosophy holds the potential to act as a theoretical corrective.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society History I: Antiquity ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Gift Relationship ▶ Hobbes, Thomas ▶ Leadership ▶ Locke, John ▶ Mill, John Stuart ▶ Philanthropy, Ancient ▶ Political Society
References/Further Readings Bartlett, R. C. (1994). Aristotle’s Science of the Best Regime. The American Political Science Review, 88(1), 143–155. Chroust, A. H. (1967). Aristotle leaves the academy. Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., 14(1) 39–43. Coby, P. (November 1988). Aristotle’s three cities and the problem of faction. The Journal of Politics, 50(4), 896–919. Du¨ring, I. (1957). Aristotle in the ancient biographical tradition. Go¨teborg (distr.: Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm).
Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato Edwards, M. (2004). Civil society. Cambridge: Polity. Irwin, T. (Trans.) (1985). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Jowett, B. (Trans.) (1988). S. Everson (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kraut, R. (2002). Aristotle political philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Kumar, K. (September 1993). An inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term. The British Journal of Sociology, 44(3), 375–395. Loos, I. (November 1897). The political philosophy of Aristotle. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 10, 1–21. Lord, C. (1984). Introduction. Aristotle’s Politics (pp. 1–24). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lord, C. (1987 [1st publ. 1963]). Aristotle. In L. Strauss & J. Cropsey (Eds.), The history of political philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacIntyre, A. C. (1984). After virtue: A study in moral theory (2nd ed.). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Marcianus of Heraclea. (1962). Vita Aristotelis Marciana (Ed.) Olof Gigon, Berlin: De Gruyter. Strauss, L. (1978 [1st publ. 1964]). The city and man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rackham, H. (Trans.) (1st publ. 1932). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (English with accompanying Greek text). Rackham, H. (Trans.) (1st publ. 1934). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (English with accompanying Greek text). Rackham, H. (Trans.) (1st publ. 1935). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (English with accompanying Greek text). Rackham, H. (Trans.) (1st publ. 1935). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (English with accompanying Greek text). Reeve, C. D. C. (Trans.) (1998). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Tessitore, A. (Ed.) (2002). Aristotle and modern politics – The persistence of political philosophy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato ANSGAR KLEIN Bundesnetzwerk Bu¨rgerschaftliches Engagement (BBE), Berlin, Germany
Brief Biography of the Theorists Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato wrote numerous articles in the 1980s to help define the contours of the debate on ‘‘civil society’’ in the United States and in Europe. Jean Cohen began her career as a professor of social science at Bennington College (1980–1983), then as an assistant professor for sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1984). Since then, she has been teaching political science at Columbia University in New York City. She is active as the Associate Editor of the journals Constellations and Dissent, and she is also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Ethics & International Affairs. Andrew Arato has been the Dorothy Hirshon
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Professor of Political and Social Theory in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research since 1998. He spent some time at the end of the 1960s at the Frankfurter Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung (Frankfurter Schule) (the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research – Frankfurt School) and became familiar with the subject of civil society through his work on Eastern European societies. His research focuses on The Frankfurt School, the history of political and social thought, theories of East European societies and social movements. Their collaborative major work ‘‘Civil Society and Political Theory’’ was published in 1992. The book is considered to be a modern classic of the discourse on civil society and has also had a strong influence on the European discourse. At that time, the euphoria associated with the democratic events of 1989 was already abating. A changed context of perception, ethnic conflicts, the war in the former Yugoslavia, populist and nationalist movements and phenomena of right-wing radicalism had gain importance and changed our context of perception, contributing to a sober general assessment of civil society debate.
Main Lines of Argument Placing the History of Ideas
For Cohen and Arato, Hegel’s ‘‘Philosophy of Right’’ is the starting point for a modern republican theory where the liberal concept of negative liberty is synthesized with the republican concept of positive political liberties. Hegel, like Montesquieu and, later, Tocqueville, viewed corporations of civil society as a hotbed of civic virtues and political identity. They are the political-cultural sounding board of legitimate domination. However, honoring the republican ethos attributed to the state by Hegel in a paternalisticstatist perspective has, from Cohen and Arato’s point of view, its foundation in civil society itself. There, processes of social integration, communicative understanding and demand formation in intermediary institutions occur which also perform a political-integrative service for overall society. Cohen and Arato turned the state-oriented Hegel on his head and assign the integration services that Hegel attributed to the state to civil society. Cohen and Arato give an overview of the development of the concept of civil society in the twentieth century. The starting point for this development is the categorical differentiation between economy, civil society and state. From their point of view, the works of Talcott Parsons and Antonio Gramsci are important contributions to the development of the theory of civil society. But both authors raise specific theoretical questions. Parsons, according to his
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critics, reduces the varied forms of civil society conceivable (by Parsons, the ‘‘societal community’’ responsible for the social integration) to the institutional form of American society with apologetic intentions. Gramsci’s concept of civil society, on the other hand, is influenced by Marxist reductionism that forces him to functionally reduce civil society to a creative collaboration of forms of cultural domination in the capitalist society. In order to avoid such conceptual weaknesses, Cohen and Arato resort back to the differentiation of systems (state/economy) and the living world (civil society) introduced by Ju¨rgen Habermas. In their discussion of prominent critics of the concept of civil society in the twentieth century, Cohen and Arato first try to lay the grounds for their own approach. They criticize the term politics as described by Hannah Arendt, who, for them, is the most important representative of the republican theory of civil society, due to its view of politics as decaying. The looming expansion of the sphere of plural social interests in modern civil society leads, from Arendt’s point of view, to blurring the distinction between privacy and publicness. For Arendt, this is the cause for the decline of republican ethos of politics, which retreats to a few constitutional moments in modern times. Because of an assessment of modern special interest politics that is negative overall, Arendt, according to Cohen’s and Arato’s critique, has not appropriately recognized the importance of the intermediary space in modern democracies that mediates between private and public spheres and in which associations voluntarily organize on a horizontal basis. In a comparative analysis, Cohen and Arato show similarities and differences of the conception of civil society and state of Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and the young Habermas of ‘‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.’’ As a challenge to a contemporary appropriate concept of civil society, they extract variations of an argument of fusion of civil society and state by Schmitt and the young Habermas. Both question the differentiation of state and civil society and diagnose a crisis of political mediation between state and society. According to Carl Schmitt, continued political democratization leads to the loss of state neutrality and to actions by the state affected by private interests. In addition to the overlapping of government actions and private interest, the private sphere is politicized because of expanding state activities. As per Schmitt, this development leads to the decline of the – mediating between state and society in the liberal sense – parliament. The young Habermas shares with Schmitt the diagnosis that state interventionism is expanding and that the political space is occupied by corporatism of private interests and adds the culturally and theoretically pessimistic thesis of manipulated mass
culture, which leads to the disintegration of the public as mediating agent between civil society and state. Cohen and Arato’s concept of civil society rejects the differentiation of state and society claimed at different versions of the fusion thesis and the decline of the mediating intermediary authorities in connection therewith. Their concept of civil society reacts to the fusion thesis and to the decline of intermediary authorities by referring to the interplay of political-cultural processes of generating interests in civil society with created interest pluralism in the political society and a proceduralism of willformation and decision-making processes by the state. Contrary to Habermas’ thesis of decay of the public sphere, they refer to associations with society as an issuer of public processes – an argument that Habermas incorporates in his later democratic-theoretical magnum opus ‘‘Faktizita¨t und Geltung’’ [‘‘Facticity and Validity’’]. From Cohen and Arato’s point of view, these civil society associations do not allow themselves to be taken over completely by mass media and the cultural industry, and they are an important counterweight to the de-democratization of the political public sphere. Michel Foucoult’s discussion on the theory of power, which analyses society as a network of relationships of power, lead Cohen and Arato discuss the scope and outlines of the concept of power in civil society theory. Finally, Niklas Luhmann’s discussion is the socialtheoretical measure of a civil society concept that, from the point of view of Luhman’s system theory, is especially vulnerable because of its mostly hermeneutic dependence on history of ideas, comparison of theories and the selfimage of social actors. Luhmann’s system-theoretical analysis of societal differentiation processes denies further theoretical value to the basic distinction between state and society: According to Luhmann, the variety of externally differentiated societal subsystems, the internal differentiation of the political system and the many specific intersystem connections cannot be sufficiently analyzed any more by such dichotomic theory concepts. The social-integrative function, attributed to the civil society from Hegel to Parsons, that generates solidarity through forms of participation and articulation of interests by the public sphere, relationships, and legitimacy-providing model answers is transferred to the externally differentiated legal system by Luhmann. Cohen and Arato dispute the selective external differentiability of participation processes in the public sphere as asserted by Luhmann and of processes of creating norms, which, from their point of view, cannot be delegated to the legal system but remain dependent on the creative collaboration of civil society. Habermas incorporated and
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discussed this idea in his subsequent democratic-theoretical magnum opus ‘‘Faktizita¨t and Geltung.’’
The Concept of Civil Society: An Overview of the Systematic Argument In chapter 3 of their magnum opus, Cohen and Arato introduce their concept of civil society. They discuss societal framework conditions and civil societal actors, framed by thoughts on political ethics at the beginning and a discussion of civil disobedience at the end. At the center of the argument are the ethics of discourse and the theory of law. It is evident, that in connection with the conception of political ethics the term politics is defined based on the concept of civil society. Let’s have a closer look at this connection. The concept of politics championed by Cohen and Arato specifically takes into consideration the cultural aspects of political action and what effect they have in processes of articulation of interests and interpretation of needs. In that sense, politics is not a process reduced to negotiating and aggregating interests; not the existing interests of individuals, but the formation of interests of civil societal actors while networking in a coordinated way. In a way, the formation of political-culturally sensible second-order preferences – is given priority in this analysis of the political process. This developed grown political knowledge moves quite far from politics as a pursuit of conflicting interests and as a negotiation of interests and focuses on the legitimizing sensible side of political action in political society. Group-specific interpretations and value models enter the process of articulating interests are championed here only in as far as they define the horizon of politically communicated interests. For the political process, it is important that civil societal actors accept the political society’s procedural rules, because only those processes make possible the continued contribution of group-specific interests to the political process. The political ethics discussed by Cohen and Arato observe that cultural particularity coexists within cultural pluralism and create the theme for the condition for communication in a political society. Political ethics are supposed to bridge the highly charged environment between community and society. To morally filter cultural pluralism produces, from this point of view, the binding force of an overlapping political identity that does not become lost in the actions of political society. The possibly explosive nature of cultural pluralism (ethnic, religious, nationalistic, and fundamentalist movements) is defused by a civil reactive culture whose normative character is explained by discourse ethics. The discourse-ethical pacification of cultural particularism requires civil society’s
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recognition of cultural plurality, from which political identity emerges. Discourse ethics, per Cohen and Arato, target the procedural principles of symmetry, reciprocity, and reflexivity, which help to form political commitment and to recognize the legitimacy of the political system. As the formal principle of founding norms, discourse ethics is the only option to justify the legitimacy of norms provided there are cultural plurality and a corresponding multitude of conceptions of the ‘‘good life.’’ Insofar as discourse ethics political philosophy includes a ‘‘structural concept of goodness’’ which not only takes into consideration negative liberties but also positive liberties of cultural self-fulfillment, it includes group-specific articulation of needs and political participation. Discourse ethics approximately expresses the moral standard for procedural conditions of realizing particular forms of the good life in a – culturally heterogenic – political society. Cohen and Arato follow Habermas’ social theory. Using the concept of institutional intermediation, they would like to discuss options and scope of democratizing the question of differentiation – increasing the weight of Habermasian thoughts. Institutional ‘‘sensors’’ and ‘‘receptors’’ in societal subsystems are supposed to keep the system integration sensitive to the requirements of social integration. They do not orient themselves defensively to the Habermasian thesis of ‘‘colonialization of the living world’’ in the sense of looking for barriers against the escalating dynamic of system integration. In fact, Cohen and Arato aggressively look for possible forms of ‘‘self-limiting’’ influence of civil society on the state and economy through institutional intermediation (Habermas has followed them later on this point). With that institutional intermediation, the democratization of differentiated societies without the price of external differentiation and subsequent loss of effectiveness in connection should become possible. Unfortunately, substantiating this theoretically promising goal is one of the weaker parts of their main work. Whereas the associations of civil society are especially open to democratization, the externally differentiated societal subsystems depend for their institutional sensitization from impulses from civil society. This is only conceivable, however, in limited forms of participation and requires analysis of institutional options receptive to this sensate opening of the subsystems. This opening is possible through installation of organization-specific forms of discourse procedures that institutionalize the interplay between orientation on effectiveness and claims for legitimacy. Civil societal actors create topics and views of problems, assess the output of the externally differentiated subsystems under consideration of concerns and
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expressed needs, which are transferred to externally differentiated subsystems in the processes of institutional intermediation. In this way, the topics are translated into the perception of societal subsystems, this means heightened context sensitivity and a possible slowdown of self-sustaining momentum. The mediating institution designated by society is the law, which not only guarantees the infrastructure of civil society but also – e.g., in form of reflexive, procedural law – institutionalizes the contextual sensitivities of societal subsystems. Here, Cohen and Arato sensitize for a – later more systematically carried out by Habermas (1992) – differentiation of law as medium and law as institution and make clear the significance of the law as institution. The chapter on social movements is supposed to deliver, from a social science point of view, evidence of exactly that type of civil societal actors normatively require for the concept of civil society. In social movements, a phenomenon especially prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, Cohen and Arato see the self-limiting radicalism at work they themselves demanded which connects defending and democratizing civil society to forms of influence on state and economy, which does not call into question the complexity level of structural differentiation as such. Using social movements is, rather, selective of norms. In their main work, the authors do not discuss social movements because they fall short of the democratictheoretically formulated level of requirements on civil societal actors. So the actor working within the exactly, normatively-formulated civil society without further ado is put on the same level with the new social movements. However, the authors do not continue this leveling in later works, e.g., when looking at the war in Yugoslavia. The argument proceeds in two steps: At first, Cohen and Arato carve out the alternate unilateralism of the American research on movements (Resource-Mobilization-Approach, RMA) and European research on movements (New Social Movements approach, NSB-approach). RMA methodically assumes social movements to be strategic actors, particularly, through Rational Choice. A look at structures of political opportunities of movement organizations complements the RMA paradigm, which concentrates on their contribution to the formation of interest organizations. Here, RMA’s analytic framework also works for Cohen and Arato. What the approach cannot do is to analyze collective actions below the threshold of interest conflict and strategic actions. Civil society’s actors use politicalpublic processes to influence political society and forms of ‘‘politics of identity’’ in civil society that aim to form (group) identities but do not tackle the democratization of social relationships. In this area the analytical power of the
NSB approach can be used with its attention to cultural processes, development of social identities or normative changes and relationships between associations.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Through differentiation between civil society and political society, Cohen and Arato’s concept of civil society is able to assign both approaches to the research on movement an appropriate place and to support their alternate emphasis for political theory. Concerning the two paradigms of research on movements, the authors distinguish between different forms of politics: Civil societal actors emerge through politics of identity; civil societal actors enter the sphere of activity of political society in forms of inclusive politics; through politics of influence civil societal actors participate in public political discourse and influence political societal actors; reform politics is the institutional establishing of discursive elements as ‘‘sensors’’ and ‘‘receptors’’ in the societal subsystems, also establishing the political and economic society. According to Cohen and Arato, social movements are found in the whole broad scale of different forms of politics and act in civil society as well as in the political society. Movement politics are a normal part of self-democratizing civil societies. The final chapter of the magnum opus addresses civil disobedience as action of political influence by civil society. Cohen and Arato discuss liberal positions (Rawls and Dworkin) and republican ones (Arendt, Habermas) and go back to their discourse-ethical considerations in connection with liberal legal principle and the principle of democratic legitimation. Contrary to the reference to Hannah Arendt and the classic republicanism, which is outdated in terms of social theory, they focus on civil disobedience as a form of politics of civil societal influence in the intermediary area through response from the public sphere. The self-restrictions of civil societal politics are especially valid for civil disobedience. Civil disobedience challenges the legitimacy of individual laws or politics using the right to be right. It aims for the reconstitution of the responsiveness of the political system with the help of a legal system that is sensitive to legitimacy and the impulses of civil society. Civil disobedience renews the principle of democratic legitimacy, which amounts to more than its established institutional forms, in process proceduralism and the principle of majority rule. According to Cohen and Arato, civil society expresses demand for a continued and in principle unfinished democratization of representative democracies especially through civil disobedience. Democratization is merely reduced to notions
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of legitimacy which prioritizes civil disobedience as form of civil society exerting influence. Scope and Limits of the Concept of Civil Society as a Political Theory of Civil Society Exerting Influence
With the background of their concept in context of normative democracy theory, Cohen and Arato emphasis on forms of ‘‘politics of identity’’ and public-deliberative influence. They focus their attention on the politicalcultural creative collaboration and the legal-institutional mediating context switching of legitimate domination. However, it is notable that their political theory differentiates a more broadly constructed inventory of political action forms. Their discussion of the politics of inclusion and reform remains categorical, but is barely discussed on an analytical basis. It almost appears as if the analytical differentiation between civil society and political society within a conception of institutional mediation is the reason that the direction of the analysis of intermediary processes unilaterally limits civil society’s forms of influence on political society and masks the processes of enforcing interests in the political society as well as their effect on civil society. Additionally, the state-theoretical consequences of the conception of a political society should be addressed. In political science discourse, this approach becomes more problematic as more normative conditions are introduced in the analysis of empirical findings on civil society forms of politics: Formation of a political identity is ensured by the existing structures of a rationalized living world, which defuses the possible dramatics of a cultural pluralism. This political identity, in turn, is the prerequisite for an ambitious reflexive action by civil societal actors under the conditions of a self-limiting radicalism. One cannot easily dismiss the danger of overstressing the normative argument. All in all, one cannot help but think that the consequence for political theory – all protests to the contrary – is a defense of potential civil societal conflicts, in which political forms of reform and inclusion are not sufficiently taken into consideration anymore. Cohen and Arato’s comments on the installation of ‘‘sensors’’ and ‘‘receptors’’ for the democratization of societal subsystems keep the discussion on options for a ‘‘democratization of the question of differentiation’’ (Hans Joas) in a rather metaphorical frame to a great extent. This overall impression is confirmed by the final chapter, in which Cohen and Arato discuss the exceptional case of civil disobedience as paradigmatic case of influence by civil society. In this chapter, they concentrate on the options of articulating aspects of legitimacy in the language of the law and totally neglect the problem of
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transferring questions of legitimacy into aspects of control of ‘‘systemic’’ coordination. The obvious question remains unanswered: how the perspectives on problems, needs, and interests generated in civil society may be asserted in the political process. They are of special relevance to political science in these discussions. Here one can find many apparent connecting threads to political sociology discussions. For example, the discussion about the ‘‘effects of institutionalization’’ makes references for the analysis of inclusive political processes in modern social movements. The same is also true for the discussion of interaction and interdependence of movement actors, parties, and organizations as political actors in political society and the effects of these processes on state actions. In the discussion on associations, the development of ‘‘discursive organizations’’ is addressed and, at the same time, the chances of organizing long-term and/or general interests are questioned; from the point of view which here dominates the ‘‘logic of collective action,’’ this can be particularly precarious. The research on parties analyzes the range of possible changes in the organization of parties Cohen and Arato, in emphasizing the responsiveness necessary of political institutions, have prepared paths to analyzing the organizational change in the intermediary sector, but they only follow these very selectively. The concept of intermediation presented overall goals for the internal adaptability of state/administration and market and they could have gone into greater depth into the questions asked here only in the bullet points; unfortunately, Cohen and Arato neglect to discuss these threads. Cohen and Arato’s concept of civil society provides an extremely fertile and inspiring theoretical framework that, in its complexity, makes possible a connection to the previously-stated problems of political science discussion. Of course, this requires moving the emphasis of the argument, which takes the limitations of forms of politics of civil society as a reason to discuss those as part of more comprehensive politics of reform. Only after such change can Cohen’s and Arato’s contribution be fully measured in the claims which they have made with the addition of their discussion of the democratization of representative democracies as well as to a reflexive continuation of the project welfare state.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Interest Politics ▶ Intermediary Organizations and Field ▶ Political Society
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▶ Schmitt, Carl ▶ Social Movements
References/Further Readings Habermas, J. (1982). Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, 2 Bde., Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1992). Faktizita¨t and Geltung. Beitra¨ge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts and des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory (771 S). Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Joas, H. (1990). Die Demokratisierung der Differenzierungsfrage. Die Krise des Fortschrittglaubens und die Kreativita¨t des kollektiven Handelns, In Soziale. Welt, Jg. 41, 8–27. Klein, A. (2001). Der Diskurs der Zivilgesellschaft. Politische Hintergru¨nde und demokratie-theoretische Folgerungen. Opladen: Leske/Budrich.
Civil Society Theory: Dahrendorf DHRUBODHI MUKHERJEE Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, USA
Brief Biography of the Theorist Born in Hamburg in 1929, Ralf Dahrendorf got involved with the anti-Nazi movement during his school years and as a result in 1944, was arrested by the Gestapo. Between 1947 to1952 he studied Sociology and Philology in Hamburg University. Later, at the London School of Economics, he continued his research as a Leverhulme research scholar and received his Ph.D. in 1956. In 1957, he became a fellow at the Center of Advanced Sciences in Behavorial Sciences in Palo Alto; Professor of Sociology at the University of Hamburg in 1958; University of Tu¨bingen in 1960 and followed his tenure to the University of Konstanz in 1966. He has also taught at a number of North American Universities. From 1964–68 he has acted as the Adviser on Educational Questions, Land Government of Baden-Wu¨rttemberg and Vice-Chairman, Founding Committee, University of Constance (Wikipedia, 2008). He continued to serve the German Parliament as a representative of the Freie Demokratische Partei from 1969 to 1970. Finally, before becoming the Director of the London School of Economics in 1974, he became the Commissioner of the European Commission in Brussels. After more than a decade at the LSE, he returned to Germany as a Professor of Social Science at the University of Konstanz in 1984.
Dahrendorf again moved to England in 1986 and became the Governor of the London School of Economics. In 1987, he was nominated as the Warden of the St. Anthony’s College in Oxford succeeding historian Sir Raymond Carr. The following year he became a British citizen and subsequently accepted Baronage from Queen Elizabeth II in 1993. As a member of the House of Lords he regularly resided as an independent crossbencher. In 2005, he went back to Berlin and became a professor at the Research Centre for Social Research. On January 11, 2007, Dahrendorf received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Studies (Wikipedia, 2008). His famous works include Marx in Perspective (1953); Industrie- und Betriebs- soziologie (1956); Class and Class Conflict (1957); Homo Sociologicus (1959); Society and Democracy in Germany (1965); Pfade aus Utopia (1967); Essays in the Theory of Society (1968); Pladoyer fur die Europaische Union (1973); The New Liberty (Reith Lectures 1975); and Life Chances (1979) (Wikipedia, 2008).
Main Lines of Arguments German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, writing in the pluralistic tradition, has rejected the Marxist notion of class conflict and reformulated social conflict as conflict between interest groups and the struggle for authority (Dahrendorf, 1958b). Dahrendorf has equally distanced himself from the two dominant theoretical approaches to understand social systems, the conflict and the functionalist perspectives, accusing them of creating theoretical utopias. He challenged the non-negotiable dichotomy that has been created between the conflict and consensus traditions (Dahrendorf, 1958a). Dahrendorf has provided a refreshing alternative explanation to understand social systems by claming that it is the social structures, which should be placed at the center of analysis of social systems. According to him the social structure contains both conflict and consensus values embedded in it (Dahrendorf, 1958b, 1968, 1977; McNamee, 1982). Drawing on the meso-conflict theory of Simmel, Dahrendorf has underscored that it is the struggle for authority instead of property that led to the modern day conflicts (Lorimer, 2006; Robbins et al., 2005). Dahrendorf and Moore (1958) further suggested that social organizations become the place-holders for different forms of authorities distribution mechanisms. It results in the creation of various interest groups who are constantly competing with each other to control for the authority. Dahrendorf draws parallels between the struggles for authority and class struggle involving domination of few groups and subordination others. Thus, Dahrendorf argues that social conflicts in a post-industrial society do
Civil Society Theory: Dahrendorf
not stem entirely from class issues, instead people representing different affiliations form interest groups that clash with each other to uphold their self-interests. Hence, Dahrendorf suggests that social conflicts have changed its primary domain from social class affiliation to interest group affiliation, and the latter is characterized by the struggle for authority and leverage in the society. This is a significant shift from classical Marxian notion of social conflict. Dahrendorf proposed a conflict model of society and questioned the Parsonian approach of comparing social structure with function oriented bio-mechanical systems (Dahrendorf, 1980). Dahrendorf termed the class-based model of social conflict as pre-industrial, where extreme emotional bonding used to create homogenous communities. These high bonding communities used to have strong identities determined by culture and property ownership (Bourdieu, 1984). Thus, such groups used to act as collectives to maintain their economic advantage over others. Dahrendorf termed these bonding networks as ligatures, which, according to him had created lack of inter-community cohesion. He argued that the industrial societies are fluid with more opportunities (life chances) characterized by more bridging networks across diverse groups. As a result, there has been more fluidity on the class lines and grouping around common interests leading to interest group crisis (Dahrendorf, 1977, 1980; Robert & Kelley, 1979; Wikipedia, 2008). Ralf Dahrendorf ’s ideas of civil society had called for a structural understanding of social conflict as opposed to Marxist-Leninist definition that strictly define social conflict as class conflict (Hazelrigg, 1972; Maier, 1969; Robert & Kelley, 1979). In fact, Dahrendorf should be credited for reintroducing the social conflict perspective in the sociological discourse on civil society when the Marxian ideas of social class and Lenin’s call for ‘‘dictatorship of the proletariat’’ had been widely termed as ‘‘utopian’’ and unrealistic (Dahrendorf, 1958a; Weingart, 1969). Dahrendorf had also challenged the prevalent communitarian theories of civil society, which view society as primarily consensus driven integrative structure, and do not acknowledge the inherent conflicts that may exist in society because of historical antecedents and structural anomalies. In order to understand the theoretical positioning of Dahrendorf, it is important to draw a little background on the theories that preceded him and influenced his work profoundly (Weingart, 1969). Talcott Parsons’ theory of structural functionalism had marked a shift in the direction of sociological theories from social conflict to social integration. Questions such as, ‘‘What brings society together?’’ became more
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important than ‘‘what drives society on?’’ The influence of Parsonian approach to sociology is profound, as it had transformed the theoretical discourse, from the late 1930s for the next several decades, to understand the factors responsible for social equilibrium (Robbins et al., 2005). The social conflict approach, which was prevalent during most of the earlier century since the publication Karl Marx’s monumental work titled the ‘‘Communist Manifesto’’ in 1848, had been challenged by the emergence of counter-theoretical perspectives such as the Parsonian systems theory (Lorimer, 2006; Robbins et al., 2005). Ralf Dahrendorf attempts to reinvent the social conflict perspectives as a supplement to the system theory interpretations of the social world. While doing so he has diverged from both Talcott Parsons and Karl Marx, the proponent of system and conflict theories respectively. He argued that in the past social conflict has been made synonymous with class conflict, which is an oversimplification of a more complex construct (Burt, 1992, 2000; Coleman, 1994). Dahrendorf posits that conflict in societies can occur for various reasons other than social class, for example conflicts of values and conflicts of authorities can result due to structural reasons. Dahrendorf, thus, had called for a ‘‘realistic approach’’ to theoretical understanding of the civil society that would uphold the ever-changing status of social institutions and norms and appreciate both the conflict and integrative characteristics of society (Dahrendorf, 1980). Dahrendorf termed both the classical Marxist notion of social conflict and Parsonian notion of social integration as utopian for their tendency to uphold either conflict or integration as mutually non-coexistent constructs. Dahrendorf proposed the analysis of social structure as a plausible route to estimate the roles of social conflict and social integration. His emphasis on the need for locating the origin of social conflict within social structures has been influenced by the development of scientific methods in sociology to gather and analyze data to measure social structures (Feldman, 1969; Maier, 1969; McNamee, 1982). Dahrendorf challenges the ‘‘conservative bias’’ of Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalist approach that overemphasizes the importance of maintaining the social order through individual will and structural integration of collective norms and values while grossly overlooked the social conflict that is a byproduct of effective functioning of every social system (Robbins et al., 2005). Dahrendorf took upon the onerous tasks of supplementing gaps within the framework of Parsonian structural functionalism by identifying structural conflicts that are not class-driven. He sides with the Marxian notion of
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social conflict and warns of the dangers of negating such fundamental characteristic as the structural conflict. He, however, infuses the idea of authority, as the key unit of analysis for social structure, as opposed to Marxian property. He takes a different approach from Marx by moving away from property-based class conflict paradigm to more authority-based power struggle approach to define structural conflict. Thus, Dahrendorf attempts to revert the argument back to social conflict and social change, a more Marxian notion, while broadly staying within the conceptual framework of Parson’s theory of structural functionalism. Dahrendorf calls for identification and classification of the problems that fall under the rubric of social conflict to avoid broad generalizations. For example, there are intrinsic conflicts seen in both war and political party rivalries, yet the tenor and the characteristics of both kinds of conflict are fundamentally different. According to Dahrendorf the structural origins and forms of different social conflict vary and it is important to take that into consideration before employing broad generalizations to define them. Thus, Dahrendorf has moved away from both Marx and Weber, who, according to him, had equated social conflict exclusively with class conflict. Thus, he assumes a unique position in the firmament of sociological theorists as one who had taken up the onerous task of fusing conflict perspective with the communitarian social integration theories, and thus making a significant contribution to social theory.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Through most of the twentieth century, the significance of social conflict and Marxian notion of class struggle was uncontested. In most parts of the world barring a few countries communism has been almost ubiquitously termed as authoritarian and exploitative. The political landscape was transformed in 1980s and 1990s with the collapse of Soviet Union, extinction of communist parties everywhere outside China and South-East Asia and an abrupt end to the ‘‘Cold War’’. This rapid end of communism has taken the most conservative political scientists by surprise. Thomas Friedman (2006) further noted that the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 was eerily coincided with the invention of the Internet, symbolizing a tectonic shift of social forces. The Reagan and the Thatcher era also put socialist and social-democratic parties on the defensive. The much-touted Reaganomics that called for smaller government and more control in the hand of private enterprises became popular in America and to some extent in the Western Europe. International Monetary Fund guided
policies also brought neo-capitalism and representative democracies in many ex-colonies in Asia and Africa (Friedman, 2006). The decline of the Soviet Union had also witnessed a simultaneous rise of the laissez-faire conservatism that vigorously promoted the functionalist-equilibriumconsensus model of social structure against social conflict perspectives. The American tradition of pluralism led by Daniel Bell (1976) denied the neo-Marxian assertion that power concentrating in the hand of small elites could lead to oppression, suggesting that such classbased power concentration cannot occur in American system. After the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence grew dramatically in a unipolar world propagating the social equilibrium approach to inform social policy in many countries (Appadurai, 1996; Bell, 1976; Robbins et al., 2005). In the early 1990s, a Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (2001) came up with the ultimate association driven analysis of American civil society. He declared after analyzing six decades of longitudinal data on civic and voluntary participation that Americans were witnessing a decline in their social capital. He defined social capital as ‘‘features of social life, networks, norms and trust that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives’’ (Putnam, 1995a, p. 169). An analysis of the above definition of social capital reflects a structural functionalist approach that suggests that social structure is horizontal and participation in social structure always brings about positive outcome. Putnam’s theory of social capital emulates the Durkheimian concept of solidarity, which is primarily based on trust and norms across social networks (Field, 2003; Baron et al., 2000; Fukuyama, 1995). The very juxtaposition of the term social and capital itself are indicative of the fact that social association would always yield a capital value (positive connotation) for participants in a social relationship. Putnam has been widely criticized by social conflict theorists for not acknowledging the vertical positioning of networks in a social structure. Putnam has been time again been accused of overlooking the structural disadvantages. Pierre Bourdieu (1990), on the other hand, defines social capital by identifying the structural hierarchies of society, which allow persons who are better positioned in social, economic, and cultural hierarchy to use their homogenous (similar) and heterogeneous (diverse) social networks to sustain the existing power distribution that benefits them. Bourdieu (1984), here, brings about how new kind of interests groups are created through their advantageous social networks (Wasserman & Faust, 1994).
Civil Society Theory: Dahrendorf
Dahrendorf should be credited for identifying the role interest groups in present-day conflict and thus highlighting the structural hierarchy factor of current social systems. Civic associations do not always necessary leads to consensus and equilibrium, interest group conflict could be a byproduct of the same that equilibrium theorist had failed to estimate (Putnam, 2001). This is more profound in the modern day Internet driven discourse on political and civic issues; interest groups like Move-On.org have used the Internet effectively to generate consensus around their agendas and came in direct confrontation with conservative interest groups such as National Rifle Association. Different lobbyist and activist groups have used the Internet time and again to ramp up their viewpoint and organize communities in real time and space (Bradley & Poppen, 2003; Qiaoming Liu & Besser, 2003). According to Dahrendorf, these kinds of social conflicts play an important role in determining policies and election processes in democratic societies and deserve the attention of the theorists. However, these conflicts are manifested within the legal framework of a given system and rarely deter the social system from functioning. This way the conflict mechanisms mentioned above are different from the Marxian and Neo-Marxian traditions and similar to the functional perspective, however, unlike functional perspective it takes into consideration the structural conflict between interest groups over authority (Appadurai, 1996). Dahrendorf has been criticized for trying to preside over an unholy marriage between two polarized social perspectives, namely the social conflict tradition and equilibrium-consensus tradition. He has been accused of diluting the realities of class struggles by replacing private property with authority as the unit of conflict. He has been accused of interpreting conflict theory to the likings of the functionalists and at the same time reinventing the conflict tradition in a new way within the broad framework of functionalist tradition and this should be treated as the most significant contribution of Dahrendorf in contemporary social theory. He might appear a little grey from the philosophical standpoint but his positions render reality orientation to understanding functional social structures and embedded inter-group conflicts within it. This is essential to understand social processes in the age of globalization and Internet driven communication (Bhagwati, 2004; Friedman, 2006).
Cross-References
▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Durkheim, Emile ▶ Interest and Pressure Groups
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▶ Interest Politics ▶ MoveOn.org ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Webner, Max
References/Further Readings Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Baron, S., Field, J., & Schuller, T. (Eds.). (2000). Social capital: Critical perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, D. (1976). The coming of post-industrial society. New York: Basic Books. Bhagwati, J. (2004). In defense of globalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Disctinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bradley, N., & Poppen, W. (2003). Assistive technology, computers and Internet may decrease sense of isolation for homebound elderly and disabled persons. Technology and Disability, 15, 19–25. Burt, R. S. (1992). Structural holes: The social structure of competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burt, R. S. (2000). The network structure of social capital. Research in Organizational behavior, 27(1), 17–40. Coleman, J. S. (1994). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Dahrendorf, R. (1958a). Out of utopia: Toward a reorientation of sociological analysis. The American Journal of Sociology, 64(2), 115–127. Dahrendorf, R. (1958b). Toward a theory of social conflict. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2(2), 170–183. Dahrendorf, R. (1968). Essays in the theory of society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dahrendorf, R. (1977). A confusion of powers: politics and the rule of law. The Modern Law Review, 40(1), 1–15. Dahrendorf, R. (1980). Life chances: Approaches to social and political theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feldman, G. D. (1969). Untitled. Journal of Social History, 2(3), 273–277. Field, J. (2003). Social capital: key ideas. New York: Routledge. Friedman, T. L. (2006). The world is flat: A brief history of twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. London: Hamish Hamilton. Hazelrigg, L. E. (1972). Class, property, and authority: Dahrendorf ’s critique of Marx’s theory of class. Social Forces, 50(4), 473–487. Lorimer, D. (2006). Fundamentals of historical materialism: The Marxist view of history and politics. Delhi: Aakar. Maier, C. S. (1969). Untitled. History and Theory, 8(1), 119–133. McNamee, S. J. (1982). Untitled. The American Journal of Sociology, 87(4), 972–975. Putnam, R. (1995a). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 67–78. Putnam, R. (2001). Civic disengagement in contemporary America. Government and Opposition, 36(2), 135–156. Qiaoming Liu, A., & Besser, T. (2003). Social capital and participation in community improvement activities by elderly residents in small towns and rural communities. Rural Sociology, 68(3), 343–365.
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Robbins, S. P., Chatterjee, P., & Canda, E. R. (2005). Contemporary human behavior theory: A critical perspective for social work. New York: Allyn & Bacon. Robert, R. V., & Kelley, J. (1979). Class as conceived by Marx and Darendorf: effects on income inequality and politics in the United States and Great Britain. American Sociological Review, 44, 38–58. Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994). Social network analysis: Methods and applications. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weingart, P. (1969). Beyond Parsons? A critique of Ralf Dahrendorf ’s conflict theory. Social Forces, 48(2), 151–165. Wikipedia. (2008). Ralph Dahrendorf. Retrieved August 28, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahrendorf.
Civil Society Theory: Dewey SHYAMA KURUVILLA Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
Wars – for which he was criticized by those for and against the wars. He stressed the need to continually clarify the aims of war, maintain academic freedom, and to continue developing democratic institutions and processes. According to Dewey, resorting to wars ‘‘suggests that existing political and legal forms and arrangements are incompetent to deal with the situation.’’ (Dewey, 1954/1927: 128). He engaged in deliberations on the formation of the League of Nations and then the United Nations. At the age of 78, he chaired the commission in Mexico that found Leon Trotsky ‘‘not guilty’’ of the crimes alleged by Stalin (Bullert, 1989; Schilpp & Hahn, 1939/1989). Dewey is internationally known for his work on education, including in Japan, Turkey, Mexico, South Africa and Russia (Ryan, 1995; Schilpp and Hahn, 1939/ 1989; Westbrook, 1991). In China he was considered a ‘‘second Confucius’’ (Ryan, 1995; Westbrook, 1991). In a New York Times book review, Rorty (2003) retells one example of Dewey’s influence in China, "
Brief Biography of Theorist John Dewey (1859–1952) was a philosopher, social reformer, educationalist, and one of the most influential political voices of his time, both in the United States and internationally (Ryan, 1995; Schilpp & Hahn, 1939/1989; Westbrook, 1991). Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James constitute the founding triumvirate of classical pragmatist philosophy (Center for Dewey Studies, 1961 – current). While the focus in this encyclopedia entry is on Dewey’s civil society theory, Dewey discussed these issues as part of a more comprehensive and integrated analysis of democracy and human experience. His analysis drew from philosophy and psychology, to the natural and social sciences, and art and education – with a view to developing more comprehensive and integrative understanding to guide human agency. He believed that philosophy should inform, and be informed by, scientific inquiry and democratic process; this was reflected in his direct involvement with academia, civil society, and government. Dewey was an active participant in civil society organizations, including labor unions and civil rights groups (Caspary, 2000; Westbrook, 1991). He acknowledged as an important source of inspiration in his work, his collaboration with Jane Addams at the Hull House in Chicago – one of the first resettlement homes for women in the U.S., focusing on social policy reform and providing services, including education and work programs for underserved communities (Shields, 2003). Dewey’s involvement in public service extended to his advising the U.S. government, including on both World
Dewey’s prestige in China was such that the State Department, in 1942, asked Dewey to write a message to be dropped from airplanes, encouraging the Chinese to keep on resisting the Japanese.
Dewey believed in translating theory to action. As an illustration of his practical orientation, Dewey had a small farm on Long Island where he kept hens. Ryan (2000: 168) recounts that at one local reception, where Dewey was the guest of honor, a lady was heard to exclaim in surprise, ‘‘My goodness, it’s the egg man.’’ Dewey’s publications include over 400 journal articles and 40 books (Center for Dewey Studies, 1961 – current). Collections of his work also comprise public speeches and invited lectures, essays, policy briefs, letters, and articles in popular magazines and newspapers, including the New Republic and New York Times. Due in part to this, Dewey was, and often is, subject to criticism based on incomplete readings of his work (Garrison, 2000; Ryan, 1995; Snider, 2000). As Snider (2000, p. 489) cautions, "
Peirce, James, and Dewey were not satisfied with proclaiming only a few of pragmatism’s points. Rather, they went to great lengths to develop pragmatism as a comprehensive and integrated theory of thought.
Dewey’s work is now made increasingly accessible through recent reprints, analyses, anthologies, biographies, and online resources. Notably, the Center for Dewey Studies has compiled a thirty-seven-volume edition of Dewey’s complete writings that is also available as a searchable electronic database (Boydston and Hickman, 1882–1953/1999).
Civil Society Theory: Dewey
Main Lines of Argument Against the vast panorama of Dewey’s work, two key aspects of classical pragmatist philosophy related to civil society theory are highlighted here: ● The relationship between self and society ● The distinction between state and civil society Self and Society
Dewey based his work on civil society, and democracy overall, on an explication of the interrelationship between individuals and society. Pragmatist philosophy differs from early liberal philosophies, for example those of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, where individuals and societies are considered as distinct, separate entities (Dewey, 1935/ 1999). Dewey working with sociologist George Herbert Mead explained that neither individuals nor societies develop in isolation. Individuals develop in relation to the societies in which they live, and can only define themselves as unique and individual in relation to others. Societies, in turn, cannot form without individuals (Dewey, 1954/1927; Mead, 1967 [1934]). In pragmatist philosophy this concept of interdependence extends to the natural environment of which human beings and their transactions are a part. In a critique in Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey (1935/1999, p. LW.11.30) points out that, "
The underlying philosophy and psychology of earlier liberalism led to a conception of individuality as something readymade, already possessed, and needing only the removal of certain legal restrictions to come into full play. It was not conceived as a moving thing, something that is attained only by continuous growth. Because of this failure, the dependence in fact of individuals upon social conditions was made little of . . . social arrangements were treated not as positive forces, but as external limitations.
Dewey held a position, aligned with Jefferson’s, that the community is the basis of democratic practice. "
Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shed by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy. (Dewey, 1925–1953/1999 p. LW.2.328)
Dewey recognized that communities are not built on physical contiguity alone. He foresaw that ‘‘to a very considerable extent, groups having a functional basis will probably have to replace those based on physical
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contiguity’’(Dewey, 1939/1989, p. 123). There are multiple, pluralistic ways in which people define themselves and the communities they form. Dewey (1954/1927) emphasized that pluralism is both a reality, and a rich resource on which societies could draw to resolve problematic situations, learn, and flourish. Dewey was concerned that it was becoming increasingly difficult to locate, build, and sustain functional communities. Pluralism can pose a challenge to coherence and continuity in building strong and evolving communities. A particular challenge is posed by the rapid development and dispersal of communication technologies and the means of production for goods and services, over the composition and content of which individuals have little control (Dewey, 1939/1989). These are issues that continue to challenge the development of global civil society movements, for example with respect to ‘‘deliberative forums’’ on the Internet (Glasius, 2005). Dewey stressed that ‘‘res publica, the common concern, remains vague and latent till defined by impartial, disinterested social organs. Then it is expressed in regular and guaranteed modes of activity. In the pregnant phrase of Aristotle, the administration of justice is also its determination: that is, its discovery and promulgation’’ (Dewey, 1899–1924/1999, p. MW.5.40). Thus a public order is required ‘‘which guarantees, defines, and enforces rights and obligations’’ towards the common good. There are two dimensions of public order that define and promote rights and laws for the common good: Civil Society and State. "
No hard and fast line can be drawn between civil society and the State. By the State, however, we denote those conditions of social organization and regulation which are most fundamental and most general: conditions which are summed up in and expressed through the general will as manifested in legislation and its execution.’’ (Dewey, 1899–1924/1999, p. MW.4.423)
For Dewey, ‘‘civil society . . . represents those forms of associated life which are orderly and authorized, because constituted by individuals in the exercise of their rights, together with those special forms which protect and insure them. Families, clubs, guilds, unions, corporations come under the first head; courts and civil administrative bodies, like public railway and insurance commissions, etc., come under the second.’’ (Dewey, 1899–1924/1999, p. MW.4.504) These categories of civil society organizations are aligned with Durkheim’s concept of ‘‘intermediate organizations’’. Building these institutions is seen as one way to address the seeming ‘‘inability of so-called ‘advanced’
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societies to develop institutions that are capable of acceptably reconciling inevitably scarce resources with individual and collective desires, [for instance] to have all the health care we want’’ (Mays, 2000, p. 122). To guide the development of a public order and related institutions that promote the public good, Dewey stressed the importance of education and the social organization of knowledge. Societal intelligence in his view was not the sum of individuals’ intelligence but: (1). The number and range of pluralistic intellectual resources in a society, particularly for the resolution of problematic situations. (2). The extent to which these resources are organized and made available to all members of society. If members of a society do not have access to the knowledge, technologies, and culture that define and drive their society, there is a risk of social fragmentation (Dewey, 1954/1927). Dewey also put forward The Ethical Postulate (a reconstruction of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit) that he hoped individuals and societies would test in evolving democratic practice and developing individual and societal capacities. "
In the realization of individuality there is found also the needed realization of some community of persons of which the individual is a member; and, conversely, individuals who duly satisfy the community in which they share, by that same conduct satisfy themselves. (Dewey, 1891/ 1999, p. 322)
State and Civil Society
The pragmatist concept of civil society, as discussed in the preceding section, is based on the idea of the common good and of developing a public order to promote this common good (Dewey, 1882–1898/1999, p. EW.3.32). However, what constitutes the public good and the public order change with time and social context. Dewey illustrates these changes using the examples of evolving forms of judicial law and geopolitical governance. In ancient Athens, inanimate objects and animals were brought to trial, for example, a tree after falling on a man was held liable for his death. Dewey cautioned that while much progress has been made from these primitive laws, there is need to go much further, for example, with respect to conflicts on the death penalty and on the treatment of juvenile delinquents in courts (Dewey, 1899–1924/1999, p. MW.5.413); these continue to be contentious issues in the twenty-first century. In the same vein, Dewey considered that: ‘‘The development of national States marks a tremendous step forward in the realization of the principle of a truly inclusive common good. But it cannot be the final step. . . (Dewey, 1899–1924/1999, p. MW.5.431).
Dewey was well aware of the limitations of government. He appreciated that ‘‘the movement to restrict the functions of government, the laissez-faire movement, was in its time an important step in human freedom, because so much of governmental action was despotic in intention and stupid in execution’’ (Dewey, 1899–1924/1999, p. MW.5.425). For reform of government in keeping with individuals’ and societies’ development, Dewey stressed the importance of the role of civil society, rather than of government. ‘‘We cannot expect the causes of a disease to combine effectually to cure the disease they create. The need is that the nonpolitical forces organize themselves to transform existing political structures’’ (Dewey, 1954/1927, p. 129). As discussed with respect to the Ethical Postulate, to guide societal reform, Dewey believed that individuals and societies would find that a commitment to ethical and moral development was without parallel as a means for social coordination and as a foundation to support individual and societal flourishing. "
The moral criterion by which to try social institutions and political measures may be summed up as follows: The test is whether a given custom or law sets free individual capacities in such a way as to make them available for the development of the general happiness or the common good.... It may be stated from the side of associated life as follows: The test is whether the general, the public, organization and order are promoted in such a way as to equalize opportunity for all. (Dewey, 1899–1924/1999, p. MW.5.431)
Dewey emphasized that for sociopolitical change to be meaningful, the moral basis for civil society action needs to be reflected and integrated across society. In describing an ideal state, Aristotle made a distinction between an inferior class of laborers or ‘‘natural slaves’’ who produced material goods and an elite class that contemplated civil and moral affairs (Dewey and Tufts, 1908/1999). In contemporary society, similar distinctions are be made, for example, between the corporate and production sector, the government and the general public, and civil society activists, academics, and ethicists. Such divisions between the material and the moral not only lead to discriminatory practices, but also compound what Dewey referred to as the problems of ‘‘materialism and brutality of our economic life’’ (Dewey, 1920/1999, p. MW.12.178). Dewey did not see human beings as inherently moral or immoral, but instead regarded moral development as an evolutionary process resulting from the democratic resolution of problematic situations in societies. Dewey believed that promoting scientific and moral development was the best way to develop civil society and democratic practice to support human flourishing.
Civil Society Theory: Dewey
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Deweyan pragmatism is increasingly seen as relevant to contemporary civil society theory. However, some view pragmatist philosophy as being naively optimistic about the ability of civil society to rationally deliberate on, and effect, social change in a way that ensures individual and societal flourishing (Bernstein, 1998; Ryan, 1995). Bernstein notes that Dewey’s was a qualified optimism (Bernstein, 1998, p. 149): "
I do think that at times Dewey is excessively optimistic about the real social and political possibilities of resolving serious social conflicts by open communication. Although this is a weakness in Dewey’s thinking, we can read him in a different way. For we can interpret Dewey as telling us that it is precisely because conflicts between different groups run so deep, that it becomes all the more urgent to develop those habits and virtues by which we can intelligently seek to negotiate and reconcile differences. . . He always stresses the ongoing creative task of nurturing the habits of intelligence – habits that can only be sustained in critical, open, tolerant communities.
The challenge, as Dewey (1954/1927) himself observed, continues to be the ‘‘improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion’’. Developing more effective methods of deliberation is a key concern of contemporary civil society theorists (Glasius, 2005; Shook, 2004). Shook discusses Dewey’s theory on deliberation in relation to Rawls’ and Habermas’, "
Habermas believes that if people were allowed to include in discussion some appeals to their actually held ethical values and norms, then that discussion would be irredeemably distorted away from genuinely rational and morally acceptable discourse. But from Dewey’s perspective, democratic deliberation should primarily concern the diversity of respected and pursued social goods and norms. Dewey would obviously agree with Habermas that democratic discourse should be free from coercion and violence. But Habermas, like Rawls, goes too far in seeking a democratic forum that requires a person to suspend or ignore her genuine values and norms. Nothing is more deserving of public deliberation than our most cherished values. (Shook, 2004: 40–41)
Dewey’s test for all social institutions and processes is whether they support the development of individual and societal capacities towards the common good and equalize opportunity for all. This pragmatist position is aligned with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach, where they argue that the primary goal of
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development is not end state utilities (such as health, wealth, happiness), but rather promoting individuals’ functional capabilities (such as the ability to access health care and education, and participate in economic transactions and political affairs) (Nussbaum and Sen, 1993). Dewey’s approach goes further than Sen and Nussbaum’s in explicitly linking the development of individual capacities with the development of society and the common good. Dewey’s emphasis on pluralism in civil society is consistent with Sen’s (2006) thesis on identity, that recognizes the multiple ways in which people define themselves and the publics they form rather than any one definitive categorization or lens. This view is also consistent with that of those feminist scholars who recognize attention to a diverse range of socio-cultural practices, perspectives and choices may be more politically useful, even for women, than attention to singular ‘‘identities’’. Diversities in sociocultural practices cannot be reduced to a single identifying category and cannot find adequate protection under such categories, even within human rights or antidiscrimination law (Charlesworth and Chinkin, 2000). Environmental concerns are a key catalyst for contemporary civil society activism. Hugh McDonald discusses how pragmatist philosophy can inform contemporary debates on the environment, drawing on Dewey’s situating human transactions within the natural environment of which these transactions are a part (McDonald, 2004). In Pragmatism and feminism: reweaving the social fabric, Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996: 21) discusses the past divergence of the social sciences from pragmatist philosophy and notes: "
But from my perspective it [pragmatist philosophy] seems to have been criticized and eventually relegated to the margins for holding the very positions that feminists today would find to be its greatest strengths. These include early and persistent criticisms of positivist interpretations of scientific methodology; disclosure of the value dimension of factual claims; reclaiming aesthetics as informing everyday experience; linking of dominant discourses with domination; subordinating logical analysis to social, cultural, and political issues; realigning theory with praxis.
Dewey explicity intended that pragmatist philosophy would be tested and evolve past his time to make it relevant for contemporary inquiry; this type of sociopolitical learning being a central tenet of pragmatist philosophy. Thus he would have welcomed critiques and connections being made between pragmatist philosophy and contemporary civil society theory.
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Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society in the US ▶ Civil Society Theory: Aristotle ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Rousseau ▶ Community, Types of ▶ Hobbes, Thomas ▶ Identity ▶ Locke, John ▶ Public Benefit and Public Good
References/Further Readings Bernstein, R. J. (1998). Community in the pragmatist tradition. In M. Dickstein (Ed.), The revival of pragmatism: new essays on social thought, law and culture (pp. 141–156). Boydston, J. A., & Hickman, L. A. (Eds.). (1882–1953/1999). The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition. Carbondale/ Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Charlottesville: InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Bullert, G. (1989). John Dewey on war and fascism: a response. Educational Theory, 39(1), 71–80. Caspary, W. R. (2000). Dewey on democracy. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Center for Dewey Studies. (1961–current). From http://www.siu.edu/ deweyctr/index.htm, retrieved 12/12/2006. Charlesworth, H., & Chinkin, C. (2000). The boundaries of international law: a feminist analysis. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dewey, J. (1882–1898/1999). The early works of John Dewey, 1882–1898. In J. A. Boydston & L. A. Hickman (Eds.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Charlottesville: InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Dewey, J. (1891/1999). Outlines of a critical theory of ethics. In J. A. Boydston & L. A. Hickman (Eds.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition (Vol. 3). Carbondale/Edwardsville; Charlottesville: Southern Illinois University Press, InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Dewey, J. (1899–1924/1999). The middle works of John Dewey, 1899– 1924. In J. A. Boydston & L. A. Hickman (Eds.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition. Carbondale/ Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Charlottesville: InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Dewey, J. (1920/1999). Reconstruction in philosophy. In J. A. Boydston & L. A. Hickman (Eds.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Charlottesville: InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Dewey, J. (1925–1953/1999). The later works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. In J. A. Boydston & L. A. Hickman (Eds.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Charlottesville: InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Dewey, J. (1935/1999). Liberalism and social action. In J. A. Boydston & L. A. Hickman (Eds.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Charlottesville: InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Dewey, J. (1939/1989). Freedom and culture. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Dewey, J. (1954/1927). The public and its problems. Athens: Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press. Dewey, J., & Tufts, J. H. (1908/1999). Ethics. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. The electronic edition. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, Charlottesville: InteLex ‘‘Past Masters’’ series. Garrison, J. (2000). Pragmatism and public administration. Administration & Society, 32(4), 458–477. Glasius, M. (2005). Deliberation or struggle? Civil society traditions behind the social forums. Ephemera, 5(2), 240–252. Mays, N. (2000). Legitimate decision making: the Achilles’ heel of solidaristic health care systems. Journal of Health Services Research and Policy, 5(2), 122–126. McDonald, H. P. (2004). John Dewey and environmental philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mead, G. H. (1967 [1934]). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nussbaum, M., & Sen, A. (Eds.). (1993). The quality of life. New York: Oxford University Press. Rorty, R. (2003, March 9). The invisible philosopher. [Book review, ‘‘The education of John Dewey: a biography’’ by Jay Martin, 2002]. Columbia University Press. The New York Times. Ryan, A. (1995). John Dewey and the high tide of American liberalism. New York, London: W.W. Norton. Ryan, A. (2000). What did John Dewey want? In J. Haldane (Ed.), Philosophy and public affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schilpp, P. A., & Hahn, L. E. (Eds.). (1939/1989). The philosophy of John Dewey (3rd ed.). La Salle: Open Court. Seigfried, C. H. (1996). Pragmatism and feminism: reweaving the social fabric. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sen, A. (2006). What clash of civilisations? Why religious identity isn’t destiny. Retrieved 03/2007, from http://www.slate.com/id/2138731/ Shields, P. M. (2003). The community of inquiry: classical pragmatism and public administration. Administration & Society, 35(5), 510–538. Shook, J. R. (2004). Deliberative democracy and moral pluralism: Dewey vs. Rawls and Habermas. In J. Ryder & K. Wilkoszweska (Eds.), Deconstruction and reconstruction. The Central European Pragmatist Forum (Vol. 2). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Snider, K. F. (2000). Response to Stever and Garrison. Administration & Society, 32, 487–489. Westbrook, R. (1991). John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Civil Society Theory: Ferguson LISA HILL University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Brief Biography of the Theorist Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) was a leading figure of the ‘‘Scottish Enlightenment,’’ a period of intense intellectual activity that took place in the second half of the
Civil Society Theory: Ferguson
eighteenth century. Famous in his day, Ferguson held the Chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1764–1785) and exerted considerable intellectual influence in Britain, Europe and America. His major works were An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) and Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792). Ferguson’s intellectual achievements were considerable: He is sometimes identified as ‘‘the first sociologist’’ and his thought embodies one of the first sustained critiques of modernity and market society (Hill, 1996). He also contributed significantly to an important strand of classical liberal thinking, namely the anti-constructivist, laissez-faire stream that was developed and popularized by Frederich von Hayek (Hill, 2006: 2–4). Most recently, he has interested scholars looking for early sources on the nature and preservation of civil society (e.g., Gellner, 1994, 1996; Foley and Edwards, 1996; Varty, 1997).
Main Lines of Argument Although Ferguson is often identified as the originator of the term ‘‘civil society,’’ it was actually in common usage during his time, denoting a social unit ‘‘larger than and different from a tribe’’ (Shils, 1991: 5) and more advanced or ‘‘civilized’’ than rude or barbarous types (Varty, 1997: 30–31). It was also a synonym for society under government, an understanding dating from classical times. Ferguson partly embraces this general conception but also develops it so that his use of the idea influenced further elaborations of civil society, most notably G. W. F Hegel’s (Waszek, 1988: passim). Ferguson’s main contribution here lay in his emphasis on the self-organizing and spontaneous character of civil society as well as the positive normative connotations with which he imbued the term. Though Ferguson nowhere systematically defines what he means by ‘‘civil society,’’ it is evident that it meant far more to him than simply living under government and also that it was not restricted to economically developed or ‘‘polished’’ societies. Civil society, for Ferguson. encompasses both the realm of uncoerced collective action and the sometimes coercive realm of the organized state, the latter of which he conceives, not as antagonistic to the liberties and desires of human agents, but as a product of their own activities, motivations and needs. Civil society is a state of social order; a condition where a people are organized (and especially self-organizing); where both informal norms and positive laws generate orderly conduct and the use of violence is moderated and regulated. Therefore the market, voluntary social and religious organizations as well as the state and its legal, military and
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political institutions are all understood to fall within civil society. Further, civil society has normative connotations because it is condition that exists only where a peoples’ lifeways and institutions are generated spontaneously and where a citizenry is civically engaged, other-regarding and therefore virtuous. Civil society is the ‘‘good’’ society and it ‘‘is in conducting the affairs of civil society, that mankind find the exercise of their best talents’’ (1995 [1767]: 149). The history of civil society – the subject of Ferguson’s most famous work – is a history of progress in political, military and legal institutions, social structure, arts, sciences, manners, population, literature, production, consumption, wealth, and liberty. It is a history of society and the polity broadly understood, referring to a process of development by which people gradually refine political society and regulate their relationships and conflicts legally, where ‘‘civility’’ and order reign, ‘‘national concert’’ is achieved and the population is civically active (Ferguson, 1995 [1767]: 28; Kumar, 1993: 377; Varty, 1997: 30–31). In its advanced (i.e., ‘‘polished’’) form civil society is characterized by a culturally homogenous yet professionally differentiated population (1995 [1767]: 178–179) that is imbued with a refined ‘‘sense of humanity,’’ a ‘‘regard to the rights of nations’’ and an ‘‘admiration of civil wisdom and justice’’ (1995 [1767]: 149). Such societies have also learned to ‘‘soften the rigours of war’’ and control the use of violence (1995 [1767]: 190). In accommodating the organized state within his idea of civil society, Ferguson’s conception is therefore different from that famously elaborated by G. W. F. Hegel who saw it as separate and distinct from the state. This is ironic since ‘‘Hegel read and used Ferguson’s work’’ and ‘‘it was Ferguson’s Essay in its German translation which helped to make the notion of ‘bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft’ fashionable in German scholarly circles’’ (Oz-Salzberger, 1995: xix).
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Civil Society and Spontaneous Order. Ferguson’s embrace of the organized state within the realm of civil society is an unavoidable consequence of his innovative social science which is built around the idea of spontaneous order and a belief in the self-organizing character of human society. He vigorously rejects the type of contractarianism found in early modern political philosophy – a rejection that made possible the transition to modern social science – (Vernon, 1979: 58; Eriksson, 1993: 254–255) and explores the manner in which subrational forces like innate drives, habit, custom and convention, material circumstances and
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conflict generate both formal and informal mechanisms for the achievement of social order (Hill, 2006: passim). Ferguson’s discourse on the origins of the state discards all rationalistic notions of a state of nature and of any social contract. Contrary to Rousseau’s postulate of pre-social ‘‘man’’ living independent, ‘‘[s]olitary, indolent’’ and ‘‘dispersed among other animals’’ (Rousseau, 1973 [1754]: 58, 54) Ferguson insists that humans have always lived in groups (1995 [1767]: 21) and have always been political and progressive. As he wrote: ‘‘the latest efforts of human invention are but a continuation of certain devices which were practised. . .in the rudest state of mankind’’ (1995 [1767]: 14). Ferguson explicitly rejects Rousseau’s attempt to ‘‘discover the natural man’’ as well as his assumption that the state of society is an impediment to such knowledge (Rousseau, 1973 [1754]: 43–45; Ferguson, 1995 [1767]: 11). Political and social institutions are coeval with the human species because they are instinctively developed. Such apparently artificial structures as regular government are, in fact, perfectly natural, because they are immanent in human nature (1792 I: 256, II: 244–245; 1995 [1767]: 129, 84). Further, ‘‘it appears to be the will of Providence that wherever there is society there should be government also’’ (1792, II: 496). Ferguson counsels ‘‘to receive, with caution, the traditional histories of ancient legislators, and founders of states,’’ insisting that history is, by and large, a spontaneous affair generated by the accumulated acts of innumerable actors through time. Contrary to the kind of ‘‘Kings and Queens’’ histories that dominated in his time, the governments of Rome and Sparta ‘‘took [their] rise from the situation and genius of the people, not from the projects of single men’’ (1995 [1767]: 121). Rather than being the result of conscious planning and design, civil society is the product of subrational group processes whereby ‘‘nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’’ (1995 [1767]: 119, My emphasis). Thus civil society has no precise point of inception for Ferguson. Since there never was a state of nature and since humans have always lived in some sort of political order, civil society – and therefore the state (in however rudimentary a form) – has always existed. Even so, there are stages in the refinement and entrenchment of civil society: it is originally characterized by transitory institutions, a diffusion of authority, the deployment of organized violence and a more even and egalitarian social structure; it proceeds through various stages (the ‘‘savage,’’ ‘‘barabarous’’ and ‘‘polished’’) to more formal, refined, centralized, and permanent institutions characterized by structured rank distinctions and hierarchies in which the majority
turn away from martial duties towards the concerns of production (Gellner, 1996: 121). Importantly, Ferguson insists that the terms ‘‘civilised’’ and ‘‘polished’’ are not synonymous; after all, ‘‘[c]ivilisation has been conspicuous in nations who made little progress in commerce, or the arts on which it proceeds.’’ The Romans, for example, ‘‘had formed a very accomplished republic, and exhibited many an illustrious character; whilst, in respect to family estate and manner of life, they were nearly in the condition of peasants and husbandmen’’ (1792, I: 252). ‘‘Polished’’ society is commercial society, whereas ‘‘civilised’’ society is something that humans have been able to achieve at almost every stage of their economic development (1995 [1767]: 79). In other words, civil society is about the level of effective political condition, not the level of economic development. Complications and Ambivalence. Though it has been mentioned that the organized state is part of civil society nevertheless there are times when Ferguson indicates that the state might pose a threat to civil society, specifically when that state is under despotic military control (see, e.g., Ferguson, 1995: 88). Similarly, while the market is an inherent aspect of civil society, Ferguson also perceives within the market dangers to civil society. These two threats are related; when civil society is enervated by the virtue-sapping, apathy-inducing effects of specialized market life, the emergence of military government becomes possible, even likely. Whereas for Ferguson’s friend and contemporary, Adam Smith, an expanding market protects civil society from the potentially noxious power of the state, for Ferguson a key threat to civil society comes from the market itself which, if left unchecked, contained the seeds of despotism. And unlike many other of his contemporaries who saw history as an inexorable march towards better and more refined states of social and political effectiveness, Ferguson is more cautious. Progress brings some gains in effective political condition but it also brings costs. On the one hand, there is an expansion of freedom and legal rights as well as a diffusion of wealth and therefore economic independence, all of which developments can enable and enrich political society (1995 [1767]: 247). Yet, on the other hand, progress and market society damage the social fabric by undermining social cohesion and the solidary passions and by depriving its specialized citizens of opportunities to practice and express their civic – and especially martial – virtue. The new prosperity of the polished age certainly brought luxury, wealth, comfort, and ‘‘convenience’’ but it also held the promise of social decay or ‘‘a kind of spontaneous return to obscurity and weakness’’ (1995 [1767]: 197–199). Commercially successful societies are characterized by increasing levels of
Civil Society Theory: Ferguson
specialization, differentiation, individuation, privatization, legalism, and depersonalization which can lead to apathy, political inertia, loss of civic virtue and the possibility of political tyranny, namely, praetorian rule. Commercialism thereby administers a kind of fatal ‘‘poison’’ to the moral health of the polity (1995 [1767]: 80) causing people to withdraw from ‘‘public affairs’’ and inducing them to become ‘‘profligate, licentious, seditious’’ and self-interested (1978 [1769]: 243–244). Anticipating an important theme of nineteenth century sociology, Ferguson notes that in modern commercial states, the division of labor erodes social cohesion, or in his own words, ‘‘loosen(s) the bands of political union’’ (1995[1767]: 206–209). The new individualistic ethic of commerce causes ‘‘members of a community. . .to lose the sense of every connection. . .and have no common affairs to transact but those of trade. . .in which the national spirit. . .cannot be exerted.’’ In simple (that is, ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘barbarous’’) societies ‘‘the public’’ exists as an intimate ‘‘knot of friends,’’ bound by a sense of common danger (1995 [1767]: 208); each male citizen is responsible for the defense of common territory and this gives rise to the vital bonds that define and preserve community. In such intimate, small-scale societies war strengthens social bonds; the perception of external common enemies results in communities of ‘‘faithful, disinterested [and] generous’’ friends (1995 [1767]: 26–29). But in modern states, the development of professional standing armies and the concomitant rise of laboring and merchant classes freed from security responsibilities and at liberty to devote themselves entirely to the pursuit of private interests (2006: 143–152), ‘‘commercial spirit’’ comes to displace vital civic spirit. Inevitably, an ‘‘admiration, and desire of riches’’ brings with it ‘‘an aversion to danger’’ (1995 [1767]: 231). Whereas in small-scale, pre-commercial (‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘barbarous’’) societies the ‘‘intercourses of men’’ are ‘‘friendly. . .affectionate and happy’’ (1995 [1767]: 104) in commercial orders avarice, individualism, competition, and legalism corrode spontaneous affection. Social relationships are now defined and constrained by contract and the pursuit of profit. In polished society ‘‘man is sometimes found a detached and solitary being: he has found an object which sets him in competition with his fellow creatures, and he deals with them as he does with his cattle and his soil, for the sake of the profits they bring’’ (1995 [1767]: 24; 1792, II: 376–377). Unlike Smith, Ferguson eschews rating the prosperity of societies according to such quantitative indicators as wealth, military might or population levels. Instead, he employs the Stoic index of the moral and civic disposition of its citizenry (1995 [1767]: 62). Civil society is characterized by an active public and a constitution
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capable of embracing and promoting political and military participation (1792, II: 509). Yet, under the effects of progress, the populace becomes ‘‘disunited and corrupted and incapable of public affections’’ in direct ‘‘consequence of their numbers’’ especially when these numbers congregate in close proximity (1978 [1769]: 242–244; 2006: 393). Though intellectually committed to progress, Ferguson personally believed that it was in the small to moderatescale city-state that people stood the best chance of living the ‘‘good life,’’ that is, as civic animals (1756: 19). Even so, he also accepted the naturalness of progress and held that the good life was still possible in large-scale societies provided that virtue was consciously and consistently cultivated. This concession was part of his attempt to remain committed to progress while finding plausible answers to the eighteenth century debate about the compatibility or otherwise of wealth and virtue. It is possible, he decides, that they are indeed compatible but only if it is understood that happiness does not consist in prosperity alone and that prosperity can threaten civic virtue (1995 [1767]: 6). It was the urgent task of government to find ways by which ‘‘reconcile. . .the social affections of mankind, with their separate and interested pursuits’’ (1995 [1767]: 138). Nevertheless, Ferguson seems unsure about whether this can be achieved to the point where ambivalence about the wealth/virtue opposition could be described as the keynote of his body of work.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society History I: Antiquity ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gellner ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Rousseau ▶ Civil Society Theory: Smith ▶ Freedom of Association
References/Further Readings Barry, N. (1982). The tradition of spontaneous order. Literature of Liberty, 5(2), 7–58. Edwards, M. (2004). Civil society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Eriksson, B. (1993). The first formulation of Sociology: A discursive innovation of the eighteenth century. European Journal of Sociology, 34(1), 251–276. Ferguson, A. (1756). Reflections previous to the establishment of a militia. London: R and J. Dodsley. Ferguson, A. (1776). Remarks on a pamphlet lately published by Dr. Price, intitled ‘‘Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty. . .,’’ in a Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament. London: T. Cadell. Ferguson, A. (1792). Principles of moral and political science: Being chiefly a retrospect of lectures delivered in the college of Edinburgh (Vols. 2). Edinburgh, UK: Printed for A. Strahan and T. Cadell, London/W. Creech.
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Ferguson, A. (1834 [1783]). The history of the progress and termination of the Roman Republic. London: Jones. Ferguson, A. (1969 [1778]). Institutes of moral philosophy. New York: Garland Publishing. Ferguson, A. (1978 [1769]). Institutes of moral philosophy. New York: Garland Publishing. Ferguson, A. (1995 [1767]). An essay on the history of civil society. In F. Oz-Salzberger (Ed. and with an Introduction). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, A. (1995). The correspondence of Adam Ferguson. In V. Merolle (Ed.) with an Introduction by J. B. Fagg (Vols. 3). London: William Pickering. Ferguson, A. (2006). Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson. In V. Merolle (Ed.). London: Pickering and Chatto. Foley, M., & Edwards, R. (1996). The paradox of civil society. Journal of Democracy, 7(3), 38–52. Gellner, E. (1994). Conditions of liberty: Civil society and its rivals. London: Penguin Books. Gellner, E. (1996). Adam Ferguson and the surprising robustness of civil society. In E. Gellner & C. Cansino (Eds.), Liberalism in modern times: Essays in honour of Jose G. Merquior. London: CEU Press. Hill, L. (1996). Anticipations of nineteenth and twentieth century social thought in the work of Adam Ferguson. European Journal of Sociology, 37(1), 203–228. Hill, L. (1997). Adam Ferguson and the paradox of progress and decline. History of Political Thought, 18(4), 677–706. Hill, L. (2006). The passionate society: The social, political and moral thought of Adam Ferguson. Berlin, Germany/New York: Springer. Kumar, K. (1993). Civil society: An inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term. The British Journal of Sociology, 44(3), 375–395. Oz-Salzberger, F. (1995). ‘Introduction’ to Ferguson, Adam, an essay on the history of civil society. In F. Oz-Salzberger (Ed. and with an Introduction). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pelczynski, Z. A. (Ed.) (1984). The State and civil society: Studies in Hegel’s political philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, J. J. (1973 [1754]). A discourse on the origin of inequality. In The social contract and discourses (G. D. H. Cole, Trans. and Introduction). London: Everyman’s Library. Shils, E. (1991). The virtue of civil society. Government and Opposition, 26(1), 3–20. Varty, J. (1997). Civil or commercial? Adam Ferguson’s concept of civil society. Democratisation, 4, 29–48. Vernon, R. (1979). Unintended consequences. Political Theory, 7(1), 57–73. Waszek, N. (1988). The Scottish enlightenment and Hegel’s account of civil society. Boston: M. Nijhoff.
The annexation of Sudetenland by Nazi Germany and the growing rise of anti-Semitism in the German-controlled protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia forced his family to emigrate and settle in London in 1939. Gellner adapted quickly to the new life in England and won an Oxford scholarship to study philosophy, economics, and politics. At Oxford Gellner was exposed to Wittgenstein inspired idealist philosophy of language which deeply conflicted with his already discernible materialist understanding of social world. With the end of war Gellner longed to return to Prague but this proved to be a futile attempt as he became profoundly disillusioned with the new Czechoslovak state’s gradual embrace of the Soviet ideology. Upon his graduation in 1947 he was appointed lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. In 1949 he took up a new appointment in the department of sociology at the London School of Economics where he soon became a professor and where he was to stay for the next 35 years. His first book, Words and Things (1959), a stern attack on the linguistic philosophy, established his reputation as an intellectual maverick who scorned trendy approaches and hegemonic schools of thought. This reputation was further reinforced with the succession of books and articles that successfully straddled philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and history and articulated a distinct analytical position that blended rationalist and materialist ontology with the historically embedded positivist epistemology. Following an extensive fieldwork in Morocco he completed his Ph.D. thesis on the Berber religious tribes which sparked his life long interest in Islam and was also a backbone of his book Saints of the Atlas (1969). In 1974 Gellner was elected to the British Academy while in 1984 he was appointed a chair in social anthropology at the Cambridge University. The collapse of communism coincided with his retirement and in 1993 he returned to Prague to head the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the newly established Central European University. Gellner died in Prague in 1995.
Main Lines of Argument
Civil Society Theory: Gellner SINISˇA MALESˇEVIC´, VESNA MALESˇEVIC´ National University of Ireland, Galway, Aras Moyola, Galway City, Ireland
Brief Biography of the Theorist Ernest Gellner was born in 1925 in Paris but grew up in the culturally diverse environment of interwar Prague.
Although Ernest Gellner was an erudite polymath whose expertise covered such diverse research fields as kinship studies, nationalism, civil society, Islam, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, state socialism, analytical philosophy and historical sociology, his intellectual preoccupation was focused on one central puzzle: how the modern social form came into being and in particular to what extent modernity is unique relative to all other social orders? The key to unlock this puzzle was to be found in comparing and contrasting two historically dominant forms of social organization: the agrarian and industrial world. Whereas,
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in his view, agrarian social universe is characterized by excessive violence, rigid hierarchy, cultural polarization and economic stagnation, the industrial society is its antipode: a social order underpinned by intensive social mobility, continuous scientific advancement, value pluralism, egalitarian ethics, cultural standardization and economic growth. However rather than being an inevitable product of evolutionary social development the transition from the agrarian into industrial world was seen by Gellner (1988) as nothing short of a structural miracle. In his view this was a profoundly contingent and unprecedented event emerging through the synergy of multiple historical accidents that occurred on the European continent including the church-state stalemate, religious wars, the existence of permeable aristocracy, the independence of free towns and the emergence of a plural state system. In Gellner’s account the birth of civil society was firmly linked to this extraordinary transition from the agrarian to industrial world. For Gellner (1994) civil society is more than a cluster of nongovernmental institutions and associations which are independent and strong enough to counterbalance the state. Although civil society requires the existence of autonomous and powerful nongovernmental bodies which can keep the state authority in check without paralyzing its role as an arbitrator between group interests and an essential keeper of internal peace these characteristics are insufficient for the existence of a fully fledged civil society. In Gellner’s view the indispensable ingredient of civil society is an individual autonomy. Any concept of civil society that does not incorporate an emphasis on the personal liberty, in Gellner’s view, can not differentiate between civil society proper and the premodern segmentary communities. In other words many traditional patrimonial collectivities such as clans, lineages, bands, or tribes were characterized by a substantial degree of autonomy vis-a`-vis central authorities, often being in position to strongly challenge the will of the rulers. However as these collectivities clearly lacked a sense of individual freedom and were governed by the strict ritualistic practices they had little, if anything, in common with the civil society. Rather, as Gellner (1994: 7) puts it one could escape the tyranny of kings at the expense of living under the tyranny of cousins. That is, the only way one could evade the oppression of the central authority in premodern world is through the obedience to a particular social subgroup. Hence in his theory civil society is conceptualized in wider and historically specific terms as a distinctly modern social order amiable to proliferation of independent associations which do not stifle one’s personal liberty.
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Since the emergence of civil society is firmly tied to modernity Gellner argues that one of the key preconditions for it to happen involves the structural transformation in human relations: from the rigidities of social status to flexibilities of contractual arrangements. Consequently Gellner (1995) depicts modern individuals as ‘‘modular’’ creatures who, just like modular furniture units, are variable and adaptable to ever changing conditions and opportunities of the modern world. In his view modularity is the precondition of civil society as under modern conditions one has the freedom to change memberships in various associations, to switch allegiances and loyalties to distinct subgroupings without being automatically ostracized from the society. Unlike the agrarian world where one’s social status and communal membership were inscribed on birth and regularly reinforced through ritual and coercion and thus were not particularly efficient, the human relationships in the industrial world derive their efficiency from their flexibility, instrumentality, and temporary character. In Gellner’s (1994: 103) witty and colorful language one can join a modern political party ‘‘without slaughtering a sheep’’ and one can leave it ‘‘without incurring the death penalty for apostasy.’’ In this theoretical model modernity also presumes existence of a substantial degree of statewide cultural homogeneity. In other words the transition from the agrarian to industrial order simultaneously spawn birth to civil society and nationalism. As the two phenomena have historically shared the same adversary – an absolutist and hierarchical social order that combined disdain for individual liberty with ignorance and antipathy for vernacular cultures – they acted as allies for much of the nineteenth century. Furthermore as proliferation of civil society required much broader cultural horizon than that of segmentary subgroupings while the spread of early nationalism depended heavily on the emerging civil society networks this alliance has initially proved mutually beneficial. Moreover as nationalist ideology has been instrumental in creating conditions for context-free communication, the standardization of a singular idiom of expression and comprehension while at the same time fostering the view of its members as being of equal moral worth early nationalism was often a springboard of civil society. However once the nation-state acquired monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within its territory and the institutional and organizational instruments of political centralization were firmly in place civil society and nationalism gradually became ideological foes. In Gellner’s view liberal individualism is a distinct feature of civil society and as such it was bound to find itself on the collision course with the stringent collectivist
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Civil Society Theory: Gellner
ethos of nationalism. Hence much of the twentieth century saw nationalist movements as hostile opponents of civil society. Furthermore for Gellner civil society entails a clear separation between the political and economic spheres as strong political institutions provide stability and security while economic pluralism limits the extent of political centralization. In social orders where there is no firmly demarcated balance of power, such was for example Soviet model of state socialism, the political monopoly over the economy impedes economic growth, brings chronic inefficiency and curbs technological innovation and creativity. Consequently the dependency and weakness of the economic sphere allows for the emergence of overly coercive and unrestrained state. In other words civil society requires a fine balance between political centralization and economic decentralization. However for Gellner (1994: 206) this does not mean that economy and the polity have somehow equal weight in this relationship of independence and interdependence but he argues that civil society operates much better under condition where economy dominates ‘‘treating the polity as its accountable servant.’’ In addition to modernity and economic plurality the emergence of a viable civil society entails also ideological pluralism. In Gellner’s view civil society cannot function in an environment where the social order is sacralized and where one doctrine permeates the entire society. For example both communist states and Islamic and other theocracies act as guardians of the absolutist normative universes where truth, power, and social order are intertwined. If political authority is not understood merely as an institutional means for organizing social life but as an essential agent for the implementation of an absolute goal for the entire society then any opposition to such authority is perceived as a direct threat to a moral order of the whole society. Hence if there is an ideological monopoly at work the institutional separation of the economic and political spheres is in itself unlikely to generate social conditions hospitable to the emergence of civil society. For Gellner (1994: 137) civil society is essentially ‘‘an amoral order’’; that is a social form that does not compel individuals to share a uniform moral universe or to unquestionably embrace a singular teleological vision of the world. In a nutshell Gellner’s concept of civil society implies the existence of economic plurality and decentralization, political pluralism underpinned by stable state structures, ideological heterogeneity, the modularity of human action and modernity. In his own words: ‘‘Civil Society. . . is a society in which polity and economy are distinct, where polity is instrumental but can and does check extremes of individual interest, but where the state is
in turn checked by institutions with an economic base; it relies on economic growth which, by requiring cognitive growth, makes ideological monopoly impossible’’ (Gellner, 1994: 211). Although Gellner develops a persuasive theory of civil society this model has also been criticized for making no clear distinction between liberalism and civil society, for conceptualizing civil society in a singular, mostly Eurocentric, way, for overly economistic understanding of human action, and for distinctively sanguine view of capitalist modernity (Hann, 1995, 2003; Lessnoff, 2002; Macfarlane, 2007; Malesˇevic´, 2007). As Gellner’s understanding of civil society privileges negative over positive liberty and explains social behavior largely in instrumental terms there is too little explanatory room left for the role ideologies and geopolitics have played in the historical development of civil society in the West. While focusing extensively on the rivals of civil society outside of western, capitalist, modernity Gellner neglects the inherent tension that exists between global capitalism and civil society. Although well aware that neoliberal model of economic development might not be the ideal environment for flourishing of civil society he nevertheless does not explore the hegemonic potential of large corporations in stifling civil society. It is far from being self-evident that the tyrannies of cousins, the state and the single faith are substantially worse than the tyranny of the market.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Contemporary relevance of Gellner’s theory of civil society can be summarized in three main points. Firstly, Gellner proposes that civil society can only flourish in modern context where the separation of political and socioeconomic spheres clearly exists. If this precondition is to be met, a balance of power between market regulators and state authorities is essential to ensure scope for actions and relationships that transcend both kinship ties and extreme individualism. In order to highlight what civil society is and what type of social order is conducive to its development, Gellner explores its historical alternatives: Marxism and Islam. By adopting Marxism as an all embracing ideology the communist states combined the tyranny of political centralization with the tight command economy. And this is the root cause of their failure: if political ideology dictates economic realm it inevitably leads to economic inefficiency and political corruption. This is well illustrated by examples from many postcommunist societies where the slow pace of transition and repeatedly failed economic restructuring uncovered the depth of state’s inaptness which contributed to the mass protests, loss of trust
Civil Society Theory: Gellner
(Sztompka, 1998) and turn towards rigid nationalism. Gellner’s account of the Islamic world highlights the issue of religious renewal through the analysis of economic modernization and bureaucratization and their relationship with political authority. Although economic modernization brought about structural changes in organization of society, it was not accompanied by novel types of social action and thought since the particular overarching religious creed dictates the (moral) order of society. In this context, ‘‘society seems to possess no cement other than faith on the one hand, and loyalty on the other . . . . The residue of the population not locked into any such network is effectively disfranchised’’ (Gellner, 1994: 28). Secondly, Gellner suggests that civil society requires modular persons who are engaged in a whole set of relationships but free to leave any associations without fear of stigmatization. Modularity is another precondition for a functional civil society since allegiance to a specific group is transferable within conditions of modernity. Human modularity is closely tied to industrial society in two main respects: ‘‘it makes possible civil society, the existence of plural political associations and economic institutions; and it makes mandatory the strength of ethnic identity, arising from the fact that man is no longer tied to a social niche, but to a culturally defined pool’’ (Gellner, 1995: 54). Whether the idea of civil society or ethnic identity will prevail depends on the specific cultural, political, and economic conditions in any given society. Modularity seems to encapsulate to some extent notions of individuality in liberal democratic societies which stand is stark contrast to communist, early postcommunist and Islamist concepts of non-modular ‘‘good citizen.’’ As in state socialist and Islamic order ‘‘good citizen’’ meant essentially ‘‘good communist’’ or ‘‘good Muslim’’ so in early postcommunist transition the onus was on replacing one model of non-modularity with another: ‘‘good Croat or Serb,’’ ‘‘good Catholic or Orthodox.’’ Finally, Gellner’s concept of civil society offers a broader understanding of the conditions of modern life than most standard liberal democratic models. While context of liberal democracy may be conducive to extreme individualism, atomization, social isolation and formal recognition (but possibly poor implementation) of political freedoms and human rights, Gellner’s idea of civil society is focused on the institutional preconditions necessary for the emergence and persistence of a thriving civil society. There is no guarantee that by ensuring political pluralism and economic development individual liberties and rights will automatically follow. In addition when civil society is perceived to stand in direct opposition to the political structure (Gellner, 1994: 56), than the liberal
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concept of civil society becomes another ‘‘moral project’’ against which other social orders are measured. And here lies Gellner’s major contribution to the civil society debates: civil society is not just a set of any nongovernmental institutions able to counteract state power. It is a historical and sociological phenomenon that requires subtle interplay of several distinctive prerequisites: modern social condition, political autonomy buttressed by steady but supple state apparatus, regulated economic freedom, absence of ideological monopolies and a flexible, contractual character of social relations.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Ethnicity ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society, Definition and Approaches ▶ Popper, Sir Karl ▶ Social Cohesion
References/Further Readings Gellner, E. (1964). Thought and change. London: Weidenfeld/Nicolson. Gellner, E. (1975). Legitimation of belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gellner, E. (1988). Plough, sword and book: The structure of human history. London: Collins Harvill. Gellner, E. (1994). Conditions of liberty: Civil society and its rivals. London: Hamish Hamilton. Gellner, E. (1995). The importance of being modular. In J. A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history and comparison (pp. 32–55). Cambridge: Polity Press. Gellner, E. (1998). Language and solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, J. A. (Ed.) (1998). The state of the nation: Ernest Gellner and the theory of nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, J. A., & Jarvie, I. (Eds.) (1996). The social philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hall, J. A. (2009). Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography. Hann, C. (1995). Philosophers’ models on the Carpathian Lowlands. In J. A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history and comparison (pp. 158–182). Cambridge: Polity Press. Hann, C. (2003). Civil society: The sickness, not the cure? Social Evolution and History, 2(2), 55–75. Lessnoff, M. (2002). Ernest Gellner and modernity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Macfarlane, A. (2007). Ernest Gellner on liberty and modernity. In S. Malesˇevic´ & M. Haugaard (Eds.), Ernest Gellner and contemporary social thought (pp. 31–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malesˇevic´, S. (2007). Between the book and the new sword: Gellner, violence and ideology. In S. Malesˇevic´ & M. Haugaard (Eds.), Ernest Gellner and contemporary social thought (pp. 140–167). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Malesˇevic´, S., & Haugaard, M. (Eds.) (2007). Ernest Gellner and contemporary social thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sztompka, P. (1998). Mistrusting civility: Predicament of a post-communist society. In C. A. Jeffrey (Ed.), Real civil societies. Dilemmas of institutionalization (pp. 191–210). London: Sage.
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Civil Society Theory: Gramsci
Civil Society Theory: Gramsci HAGAI KATZ Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel
Brief Biography of the Theorist
(or government). And indeed, elsewhere Gramsci writes that ‘‘between the economic structure and the state with its legislation and coercion stands civil society’’ (Gramsci, 1971: 209). However, it is important to note that for Gramsci these distinctions are only analytic or theoretical. As Joseph Buttigieg explains: "
Gramsci’s enlarged concept of the modern State is, therefore, triadic; its three elements, political society, civil society, and the economic sphere, are inextricably intertwined— they are separable only for methodological or heuristic purposes. (Buttigieg, 2005: 43)
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian journalist and the leader of the Italian Communist party who died in the Fascist prison, is considered one of the major theoreticians of civil society. His ideas have become extremely influential in the civil society discourse, on both its academic and political sides. His notions of civil society, the state, and hegemony are discussed in over 30 notebooks of history and analysis of socialism, fascism, and other topics, written in the Fascist prison, as well as in some of his preprison writings. Gramsci’s concept of civil society, like much of his notions and conceptions, isn’t summed up in a single place in his writing, but rather develops gradually from early remarks in his pre-prison writings through fragmentary and seemingly haphazard formulations in several of his prison notebooks. While there are a few passages in the Prison Notebooks where Gramsci addresses the concept of civil society in a more formal and systematic way, much of his observations on civil society are intertwined with his analyses of a wide variety of topics.
And so, civil society includes representative institutions of the economic sphere, such as employers’ associations and trade unions, together with the more commonly accepted manifestations of civil society, such as churches, parties, professional associations, educational and cultural bodies. Gramsci’s work depicts a complex and dialectic interrelation between the state, civil society and hegemony. Within this relationship civil society plays a dual and dialectic role, as an agent of government and the hegemonic forces that control the state, which on the one hand is used as an instrument to maintain the current relations of power in society. On the other hand, civil society is the arena of creativity where counter-hegemonic forces develop alternatives to the hegemonic ideologies and practices, and from where, under specific conditions, reformist processes can emerge.
Main Lines of Argument
Civil Society and Hegemony
For Gramsci, civil society is located within society’s superstructure (in Marxist and Neo-Marxist thought the base is equivalent to the mode of production and the social order enforcing it, while the superstructure is the culture, technology, institutions, etc. which emerge from the material conditions and circumstances of production and support it), which in Gramsci’s works, pertains to institutions, forms of consciousness and political and cultural practices (Williams, 1978). The superstructure is the sphere of mass cultural and ideological reproduction, and it consists of two major levels:
The concept of Hegemony is central to Gramsci’s idea of civil society. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony is based on Marx’s notion of ‘‘false consciousness,’’ which is a state in which the members of the dominated classes are ideologically blinded to their subordinate position in the social structure. Thanks to false consciousness, true class consciousness is hindered by the ideology of the ruling class, and the masses are made to identify with a system which exploits them and its underlying ideology. Gramsci used the term ‘‘hegemony’’ to name the process of political domination through ideological domination. He showed how dominant elites use the state as well as the popular culture, mass media, education, and religion to reinforce an ideology which supports their position in the relations of force. Gramsci defines hegemony as a form of control exercised by a dominant class over subaltern groups in society. Although in his prison writings Gramsci typically is careful not to use Marxist terminology such as ‘‘class,’’ and ‘‘proletariat’’ (because his work was read by a Fascist censor), his class distinctions reflect the reality of his place and time.
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[O]ne that can be called civil society, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called private, and that of political society, or the State. (Gramsci, 1971: 12)
Since the superstructure is distinct from the base, which consists of social relations of production of a predominately economic character, and following Gramsci’s critique of Marxist economism, it is often argued that Gramsci developed a three-way distinction between the economy (the market), civil society, and the state
Civil Society Theory: Gramsci
Gramsci’s dominant class was the bourgeoisie, the modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of waged labor; and the central subordinate class was the proletariat, but also other subaltern groups. Gramsci’s hegemony refers to a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which dominated or subordinate classes succumb to their own domination by ruling classes, as opposed to being simply forced or coerced into accepting inferior positions. Hegemony, thus, refers to a sociopolitical situation or as Gramsci calls it ‘‘a moment,’’ in which there is an alignment of the superstructure (the dominant ideology) with the base (class divisions and the economic and political practices that support them). In hegemony, a certain way of life and thought is dominant, and is diffused throughout society to inform norms, values and tastes, political practices, and social relations (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982). Hegemony thus saturates the society to such an extent that it corresponds to the reality of social experience. In this way, people contribute to the continued dominance of the ruling class, by accepting the dominant culture’s values and assumptions as their own: repression is replaced by inculcation (Moen, 1998). Class dominance, as theorized by Gramsci, results from a combination of coercion and consent. The dominant class becomes hegemonic and promotes it own ideology as the commonsensical way of thinking through leadership and persuasion, so that instead of imposing itself on the subaltern classes, it acquires their consensus. The dominant class becomes firmly established not by forceful repression of the subaltern classes but rather by creating and disseminating an ideological commonsense, what Gramsci calls ‘‘forma mentis,’’ and by establishing a system that embodies this forma mentis and transmutes it into a certain social order, or even ‘‘makes it appear to be orderliness itself ’’ (Buttigieg, 1995: 13). Naturally, coercion is never completely missing from arrangements of power, but in hegemonic arrangements what matters is the power of ideas and the politics of consent, while force and coercion are less visible (Rupert, 2005). Since hegemony is not a result of imposition but rather of consent, this leadership is not exercised primarily through the mechanisms of government, rather it is acquired chiefly in the sphere of civil society where consensus is generated. In order for the hegemonic groups to control political society with the consent of the governed, that is for them to be ‘‘hegemonic,’’ they must allow for a space where free association and action (or a belief of free association and action) is allowed. When the ideas and worldviews formed in this ‘‘free’’ space buttress existing social, economic, and political arrangements, they are thought of as doing so willingly and spontaneously. In this, the action
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within civil society, directed by hegemonic elites and the forma mentis they engender, serves to legitimize existing arrangements and relations of power. Achieving a hegemonic position in civil society is resolutely more important to the ruling classes than gaining control over government. Controlling government allows hegemonic groups to use the legitimate force of the state to protect their interests, if they must. However, relying only on brute force as their only source of power would make them vulnerable to a simple straight-on challenge on the control of legitimate force such as in a coup d’e´tat. Contrastingly, hegemony causes potential opposing groups to consent with the dominant groups’ control and identify with its ideology, and this is likely to prevent a coup d’e´tat from occurring in the first place. To give credibility to the belief that the government is above class distinctions, the dominant class must make some concessions to accommodate some of the aspirations of subaltern groups. The subaltern groups’ aspirations, however, are bounded by the prevailing forma mentis, and consequently they will promote ‘‘their’’ interests in a manner that does not threaten the existing order and is compatible with the established rules of the game. Simultaneously, the subaltern groups’ imagined freedom to act on their own behalf acts as a sort of a pressure valve, by which the unrest caused by domination is given an outlet within the sphere of civil society, without disturbing the apparatus of the state and the existing forma mentis it protects. In this way hegemonic forces allow for minor changes and adjustments, such that don’t change the basic power arrangements in society, but give subaltern groups a feeling that change is possible. In this slow and wellcontrolled process, which Gramsci calls ‘‘passive revolution,’’ the hegemonic elite forgoes some of its immediate economic interests and allows for the forms of its hegemony to change marginally, for the purpose of fortifying the basic power arrangements and buttress its dominant position in these arrangements. Gramsci mentions Frederick Taylor’s ‘‘scientific management’’ movement as an example of passive revolution, as it introduced changes in the organization of work, but left existing patterns of ownership intact. Obviously, the hegemonic elites are not passive observers. They are present and participate in various institutions, cultural activities, and other forms of social interaction, and provide leadership in specific directions. Thus, hegemony is achieved through indoctrination by different institutions of civil society, some of which are controlled by hegemonic elites, others are infused with the hegemonic ideology, and yet others are co-opted by the hegemonic elite, what Gramsci called ‘‘transformismo’’ – ‘‘a process whereby the hegemonic groups absorbed,
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Civil Society Theory: Gramsci
translated and articulated the demands of some of the dominated sectors the better to defuse them’’ (Munck, 1996: 43). The result is ‘‘coercive orthodoxy’’ (Persaud, 2001: 65) – the self imposition of the hegemonic doxa by the subaltern elements in society on themselves. Therefore, civil society is the arena where the prevailing hegemony in the modern state is constantly being reinforced, but also the only arena where it can be truly contested. Since in Gramsci’s thought civil society, and not the state as in Hegel, is the active and positive element in historical developments, it is the locus of impending change. It is the creative space, where subaltern groups can coalesce and engage in a counter-hegemonic effort to alter society (Showstack-Sassoon, 1982). Actually, hegemony necessitates counter-hegemony, since it creates contradictions that cause unrest among subaltern groups. Hegemony and counter-hegemony are best seen as ‘‘simultaneous double movements’’ that reciprocally shape one another – hegemony informs counter-hegemony, and counter-hegemonic efforts cause hegemonic forces to realign and reorganize themselves (Persaud, 2001: 49).
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society State and Civil Society
Gramsci’s use of hegemony cannot be understood apart from other concepts he developed, including those of ‘‘State’’ and ‘‘Civil Society.’’ Actually, what sets hegemony apart from domination is the symbiosis between government and civil society. This can only be analyzed in a meaningful way when one understands that civil society is not separate from or exclusively opposed to the state (Buttigieg, 2005). Gramsci’s insights on the state and civil society were developed in the context of the dramatic events of his time, such as the Russian Revolution, the ascent of fascism, World War I and the social unrest that followed it, rapid European industrialization; and were influenced by his point of view as the leader of the Italian communist party. The most concise expression concerning civil society and the state appears in his sixth notebook, where he writes: ‘‘one might say that State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion’’ (Gramsci, 1971: 263). Hence, Gramsci rejects the sharp distinction drawn in mainstream liberal theory between civil society and the state or government. For him, the distinction between political society and civil society is purely methodological, and actually, as he argues in his 13th notebook, civil society and state are one. He saw civil society as a part
of his notion of the ‘‘integral state’’ (Gramsci, 1971: 267). In fact, although political society is the most immediately visible aspect of the state, civil society is its most resilient constitutive element. The intricate, organic relationships between civil society and political society is what produces hegemony, and thus makes it possible for certain classes of society to dominate the state and maintain their dominance, perpetuating the subalternity of other classes. Political society and civil society mutually reinforce each other to the advantage of certain classes, groups, and institutions. Control of the state is accomplished through hegemony in civil society, hegemony that is achieved through consent. But consent of the subaltern groups to hegemonic ideology is not a truly free choice; it is manufactured and manipulated by the dominant classes who control certain institutions of civil society, co-opt others, and infuse the rest with the forma mentis that they desire. So, the real indication of the state’s strength is what Gramsci calls a ‘‘dialectical unity’’ between government power and civil society (Gramsci, 1971: 169–170). The sturdiness of the modern state is dependent on the support offered by a sturdy civil society: ‘‘In the East [here Gramsci refers to the Tsarist, pre-modern state in Russia HK] the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West [here Gramsci refers to western modern liberal states -HK], there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state tottered a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’’ (Gramsci, 1971: 238). Civil Society as a Revolutionary Project
Gramsci’s elaboration of the concept of civil society is not just a theoretical or philosophical project. It is set up expressly to develop a revolutionary strategy that would disable the coercive apparatus of the state, allow subaltern groups to gain access to political power, and create the conditions that could give rise to a consensual society wherein no individual or group is reduced to a subaltern status (Anderson, 1976). Gramsci’s transformation of society starts in civil society, and ideally ends with the complete extension of civil society so that it no longer needs a coercive apparatus to protect it. The existence of civil society and the necessity of hegemonic elites to permit some freedom of action within it (otherwise they rely on force alone, and cannot achieve hegemony) provide the space and opportunity for counter-hegemonic mobilization. The subaltern state provides the incentive. The reliance of the modern liberal state on acquiring dominance through hegemony (that is,
Civil Society Theory: Gramsci
through generating consent in civil society) brings about the very cultural, social, and political formations that challenge hegemony. Hegemony in Gramsci’s view is not a final and unchangeable state, but rather an unstable result of an ongoing process of political and ideological altercation, which he called ‘‘war of position’’ and which takes the form of a ‘‘reciprocal siege’’ between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic actors. Hence, Gramsci’s political project calls for addressing the popular forma mentis, calling the subaltern elements’ attention to the tensions and possibilities within it, and to the social implications and the political ramifications that these possibilities can bring (Rupert, 2005). Since civil society is where hegemonic forces achieve and bolster their power in peaceful ways, it is also where resistance to such hegemony must take place. To generate hegemonic change the subaltern groups need to assume leadership (‘‘direzione,’’ in Gramsci’s words) in the cultural sphere. Revolutionary activity is a protracted process of developing, propagating and inculcating an alternative forma mentis. This is done through intellectual elaboration and education on a mass scale, and through systematic organization. These activities are only possible in civil society, and they create new spaces in civil society that are beyond the reach of the state. How is change obtained? Gramsci’s concept of hegemony pertains to the condition in which the dominant classes utilize the state to both coerce and at the same time achieve consent to their dominance within civil society. Since this marginalizes the interests of some of the subordinate groups, they organize in the only space available to them – in civil society. For real and lasting change adjustments must be made in the ‘‘relations of force’’ at the political level. The ability to make such adjustments is affected by the degree of political organization and aggressiveness of the rival forces, the strength of the alliances they manage to mobilize, and their level of organization. There are several pre-conditions for hegemonic change. These can be summarized into organization, ideology and action. The first condition involves the creation of a counter-hegemonic ‘‘historic bloc’’ – a coalition of groups, bridging the differences between the myriad groups disadvantaged by the relations of force in society at a specific historic moment. Gramsci’s revolutionary project is essentially democratic and all-inclusive, as it aims ‘‘to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups,’’ and as a result ‘‘to create the conditions in which this division [leaders/led] is no longer necessary’’ (Gramsci, 1971: 332–5, 144). The concept of the historic bloc is central to the conception of social
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change in Gramscian thought. Societal transformations which are not merely passive revolution cannot be engendered by isolated single actors. They can only be brought about by a coalition of groups, determined to acquire hegemonic control over society, what was referred to by Gramsci also as the ‘‘united front’’ (see for example in Anderson, 1976: 58). This is a radical-pluralist conception that locates the forging of counter-hegemony in the ‘‘multiplicity of antagonisms’’ evolving in and by way of the social relations within civil society (Ratner, 1992: 235). The second condition is development of political consciousness (Forgacs, 1988) of the different actors in the historic bloc, and the advance of a shared counterhegemonic (reformist) ideology by the different subaltern groups. While Gramsci thought that labor should lead the counter-hegemonic bloc, he envisioned the historic bloc as a dialogue between labor and other groups, organized around all sorts of identities, including gender, racial identities, and more: "
An historical act can only be performed by ‘‘collective man,’’ and this presupposes the attainment of a ‘‘culturalsocial’’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world. (Gramsci, 1971: 236)
This involves also an attempt to infuse public opinion with counter-hegemonic ideas, as both a mobilizing mechanism and a change strategy (Fontana, 2006). Lastly, the elements of the counter-hegemonic historic bloc must take action – they must stop being a passive participant in the relationships of power, become agents, and take actions aimed specifically at hegemonic change. As Gramsci envisioned: "
. . .if yesterday the subaltern element was a thing, today it is no longer a thing but an historical person, a protagonist. . . an agent, necessarily active and taking the initiative. (Gramsci, 1971: 336–7)
But Gramsci didn’t call for a head-on assault on the state and the hegemonic elites that hold it. Using military jargon, he distinguished between war of maneuver, which is a full blown attack on the institutions of hegemony, trying to seize the state on the one hand, and war of position, on the other hand. War of position is a longrange contestation for ideological hegemony, and it is a gradual process taking place on many fronts (Moen, 1998). A war of maneuver may succeed in overthrowing the current hegemony, but if its impact is to last, and a new hegemony is to be forged, it requires the organization of widespread consent, only achievable through a
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Civil Society Theory: Habermas
prolonged war of position within civil society. Hence, the counter-hegemonic historic bloc should engage in an integrated intellectual and political struggle at a variety of levels at the social order that slowly builds up the social foundations for a new regime (Rupert, 1993). Gramsci’s ideas of civil society have become increasingly influential in the civil society discourse. However, often the application of his ideas is done in a simplistic way. His theory highlights the complex relations between civil society and hegemony, and the position that civil society takes as the sphere that links hegemony to the state. It cannot be reduced to simple dichotomies or to simple anti-statist sentiments. One of the most attractive features of Gramsci’s thought is the blueprint for social change that he offers. In recent writings applying his blueprint to our time, civil society is all too often taken as a homogenous reformist force. Nothing can be further from Gramsci’s theory of civil society than such an overly benign view of civil society.
Rupert, M. (1993). Allienation, capitalism and the inter-state system. In Stephen Gill (Ed.), Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations (pp. 67–92). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rupert, M. (2005). Reading Gramsci in an era of globalizing capitalism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4), 483–97. Showstack-Sassoon, A. (1982). Approaches to Gramsci. London: Writers and Readers. Williams, R. (1978). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cross-References
Brief Biography
▶ Civic Agency ▶ Civil Society History VI: Early and Mid 20th Century ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Political Society ▶ Theories of the Nonprofit Sector, Political ▶ Theories of the Nonprofit Sector, Sociological
References/Further Readings Anderson, P. (1976). The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review, 100, 5–78. Buttigieg, J. (1995). Gramsci on civil society. Boundary 2, 22(3), 1–32. Buttigieg, J. (2005). The contemporary discourse on civil society: A Gramscian critique. Boundary 2, 32(1), 33–52. Fontana, B. (2006). Liberty and domination: Civil society in Gramsci. Boundary 2, 33(2), 51–74. Forgacs, D. (1988). An Antonio Gramsci reader: Selected writings, 1916– 1935. New York: Schocken Books. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Moen, D. G. (1998). Analysis of social transformative movements in advanced capitalism: A neo-Gramscian approach. Journal of Policy and Culture, 3, 117–133. Munck, R. (1996). For a sociology of transformation. Transformation, 29, 41–52. Persaud, R. B. (2001). Counter-hegemony and foreign policy: The dialectics of marginalized and global forces in Jamaica. New York: State University of New York Press. Ratner, R. S. (1992). New movements, new theory, new possibilities? Refelections on counter-hegemony today. In W. K. Carroll (Ed.), Organizing dissent: Contemporary social movements in theory and practice: Studies in the politics of counter-hegemony (pp. 234–242). Toronto: Garamond Press.
Civil Society Theory: Habermas DIETER RUCHT Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Ju¨rgen Habermas, born in Du¨sseldorf (Germany) in 1929, is widely known and respected as a theorist who bridged philosophy and sociology. Beginning in 1949, he studied various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities in Go¨ttingen, Zurich, and Bonn. After having finished his Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy in 1954, he began to write for several newspapers and journals before serving as an assistant of Theodor W. Adorno at the renowned Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. There he became familiar with leading figures of the so-called Frankfurt School and their classic referents including Karl Marx. Because of tensions with the institute’s director Max Horkheimer, Habermas submitted his postdoctoral dissertation at the University of Marburg. Published under ¨ ffentlichkeit (1962), it the title Strukturwandel der O became a milestone in its field. Via the support of the hermeneutic philosopher Joachim Gadamer, Habermas got a professorial position at the University of Heidelberg in 1961. He succeeded Horkheimer as a chair of philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt in 1965. In 1971 he became codirector of the then newly created Max Planck-Institute in Starnberg (Bavaria). After 10 years, he returned to Frankfurt to work there as a professor of philosophy until his retirement in 1994. Since then, Habermas has remained active in writing numerous books and articles. In addition to his scholarly work ranging from the logic of social sciences, to linguistic theory, to the role of law in modern societies, he did not shy away from political debates, for example on the student movement in the 1960s (of which he was critical), and on European integration.
Civil Society Theory: Habermas
Main Lines of Argument Compared to the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action, the concept of civil society is definitely less prominent in Habermas’ writings. It was only in his book Faktizita¨t und Geltung (1992) that he sketched his ideas on civil society in a chapter entitled ‘‘On the role of civil society and the political public sphere’’. Yet the foundation for these reflections on civil society can be found in his earlier work, in particular his opus magnum Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981). Here he gives up his earlier assumption that society as a whole can be analyzed in terms of action theory only. Instead, he conceives of modern societies as systemically stabilized interactions between socially integrated groups (1981: 228). They are a composite of functional systems (basically the economy and the state) and the lifeworld. Throughout the evolution of humankind, systems and lifeworld have become separated from each other. Nevertheless, they are interdependent and cannot replace each other. Systems that are highly organized have to be understood in a functional perspective. They are integrated by abstract mechanisms such as money (the economy) and power (the state). Lifeworld has a different status and a different purpose: serving the socialization of individuals, cultural reproduction and social integration. It is a kind of intuited cultural knowledge shared by those engaged in communicative action and mutual understanding. While in systemic contexts individuals are primarily oriented towards instrumental and strategic action, lifeworld is the realm of communicative action rooted in the use of language and open to interpretation. The interplay of systems and lifeworld tends to be problematic insofar as systems have a tendency to expand their operational logic beyond their own realm and invade the lifeworld. By this process which Habermas, in an often cited formula, coined ‘‘the colonization of lifeworld’’ (1981: 522), the latter risks loosing its integrity and, more particularly, its capacity to reproduce itself. Such an undermining of the lifeworld, in turn, would also endanger the performance of systems which depend on the external structures that secure social integration. Moreover, even the mechanisms on which systems are based are ultimately anchored in the sphere of the lifeworld. While the concept of the public sphere was absolutely central in Habermas’ first monograph Strukturwandel der ¨ ffentlichkeit (1962), it played a less salient role in his O Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Nevertheless, there he provides some hints on how to define the public sphere against the backdrop of his general theory
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of society. In discussing the exchange processes between the functionally integrated subsystems and the lifeworld, Habermas attributes to the lifeworld two ‘‘institutional orders’’ (1981: 473): first, the private sphere which primarily rests on the core family, specialises in the task of socialization and, in the modern capitalist system, is discharged from economic functions; second, the public sphere based on networks of communication which are intensified by cultural institutions and, in the later stages of modernity, the mass media. In terms of material or monetary exchanges, the state (or administrative system) provides organizational services (e.g., infrastructures) by taking taxes. In terms of power exchange, the state offers political decisions by expecting mass loyalty. Thus, from the perspective of the state, the public sphere is able to procure legitimacy. Strikingly, the category of civil society is absent in this conceptualization. This gap is at least partially filled in some of Habermas’ later publications. His conceptualization of civil society and the political public sphere in Faktizita¨t und Geltung is inspired by two lines of thought. First, regarding the structure and processes of politics, Habermas draws on a model developed by Bernhard Peters (1993). Accordingly, democratic constitutional systems are characterized by the dissociation between the political center and its periphery. The center, institutionally represented by administrations, judiciaries, election processes and parliamentary bodies, has the formal authority to make decisions. The periphery is broadly divided into an internal and external segment. The former consists of a range of quasi-statist institutions (e.g., universities, social security organizations) which closely interact with administrations or perform functions that the state has delegated to them. The outer periphery, in turn, is divided into two parts. On one hand, there exists a host of organizations with whom state authorities coordinate in order to secure smooth implementation of their policies. This coordination occurs mainly in informal and non-transparent ways, as exemplified by the tripartite neo-corporatist arrangement that exists in some countries. On the other hand, there is a vast array of associations, private and public interest groups, social movements, and citizen initiatives that seek to influence the state. It appears that Habermas considers this outer periphery to be the stronghold of a politically attentive civil society that, in extraordinary situations, has the will and capacity to challenge the political center by the ‘‘mode of besiege’’ (1989: 475). In such a situation, the political decision-makers are forced to justify their decisions, to engage in a public discourse, and probably to make concessions or even to fundamentally change their position.
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Second, in specifying the role and quality of civil society, Habermas draws on the work of Cohen and Arato (1992). According to them, civil society is marked by the principles of plurality, publicity and legality. Habermas also adopts their idea that civil society could serve as a mediator between the political system and the lifeworld. Through this idea, he seems to re-define the status of the public sphere. While in 1981 he defined the public sphere, along with the private sphere, as an ‘‘institutional order of lifeworld’’, he now understands the public sphere to be a structure that ‘‘mediates between the private sectors of lifeworld on the one hand and the functionally specified action systems on the other hand’’ (1992: 451) and, in other terminology, as a resonance board for those problems which have to be solved by the political system (1992: 435). Yet in Faktizita¨t und Geltung, Habermas neither properly distinguishes the public sphere from civil society nor clarifies their relationship. He only provides some clues, asserting that the political public sphere is based on civil society which, in turn, is rooted in the lifeworld. However, he specifies that the public sphere should not be mistaken as an institution, an organization or a system. Instead, it is a communication structure that refers to the social space created by communicative action. In this communication process, different opinions are presented, aggregated and condensed into public opinion. Public opinion is not oriented to seize power but to influence power (1992: 439). This is possible because the political system has to remain sensitive in order to maintain its legitimacy. The potential quality of public opinion stems from its procedural underpinnings: It is the outcome of a deliberative process with free access and the free flow of views and arguments. Obviously, such a process can be severely hampered by a public sphere which is dominated by power structures. Therefore, the public sphere should not only serve as a (de-)legitimizing structure vis-a`-vis the political center, but also as a self-reflexive structure that is willing to overcome its own deficiencies. Habermas contends that the interplay of a civil societybased public sphere with an institutionalized and legally bound formation of opinion and political will, within parliamentary und judicial settings, suggests the sociological application of the idea of deliberative politics as specified by Cohen and Arato. He also agrees with these authors about the importance of civil society’s self-restriction. Civil society should not be mistaken as the heart and mind of a society’s self-organization. Rather, it is a limited sphere that cannot replace the formal institutions of political decision-making. Public opinion cannot rule. Instead, it has to pass the filter of institutionalized procedures so that
communicative power becomes transformed and eventually has an influence on authoritative law-making (1992: 449–50). This is particularly so in extraordinary situations when salient issues are debated. In a recent article Habermas (2008) further specifies his understanding of the public sphere and civil society. The public sphere is defined as a space between the formally organized consultations and negotiations within the center and the activities and informal talks of civil society at the margins of the political center (2008: 164). More importantly, Habermas elaborates on the role of the public sphere and its relationship with civil society in both descriptive and normative terms. All participants, whether from the center, the functional systems or civil society, engage in political communication to influence the formation of public opinion. Even when operating in a strategic manner (as opposed to the spirit of seeking mutual understanding), these participants have to respect certain rules in order to become effective: ‘‘They must contribute to the mobilization of important themes, provable facts and convincing arguments which, in turn, are submitted to critical examination’’ (2008: 177). This very much resembles Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on how to establish public reason. The possibility of such a critical examination depends on a number of requirements which, according to empirical findings, are by no means guaranteed. Habermas is well aware of pathologies of political communication which are likely to produce passive and diffuse mass loyalty instead of a normatively preferable legitimacy based on a deliberative model. The latter would depend on two elementary conditions: First, political communication which strongly relies on mass media must be guided by self-regulating mechanisms and have relative autonomy with regard to its environment. Second, there must be a feed-back between the discourses of the informed elites and a civil society responsive and ready for intervention. Democratic legitimation via public communication requires adequate input into the political system – input that reflects the whole range of citizen’s interests. From a normative viewpoint, this participation should not be restricted to influencing the composition of parliamentary bodies and the government via electoral participation. Besides the fact that the attitudes of the voters are formed within the context of public opinions, the collectively binding political decisions should always be made under the eyes of a communicating and controlling political public. On the other hand, participation of civil society is only possible ‘‘when the media-supported communication reaches the citizens who want and are capable of participation in
Civil Society Theory: Habermas
the formation of a reflected public opinion by taking a stance vis-a`-vis the publicly discussed problems of society’’ (2008: 184). Habermas certainly attributes to civil society a vital role: Civil society articulates those deficits that are experienced by various groups in the lifeworld. These public opinions and concerns potentially influence the voters who, in turn, have an impact on the competition between political parties. Ultimately, the voters may challenge a government’s legitimacy (see 2008: 168–69). At the same time, he does not assign to civil society a central position. As one among various arenas of political communication, civil society is situated at the margin of the political public sphere. Or, as suggested in a diagram (2008: 171), it is an element even external to the public sphere. This latter perception is also indicated by the assertion that civil society disposes on ‘‘its own, more or less autonomous public spheres‘‘(2008: 183). While it is not clear whether Habermas considers such a marginal position of civil society to be normatively desirable, he doubtless takes this marginality as an empirical fact. He observes ‘‘a hierarchy of actors on the stages of the political public sphere dependent on the categories of power or capital’’ (2008: 176f.). Corresponding to this hierarchy there are varying degrees of structuration: ‘‘With regard to the highly institutionally condensed center represented by the state, the political public sphere is a loosely structured periphery that is rooted in the still more evasive communicative networks of civil society’’ (2008: 164). Relative to professional politicians and lobbyists the civil society actors are in an unfavourable position. The signals and impulses of civil society are usually too weak to trigger, at least in the short run, learning processes in the political system or to profoundly re-orient processes of political decision-making. The public sphere works as a filter system in which some participants, for example the established political parties and large interest groups, prevail over the mass of dispersed, unorganized participants. Moreover, the organization of mass media tends to reflect and deepen that asymmetry so that, apart from extraordinary moments, those well-organized participants who operate in front of the mass public overshadow those weak and loosely organized participants who emerge out of the mass public (see 1992: 453).
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Though having never devoted much energy to elaborating on the concept of civil society, Habermas is, nevertheless, influential for a theory of civil society. This is mainly so because several of his theoretical building blocks support
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or complement the idea of civil society, most importantly the concepts of the (political) public sphere, the role of morality, law and civil liberties as a precondition for a thriving civil society, and the relevance of discourse with its central element of the ‘‘forceless force of the better argument’’ (1971: 131). At the same time, Habermas warns us against an idealization of the role and the potential of civil society. To him, civil society is not the heart of society at large. Nor does he agree with attempts to reintegrate the economy into the concept of civil society – attempts primarily promoted by neo-liberal strategists and transnational corporations. After all, according to him, modern societies are a web of various systems and spheres which should maintain their relative autonomy. Civil society can only unfold its complementary and critical potential under certain conditions and in interaction with more formalized institutions of the political center under the rule of law. While some commentators blame Habermas for idealizing the power of discourse and deliberation, they fail to recognize his distinction between a highly conditional potential and empirical reality. Habermas has only slightly softened his sceptical view of the structures and processes of political communication (Habermas, 1990). And to the extent that political communication is shaped, if not distorted, by the use of power and money, the civil society, which has to pass the public sphere to influence the political decision-makers, generally remains a weak participant. There is a lesson, then, for the passionate promoters of civil society: It is more important to reduce the obstacles for a deliberative communicative praxis within the public political sphere than it is to strengthen the associational web of civil society. Also in taking a look at transnational public spheres and the use of the Internet, Habermas is not overly optimistic that civil society will be able to strongly influence, via the public sphere, the political decision-making processes.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato ▶ Intermediary Organizations and Field ▶ Political Society ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Social Movements
References/Further Readings Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ¨ ffentlichkeit. Neuwied/Berlin: Habermas, J. (1962). Strukturwandel der O Luchterhand.
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Habermas, J. (1971). Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz. In Habermas, Ju¨rgen, Luhmann, Niklas (Eds.), Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (pp. 101–141). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band 2. Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1989). Volkssouvera¨nita¨t als Verfahren. Ein normativer ¨ ffentlichkeit. Merkur, 43(6), 465–477. Begriff von O Habermas, J. (1990). Vorwort zur Neuauflage. In Habermas, Ju¨rgen ¨ ffentlichkeit (pp. 11–50). Frankfurt/M: (Ed.), Strukturwandel der O Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1992). Faktizita¨t und Geltung. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (2008). Hat die Demokratie noch eine epistemische Dimension? Empirische Forschung und normative Theorie. In Habermas, Ju¨rgen (Ed.), Ach, Europa. Kleine Politische Schriften XI. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp. Peters, B. (1993). Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.
Civil Society Theory: Hegel ANSGAR KLEIN Bundesnetzwerk Bu¨rgerschaftliches Engagement (BBE), Berlin, Germany
Brief Biography of the Theorist Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was born in 1770 as the son of a royal Wu¨rttemberg magistrate family in Stuttgart/ Germany. After leaving secondary school he was educated in theology and philology between 1788 to 1793, holding a scholarship at the Tu¨binger Stift. He studied together with Schelling and Ho¨lderlin. The outbreak of the French Revolution is celebrated but as well they are inspired by antiquity. These two reference points had a deep impact on Hegels works. After working as a tutor in Bern/ Switzerland (1793–1797) and Frankfurt/Germany Hegel qualified as a professor in Jena, that used to be an intellectual centre in Germany, and was appointed to an extraordinary professorship. In Jena his first big work the Paenomenology of Spirit is published in 1807. Due to financial problems - the professorship is only poorly paid - Hegel then works as editor of the Bamberger Zeitung (1807–1808) and later as principal of a Gymnasium (secondary school) for eight years (1808–1816). In this period the two volumes of Science of Logic are published (1812 and 1816). Only in 1816 he was able to go back to university, first in Heidelberg/Germany (1816–1818) then in Berlin. There Hegel unfolds his great impact on his contemporaries in big lectures on the ‘‘Philosophy of History’’, the ‘‘History of Philosophy’’,
‘‘Religious Philosophy’’, ‘‘Aesthetics’’ and ‘‘Philosophy of Right’’. His Philosophy of Right in particular were a significant groundwork and starting point for Hegel’s notion of the bourgeois society. It was finished in 1820 but published only in 1882 because of problems with censorship. On the peak of his activity and influence Hegel died of the cholera in Berlin in 1831. In 1821, in his Philosophy of Right (Hegel, 1976), Hegel differentiated between ‘‘civil society’’ and ‘‘state’’ in a theoretical-systematic manner that characterized the modern understanding of state and society in Continental Europe. Hegel was not the first theorist to distinguish between state and civil society. In his conceptual version of this distinction, however, he not only discussed and made explicit the implications and consequences of a modern application of a concept which differed from the classic conceptual understanding, but at the same time attempted, based on modern conceptual understanding, to connect the political experiences of the French Revolution as well as the economic and sociological experiences of the Industrial Revolution with a virtuous thinking of the motives stemming from the historical tradition of the republican discourse. Hegel’s effort to unite the liberal conception of negative freedom with the republican tradition of political society under the conditions of modern society – in Taylor’s words, the integration of the Lockean with the Montesquieu thread within the liberal tradition (Taylor, 1993: 142) – has become one of the most important points of reference in the most recent discussions about civil society.
Main Lines of Argument On the Formal Structure of the Philosophy of Right
In order to understand Hegel’s interpretation within the civil society discussion, it is reasonable to first start on the main features of his political philosophy. Firstly, as regards the formal structure, in the 1821 Hegelian Philosophy of Right, right and morals, along with family, civil society, and state, belong to the domain of the ‘‘objective mind.’’ They form the purpose of political philosophy (Go¨hler/Klein, 1993a: 307ff). In the Philosophy of Right of 1821, a distinction is made between the dimension of abstract right (}} 34–104) and morality (}}105–141) and the dimension of ethical life (}}142–360). The ‘‘abstract right’’ represents Hegel’s response to the theories of natural law and includes property and contract references on a legalistic level, in accordance with the functional requirements of civil society as a capitalistic market economy, as well as the state’s power to impose sanctions. If necessary, the state can also force compliance with contracts, which
Civil Society Theory: Hegel
are the ‘‘recognition of property, health, honor, and life of other individuals’’ (Go¨hler, 1993b: 6). The field of ‘‘morality’’ includes Hegel’s critique of the Kantian universalistic moral philosophy as an individualistic, decontextualized rational law (Ilting, 1975). Despite this critique, Hegel treats the moral standpoint as an ‘‘aspect of law for the free personality which is not simply eliminated from the ethical life, but rather remains in force inside this free personality as the law of subjectivity and of conscience’’ (Benhabib, 1992: 48). In the field of ‘‘ethical life,’’ Hegel then discusses the interrelationship of family, civil society, and state. This comes across to the reader as a ‘‘context of lived relationships and institutions’’ (ibid. 48). The civil society plays an intermediary role between the family as the ‘‘direct or natural’’ ethical life (} 157) and the political state as a substantial unit of subjectivity and generality (} 260). The right of the modern (male) individual to distinctiveness and subjectivity (}} 152 and 154) – the recognition of which differs in the modern state from that of the ancient polity – is realized in the family if it is a top priority in civil society (}} 158–181) (For a feministic critique of Hegel’s political philosophy, see Benhabib and Nicholson, 1987: 540ff.; for more recent debates on civil society from a feministic standpoint and the associated inclusion of the family into the civil society – also reproduced in this form by Cohen and Arato – see part 1, chapter 4.4.1 of this analysis). Civil society is the ‘‘outer state – a state based on need and reason’’ (} 183), in which the ‘‘citizens of this state are private persons, having their own interest for their purpose’’ (} 187). This civil society is composed of the economic field of the ‘‘system of needs’’ (}} 189–208), the ‘‘administration of justice’’ under private law (}} 209– 229), the ‘‘police’’ (}} 231–249), and the ‘‘corporations’’ (}} 250–256). It also appears to be particularly a field of egoistic self-interest characterized by a ‘‘loss of the ethical life’’ (} 181) (When Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is viewed in a line of continuity with his earlier political systems (Go¨hler, 1974; Go¨hler, 1993a and 1993b), one discovers the interconnection of traditional and modern elements which can be observed for the ‘‘civil society’’ of the philosophy of right). Hegel contrasts the ‘‘political state and its constitution’’ with civil society distinguished in such a manner (}} 257–360; see } 267). The system of needs includes Hegel’s perception of the modern economic literature of his time: Smith, Say, Ricardo (} 189). Here the individual seems to be a private person who seeks to satisfy individual needs under the terms of a work-sharing economy moderated by the market. The economic dynamics occur from backstage, beyond individual awareness and in a contradictory
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manner. In line with the system of needs, Hegel anticipated a generalization and expansion of needs in the course of the monetization of trade, as well as an expansion of social inequality. He sees the contribution of the division of labor for the establishment of economic value, but also its unilateral results for the individual laborer. Hegel spoke out critically a number of times about the possible negative social and political effects of the market economy on the polarity of wealth and poverty (approx. }} 241–245; compare Go¨hler/Klein, 1993a: 311). Ultimately, Hegel also regards social differentiation as a consequence of the market economy dynamic, though without incorporating the emerging working class into his concept of groups and their mergers in corporations. These he conceives in a modern sense as freely chosen associations. The corporations are a reintegrated factor which unifies the individuals within civil society alongside ‘‘righteousness’’ and ‘‘reputation’’ (Hegel, 1976: } 207). In a narrower sense, because they were deliberately chosen, the corporations no longer belong to the abstract, willless, and unconscious process behind the backs of concerned parties that characterizes the workings of the market economy. Aside from the system of needs, which requires a private person, Hegel simultaneously outlines a tangible person within civil society as a ‘‘legal person, client of general authority, and association member. It is only on the level of the system of needs, the description of which Hegel derives from political economy, that a radical depiction of civil society as anti-moral is consistently upheld’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 97). After the family, Hegel explicitly designates the corporation as ‘‘the second and moral root of the state established in civil society’’ (} 255). Therefore, in Hegel’s civil society, there are elements of an interest that overcomes private egoism in questions of generality and the solidary merger, which contradict a reductionistic economic vision – e.g., with Marx or in neoliberal interpretations – and plan for a political component of social integration. Corporations are also not merely a new edition of the old guilds, but are ‘‘voluntary organizations in which persons organize themselves according to their vocation, trade, and interest. Above all, the weakness of the traditional democratic and liberal theory lay in its rejection of all intermediary groups standing between the individual and the state. Similar to de Tocqueville one or two decades later, Hegel wants to restore equilibrium between the two’’ (Avineri, 1976: 198) (This concept of corporations embodied by Avineri represents the origin from which Hegel attempts to produce a conception of civil society based on ‘‘free associations’’ and autonomous publicity from Cohen and
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Arato, in terms of the Montesquieu line of civil society accentuated by Taylor). The separation of the state from civil society is attended by the distinction of social and political integration, which is foreign to the republican discourse on virtue but essentially forms the basis of the liberal discourse on interest. According to the discourse on interest, the scope of private interests constitutes autonomy of the social interest. More recent socio-scientific discussions differentiate between three dimensions of social integration, namely ‘‘problems of functional coordination of activities in the outer world, problems of moral integrity, and problems of expressive collectivization’’ (Peters, 1993: 399; see also Fuchs, 1999 and the articles in Friedrichs and Jagodzinski, 1999). Perhaps not in these notions but surely as regards content, Hegel is familiar with functional coordination as a task of the state agenda, regulation, and compensation of social problems stemming from the economic dynamics (For Hegel, the expressive collectivization is a duty of the ethical life of the state and is thus a purpose of political integration, while moral integrity is not simply eliminated from the ethical life via the right of free personality, but rather remains in force inside this free personality as the law of subjectivity and of conscience). The system of needs requires legal protection by the liberal state which rules by laws. In the ‘‘outer state – a state based on need and reason’’ in the civil society, the economy of the market society presumes ‘‘administration of justice’’ to be an application of law and adjudication by a court of law. The term ‘‘police’’ denotes state measures for safeguarding inner order and welfare within civil society (According to the conceptuality of the time, this is ‘‘the entire field of activity of the interior ministry’’ (Go¨hler, 1993b: 3)). The state-regulated components of civil society for Hegel should not be overlooked. On the one hand they create the general conditions for the system of needs, but on the other hand they compensate for its consequences. This obviously applies to the administration of justice, but particularly to the police: ‘‘The police represents state penetration into civil society to serve the interests of justice and order by compensating for both of these phenomena without eliminating their basic causes, which lie in the dynamism of the system of needs’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1991: 104f.). Though it remains to be seen if Hegel has precapitalistic interventions of the state or a modern welfare state in mind, his considerations can be related to an expanding radius of action of the state, as it can be seen in the social state’s later development. On the one hand, the state reacts to the problems of social integration as a constitutional and interventionist state. On the other hand, Hegel treats the demands that arise for modern
societies with regard to moral integrity and expressive communization as problems of morality. In addressing the context exchanges of family, civil society, and state in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel did not merely form sociological significant insights into the complexity of modern societies. As a political theorist, he is primarily interested in conceptually grasping the demands on political integration that arise here under the conditions of a self-autonomizing social integration.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Integration and Mediation: A Statist and Civil Societal Interpretation by Hegel
Hegel deliberately places civil society in a mediating position between family and the political state. Even though civil society – particularly in view of the ‘‘system of needs’’ – appears to be a place of modern subjectivity and particularity and of loss of ethical life, it is conveyed – and here Hegel adheres to the central intentions of the republican discourse of virtue – in the political state in such a way as to ensure that political integration is made possible: ‘‘The principal of the modern states has the tremendous strength and depth to cause the principle of subjectivity to complete itself into the autonomous extreme of personal specialty while simultaneously leading it back into the substantial unit and thereby retaining this in itself. . . .The nature of the new state is that the generic be joined with the full freedom of specialty and with the wellbeing of individuals; that the interest of the family and civil society must therefore gather itself to the state; but that the generality of purpose cannot progress without individual knowledge and want of specialty which must retain its right’’ (Hegel, 1976: } 260). Through the corporations, civil society also remains politically integrated and is conveyed to the state through assembly of estates and public opinion. ‘‘The Hegel Perception,’’ by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, addresses the politically integrative function of civil society. In Hegel’s mediation between the state and civil society, they want to make clear the theoretical positions of points that characterize the new understanding of civil society as political society: ‘‘Thus is our thesis that the mediation of anti-morality and morality culminates in a notion of public life that Hegel only inconsistently identified with state authority’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 96). According to the quintessence of their perception, politics are with Hegel by no means concentrated on the domain of the state, but characterize a public space which has settled ‘‘as an intermediary’’ between state and society. Above all, he
Civil Society Theory: Hegel
derives his impulses from the associative mergers that Hegel placed as corporations in civil society. Cohen and Arato emphasize the interrelationship of social integration and political integration within the scope of a society-oriented theory of politics which, even with Hegel, was placed by this interrelationship. Therefore, they place the role of corporations, assembly of estates, and public opinion, as civil society’s means of communication in the sphere of the state, in the foreground of their interpretation. They find indications that in Hegel’s concept of civil society, political integration is already being conceived as its independent achievement within its context exchange with the state. Cohen and Arato understand political integration primarily as an accomplishment of civil societal association in combination with deliberate publicity. They emphasize the interrelationship of social and political integration in an associative democracy. However, in critical differentiation of Hegel in reference to his concept of corporations and public opinion, they shift the task of the political integration of society back into civil society, a step that Michael Stolleis designates as a step ‘‘from the ethical state to citizen virtues’’ (Stolleis, 1995). The Hegelian concept of corporations is central to their perception. Decidedly understood in a new reading as free associations including new social movements, corporations assume, in the deliberate-democratic interpretation, a pivotal role in the development of rationaluniversal political identity (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 113). Instead of the state, civil society as political society becomes the primary point of reference of political integration, which is then, of course, also to be appropriately represented in political institutions. Cohen and Arato are skeptical regarding the ‘‘ethics’’ of the state, in the sense of a discourse-ethical establishment of deliberative theory of democracy. The state is to limit itself to the procedural safeguarding of civil society’s ‘‘plurality of forms of life’’ under the conditions of individual autonomy. Their objection to Hegel is that ‘‘he did not discover that modern civil society is characterized by the conflict not only of moralities (which he at times seemed to recognize) but also of the normative conceptions of politics itself.’’ Thus, he did not see that it was possible to establish a new form of Sittlichkeit (‘‘civility’’) containing a plurality of forms of life; this would make consensus possible only on the level of procedures, but even such a consensus can lead to some shared substantive premises and even a common identity’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 94). Elements of statehood in Hegel’s civil society, such as administration of justice and police, in which both the principle of negative freedom and ‘‘the fundamental principal of the liberal concept of the state’’ (Go¨hler, 1993: 3)
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are accentuated, do not simply exist. With corporations, the associative momentum of the ‘‘corps interme´diaires’’ (intermediary bodies) is also included, which we came across with Montesquieu as a fundamental element of the conception of ‘‘political society’’. Then again, in Hegel’s ‘‘political state’’ there are elements of mediation with civil society which assume the function of political integration: With Hegel, these elements are: the bureaucracy (executive), the assembly of estates (legislative), and public opinion. In the ‘‘Hegelian Philosophy of Right,’’ a line of argument can be followed in which political integration – concern for the general interest – is viewed as a principal task of the state. In Hegel’s theory of architecture, the previously outlined elements of a legal framework, as well as of a regulating and compensating state, are effective within civil society as ‘‘administration of justice,’’ as the ‘‘general power’’ of the police, and as the ‘‘general state’’ of bureaucracy. Yet, connected in a vertical alignment with the institutions of the ‘‘political state’’ and their concern for public welfare, these elements acquire traits of a paternalism of state which is expressed in a wide spectrum of tasks, ranging from interventions in markets (price control), to public welfare and upbringing through public allocation of work, to the problems of colonization which existed in Hegel’s time. Just as Hegel grasped judicial power and the police as governmental power, bureaucracy is also not only a social standing of civil society, but at the same time – as state administration – a political institution. With Hegel, however, there is a second reading of mediation between state and civil society aside from this allocation of duties – which penetrates the entire Philosophy of Right – to a paternalistic state that regulatively interferes with civil society. Hegel offers a horizontal political mediation correlation through the politicalintegrative cooperation of social classes, their corporate mergers, the assembly of estates representative of them, and public opinion. Here the citizens’ orientation on public welfare and their mergers, which are of particular interest to Hegel, are communicated from civil society. This civil society now comes into view as a place of social integration and of a political learning process aimed at a political will of the state and decision making. This line of Hegel’s political philosophy now offers connections for a newer comprehension of civil society. Hegel is skeptical about the understanding of interest representation, which has become a distinctive factor in modern liberal democracies. In his view, it breeds too much individual arbitrariness and particular interest – a caveat which he also avers with the civil public in mind. However, just as he considers ‘‘subjective freedom’’ indispensable, he also emphasizes that ‘‘insights and causes’’
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(} 316, addendum) are accentuated in public. The public deserves ‘‘to be both respected and despised’’ (} 318) in the area of conflict of ‘‘distinctiveness of public intentions’’ and of insights and causes. In light of such ambivalent public opinion, the duty lies with the intellectuals and the political elite to, in their interpretation, ‘‘find the truth in it’’ (} 318, addendum). In corporations, interest groups join together. These interest groups create the labor division of the ‘‘system of needs’’ – for Hegel, this is particularly the standing of the ‘‘industry’’, while he does not take into consideration associations of the worker class, which for him are already foreseeable (The special position of nobility and bureaucracy as classes in Hegel’s state structure should not be dismissed here). However, it is not the aggregating interest representation (the special position of nobility and bureaucracy as classes in Hegel’s state structure should not be dismissed here) that sets corporations apart. Although representation by delegates is inevitable, it should ‘‘not be automatically disbanded as with individuals nor assembled at short notice merely for a single and temporary act, but rather should be arranged as in its associations, communities and corporations which have already been constituted. In this manner, they will maintain political cohesion’’ (} 308). The corporations’ orientation on class ‘‘honor’’ is definitive in this regard, on which Hegel centers the focus: ‘‘It is also recognized that the member of a corporation, A.K., belongs to the whole, which itself is an element of the general society. The member moreover has interest and efforts invested in the unselfish purpose of the whole’’ (} 253). For Hegel, socialization and education are the characteristics that set corporations apart. ‘‘Thus all of corporate life, assuming the already mentioned modernization of its structure, helps to overcome the gap civil society produces between bourgeois and citizen by educating individuals to internalize the common good and develop civic virtue’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 106). Aside from the family, the corporations are in this sense the second ‘‘ethical root of the state established in civil society’’ (} 255). Arising from the specific, particular purposes of corporations is a substantial general interest, as well as ‘‘patriotism, the political disposition’’ (} 268). In the assembly of estates, the rationality of corporations’ political power of judgment is accentuated in a political-institutional manner. In the assembly of estates’ ‘‘consultation and conclusion,’’ it does ‘‘not depend on the abstract and separate individual speaking up, but on his interests being claimed in an assembly dealing with general things’’ (} 309, addendum). Thus, on the one hand, the control which the legislative assembly of estates
exerts on public opinion is in the context of the statepaternalistic traits of his argumentation, yet the assembly of states is under the influence of the corporations: ‘‘In this sense, not only does the political public of the legislature control public opinion (Hegel’s stress), but a pre-political public sphere plays an important role in constituting public life in the political sense’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 111). Here, Hegel’s acceptance of a public ability to rationalize remains bound to the reflexive self-understanding within the corporations, which is led by viewpoints of ‘‘honor.’’ For Hegel, as Cohen and Arato summarize, the goal of the ethical state is indisputably the rational universalistic identity of a patriotic ethos – the ‘‘awareness that my substantial and special interest is preserved and contained in the interest and purpose of another (in this case, of the state) as well as in relation to myself as an individual’’ (} 268). Nevertheless, it remains unclear ‘‘whether the generation of this ethos is assigned to a state sphere dominated by the executive and linked only to the projections of the state into civil society (the assembly of estates, A.K.), or to a sphere dominated by a legislature drawing on autonomous societal resources such as the corporations and public opinion’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 113). In this way, in light of the ever-appearing ambivalence of his lines of argument of political integration – alternating to and fro between, on the one hand, paternalism of state and a vertically conceived will-formation of state and, on the other hand, a modern republican line of argument which horizontally emphasizes society’s process of will-formation, which is admittedly subordinated to the state and yet political – Hegel’s perception of the idea of civil society must be limited to bringing to the fore a line of argument of a modern republicanism from the Hegelian concept formations with the intent of constructive theory. ‘‘It is precisely at this level, at the point where civil society and the state intersect, that Hegel rediscovers and integrates, without explicitly saying so, the ancient topos of political society’’ (Cohen and Arato, 1992: 110). Hegel’s reference to republicanism’s discourse of virtue, in its distinctiveness, then becomes apparent: Hegel’s recourse to positive freedom and political society follows the constitutive foundation of the liberal concept of negative freedom. Hegel’s advocacy of political civil rights and liberties, of publicity of legislation, of the political role of the entity of association, and of the combination of public opinion and deliberation only becomes understandable in this normative framing. As an imposing struggle for the mediation of negative and positive freedom characterizing Hegel’s entire political philosophy, his
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Philosophy of Right leads to the center of democratic theory’s question which occupies the discourse of civil society (Wellmer, 1993a, b). His theory of corporations as the ‘‘pillars of public freedom’’ (} 265) sheds light on the efforts to define civil society according to political theory as the ‘‘association of associations’’ (Walzer, 1992: 79) in the institutional interrelationship of liberal-representative modern democracies. The developments of theory, which have reproduced or criticized Hegel’s movement since his time, can be pursued from this point.
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Michael Stolleis 1995: Staatsethik’, oder: Vom sittlichen Staat zu den Bu¨rgertugenden. In: Kritische Vierteljahresschrift fu¨r Gesetzgebung & Rechtswissenschaften, Heft 1, 58-68. Charles Taylor 1993: Der Begriff der‚ bu¨rgerlichen Gesellschaft’ im politischen Denken des Westens, in: Micha Brumlik / Hauke Brunkhorst (Hg.): Gemeinschaft und Gerechtigkeit, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. Michael Walzer 1992: Zivile Gesellschaft und amerikanische Demokratie, Berlin: Rotbuch. Albrecht Wellmer 1993a: Freiheitsmodelle in der modernen Welt. In: Ders.: Endspiele. Die unverso¨hnliche Moderne. Essays und Vortra¨ge, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 15-54. Arbrecht Wellmer 1993b: Bedingungen einer demokratischen Kutlur. Zur Debatte zwischen, Liberalen‘ und, Kommunitaristen’. In: Ders.: Endspiele. Die unverso¨hnliche Moderne. Essays und Vortra¨ge, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 54–80.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Civil Society Theory: Montesquieu
Civil Society Theory: Kant References/Further Readings Shlomo Avineri 1976: Hegels Theorie des modernen Staates, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp. Seyla Benhabib/Linda Nicholson 1987: Politische Philosophie und die Frauenfrage. In: Iring Fetscher/Herfried Mu¨nkler (Hg.): Pipers Handbuch der politischen Ideen, Bd. 5, Mu¨nchen-Zu¨rich: Pieper, 513-562. Jean Cohen/Andrew Arato 1992: Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge/Mass – London: MIT-Press. Seyla Benhabib 1992: Kritik, Norm und Utopie. Die normativen Grundlagen der Kritischen Theorie, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. Ju¨rgen Friedrichs/Wolfgang Jagodzinski (Hg.) 1999: Soziale Integration, Opladen-Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher. Dieter Fuchs 1993: Soziale Integration und politische Institutionen in modernen Gesellschaften, WZB (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fu¨r Sozialforschung)-Arbeitspapiere, FS III 99-203. Gerhard Go¨hler 1974: Dialektik und Politik in Hegels fru¨hen politischen Systemen. Kommentar und Analyse. In: ders. (Hg.): Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Fru¨he politische Systeme. System der Sittlichkeit. ¨ ber die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts. U Jenaer Realphilosophie, Frankfurt/Main – Berlin – Wien: Ullstein, 337-610. Gerhard Go¨hler 1993: Hegel und das Problem der gesellschaftlichen Einheit – die Staatslehre neu gelesen (Manuskript). Gerhard Go¨hler/Ansgar Klein 1993: Politische Theorien des 19. Jahrhunderts. In: Hans-Joachim Lieber (Hg.): Politische Theorien von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Bonn: Bundeszentrale fu¨r politische Bildung, zweite Auflage, 259-656. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1976: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundriss (1821). Bd. 7 der Theorie-Werkausgabe, Redaktion: Eva Moldenhauer/KarlMarkus Michel, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Karl-Heinz Ilting 1975: Die Struktur der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. In: Manfred Riedel (Hg.): Materialien zur Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 52-81. Ansgar Klein 2001: Der Diskurs der Zivilgesellschaft. Politische Hintergru¨nde und demokratietheoretische Folgerungen, Opladen: Leske und Budrich Bernhard Peters 1993: Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
JU¨RGEN SCHMIDT Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Brief Biography of the Theorist Immanuel Kant and European enlightenment can be seen quite as synonyms (Geier, 2003: 186ff.). Not only with his essay ‘‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment’’’ written for the monthly newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift this connection became obvious. With his entire philosophy he ‘‘eradicated the last traces of the medieval worldview from modern philosophy’’ (Guyer, 1998/2004). Kant was born on 22 April 1724 in Ko¨nigsberg, East Prussia, as son of an artisan master. Except for several years during his work as tutor in households in the surroundings of Ko¨nigsberg he never left this city. While earlier autobiographies characterized Kant as stiff, dutiful, only concentrated on his work, the recent autobiographies show a person who was integrated in Ko¨nigsberg society and on familiar terms with different social groups within the town (Ku¨hn, 2001/2003). Kant worked since 1755 as lecturer and sublibrarian before he was appointed as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. The first works Kant wrote and published dealt with natural science, but then he turned since the late 1750s more and more to philosophical questions, but without neglecting his interest on natural phenomena. As he put it in one of his famous words in ‘‘Critique of Practical Reason’’: ‘‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’’ (Kant, Critique
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of Practical Reason, quoted in Guyer, 2006: 1). Among his most influent writings are Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). The epistemology of Kant is called – and called by himself – the ‘‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’’ since he argued against the natural perception that things are given and the human being can recognize them as such; in contrast, cognition is not formed by given things but things are constructed by human mind and cognition (Guyer, 2006: 45–125, esp. 50ff.). Kant died on 12 February 1804.
Main Lines of Argument Kant developed no complete political theory and his political thinking has to be reconstructed within his whole work. As one result some of his thoughts, e.g., the thinking about revolutions, appear in part inconsistent (Kater, 1999). Besides this, Kant contributed to the debate about civil society in at least four sectors: the relationship between civil society and the state, the principle of public sphere, the problem of exclusion/inclusion and global civil society. While some authors see Kant’s thinking about civil society and the state only as predecessor of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Adloff, 2005: 30), Kant made some arguments that can be considered under different interpretation. On the one hand a distinction between state and society can be noticed. In Kant’s political essay ‘‘Towards Perpetual Freedom’’ he describes the ‘‘[state] as a society of men, which no one other than itself can command or dispose of’’ (Kant, 1991: 94). It is concluded that ‘‘the strong systematic position of the term ‘society of men’’’ which has to be understood not as a mere assembly of people but as a strong economic and cultural unity ‘‘refutes the prevalent notion that Kant did not differ between state and society’’ (Gerhardt, 1995: 52–54). On the other side Kant explicitly stated in an ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose’’ that the existence of a free society could only be fulfilled under the condition of ‘‘the most precise specification and preservation of the limits of this freedom’’ (Kant, 1991: 45). John Ehrenberg concluded from this: ‘‘There can be no freedom without law, no civil society without the state, and no peace without coercion’’ (Ehrenberg, 1999: 117). But Kant did not think in terms of a totalitarian suppressive state. The opposite was the case. The best model to realize a ‘‘civil state’’ was a republic. But since people lived in an ambivalent status of ‘‘unsocial sociability’’ (ungesellige Geselligkeit) a modus of coexistence within society had to be found where the three main principals of the civil state – ‘‘1. The freedom of every member of society as a human being. 2. The equality of
each with all the others as a subject. 3. The independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen’’ (Kant, 1991: 74) – could be realized. And this was a state directed by moral law and reasonable judgment. But this – so to say Hobbesian heritage with new solutions (Tuck, 1999: 207–225) – was only one aspect within Kant’s civil society approach. If one of the main origins of civil society can be ‘‘found in the philosophical revolution which discovered the autonomy of deliberative judgement’’ (Howard, 1985/1993: 46), Immanuel Kant stands for this strand as most central figure with his famous answer to the question ‘‘What is Enlightenment’’: ‘‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!’’ This finding was the political outcome of Kant’s Copernican revolution. The emphasis to use one’s own mind, central to every civil societal engagement until today, was only one aspect within this text. In addition, in this essay written for a broader audience Kant underpinned the role of the public sphere. Since it was unlikely that one single person could leave his state of immaturity behind Kant believed that a ‘‘public audience’’ would be able to take that decisive step because within in a broader audience there ‘‘will always be a few who think for themselves’’ and who ‘‘thrown off the yoke of immaturity.’’ Central for the success of this process of enlightenment according to Kant was freedom, especially that freedom ‘‘to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’’ (Kant, 1991: 54, 55). The claim of the right to speak and gaining public opinion is a powerful factor. It is, on the one hand, a central point within Kant’s republican thinking which opens for the citizen the possibility to participate as reasonable citizen. On the other hand, this argument was and is an important instrument to bring even in states, where human rights are abandoned, principles of the civil state on the fore (Niesen, 2005: 179, 184; Sassenbach, 1992: 76). Finally, the public use of reasonable discourse was in Kant’s view the only means to bring together the different social groups in reflecting their situation and find a way to sociability. Thus, this argument refers back to the civil state and its ‘‘a priori principles’’ of the human being, the subject and the citizen. Kant’s reflection about civil state, civil society, autonomous human being, public sphere and republican forms of governance did not lead him to an argumentation for a widespread participation. In contrast, Kant differentiated
Civil Society Theory: Kant
between active and passive citizens. In ‘‘On the Common Saying: ‘This may be right in theory, but it does not apply in practice’’’ as well as in ‘‘Metaphysics of Moral’’ Kant excluded children, disabled persons, women, and dependent workers from participation in civil society. Arguing from natural law as well as from the economic sphere Kant saw theses groups as nonautonomous because they had no form of private property. Changing from the high morals of his own thinking to social reality Kant fell back on the conventional use of the term civil society. Norms and facts diverged. The utopian project of civil society turned to a bourgeois society model and Kant was criticized in later interpretations as advocate of bourgeois economic interests. However, some defenders of Kant argued that in this case it is necessary to differentiate between Kant’s considerable philosophical method and his unacceptable specifications of content, while others stated that ‘‘his formalism prevented him from probing deeply into the network of material relations that constituted civil society.’’ What remains is the ambivalence between Kant’s engagement for liberal rights and his entanglement in terms of exclusion (Niesen, 2005: 194–201; Klar, 2007: 169–176; Saage, 1994: 12; Ehrenberg, 1999: 118). Kant appears here as some kind of narrow-minded person; on the other side, Kant was a global thinker. His ideas of the republic and of the public sphere are both thought in a world perspective (Gerhardt, 1995: 196; Kater, 1999: 60). In ‘‘What is Enlightenment’’ Kant already stated: Those who participate in the public reasonable discourse have to be aware that they are members ‘‘of a complete commonwealth or even of cosmopolitan society (Weltbu¨rgergesellschaft)’’ and that their real audience is ‘‘the world at large’’ (Kant, 1991: 56ff.). Kant’s global approach became most obvious in his essay ‘‘Toward Perpetual Peace.’’ Kant did not from the beginning of his political and philosophical reflections favor peace politics. In his 1784 published ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’’ Kant emphasized that history of mankind showed that from ‘‘discord’’ arose a lot of evil, but it also forced people to stretch one’s strength and thus created new culture and art. Even more explicit he wrote in ‘‘Critique of the Power of Judgment’’ that war, if waged by respecting order and civil rights, had something sublime. Only five years after this statement he published ‘‘Toward Perpetual Peace.’’ It was the French Revolution that forced Kant to change his mind. He recognized that this occurrence brought people in a new position with regard to law and politics. And in modern theory it was Dick Howard who described ‘‘the political revolution for which autonomy meant literally autos-nomos, the
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self-giving of the law free from external constraint’’ as second pillar of the origins of civil society – besides philosophical thinking of autonomous human beings (Howard, 1985/1993: 46). Kant would have never gone so far since he favored reforms instead of revolutions to create a civil state (see Kant, What is Enlightenment, 1991: 55; Kersting, 1992: 358–361), but with regard to his position to war and peace the French Revolution was the central turning point for him. The revolution demonstrated that people gave themselves of their own accord a free constitution and moved without war to a higher level in the civilizing progress. From now on Kant saw that the pursuit of autonomous citizens was directed towards freedom and equality. In this reasonable progress war would violate while in the former thinking of Kant before French revolution war was part of that civilizing progress. At first Kant postulates in six preliminary articles the basic rules which a perpetual peace between states needs. Among these concrete articles Kant differentiated between those of the ‘‘strictest sort’’ (e.g., no forcible state intervention of one state in the constitution and government of another) and those which ‘‘allow some subjective latitude according to the circumstances in which they are applied’’ (e.g., abolition of standing armies, ban of contracting debts in regard to external affairs of the state) (Kant, 1991: 93–97). That peace definitely works and enduringly lasts Kant in the following formulated in three ‘‘definitive articles’’ essential conditions: all states had to become republics, the right of nations had to be based on a federation of free states, while the cosmopolitan right (Weltbu¨rgerrecht) should be limited to universal hospitality. To secure world peace in Kant’s view one had to start with the legislative order in the interior of the state. Second, international relations had to be organized in a union of states where each state still holds its sovereignty, whereas an international state, a world republic, in which only one sovereignty existed, was an utopian idea. Hospitality finally guaranteed every citizen everywhere ‘‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility’’ (Kant, 1991: 98–108). In a historical period in which global politics and global economy came on the agenda and more and more actors became involved (American Revolution, colonialism, e.g.,), Kant offered ways of a peaceful coexistence. And, with the claim of hospitality his philosophical sketch ‘‘perpetual peace’’ not only had the seed of criticizing colonial politics inherent, but – interpreted as an entitlement of a citizen against another state authority – was the predecessor of European Union legislation that every citizen of the EU can take legal action against an EU-state to which he does not belong (Gerhardt, 1995: 105ff.).
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Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society First, in civil society approaches the relation between exclusion and inclusion is debated. While in Kant’s reasonable arguing a civil society of free and equal human beings arose, the term of autonomy could also lead to exclusive mechanisms within civil society. The ‘‘utopian surplus’’ of the civil society concept during enlightenment (Kocka, 2007: 86) could also become a burden which could not be fulfilled. Second, the same ambivalence is true for debating global civil society. On the one side, Kant is still one of the central basing points, since in his thinking he ‘‘envisaged a ‘law of world citizenship’ (ius cosmopoliticum) which binds citizens and states into a higher republican commonwealth of states.’’ Tracing content and arguments in Kant’s ‘‘perpetual peace’’ in the previous paragraph demonstrated the entanglement between Kant and global civil society. On the other side, in this context it is also possible to recognize that Kant’s and his coevals’ idea about cosmopolitanism ‘‘was the privilege of those whose lives were already anchored in local civil societies’’ (Keane, 2001: 25, 28). Therefore, in addition, reflecting Kant’s global perspectives opens the possibility to discuss the role of the self and the other. The recognition of the other as basis of a moral order of society becomes here a central argument (Honneth, 2001) and points of contact to this consideration can be found in Kant’s work: ‘‘All right consists solely in the restriction of the freedom of others, with the qualification that their freedom can coexist with my freedom within the terms of a general law; and public right in a commonwealth is simply a state of affairs regulated by a real legislation which conforms to this principle and is backed up by power, and under which a whole people live as subjects in a lawful state (status iuridicus). This is what we call a civil state, and it is characterized by equality in the effects and counter-effects of freely willed actions which limit one another in accordance with the general law of freedom’’ (Kant, Common Saying, 1991: 75ff.). John Ehrenberg concluded: ‘‘Authority may be necessary for moral freedom, but Kant’s notion that everyone is capable of moral judgment represented a radical break with prevailing ideas about the moral capacity of ordinary people. [. . .] Kant’s contribution to modern theories of civil society consisted in his conception of a public life infused with moral purpose that is accessible to all’’ (Ehrenberg, 1999: 118). Therefore, discussing civil society under the auspices of an interactive normative approach and civility Kant still can be an influential mentor who established global civil society by reason not by utopian thinking.
Cross-References
▶ Civility ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Cosmopolitanism ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Hobbes, Thomas ▶ Public Sphere
References/Further Readings Adloff, F. (2005). Zivilgesellschaft. Theorie und politische Praxis. Frankfurt/ Main, Germany: Campus. Ehrenberg, J. (1999). Civil society. The critical history of an idea. New York: New York University Press. Geier, M. (2003). Kants Welt. Eine Biographie. Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt. Gerhardt, V. (1995). Immanuel Kants Entwurf ‘‘Zum ewigen Frieden’’. Eine Theorie der Politik. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Guyer, P. (1998/2004). Kant, Immanuel. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, from http://www. rep.routledge.com/article/DB047 Guyer, P. (2006). Kant. London/New York: Routledge. Honneth, A. (2001). Recognition or redistribution? Changing perspectives on the moral order of society. Theory, Culture & Society, 18, 43–56. Howard, D. (1985/1993). From Marx to Kant (2nd ed.). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kant, I. (1900ff.). Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Ko¨niglich Preußischen (today Berlin-Brandenburgische) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vols. 29). Berlin, Germany: Reimer, later Walter de Gruyter (standard German edition). Kant, I. (1968ff.). Werke in 12 Ba¨nden. In W. Weischedel (Ed.) (Vol. 12). Frankfurt/Main, Germany: Suhrkamp (more modern German edition). Kant, I. (1991). Political writings. In H. Reiss (Ed.). 1Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (all Kantian texts are cited according to this edition). Kant, I. (1992ff.). The Cambridge edition of the works of Immanuel Kant in English translation. In P. Guyer & A. W. Wood (Eds.) (Vol. 16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (standard English edition). Kater, T. (1999). Politik, Recht, Geschichte. Zur Einheit der politischen Philosophie Immanuel Kants. Wu¨rzburg, Germany: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann. Keane, J. (2001). Global civil society? In H. Anheier et al. (Eds.) Global civil society 2001 (pp. 23–47). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Kersting, W. (1992). Politics, freedom, and order: Kant’s political philosophy. In P. Guyer (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Kant (pp. 342– 366). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klar, S. (2007). Moral und Politik bei Kant. Eine Untersuchung zur Kants praktischer und politischer Philosophie im Ausgang der ‘‘Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft.’’ Wu¨rzburg, Germany: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann. Kocka, J. (2007). Civil society in nineteenth century Europe: Comparison and beyond. In M. Hildermeier (Ed.), Historical concepts between Eastern and Western Europe (pp. 85–100). New York/Oxford: Berghahn.
Civil Society Theory: Keane Ku¨hn, M. (2001/2003). Kant. Eine Biographie. Mu¨nchen, Germany: Beck (English version: 2001). Niesen, P. (2005). Kants Theorie der Redefreiheit. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos. Saage, R. (1973/1994). Eigentum, Staat und Gesellschaft bei Immanuel Kant. Mit einem Vorwort ‘‘Kant und der Besitzindividualismus’’ von Franco Zotta. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos. Sassenbach, U. (1992). Der Begriff des Politischen bei Immanuel Kant. Wu¨rzburg, Germany: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann. Tuck, R. (1999). The rights of war and peace. Political thought and the international order from Grotius to Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Civil Society Theory: Keane CRISTINA PUGA Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico
Brief Biography of the Theorist John Keane has been a leading figure in civil society theory for more than 3 decades. A student in Toronto of C. B. Macpherson under whose direction he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the public sphere, now a professor of Politics at the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin and at the University of Westminster in London, where he founded the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Keane was one of the first contemporary authors to draw new attention to the concept of civil society and to bring together a remarkable group of intellectuals to reflect on the subject. Along the period, he has intelligently witnessed the changes of civil society, has underlined its relation to real democracy and has produced substantial ideas and insights on civil society development and new tendencies. His contribution became truly remarkable in 1988 when two books under his name were simultaneously published: one (Democracy and Civil Society) reunited seven essays on the subject of civil society, several of which dwelled on the democratic limitations of the soviet system, where Keane remarked that civil society was absorbed within the State which kept citizens under permanent surveillance; the other (Civil Society and the State) with Keane as editor, contained essays by authors such as Agnes Heller, Norbert Elias, Clauss Offe, Norberto Bobbio, and Va´clav Havel on different aspects of an awakening civil society in the world, including a chapter by Keane himself on the use of the term along the last two centuries. The moment was particularly important. The books were still on press when the soviet system collapsed:
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Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Berlin people, among others, became living proof of the importance of the new concept that Keane and his colleagues had set on the table, and of the need to go further on the new role of civil society in the democracy-building process. It was the best moment to engage in the discussion that Keane was driving to ‘‘about an old-fashioned category, to invest it with fresh theoretical meaning and political significance’’ (OI: 5) Between 1995 and 2007, new books by Keane on similar subjects were published: The Media and Democracy, Tom Paine. A political life; Reflections on Violence; Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions; Vaclav Havel: a Political Tragedy in Six Acts; Global Civil Society, and Violence and Democracy. Common denominators in all of them have been a strong belief in democracy as a system of freedom and pluralism, a well-informed research on the social trends to violence and a quest on the role which civil society plays in promoting one and avoiding the other. John Keane is a consultant to the United Nations and the Evolution of Global Values project at the University of Leiden and a recent member of the American Institutions of Democracy Project. He lives in London and, after a research of more than 6 years, has just finished The Life and Death of Democracy, a major book on the history of democracy just published in the United Kingdom.
Main Lines of Argument Civil society, democracy, and violence are the three axes of Keane’s work, interwoven in a distinct but complex tapestry which is, perhaps, inevitably unfinished as Keane starts from the idea of an ever-changing civil society which exists in relation to its times and its conditions of existence. This historical perspective is well reflected in a recent essay on the changes of society’s attitude towards children (‘‘Children and Civil Society,’’ London 2008). Keane shows how a new struggle against cruelty and violence towards children, together with the concern for their well-being and with a growing respect for their opinions, is part of a trend to consider them as an important and active part of civil society, quite a change from the former tendency to see youngsters as immature human beings subject to parents and other adults’ wills and severe punishments. State institutions, markets and media development as well as international communication and awareness are important conditions of civil society’s existence and of its swifting from a wide range of local associations and movements defending national identities to an increasingly diversified and cosmopolitan conglomerate of people, organized groups, virtual movements and networks among communities otherwise separated by oceans and
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Civil Society Theory: Keane
cultural differences. Globalization acts as a new and complex environment which has modified the scope and political importance of civil society. Communications have changed and a wider world recognition has emerged. A new dynamics of capitalism – ‘‘turbocapitalism’’ Keane calls it – transports cultures and ways of living, enhances perceptions of each other and gives a new significance to civil societies around the world. Civil society has given way to global civil society. Civil Society
Keane is reluctant to offer a strong definition of civil society. In his own words, it is a ‘‘fragile and polysemic’’ concept, ‘‘object of intensive discussion and controversy’’ (CSS) since the second half of the eighteenth century when civil society was first considered as a realm separated from state. One of his essays traces the story of the concept from the aristotelic tradition of a civil society or a polis equal to the State, to Tocqueville’s conviction about the power of citizens against state despotism, including Tom Paine and Hegel along the development of the concept. Prevention of despotism – this last looked at as an ideal type of extreme concentration of power – set the ground, says Keane, ‘‘to an entirely new understanding of civil society – a term which was itself capable of striking fear into the hearts of a good many political despots, old and new’’ (DD: 66). Keane considers that also civil society can be understood as an ideal type category ‘‘that both describes and envisages a complex and dynamic ensemble of legally protected non-governmental institutions that tend to be non-violent, self-organizing, self-reflexive, and permanently in tension with each other and with the start institutions that ‘frame’, constrict and enable their activities’’(OI: 5). Civil societies, he adds in a controversial text, ‘‘are differentiated in complex ways by a multiplicity of nongovernmental rules: intimacy and friendship, public debate and social conversation, forms of play and rites of passage to do with birth, marriage, procreation, and death, but also by the rules of money, property, commodity production, exchange and consumption’’ (CSM: 4). The concept is certainly multivalent and, as Keane himself repeatedly points out, value-laden. To grasp it, he finds three possible and valid approaches: analytical, strategic (political) and normative. The analytic approach tries to develop a precise and operative concept of civil society which takes into account on one side, its separation from government power and its complex relation to market, and on the other, the diversity of an ensemble of organizations, groups, movements, and individuals with a great variety of interests and tendencies; a civil society
which is often far from the idealized image of harmony and civilization that many authors have bestowed upon it. The second approach refers to the political use of civil society as a collective actor, able to oppose state policies, market constraints and authoritarian leaders. While that has been often the case of social movements and citizen initiatives, Keane reminds that the inner diversity of civil society certainly confers to groups and movements the capacity of contestation, denounce, and change but also includes many other not so active or even democratic trends. The third approach points towards a desirable behavior of civil society as a guardian of freedom, tolerance, and peace. However, he insists, civil society is ‘‘wreckable’’ and should not be ‘‘mythologyzed’’ (OI: 50–52). All in all, in the three cases, explored with a wide theoretical baggage which draws both from classic authors and from contemporary experiences, Keane guards against an ideological use of the term and keeps present the historical, polemic, plural, and deliberative nature of civil society. There is however, a slight normative bias in the whole of his work because of several reasons: because he believes that the action of civil society may be crucial to set limits to State’s authoritarian tendencies; because he thinks that civil society is plural and requires pluralism to survive, so it has to preserve democracy as a plural field; because he sees civil society as the ‘‘guardian’’ of equality and solidarities, and because he thinks that uncivil society – that is, violence, haunts civil society and an effort is permanently required to avoid and prevent it. The best in civil society is a recognized tendency towards trust and good living conditions – that which has been called ‘‘social capital’’ – and that has to be strengthened and defended. Democracy and Civil Society
No doubt, democracy lies under Keane’s approach to civil society as a sort of leit motif which not only explains civil society but stands as the necessary social environment for its existence. Democratic institutions from rules to parliaments and elected governments guarantee the freedom for a plural and tolerant civil society to exist. Democracy is not just universal vote, periodical elections and replacement of leaders, but a complex set of procedures which grant the possibility to a variety of unrestricted ways of living and exchange of opinions. Minority rights, freedom, rule of law, as well as equalizing policies (health, education, income) are fundamental to provide a fair and well-informed citizenship, which, on turn has the fundamental task of watching and controlling the exercise of power.
Civil Society Theory: Keane
Civil society, says Keane, is intrinsically diverse and requires a permanent exchange of ideas to find agreements among individuals even from very different points of view. From this perspective, an active, pro-positive, and vigorous civil society can only survive if democracy is kept and perfected to ensure the possibilities to exercise freedom and tolerance in an unrestricted way. He thinks a democracy is only such if it can provide the grounds for a safe exercise of freedom, for a continuous flow of ideas and for the possibility of contesting the government decisions. That also explains his assert that civil society could not survive within the socialist regimes where government tends to be present in any realm of society and avoids or punishes any spontaneous action coming from it. Respect for the individual and for his freedom of ideas and choices is the basis of a true democracy and of an active civil society. Somehow unsettling for those who see the Arab world as a source of violence, he recalls in different writings that real tolerance has been present in Muslim culture (which recognizes every individual’s right to choose his own religion) for a long time, and that Islam is ‘‘a potential force for civility’’ (VD: 185). Keane’s more recent works on democracy recall the changes occurred along history to move from ancient direct democracy, to representative democracy, then to a more recent and complex democracy where new participatory mechanisms extend to civil society the possibility of power-control and monitoring. Democracy is seen as an ever-changing system which has different characteristics in different parts of the world and, that, as a whole, is still being built, However, remarkable ‘‘counter-trends’’ endanger it: social inequality, lack of trust in political parties, multiculturalism, and insecurity among other elements, create a fragile and uncertain future for democracies (DE). Also, because civil society is far from being perfect and free from injustice, wrong judgment and failure, democracy in former Keane’s writings appears as a sort of mined field, subject to the excesses, contradictions, and trespassings of its own citizens – that is, of its own civil society. Nevertheless, a democratic, plural background is a prerequisite for any initiative from civil society. So, to preserve democracy becomes a responsibility of civil society because it is the only way to preserve its own existence. Actions against democracy which aim to destroy pluralism, can revert against the whole existence of civil society itself. Violence and Uncivil Society
Keane finds that civil society is prone to violence. From Hobbes to Arendt, many authors including Elias, Paine,
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Montesquieu, Schumpeter, and Marx have recognized the tendency and even the need for violence in different ways – some consider it as a part of the human condition, others relate it to politics, with the idea that the transformation of a certain political form will automatically lead to more peaceful forms of life within society. From the experience of a century loaded with violence (concentration camps, genocidal wars, nuclear explosions) Keane’s concern is not where does violence lay as has been the preoccupation of others, but mostly if there is a chance of stopping it from the action of a civil society that has grown more civil – or civilized – but can easily become uncivil. Civilization (‘‘a march through stages of gradually increasing perfection’’) means in Keane’s proposal, a detachment from violent means and from causing suffering to others, instead finding deliberative ways to end conflict. The way of democracy is also the way to peace and nonviolence. Against the idea of a violent human nature, Keane suggests to look for reasons in civil society itself and in the conflicts and tensions produced by society’s contradictions. ‘‘Why do the shock-absorbing institutions of civil societies – he asks – tend to be overburdened, such that they generate from within their own structures of violence that contradict the freedom, solidarity and civility which otherwise make them so attractive?’’(RV: 114). To his own question he finds a long list of reasons. Plurality of forms of life; capitalist expansion; developmental differences (‘‘the whole modern history of colonization and bullying of the uncivilized has been riddled with violence’’) freedom to associate in complex ways; discrimination (racial prejudice, joblessness, etc.) and discontent with private life conditions (the ‘‘conflict-ridden logics of the household’’) are some of the multiple causes of violence, not excluding the fact of violence experienced as pleasure from people who need it to give meaning and excitement to their lives through violent movies, novels, or witnessing violent acts. The question is closely related to the problem of how to control power. Because the State has the monopoly of lawful violence and the faculty to declare war, it has become a permanent menace upon its subjects and those of conquered countries. Actually, Keane finds an additional reason for violence in nationalism, where a deep rooted sense of identity is easily manipulated and used against others. ‘‘Like other ideologies, nationalism is an upwardly mobile, power hungry and potentially violent language game which makes falsely universal claims.’’ It has ‘‘a fanatical core’’ and a tendency to simplify things. Contrary to complex civil society; it is arrogant and fearful of ‘‘the other’’ (RV: 125).
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In the last two centuries, citizens have tried to find ways to keep at hold state power and with it, the excesses of violence and the possibilities of war. The Philadelphia model, where every citizen is embodied with a certain capacity (even armed) to defend against power abuses has somehow been extended to supranational models which, not free from contradictions, try to restrain the Westphalian model of interstate power and to democratize the means of state violence. But more important is a trend of citizens towards a ‘‘politics of civility’’ which aims to avoid the arbitrary use of violence against civil society. Keane’s discourse in this point finds an obstacle in the problem of legitimate violence where he has to make some exemptions to his own rule, such as suicide when it becomes a way to rebel against authority and to bring attention to the violation of freedom (as was the case of Jan Palach in Czechoslovakia); euthanasia; revolts against autocratic and dictatorial regimes, collective resistance and liberation wars. Most of these actions are exerted by citizens led by the belief in a more pacific and harmonious society, a utopia, ‘‘where less violence is thinkable, perhaps even achievable. . .’’ (RV: 87). Pacifism and civilization are also menaced by internal wars – which happen when a sector of society cannot find formal or informal channels to solve problems and then takes arms against power. Resistance movements, sabotage, guerrilla, and insurrection as more or less agreed stages of civil war may generate extreme violence: ‘‘the most terrible experience of death and destruction’’ as was the case of Bosnia which Keane has in mind when he writes about this kind of violence. Additionally, a certain decay of conventional armies and nation frontiers favor the emergence of a diffuse civil war directed by smaller groups within society: Cities witness a new local violence such as drug barons or crazy killers, which have made some authors as Robert D. Kaplan and Enzensberger talk about a ‘‘primitive’’ warfare. Keane refers to them as uncivil wars, ‘‘the quintescense of incivility’’ and worries that the legitimate fight against them leads towards more violence and suppression of freedom. A ‘‘plurality of strategies’’ including macrolevel agreements concerning arms reduction, war crimes tribunals and the need for regional integration of previously sovereign states, as well as micro level laws against body harassment and everyday violence is thus required (RV: 152). Those are only effective (to an extent) if civil society nurtures them through multiple actions, from public spheres at micro levels such as clubs, associations, and local movements to meso and macro levels, which include media and global civil societies. Against the thesis on violence saturation by media, and on a pure sado-masochistic relationship of publics to
violent media or newsreels, he believes that images of war, concentration camps and extreme violence have helped to create a sense of shame on civil society which gives a push towards a better and more peaceful world. Markets and Civil Society
The relation between civil society and markets is perhaps the most controversial aspect of Keane’s theory. Opposite to various purist assumptions of civil society as a realm completely separated from economy, he shows that the logics of market and civil society are closely interrelated. To consider civil society as an uncontaminated sector which exists without any connection to market is unreal and self-deceiving. His main thesis on this subject is that markets need civil society to develop and flourish as much as civil society requires the network of economic relations created by markets, and has a need of economic means in order to carry on its projects. Both society and market create rules that become part of the general institutional environment. Markets (which are human creations) are organizing forces that have an influence on ways of living, on moving people from one country to another, on creating social rules and on stimulating social exchange and interaction. At the same time, they have a tendency ‘‘to spoil social interaction.’’ Although civil society ‘‘can never be transformed into capitalist markets,’’ Keane concludes, ‘‘the marriage between markets and other civil society institutions may be (and often is) unhappy, but for the sake of their mutual survival their divorce is forbidden’’ (MCS: 4). The importance of markets for civil society to develop and thrive, increases when they become global. ‘‘Turbocapitalism’’ generates additional income, goods, and services across countries, resets local rules and spreads consumption habits; business firms create new networks, provide training, develop technologies and have the power to move their investments from one country to another. In a dynamics that is positive and negative at the same time, turbocapitalism ‘‘both nurtures and disorders the structure of global civil society within which it operates’’ (GC: 82). Global Civil Society
Economic changes, market expansion and communication technologies lead to a new kind of civil society with a worldwide scope and network capacity. Civil society becomes global and their efforts towards peace and pluralization of power ‘‘are felt everywhere. . .to the planetary level itself ’’ (GCS: 8). Keane is not referring to an organized unique network but to a diverse and ‘‘multilayered’’ universe of
Civil Society Theory: Keane
individuals, organizations, and collective actors that may act together or separately, that have many different and often contradictory goals and ways to achieve them, ‘‘a vast scenario in which hundreds of thousands and millions of individual and group adventures unfold, sometimes harmoniously through cooperation and compromise, and sometimes conflictually. . .’’ (GCS: 11). Big firms, international regulatory organisms and many small groups acting locally but with globally interconnected potentialities may be part of that rather vague though increasingly influential conglomerate that Keane presents as an ideal type comprising five defining features: it is nongovernmental (that is, existing without a direct relation to States and governmental order), social (in the sense of a dynamic society) civil (referred to the spaces of freedom, regulation, and nonviolence that ensure social life) plural (which means diverse and often conflicting ideas) and of course, global, that is, made of ‘‘politically framed and circumscribed social relations that stretch across and underneath state boundaries and other governmental forms’’ (CSC: 17). Migrations, adopted habits, hybridized languages, increasing tolerance and reciprocal influences from different cultures help to integrate this global civil society which, nevertheless, remains as a new phenomenon still alien to a great many social groups and national societies which lack the economic, political, intellectual, and communicative conditions to be part of it. It is not, recalls Keane ‘‘a universal society’’: it resembles instead, ‘‘a string of oases of freedom in a vast desert of localized injustice and resistance’’ (GCS: 141). With globalization a new set of institutions above national frontiers come to control and define economic relations and many other aspects of social life: Keane refers to them as a ‘‘cosmocracy’’; a conglomerate of institutions and processes that work at different levels (local, regional, state, and global), and have political effects, at a global scale.(GCS: 98). Power, which was behind Keane’s interest in civil society from his first works, becomes, with globalization a much more complex problem. A new governance, based on a multilevel system is growing, creating rules in fields as diverse as human rights, bird migrations or internet usage, but still missing accountability, general acceptance, social participation mechanisms, and freedom from the territorial and arrogant dominance of the United States. Wishfully, ‘‘cosmocratic structures will facilitate a Global New Deal: a multilayered political settlement defined by a core of governing institutions designed to rein in the most destructive behaviors, and a periphery of governing institutions based on more voluntary and noncoercive regulations’’ (GCS: 126).
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Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Keane is important not only because he was one of the first contemporary authors to draw new attention to the concept of civil society but also because at the same time he developed new related subjects which have added dimensions and elements of analysis to understand the relation of civil society to democratic change and sustenance. In his work, power, market, violence, media, and global economy have been identified as key factors to understand the shaping of civil society as well as its potentialities. The recognition of global civil society as a new concept, different from the simple civil society, leads towards the many complicated and diverse possibilities of social change in the near future. The foresight is contradictory. On one side, based on a wide knowledge of cultural and theoretical sources of his object, Keane seems to have a well-founded intellectual trust on the civilizing action of civil society. From the campaigns of the nineteenth century against slavetrading to the movements which changed labor laws during the first decades of the twentieth, and to the many different causes of the new century, he finds a civil society tendency towards regulation, peace, and cultural understanding. On the other side, he draws a picture where peace movements and human rights initiatives run together with massive arms production and nuclear risks, where mass movements can easily become violent and uncontrollable, where violence is easily privatized and used against others and where a ‘‘turbocapitalism,’’ which acknowledges the need of peace for a better market functioning, and which promotes communications among peoples and organizations, also deepens inequality, promotes violent governments and causes environmental destruction. Thus the prudent and sometimes even contradictory way in which Keane refers to the potentialities of a civil society towards a more peaceful, equalitarian, and participative world. Although he draws a line between civil and uncivil society, he often recognizes that civil society moves towards change for a better world at the same time than it can get involved in violence and irrationality. Even terrorism, dwells in small retreats of civil society and operates in its ‘‘more or less invisible channels.’’ He also finds democracy guilty of excesses and trespassings in the name of order and of its fight against enemies such as terrorists or drug barons. However, he finds that civil society – global civil society – as a new awareness of living together in a diverse world, can be seen as a normative ideal. Global civil society sets the ethical condition of pluralism, because it creates a global space for
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tolerance, trust, hospitality, and freedom. Although it cannot be predicted to last and prevail, Keane sustains that global society, ‘‘the universal precondition of the open acceptance of difference’’ (GCS: 203) exerts a pressure towards peace and towards the preservation of the planet.
ANSGAR KLEIN Bundesnetzwerk Buergerschaftliches Engagement (BBE), Berlin, Germany
Cross-References
Brief Biography of the Theorist
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Economy ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in the European Tradition ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society History VI: Early and Mid 20th Century ▶ Civil Society History VII: Late 20th and 21st Century ▶ Civil Society Theory: Cohen and Arato ▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci ▶ Civil Society Theory: Paine ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Civil Society, Violence and War ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Uncivil Society
References/Further Readings Keane, J. (1988). Civil society and the state (quoted as CSS). London: Verso. Keane, J. (Ed.) (1988). Democracy and civil society (DCS). London: Verso. Keane, J., Inoguchi, T., & Newman, E. (Eds.) (1998). The changing nature of democracy. Tokyo/New York: United Nations University Press. Keane, J. (1991). The media and democracy. London: Polity. Keane, J. (1995). Tom Paine. A political life. London: Bloomsbury. Keane, J. (1996). Reflections on violence (RV). London: Verso. Keane, J. (1998). Civil society. Old images, new visions (OI). Cambridge: Polity. Keane, J. (2000). Vaclav Havel – A political tragedy in six acts. London: Bloomsbury. Keane, J. (2002). Whatever happened to democracy? London: Institute of Public Policy Research. Keane, J. (2003). Global civil society (GCS). Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Keane, J. (2004). Violence and democracy (VD). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keane, J. (2006). Civil society: Berlin perspectives. Oxford/New York: Berghan Books. Keane, J. (2009). The life and death of democracy. London: Simon and Schuster. (A brief essay on Democracy, from Encarta Encyclopedia is quoted as DE). Mellucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present – Social movements and individual needs in contemporary society. London: Hutchinson. A larger view of Keane’s books, articles and essays may be consulted at http://www.johnkeane.net
Civil Society Theory: Marx
Karl Marx (1818–1883) spent his college years from 1835 to 1841 in the German cities of Bonn and Berlin. Hegel’s philosophy and the Left Hegelian critique made a deep impression on Marx who soon became a member of the young Hegelian circle of intellectuals around Bruno Bauer. Due to his affiliation with the Left Hegelians, an academic career seemed rather unlikely for Marx. In October 1842, therefore, he took over the editorial leadership of the liberal ‘‘Rheinische Zeitung’’ that became one of the leading oppositional papers. Marx decided to leave the editorial office in March 1843 owing to the frequent censorship by the Prussian government. In the same year, Marx wrote a ‘‘Critique of the Hegelian Constitutional Law’’. He went to Paris to edit the ‘‘German-French Annuals’’ together with Arnold Ruge. The project, however, failed after the first issue in 1844 in which the two essays ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ and ‘‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’’ were published. In the same year, Marx wrote the ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’’, first published in 1932, which contains the famous passages on his notion of labor. During his stay in Paris through February 1845 (when he was expelled from France), Marx met well-known socialists and communists like Proudhon amongst others. The French worker’s meetings that he joined from time to time left a big impression on him. In this period, he got to know Heinrich Heine and also Friedrich Engels (August 1844) with whom he would work together closely for the rest of his life. From 1845 to 1848, he lived in Brussels with his family. Here, he wrote in a notebook the ‘‘Theses on Feuerbach’’ (1845), ‘‘The Holy Family’’ (1845) together with Engels, and ‘‘The German Ideology’’ (1845; published in 1932) disagreeing with Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and the ‘‘genuine socialists.’’ In 1846, Marx had an altercation with Wilhelm Weitling’s communism; in 1847, the French edition of ‘‘The Poverty of Philosophy’’, a critique on Proudhon, was published. Marx wrote the ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’’, together with Engels in February 1848. It was commissioned by the headquarters of the Communist League, in the Brussels section of which Marx was presiding over since 1847 and was inspired by the 1848 revolution.
Civil Society Theory: Marx
After being exiled from Brussels to France in March 1848, Marx returned to Germany in April to take over as a chief editor of the ‘‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung’’ in Cologne. Its 301 issues that were published between 31 March 1848 and 18 May 1849 are an impressive evidence of how the attempt to promote the socialist republic within the German middle classes failed. Marx was banished as a stateless person by the Prussian state on 16 May 1849. With his family, he went through France into London exile, penniless. After giving up all expectations of a nearterm revolution together with Engels, Marx delved into a study of economics in the following years. In 1857, he started writing the ‘‘Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy’’; in 1862, the Hamburg publishing house Otto Meissner edited the first volume of his main politicaleconomic work ‘‘Capital,’’ the second and third volumes of which were edited posthumously by Friedrich Engels in 1885 and 1894. Marx was a founding member of the International Worker’s Association, The First Internationale that wasinitiated by English and French workers. There, supporters of Fourier, Cabet, Proudhon, Blanquis, Bakunin, and Mazzini came together. Marx took over the lead of the general secretariat and wrote the inaugural addresses and the organization’s by-laws. In the following years, he tried to strengthen the impact of his ideas within the numerous political currents. Serious tension with the supporters of Proudhon during the first years was followed by fierce struggles with the Russian anarchists around Bakunin. Marx emerged victorious in 1872. Bakunin was excluded; the organization, however, broke up in the aftermath of this controversy. Marx’ health deteriorated in his last years, so his production declined too. He died in March 1883 in London (Rubel, 1968; Lieber/Helmer, 1988).
Main Lines of Argument The Bourgeois Society as an Economic Society
In his early works, Marx criticized social inequalities in a radically democratic way. However, for the early Marx the question of legal relationships and form of government had to be understood within the context of social, particularly economic, living conditions. In his later works, ‘‘outperforming and radicalization of the bourgeois democracy’’ (Wellmer, 1986, p. 230ff.) came second after the critique of democracy which he understood as the form of rule in the bourgeois class society. Thus, Marx could only define the relationship between the citizen and the political community in a future society aporetically, not being able to develop a political theory in his later work. Marx’s notion of a future society, in which the state is
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reintegrated into society and in the classless society loses its ‘‘bourgeois’’ qualities, aims at a utopian space beyond politics. In the early works Marx considered the citizens’ freedom and equality as a political expression of establishing the ‘‘egoist person’’ in the bourgeois society. He criticized the separation of ‘‘bourgeois’’ and ‘‘citizen’’ (citoyen) that to him was artificial and needed to be overcome. It is his critique of the political economy that first reduced freedom and equality of the individuals to a sheer equivalent of the capitalist exchange of commodities. Bearing in mind Hegel’s presupposed separation of state and society Marx analyzed the political institutions of the bourgeois state with regard to how they function within the capitalist trading and production structure. The bourgeois state based on the rule of law guarantees, through the equality of the legal entities and the freedom of selfseeking private interests, the prerequisites under which an advanced trade can take place. The freedom of the private owner mainly means freedom from personal constraints or negative freedom. Guaranteeing the characteristics of the owner as a legal person, his or her secureness, freedom, equality, legal capacity, and legal protection necessarily require public law. Unmasking the quasi-egalitarian regime of the bourgeois democracy – connected with the concept of ‘‘gegensta¨ndliche Ta¨tigkeit’’ – at the same time displays the difficulties of Marx’s political theory. As the capitalistic form of exploitation does not oppose the nominal freedom and equality but rather can only be realized within these legal conditions, all forms of freedom and equality are ideologically criticized. From this follows that Marx’s concept of the proletarian revolution leaves out the political and institutional needs of a future society – a gap regarding theory of democracy. Political power to Marx was mainly an instrument to revolutionize society. ‘‘Instead of developing the bourgeois democracy’s potential to emancipate itself toward the general condition of emancipation, Marx is solely interested in the bourgeois institutions as the means of a proletarian takeover and prestages of a proletarian anti-regime’’ (Zimmermann, 1985: p. 228). In the Communist Manifesto, to Marx, the ‘‘struggling for democracy’’ was nothing else rather than ‘‘Erhebung des Proletariats zur herrschenden Klasse’’ (‘‘to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class’’) (MEW 4, p. 481), and in his second ‘‘The Civil War in France’’(1871), the republic was just a ‘‘revolutiona¨res Mittel, um die Klassenherrschaft selbst zu brechen’’ (‘‘revolutionary means of breaking down class rule itself’’) (MEW 17, p. 608).
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Marx understood the ‘‘political transition period’’ in terms of dictatorship: ‘‘Zwischen der kapitalistischen und der kommunistischen Gesellschaft liegt die Periode der revolutiona¨ren Umwandlung der einen in die andere. Der ¨ bergangsperiode, deren entspricht auch eine politische U Staat nichts anderes sein kann als die revolutiona¨re Diktatur des Proletariats’’ (‘‘Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat) (Kritik des Gothaer Programms/Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MEW 19, p. 28). If the antagonism of the classes ceases, of this Marx was sure, politics must finally cease because ‘‘politische Gewalt im eigentlichen Sinne ist die organisierte Gewalt einer Klasse zur Unterdru¨ckung einer andern’’ (‘‘political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’’) (Kommunistisches Manifest (Communist Manifesto, in MEW 4, S. 482). ‘‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’’
Referring to Blanqui, Marx had already used the phrase ‘‘dictatorship of the proletariat’’ in 1850. Blanqui had conceived the dictatorship of the proletariat as an ‘‘Erziehungsdiktatur’’ that was supposed to propagate communism. Marx considered this kind of dictatorship essential even if it just had a transitional function at this stage of his thinking. Within a political-actionist concept, to him the revolutionary socialism was ‘‘die Permanenzerkla¨rung der Revolution, die Klassendiktatur des Proletariats als notwendige Durchgangsperiode zur Abschaffung der Klassenunterschiede u¨berhaupt.’’ (‘‘the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally’’ (Klassenka¨mpfe in Frankreich/The Class Struggles in France, MEW 7, p. 89). Following the Blanquist tradition, to Marx the takeover of power is first of all an action of a few determined communists. The political action then, being an example, is to evoke political consciousness in the working class masses. For Marx there is no doubt that the proletarian dictatorship will finally be a majority rule. His actionbased notion of a forced upheaval brought about by a minority became less important in the 1850s due to the changing historic-political context. Up to then he had expected revolutions breaking out in the advanced capitalist countries in Europe in the near future. Now, he tied the eruption of revolutions more to economic circumstances and the course of crises. In the final years of the 1860s Marx would even consider that revolutions might
first erupt in the predominantly rural countries in the periphery (like Russia). ‘‘Das internationalistische Konzept verlangt die Koordinierung der Arbeiter mit anderen Klassen und Schichten (Bu¨ndnisproblematik) und mit ‘Nationalka¨mpfen’. Der Sektor ‘Diplomatie’ wird zum Gegenstand der Arbeiterpolitik’’. ‘‘The internationalistic concept calls for a coordination of workers with other classes (Bu¨ndnisproblematik) and with nationalistic struggles. Diplomacy becomes an element of workers’ politics’’ (Arndt, 1985, p. 111). The concept of a permanent action is replaced by the notion of a long-term political struggle. The transition period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, too, becomes a protracted process. In the context of the political conflict in the advanced capitalist countries in Europe the universal suffrage and with it the forms of parliamentary debate gain political importance (Sieferle, 1979). ‘‘Die Indienstnahme des Staates fu¨r die rechtliche Durchsetzung und Garantie des Normalarbeitstages mindert die Konkurrenz und Zersplitterung der Arbeiterklasse. Auch die Forderung nach einer Abschaffung des Erbrechts za¨hlt ¨ bergangsmaßregeln. . ., die geeignet sind, Marx zu den U schließlich einen radikalen Wechsel der Gesellschaft zuwege zu bringen’’ (MEW 16, p. 369). Under certain preconditions Marx then considered a ‘‘peaceful’’ transition to the proletarian dictatorship possible. In doing so he perceived the alternative of a peaceful and violent takeover to be dependent on tactical decisions on suitable political forms of struggling: ‘‘Der Arbeiter muß eines Tages die politische Gewalt ergreifen, um die neue Organisation der Arbeit aufzubauen. . . . Aber wir haben nicht behauptet, daß die Wege, um zu diesem Ziel zu gelangen, u¨berall dieselben seien. Wir wissen, daß man die Institutionen, die Sitten und Traditionen der verschiedenen La¨nder beru¨cksichtigen muß, und wir leugnen nicht, daß es La¨nder gibt, wie Amerika, England, und wenn mir eure Institutionen besser bekannt wa¨ren, wu¨rde ich vielleicht noch Holland hinzufu¨gen, wo die Arbeiter auf friedlichem Weg zu ihrem Ziel gelangen ko¨nnen. Wenn das wahr ist, mu¨ssen wir auch anerkennen, daß in den meisten La¨ndern des Kontinents der Hebel unserer Revolution die Gewalt sein muß; die Gewalt ist es, an die man eines Tages appellieren muß, um die Herrschaft der Arbeit zu errichten’’ (‘‘Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor. . . . But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same. You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries – such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would
Civil Society Theory: Marx
perhaps also add Holland – where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labour’’; MEW 18, p. 160). Irrespective of how the takeover of power might happen Marx stuck to his concept in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is an inevitable transition period on the way to a future communist society. This question was at the center of the argument with the anarchist Bakunin and his supporters in the First Internationale. While Bakunin called for the immediate abolition of the state and the replacement of authority by autonomy as the first revolutionary measures, Marx persisted on the need to revolutionalize the social conditions and to break the resistance of the capitalist class by the help of the government (Lenk, 1981, p. 70f.). Marx first assumed that the working class needed to commit the bourgeois state for its purposes in a different way. However, he stated his view more precisely when he experienced the Paris Commune of 1871. Thus, he came to believe that the working class could ‘‘nicht die fertige Staatsmaschinerie einfach in Besitz nehmen und diese fu¨r ihre eignen Zwecke in Bewegung setzen’’ (‘‘cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’’) (‘‘Der Bu¨rgerkrieg in Frankreich’’; MEW 17, p. 336). In the political organization of the Commune he believed to have found an ideal for the political organization of the dictatorship of the proletariat: Marx emphasized the system of councils with an imperative mandate for political representative, civil servants, and judges, worker’s wages for public functions, the decentralization of political fundamental units, and the abolition of a standing army – this last element Marx had pointed out since 1848. Marx later decided against generalization of the political structures of the Paris Commune (Brief an Domela Nieuwenhuis, MEW 35, p. 159f). His comments on the impact and design of the political institutions of a transitional period (that are mainly to be found in his historical writings) were not developed to a degree of general understanding. Remarkable is the peculiar connection of the concept of a political system of councils – characterized by decentralization and grassroots democracy – with the concept of an economic centralization. The victorious proletariat is to implement the socialist working method by transferring the means of production into public ownership. Marx emphasized ‘‘daß das gegenwa¨rtige ‘spontane Wirken der Naturgesetze des Kapitals und des Grundeigentums’ nur im Verlauf eines langen Entwicklungsprozesses neuer
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Bedingungen durch ‘das spontane Wirken der Gesetze der ¨ konomie der freien und assoziierten gesellschaftlichen O Arbeit’ ersetzt werden kann. . . . Aber die Arbeiterklasse weiß zugleich, daß durch die kommunale Form der politischen Organisation sofort große Fortschritte erzielt werden ko¨nnen’’ (‘‘spontaneous action of the natural laws of capital and landed property’’ can only be superseded by ‘‘the spontaneous action of the laws of the social economy of free and associated labour’’ by a long process of development of new conditions. . . . But they know at the same time that great strides may be [made] at once through the Communal form of political organization’’ (MEW 17, p. 546f). The economically justified expropriation of expropriators is supposed to end all social basics of class rule. Not only the emancipation of the worker but, as Engels stated in ‘‘The Origin of the Family,’’ also that of wife and children will be possible (MEW 21, p. 76–84). The socialist society of the transition period conforms the relations of production to the conditions of the forces of production that have been constituted by the capitalist society. All members of society are to be flagged down to ‘‘productive labour’’ even if, in the beginning, they need to be forced to work, ‘‘Arbeitszwang’’ – as it is stated in the Communist Manifesto. Politically protected by the proletarian dictatorship – domestically suppressing the overthrown class and guaranteeing the education of the working class, externally defending from hostile powers – the economic institutions of capitalism are to be gradually transformed.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Unlike the early socialists Marx and Engels believed that the measures to establish a communist society must evolve from a ‘‘science-based’’ understanding of the present society. Nevertheless, their picture of a future society is shaped by their socialist predecessors’ notions: the notions of the satisfaction of needs in an affluent society, of social homogeneity coming along with balanced working and living conditions, of the removal of a gendered division of labor and of the international community leaving behind national rivalry reappear in Marx and Engels. The Difference Between Bourgeois Society and Civil Society
Justice loses its function in a communist society that is solely based on the principle of free association. As soon as legislation ceases to be the expression of state authority and power – but only exists as self-determined volition – it can be abandoned. Hence the state institutions that are needed to enforce legislation become dispensable. Regarding this consideration Marx remains a student of
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Rousseau and his notion of self-legislation through the common will of the ‘‘volonte´ ge´ne´rale.’’ That there might be a possible contradiction between the will of all (volonte´ des tous) and the common will that could not ultimately be empirically tested seemed to Marx inconceivable when considering future society. Therefore, political institutions providing opinionand will-forming as well as the law guaranteeing freedom and equality are unnecessary. All functions of government in the traditional sense become dispensable: ‘‘Ist einmal das Ziel der proletarischen Bewegung, die Abschaffung der Klassen erreicht, so verschwindet die Gewalt des Staates, welche dazu dient, die große produzierende Mehrheit unter dem Joche einer wenig zahlreichen ausbeutenden Minderheit zu halten, und die Regierungsfunktionen verwandeln sich in einfache Verwaltungsfunktionen’’ (MEW 19, p. 50). The dictatorship of the proletariat leads to a society without a state. According to the ‘‘Communist Manifesto’’ it is superseded by a barely defined ‘‘public power’’ acting on the basis of a social ‘‘Assoziation, worin die freie Entwicklung eines jeden die Bedingung fu¨r die freie Entwicklung aller ist’’ (‘‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’’; MEW 4, p. 482). In Marx the desired picture of a harmonious communist society free of conflict seems to have obscured questions of political forms of settling conflicts, also eclipsing liberal guarantees of human and civic right as well as challenges of a democratic opinion-forming and the formation of will (Cohen, 1982). The Marxian ‘‘republic of labour’’ is outrightly interpreted as an ‘‘association of free people.’’ His notion of the social practice which he derived from his notion of labor (Honneth, 1980) is meant to comprehend, by the cooperation features included in it, all essential social communication and understanding that are to align both needs and interests. Regarding the immediacy of individual action, a characteristic of the future society, the specific rules and institutions of social self-regulation do not apply. Concerning Marx’s ‘‘republic of labour,’’ similar reservations toward the anarchistic concept of a society free of rule may be necessary: the organizational form of free association cannot be a model of complex societies and it conceals the challenges of an institutionalized way to handle conflicts. These cannot exclusively be explained by their freedom-limiting nature. The actual explosiveness of Marx’s and Engels’ political concept consists in linking the future communist society to the transition period of the ‘‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’’ While not defining an institutional structure the notion of a ‘‘republic of labour’’ legitimizes a
certain type of government. This type of government puts up to negotiation the democratic and legal achievements of the bourgeois democracy – even though it is pictured as a majority rule and as a matter of principle limited to a transition period (Kelsen, 1923). The emphatic radical-democratic position of the younger Marx turns into a speculative framework of metahistory that, by postponing democratization to the future society, hinders the continuation of his original themes of critique. The immense power of Marx’s theory for political mobilization might not least of all be due to this utopian aim that he claimed to be of a scientific nature (Speth, 2000). Ironically, Marx’ target of a society free of rule, in the twentieth century, served to philosophically legitimize a social system that in order to be stable needed to build on a bureaucratic governmental rule. Marx’s justification of the dictatorship of the proletariat offered problematic starting points for that. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the Eastern European dissendent movements of the 1980s, in their critique of the post-Stalinist societies, are linked with the political concept of civil society. Their recourse to the outstanding emancipatory potentials of democracy owes to the experience that these potentials can by no means be reduced to a form of bourgeois government. This Marx has not defined clearly enough. Guaranteed human and civil rights and an institutionalized pluralism of interests, positions, and lifestyles form the essential political framework of a socially fair-minded society – this is what the discourse of civil society shows. The current global economic crisis as well shows that the dynamics of the capitalist market economy that Marx critically described still challenge the state and civil society today. For the current debate about civil society, Marx’s legacy remains to a great extent relevant.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Proudhon, Pierre Joseph
References/Further Readings Arndt, A. (1985). Karl Marx, Versuch & u¨ber den Zusammenhang seiner Theorie. Germany: Bochum. Cohen, J. (1982). The limits of Marxian critical theory, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Honneth, A. (1980). Arbeit und instrumentales Handeln. In A. Honneth & U. Jaeggi (Eds.), Arbeit, Handlung, Normativita¨t (pp. 185–233). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Kelsen, H. (1923). Sozialismus und Staat (2nd ed.). Leipzig, Germany: Hirschfeld. Klein, A. (2001). Der Diskurs der Zivilgesellschaft. Politische Kontexte und demokratietheoretische Bezu¨ge der neueren Begriffsverwendung. Opladen, Germany: Leske Budrich.
Civil Society Theory: Montesquieu Lenk, K. (1981). Theorien der Revolution (Revised ed.). Mu¨nchen, Germany. Lieber, H.-J., & Helmer, G. (1988). Marx-Lexikon. Zentrale Begriffe der politischen Philosophie von Karl Marx. Darmstadt, Germany. ¨ konomie. RohentMarx, K. (1974). Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen O wurf. Berlin: GDR. Marx/Engels selected works. (1958–1983). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Rubel, M. (1968). Marx-Chronik/Daten zu Leben und Werk. Mu¨nchen, Germany: Carl Hanser Verlag. Sieferle, R. (1979). Die Revolution in der Theorie von Karl Marx. Frankfurt/M: Ullstein. Speth, R. (2000). Nation und Revolution. Politische Mythen im 19. Jahrhundert. Opladen, Germany: Leske & Budrich. Wellmer, A. (1986). Naturrecht und praktische Vernunft. In E. Angehrn & G. Lohmann (Eds.), Ethik und Marx (S. 197& –238). Ko¨nigstein/Ts. Zimmermann, R. (1985). Utopie – Rationalita¨t – Politik, Zur Kritik, Rekonstruktion und Systematik einer emanzipatorischen Gesellschaftstheorie bei Marx und Habermas. Freiburg/Mu¨nchen: Alber.
Civil Society Theory: Montesquieu CLAUDIA OPITZ-BELAKHAL Universita¨t Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Brief Biography of the Theorist Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Bre`de et de Montesquieu, was born on January 18, 1689 in the Chaˆteau de la Bre`de near Bordeaux and died on February 10, 1755 in Paris. Born into an old noble family of the Bordelais, Montesquieu accomplished his classical and literary studies at the College of the Oratorians of Juilly near Paris in 1705. Between 1705 and 1708 he studied law at the University of Bordeaux and in 1715, after a second stay in Paris, he got married to the Protestant noblewoman Jeanne de Latrigue who brought him a substantial dowry and with whom he had three children. The following year, he inherited a fortune upon the death of his uncle as well as the title ‘‘Baron de Montesquieu’’ and ‘‘Pre´sident a` Mortier’’ in the ‘‘Parlement de Bordeaux.’’ Nine years later, he resigned from his office and gave himself entirely to study. Some time earlier, he had achieved literary success along with some scandal by anonymously publishing his Lettres Persanes (1721), a novel based on the imaginary correspondence of two Persians who point out the absurdities of the contemporary French society and state while visiting Europe and Paris. Due to the scandal surrounding the book, Montesquieu was elected member of the ‘‘Acade´mie Franc¸aise’’ only in 1729 although he had been a candidate some time before.
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In younger years, Montesquieu had gone on a travel through Europe, spending 1 year in Italy and 18 months in England where he had become a member of the ‘‘Royal Society’’ and of a Masonic Lodge before resettling in France. These experiences became an inspiration for his work on The Spirit of Laws (De l’Esprit des Lois), a comparative study of political systems, constitutions and traditions published in 1748 which had kept him busy for almost 20 years. Earlier on, he had published two novels – Le Temple de Gnide (1724) and Arsace et Isme´nie (1730) – before he took up his historiographical and political studies on the Roman Empire which resulted in the Conside´rations sur les Causes de la Grandeur des Romains et de leur Decadence published in 1734. At an older age, Montesquieu was handicapped by poor eyesight and had gone completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He is buried in the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris.
Main Lines of Argument Montesquieu’s major work, De l’Esprit des Lois (publ. 1748) quickly rose to enormous influence although it met some harsh criticism, especially in France, for including old-fashioned climate theory and stating that the climate may substantially influence man’s nature and human society. Montesquieu reacted against this criticism by writing a defence on his book, entitled La De´fense de L’Esprit des Lois and published in 1748. In 1751 the Roman Catholic Church banned De l’Esprit des Lois along with most of Montesquieu’s other works and put it on the Index accusing the publication of containing severe attacks against papacy, celibacy and church law. Yet, De l’Esprit des Lois received highest praise from liberal thinkers in Europe and North America where the writing directly influenced the Virginia Constitution. In his complex and sometimes diffuse treatise Montesquieu analyzes ‘‘the interrelations that laws must have with the structure of any government concerning customs, climate, religion, trade and so forth . . .’’ The work is therefore a mixture of traditional political theory and sociological and anthropological reasoning. There are, he says, echoing and somehow deforming Aristotle’s theory on politics, three main forms of government: monarchy, democracy and despotism. He further points out that these government forms not only depend on climate, geography, and the economic situation but run according to social principles: while monarchies rely on the principle of honour, republics rely on the principle of political or civic virtue and despotism relies on fear. Free governments are dependent on fragile constitutional arrangements and, therefore, monarchies as much as republics can more easily turn into despotic
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political systems than a despotic regime can be turned into a free(er) one. In monarchies and democracies (or republics) the behaviour of its citizens and people is a decisive force in the struggle against despotism, whereas in despotism it is the ruler himself who might establish a certain kind of freedom – like, for example, Tsar Peter the Great who decided to reform Russia’s inherited despotic government structures. But interestingly enough, in all cases not only men’s but equally women’s behaviour is crucial for the success or failure of liberty. Therefore, Montesquieu includes a brief but systematic comparison of women’s situations in different political systems (chapter VII.9) saying that women in despotically ruled countries in the South and in the Orient endure most misfortune because they have to live in slavish dependency and bondage. According to Montesquieu, women in the more temperate North – where monogamy is usual – women hold a strong position in marriage as well as in society and are clearly better off. Still, the fact that women dominate marriage and society alike is perceived to be dangerous for the political system there – democracy – that will likely either turn into a monarchy – where luxury rules together with women’s pleasure, like Montesquieu puts it – or into despotism where women have to live in domestic slavery. Democracy appears to be a fairly unstable system which tends to overwhelm its citizens, women even more than men, for ‘‘in the republics women are free according to the laws and captive according to the customs’’ (ibid.). Consequently, according to Montesquieu, monarchical government offers the best conditions for women as much as for men. Women here not only can inherit and possess wealth and buy all sorts of luxury, but the mixture of liberty and constraint, of passion and reason, of vanity and luxury inherent in monarchical government also allows them a certain amount of power and influence as can be seen at the French Court or in the Parisian salons. It is here that one can find most ‘‘civilization’’ of manners and customs. In fact, in The Spirit of Laws one cannot explicitly find the term ‘‘civil society’’ which has actually been coined by the Scottish social philosopher Adam Ferguson only in 1759, but Montesquieu uses already terms like ‘‘esclavage civile’’ (civil serfdom) or ‘‘liberte´ civil’’ (civil liberty) to describe social settings and mechanisms. In Montesquieu’s description of the gender-mixed salons and semi-domestical ‘‘circles,’’ one can discern at least an allusion to a modern civil society concept since salons and semi-domestical circles help to prevent despotism; just like the French nobility or the ‘‘parlaments’’ they
serve as ‘‘pouvoirs interme´diaires’’ intermediary powers, but are not part of the political constitution of the realm. By considering women and sociability to have a forceful influence on governments, Montesquieu overcomes powerful traditional models of political thinking and becomes one of the first modern sociologists: a specialist in societies which are ‘‘civil’’ by definition, since ‘‘civil’’ sociability and salons are not considered to be a possible replacement for political institutions or else a school for politically ambitious women. According to Montesquieu, women do actually have an important role and influence on politics, albeit not by political means though, but by their female character, especially their love of luxury. Due to a perfect combination of (self-) control and luxury liberty can and will reign. As diligent consumers, women help to establish and push forward (luxury-) trading which is in turn itself a forceful agency of civilization, as Montesquieu underlines in chapter XX.1, but is actually capable of corrupting virtuous morals in republics – as much as women are. In the salons, women are entertaining conversation, helping thereby to civilize their male companions who not only are salon visitors but also (potential) warriors. Yet, women should never be allowed to be public speakers, officeholders or citizens. For if they transgress the given gender limits, they not only transgress (moral) laws, but also endanger, willingly or not, the whole political system – although, in Montesquieu’s view, women endanger monarchies far less than, for example, republics where women’s moral behaviour is vital to the public as much as to the domestic order. Therefore, as Montesquieu further points out, women in republics of their own accord avoid the public sphere (since they feel ashamed to ‘‘go public’’) whereas in despotic regimes they are forced to stay at home or in the harem. The informal meeting and mingling of men and women in a space between familial domesticity on the one hand and political institutions on the other is, in Montesquieu’s view, the very expression of a stable and moderate monarchical government as much as of a liberal and social regime – hence a ‘‘(civil) society.’’ In The Spirit of Laws Montesquieu takes the welfare and suffering of women into consideration to this extent because he reflects the social, cultural, and material conditions of politics in a larger sense than his forerunners in Classical Antiquity or in the Renaissance did. To Montesquieu, society is the realm of the ‘‘social animals,’’ inhabited by women and men alike. Montesquieu, like many other Enlightenment thinkers, considers society to be no longer situated between a sphere of order guaranteed by absolute political power, and a sphere of anarchy, of contested or even destroyed political order through civil
Civil Society Theory: Montesquieu
war. In his view, human beings have already been ‘‘civilized’’ (women a little more than men) and society is then a sphere located between politics and domestic life. In Montesquieu’s view, this realm is not only considered a defence against despotic powers, but also places monarchical government as a sort of middle ground system between republics with an totally politicized everyday life and the total depolitization of despotic regimes. Montesquieu obviously shared the eighteenth century idea that (civil) society was the ground upon which any legitimate political and economic structure has to be built. At least, this is the definition found in the Encyclope´die where – in the article on ‘‘Philosophe’’ – it is said that ‘‘civil society (socie´te´ civile) is, so to speak, a divinity on earth,’’ i.e., an absolute moral power and a force in political life. But whereas the Encyclope´die promotes the ideal ‘‘civil society’’ as a ‘‘socie´te´ des gens de letters,’’ an association of learned people, Montesquieu did not consider literary life and learned institutions like the ‘‘acade´mies’’ or the ‘‘socie´te´s des lettres’’ to play an important role in civilising society. He agreed with most of the gallant French philosophers of his days who saw civil society as ‘‘a vast gathering of free and polite individuals – a kind of universal salon,’’ as Daniel Gordon puts it. And women seemed to be the most important agents within this ‘‘universal salon’’ simply because they did per se not have political power and public positions.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Still, it is puzzling that Montesquieu describes the policing role of women in rather negative terms. He once even speaks of their ‘‘corrupting’’ influence. However, this ‘‘corrupting’’ influence is in Montesquieu’s view not a real problem as long as it helps to uphold political and moral order. Therefore, it mostly depends on the government’s character whether women are dangerous or not. In monarchies for example, women help to ‘‘limit virtue,’’ as he says, for ‘‘virtue needs limitation,’’ whereas in democracies, women’s love of lust and luxury is devastating and could turn democracies into monarchies or even into despotism. Thus, as Dena Goodman puts it, ‘‘the philosophers allotted them [i.e. women] a dignity and a legitimate authority. At the same time, however, they defined in gendered terms different and complementary roles for men and women within that society and thus [. . .] inscribed gender difference in the conception of society and its governors.’’ What is even more troubling, Montesquieu in fact put a quite obvious political agenda on his book: His
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arguments follow his political convictions in many ways. He wanted to show that a ‘‘mixed’’ constitution such as the one to be found in England would be better for France than the then established absolutist monarchy. On the other hand, he is a fervent admirer of French salon culture and Parisian sociability. Consequently, Montesquieu’s political theory is not only a mixture of systematic and descriptive reasoning, but it is biased in various ways: It is Franco– as much as Eurocentric – because despotism, for example, the worst of all political regimes, is perceived to be a political system found almost exclusively in Muslim countries in Asia. Thereby, Montesquieu was one of the inventors of the concept of ‘‘oriental despotism’’ which still is a trope in vigour today. Moreover, Montesquieu’s analysis is deeply influenced by his reserves against republicanism as much as by his zeal of limiting monarchical power. As a result, he reduces the concept of civil society to a balancing factor for monarchical government (in France), limiting hereby narrowly women’s political roles and at the same time making them look to be a serious threat to republican government or democracies. Even if one takes into account that Montesquieu’s foremost interest was to outline a model of the making and transformation of political and legal systems and not to give an empirically correct description of the world, his writing is in no way an adequate or objective description of eighteenth century European and ‘‘Oriental’’ gender relations and/or political regimes. Hence, his book is a quite fragile basis for any discussion on civil society today. Still, Montesquieu’s book and arguments reminds one that ‘‘civil society’’ is – at least in its beginnings – an extremely biased concept in a gender perspective as much as in the perspective of different political systems or cultural traditions. In order to establish a less biased and more far-reaching conceptual framework, it still seems helpful to go back to its very roots and to decipher its ambiguous, even contradictory but always political implications.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Civil Society and Gender ▶ Civil Society History I: Antiquity ▶ Civil Society History III: Renaissance ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society Theory: Aristotle ▶ Civil Society Theory: Ferguson ▶ Civil Society Theory: Paine ▶ Civil Society Theory: Rousseau
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Civil Society Theory: Paine
▶ Civil Society Theory: Smith ▶ Free Masons
References/Further Readings Althusser, L. (1972). Politics and history: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx. London: NLB. Baker, K. M. (1994a). A Foucauldian French Revolution. In J. Goldstein (Ed.), Foucault and the writing of History Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.(pp. 195–96). Baker, K. M. (1994b). Enlightenment and the institution of society: Notes for a conceptual history. In W. F. B. Melching & W. R. E. Velema (Eds.), Main trends in cultural history Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.(pp. 95–120). Goodman, D. (1994). The republic of letters: A cultural history of the French enlightenment. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Goodman, D. (2001). Policing society: Women as political actors in the enlightenment discourse. In H.-E. Bo¨deker & L. Steinbru¨gge (Eds.), Conceptualising woman in enlightenment thought Berlin, Germany: Berlin-Verlag.(pp. 129–142). Gordon, D. (1995). Beyond the social history of ideas: Morrellet and the enlightenment. In J. Merrick & D. Medlin (Eds.), Andre´ Morrellet (1727–1819) in the Republic of letters and the French Revolution. New York: Peter Lang. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Trans. T. Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Keohane, N. O. (Ed.) (1980). Montesquieu: Constitutionalism and civic virtue. In Philosophy and the state in France. The renaissance to the enlightenment Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (pp. 392–419). Krause, S. R. (2002, October). The uncertain inevitability of decline in Montesquieu. Political Theory, 30(5), 702–727. Opitz-Belakhal, C. (2002). Aufkla¨rung der Geschlechter, Revolution der Geschlechterordnung. Studien zur Politik- und Kulturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, Mu¨nster, Germany: Waxmann. Pangle, T. L. (1973 [1989]). Montesquieu’s philosophy of liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shackleton, R. (1961). Montesquieu; a critical biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starobinski, J. (1953 [1981]). Montesquieu. Paris: Seuil.
Civil Society Theory: Paine FRED POWELL National University of Ireland-Cork, Cork, Ireland
Introduction "
These are the times that try men’s souls. . . .Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. Tom Paine
Modernity gave birth to a movement called ‘‘modernism,’’ which was revolutionary in its impact, both in politics and
culture. It spawned a rigorous civil society. The debate about civil society in modern social and political thought started in the Old World but quickly crossed the Atlantic to the New World of the American colonies. Essential to the widening of the debate was Tom Paine (1737–1809), who dominated progressive political thought in Britain, France and America during the age of revolutionary struggle against absolutist tyranny in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It was the simplicity and clarity of Tom Paine’s philosophy that made him so popular with an emerging political public ready for change. He questioned the source of government and its purpose, concluding sovereignty belongs to the people through the democratic expression of their will in civil society. At the core of Paine’s philosophy was natural rights theory. He asserted ‘‘natural rights are those which appertain to a man in the right of his existence.’’ Paine’s remarkable contribution was to turn Enlightenment humanism into a popular topic of public debate. In doing so, he was to reshape the course of world history. This was his monumental achievement that has defined modernity in terms of political values in the West and set a standard for the rest of the world to emulate.
Brief Biography of the Theorist Tom Paine was born in England at Thetford in 1737 and died in New York City in 1809. His brilliance as a pamphleteer, political agitator, controversialist, and popular interpreter of the Enlightenment values made him one of the great intellectual figures of his time. The son of a small business man and a family with Quaker beliefs, Tom Paine demonstrated intellectual ability from an early age, winning a place at a local grammar school. However, he was to abandon scholarship for a life at sea in his early teens. He returned to live a restless life in London and a variety of towns on the south coast of England, before finding a government position as an excise man in Lewes, where he married. Already his political outspokenness was apparent, when he was sent to lobby parliament in London in 1772 on behalf of excise men seeking better wages. His militancy was rewarded by dismissal from the public service. At the age of 37, he decided England no longer offered him a future and departed alone for the American colonies. His decision was a fortuitous one because it launched Tom Paine on a career as a revolutionary agitator with few peers in modern history. If democracy is to claim a modern revolutionary founder, it would be hard to find a candidate with a better claim to the title than Tom Paine, who interpreted its meaning to a vast public audience, eager for liberation from despotism.
Civil Society Theory: Paine
In America, he found a patron Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), statesman, scientist and founding father of the United States. This association was to launch Paine in history, propelling him to the highest levels of American political circles, on the side of independence. He became a close political ally of George Washington (1732–99), who admired his political genius. The publication of Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, on the eve of the American Declaration of Independence in January 1776, made him a household name. It sold over 200,000 copies in a population of three million. The impact of Common Sense on the American Revolution can be compared to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the Civil War (1861–5). It made Tom Paine a celebrity in America. His description of King George III as ‘‘the Royal Brute of Great Britain’’ resonated with the oppressed colonists, mystified by the rule of a continent from a small European island. Paine’s republicanism won both their hearts and minds. Democratic ears warmed to his invective prose that castigated monarchy as an absurd and inherently corrupt form of government. One honest man, Paine opined, was worth ‘‘all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.’’ The choice, according to Paine, was between a tyrannical king, colonial domination and economic exploitation based upon unjust taxation or liberty, happiness and democracy in an independent republic. Paine had captured the revolutionary moment and articulated its case as no other contemporary, galvanizing the popular mood while framing the constitutional language of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. During the ensuing campaign for independence, Paine produced another 15 pamphlets relentlessly asserting the case for democratic revolution. Paine was rewarded with a position and modicum of power after the American Revolution by the grateful citizens of what he had, in 1777, named ‘‘the United States of America.’’ But at the height of his political fame in America, Paine’s natural restlessness asserted itself, drawing him back to Europe and new political campaigns for democracy. At heart, Paine was an internationalist, whose political ambitions were global. As Tom Paine put it himself, ‘‘my country is the world’’ and his ambition ‘‘to do good, my religion.’’ Paine’s irrepressible hope and creative political imagination were soon to embark on new skirmishes in the cause of democracy. Back in Europe, Tom Paine was to inspire another revolution. He responded to Edmund Burke’s conservative pamphlet Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), which sought to galvanize despotic regimes across Europe against the revolutionary tide of democracy. Paine produced his historic Rights of Man in two parts in 1791 and 1792. Burke and Paine were well-matched as the master
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voices of respectively conservative and radical thought. But in the Rights of Man, Paine left little doubt as to his revolutionary intent of over-throwing the existing tyrannical political order. Burke retorted with a hint to the authorities that Paine’s work was seditious, which was soon followed by a warrant for Paine’s arrest and the banning of the Rights of Man. The extraordinary popular success of the Rights of Man, which reached audiences of in excess of 200,000 in Britain and 100,000 in the United States, as well as bumper sales in Ireland on the eve of the 1,798 Rebellion, was too much for the embattled authorities to ignore, because it counterpoised democracy against hereditary power. Burke’s dubbing of Paine as a purveyor of sedition illustrated the paucity of the conservative case against democracy. But it also highlights the political dangers Tom Paine faced from his enemies. Public opinion was being turned against him in England, as an agent of the French revolutionary cause. Paine departed for France, ahead of a political trial to take his seat in the French National Assembly, as the representative for Calais. In France he was welcomed as a hero. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen by the National Assembly in Paris was a triumph for Paine’s advocacy of democratic politics. He hailed it as a milestone in history: ‘‘truth has given it an establishment; and Time will record it with a name as lasting as its own.’’ But Paine was soon out of kilter with the Jacobins’ reign of terror. He refused to vote for the French king’s execution. His natural humanism and Quaker origins had not prepared him for revolutionary violence. He soon found himself incarcerated in the Luxembourg prison, after France declared war on England. He was lucky to escape with his life, largely due to the intercession of the American ambassador, James Monroe. Tom Paine now turned to his most controversial work The Age of Reason, published between 1794 and 1796. It was widely interpreted as an attack on organized religion from a secularist perspective. The Age of Reason was vilified by conservatives in England and shunned by his former revolutionary colleagues in America. In seeking to expose the superstition of organized religion, Paine had taken a step too far in challenging the popular imagination to think for itself in the Age of Reason. He lost his natural constituency. Remarkably, Tom Paine continued on his intellectual odyssey in his last important work – Agrarian Justice Opposed to Agrarian Law and to Agrarian Monopoly (1795) – linking his economic ideas to his previous political and social views expressed in The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. In this work he moves close to socialism, discussing the iniquities of wealth and the injustice of poverty.
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While Tom Paine died in obscurity in America, a forgotten and forlorn figure, his legacy to revolutionary politics is seminal. Overshadowed by the Soviet (1917) and Chinese (1949) revolutions during the twentieth century, Paine’s revolutionary democratic brand of political change offers a powerful intellectual inspiration to campaigns to ‘‘democratize democracy’’ in the twenty-first century. Tom Paine is a quintessential modernist political figure that advocated the power of civil society to democratically confront tyranny through moral argument, based upon human rights and peaceful nonviolent protest, epitomized by the Velvet Revolutions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. But his work in its modernist orientation also identifies a radical tradition in civil society that challenges the liberal view of Paine’s near contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), much favored by present-day mainstream political opinion in liberal democracies. Paine’s modernist political legacy is a powerful testament to democracy, liberty and equality. That is the greatness of his achievement.
Main Lines of Argument John Keane’s authoritative biography Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995), in an exegesis on Common Sense, rests his analysis on this core distinction between state and civil society. It is essential to the modernist interpretation. Premodern concepts of the relationship between civil society and the state rested upon their unity. Such views were shaped by the political structures of Ancient Greek and Roman civilization. The Greeks located their concept of civil society (politike koinonia) in the institution of the agora, a site of political assembly or local market place, an interface between the public and private spheres of social life. For the Greeks, the polis or city state, constituted the body politic of citizens. The Romans used the term civitas to describe the city state, emphasizing the rule of law and civility (in public tastes and manners), as the overarching principles of a civilized society. For Tom Paine, the state and civil society had counterpoised meanings. He viewed the state as a system of governance that oppressed citizens. Its powers, according to Paine’s Common Sense, ought to be constrained because free citizens in a democracy needed to subordinate the state to civil society, rather than the other way round. Paine boldly asserted in Common Sense: "
Society in every state is a blessing but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamity is
heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like a dress, is a badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
Paine’s vision of civil society transposed previous subjects into citizens with rights. He viewed this transformed political landscape as the model for American governance. While the government of the United States was to rest upon the principle of representative democracy, as befitting the scale of a continental nation, civil society was to be essentially the voice of participatory democracy. Paine’s idealism as set out in Common Sense, his blueprint for the American Revolution, was perhaps misplaced. Women, slaves, first nation Americans and many other social groups were not included in the new political order. But his underlying arguments that supported citizenship, human rights and democracy were to act as a counterweight to the hegemonic forces that began to shape the United States into the most powerful economic and military nation in the world. American values continued to be contested by American civil society. In this respect, Paine was vindicated in his ambitions for American democracy. Tom Paine’s return to the European political stage in 1787, after his sojourn in America was to prove fortuitous for European democracy and evolving notions of civil society. Both the American and French Revolutions were products of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. However, they offered quite different interpretations of its meaning. For Americans (at least those within the ruling orders), liberty defined virtue. On the other hand, Europeans became preoccupied with the pursuit of equality as the defining virtue of the good society. Europe was emerging from a highly stratified feudal social order. The belief that it was only possible fundamentally to transform the ancien regime by revolutionary action into a new democratic order was the motor force driving European history. European notions of civil society devolved on the right to associative democracy. Europeans’ view of what that right meant went far beyond Alexis de Tocqueville’s bucolic picture of Americans associating in a utopian world, where communitarianism flourished. For Europeans, the right to associate encompassed political, economic and social rights. In other words, association envisaged a robust democracy, based on conflict, in marked contrast to the assured American consensus. European civil society grew out of clandestine Masonic lodges that sought to promote progressive political change, notably in France and Germany. Freemasonry
Civil Society Theory: Paine
emerged as the first substantive expression of this right to associate, building on medieval roots in guilds and brotherhoods. This was the political context into which Paine plunged with the publication of the declamatory pamphlet, The Rights of Man, in the early 1790s. His extraordinary statement of human rights was to set Europe ablaze with revolutionary ideas, rather like Karl Marx and Freidrich Engles’ publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Paine argued that citizens must be the source of sovereignty upon which government rested. Heredity, as the source of government, was at odds with natural rights in the modern world. The divine right of kings to rule was finished, according to Paine: "
It was not against Louis XVI but against the despotic principles of the government that the [French] Nation revolted. These principles had not their origin in him but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the Augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything short of universal Revolution. . . .The natural moderation of Louis XVI contributed nothing to alter the hereditary despotism of the Monarchy. All the tyrannies of former reigns, acted under that hereditary despotism, were still liable to be revived in the hands of a successor. It is not the respite of a reign that would satisfy France, enlightened as she then has become. A casual discontinuance of the practice of despotism, is not a discontinuance of its principles; the former depends on the virtue of the individual who is in immediate possession of power; the latter, on the virtue and fortitude of the nation.
Paine reinterpreted natural rights within the political realities of democratic society based upon citizenship. He equates civil society with civil rights: "
Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, not to have fewer rights than they had before, but to have those rights secured (Paine’s italics).
In Part 2 of the Rights of Man, Paine addressed himself to the question of what he means by ‘‘civilized society’’ in a chapter entitled ‘‘Of Society and Civilization.’’ At the outset, Paine asserts the collective nature of civil society, ‘‘the mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of a civilized community upon each other, creates a great chain of connection, which holds it together.’’ He concludes, ‘‘no one man
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is capable without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants; and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to the centre.’’ In the Rights of Man, Paine states his position on the future role of government, seeing it as subordinate to civil society in an associational democracy: "
Formal Government makes but a small part of civilized life; and when even the best that human wisdom can devise is established, it is a thing more in name and idea than in fact. It is to the great and fundamental principles of society and civilization – to the common usage universally consented to, and mutually and reciprocally maintained – to the unceasing circulation of interest, which passing through its million channels, invigorates the whole mass of civilized man – it is to these things, infinitely more than to anything which even the best government can perform that the safety and prosperity of the individual and of the whole depends.
Paine’s view of government is very different from the despotic variety ‘‘government is nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society.’’ Stripped of its despotic powers, in Paine’s view, government fuses with civil society as part of associational democracy. Clearly, he is open to accusations of utopianism. However, Paine’s view needs to be considered within the context of his doctrine of universal revolution.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Paine was a committed internationalist dedicated to changing the global political order in the cause of democratic revolution. He was the first modernist political activist to dedicate himself to the cause of world revolution. Others were to follow: Marx; Lenin; Trotsky, and Mao Zedong. Paine described himself as ‘‘a citizen of the world’’ and futuristically speculated on the possibilities of the ‘‘universal citizen.’’ His belief in human rights was to anticipate the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 that laid down the basic elements of global citizenship. His hopes for democratic revolutions were significantly realized in the decolonization process of the twentieth century, which were the ultimate realization of his democratic ambition to make all human beings equal. Paine’s relevance to the present-day was highlighted when President Barack Obama, in his inauguration speech on January 20, 2009, cited Common Sense ‘‘Let it be told to the future world. . . .that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive. . .that the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’’ These words, originally read at the command of
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George Washington to his troops, provided President Obama with a metaphor for our present-day financial crisis that threatens democratic values and institutions. Paine’s vision of government subordinated to civil society was achieved during the twentieth century. The ideals of civic virtue and social obligation dominated social thought in the Western World between 1900 and 1975. They gave rise to the Welfare State as an antidote to the vagaries of the market and the iniquities of a society based on the principle of acquisitive individualism. Since the mid-1970s fiscal crises, including inflation, stagnation and external trade imbalances, have created new realities. The Welfare State had represented for many a growing civilization of expectations in which social obligation and civic virtue became synonymous. Paine’s dream was achieved, if only to be undone by welfare reform in the latter years of the twentieth century. Classical conservatism, once the most powerful critique of capitalism, does not exist in a postmodern world. There is no political movement in the developed world arguing the case for divine right of kings, landed aristocracies and organic and economic institutions that dominated Western civilization for millennia. In its place, liberal democracy has created a dynamic materialistic and all-pervasive global culture that we call postmodernity. All that is left of classical conservatism is a romantic yearning for a world of lost innocence, as is imagined to have existed prior to its transformation by capitalism and its ideological counterpart, liberalism. Burgeoning global capitalism, by curtailing national expenditure possibilities, has also undermined the Welfare State as the political solution to societal contradictions. Where do civil society and the state fit into the structure of postmodern society? We have noted the changing nature of the postmodern project in the West. It is, however, impossible to ignore the momentous events of 1989, when the Communist world collapsed during the Velvet Revolutions, in which civil society confronted tyrannical states in the name of democracy. This raises challenging questions about the future. Will the historical symbiosis between capitalism and democracy that characterized the West be generalized on a global scale? Should we not see the return to nationalism, fascism, and racism in Europe precisely as a reaction to this process of global unification? What future has civil society as a vehicle for social action and change in this new social order? How would Tom Paine have viewed this democratic challenge? One can take the pessimistic view and envisage the future role of civil society activists in terms of defensive politics as governments increasingly temporize with markets and unleash the full force of the security state.
As social divisions widen between class groups, gender groups, and ethnic groups, civil society activists can seek to advocate the cause of social justice by helping the socially-excluded to challenge fundamental inequalities. The politics of participation can become the touchstone of civil society in the twenty-first century as the emancipatory political dreams of the twentieth century disappear into the realms of historical curiosity. That is the pessimistic scenario. It suggests a vital but Sisyphean role for civil society in the future. It is very unlikely that Tom Paine would have accepted such pessimism. He would have viewed it as democratic defeatism. On the other hand, taking the Paine approach, one can embrace a more cosmically optimistic view of the future of the world and the role of civil society. The political changes we are witnessing at the beginning of this century are undoubtedly profound. But, arguably, even more profound changes are taking place in which the modernity with which we are familiar is being replaced by a new modernity, which some sociologists call postmodernity, others latemodernity, yet others postindustrial society or the information society. They agree, however, that this a ‘‘reflexive modernity’’ which is qualitatively different to anything experienced by humankind to date. In this transformed landscape, the concept of active citizenship that underpins civil society opens up a new site for democratic practice. The pursuit of an ethicallybased citizenship provides new space for social activism. In this context, the traditional conflict between capitalism and democracy is moved on to new ground. In essence, the struggle for recognition is against social exclusion, which can be defined as the absence of social, cultural and political rights. Social movements have become the embodiment of this new politics in which civil society is recuperating democracy by offering alternatives to the elite representative model. This has given rise to a Social Left that arguably is inspired by Tom Paine’s vision of civil society. No political thinker could be more relevant to late modern realities than Tom Paine, the apostle of democracy.
Cross-References
▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville
References/Further Readings Hook, S. (Ed.) (1969). The essential Thomas Paine. New York: Mentor. Keane, J. (1995). Tom Paine: A political life. London: Bloomsbury. Powell, F. (2007). The politics of civil society. Bristol: Policy Press.
Civil Society Theory: Rousseau
Civil Society Theory: Rousseau CLAUDIA OPITZ-BELAKHAL University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Brief Biography of the Theorist Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 as the son of a failed watchmaker, and his whole life he spoke of himself as a citizen of Geneva, the prospering city Republic at the French border. He was one of the most influential philosophers and novel writers during the Enlightenment although he had never had a systematic education at school or university. Especially his political philosophy (the Contrat Social publ. in 1762) influenced the French Revolution and the development of liberal, socialist and (ex negativo) conservative theory. With his Confessions, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and other writings, he influenced modern autobiography and encouraged a new focus on the building of subjectivity that bore fruit in the work of thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Freud. His novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise (published in 1761) was not only a best-seller but most influential for the development of romanticism. His novel ‘‘Emile ou De l‘ Education’’ (publ. in 1762) became one of the most seminal texts for modern pedagogy and educational debates. He also made important contributions to music as a theorist and a composer. He led a quite instable life and had to face a lot of criticism and personal persecution for his writings on religion and politics although he never failed to find supporters and finance for his personal needs, even from within the French aristocracy. He had to flee once from Geneva and went to Savoy, where he met a French noblewoman, Mme de Warens, and turned from Calvinism to Catholizism. Then he went to Paris and from there to Venice. He had to leave Venice for a dispute with his master, the French Ambassador, therefore went back to Paris, where he spent most of his life as a writer and composer. For political reasons he had to leave Paris, too, and turned back to Geneva and to Calvinism to get back his Genevan citizenship in 1754. While in Paris, he had become friends with French philosopher Diderot and beginning with some articles on music in 1749, he contributed several articles to the latter’s Encyclope´die. His most noted work was an article on ‘‘political economy’’ written in 1755. Soon after, his friendship with Diderot and the Encyclopedists became strained. Rousseau returned to Geneva and lived in the nearby mountain village Motiers. But again, he had to flee: for his unorthodox religious ideas and life style he was chased
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by the village people; so he turned to England and stayed at David Hume’s house for some time in 1765 where he fell mentally ill and suffered from paranoid fantasies. He returned to France in 1767, and finally to Paris, where he married The´re`se Levasseur, his loyal companion for so many years. Rousseau spent his final years in deliberate withdrawal. He died at Ermenonville in July 2, 1788, and was reburied alongside other French national heroes in the Panthe´on in Paris, 16 years after his death, in 1794.
Main Lines of Argument In a civil society perspective, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most important work surely is the ‘‘Contrat social’’ (Social Contract), which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published in 1762, it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article Economie Politique, featured in Diderot’s Encyclope´die. Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them – an idea he borrowed from David Hume and other liberal philosophers of his time. The double pressure of competition and dependence threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together into a political society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law. While Rousseau argues that sovereignty should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereignty and government. The government is charged with implementing and enforcing the general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, known as magistrates. Rousseau was bitterly opposed to the liberal idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly. Rather, they should make the laws directly. For the sake of his model of a direct democracy, or a ‘‘political society,’’ Rousseau despised, on the other hand, the then widely spread idea of the civilization of manners or socie´te´ police´e, another term for civil society. Already in
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his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) Rousseau had challenged the widely-held belief that society had improved over time. In the Discours sur l’Ine´galite´ (1754), he continued to challenge the philosophy of history which underlay the Enlightenment narratives of progress from barbarity to civilization by championing l‘homme sauvage (the wild man) over l‘homme public (public man). In doing so, Rousseau denied the value of both civility and civil society and redefined gender roles. For Roussseau acknowledged the policing role of women; what he rejected was society – a civil society grounded on difference, as Dena Goodman put it (Goodman, 2001). In Rousseau‘s view, l‘homme police´ (the civilized man) was in no way superior to l‘homme sauvage (the wild man), and, even worse, the socie´te´ police´e was grounded in usurpation and injustice. The only legitimate orders for Rousseau were the natural order of the family and a political order rooted in the sovereign wills of the individuals (or, more exactly: adult males) who composed it. For in Rousseau’s polity, order is achieved by the elimination of difference which, in practice, meant the exclusion of women from it: not only did he assume that women were essentially different from men whereas men were essentially ‘‘identical,’’ but he identified women as the primary causes of differences (that is, conflicts) between men. In fact, in the Discours sur l’ine´galite´ (Discourse on inequality; 1755), civilization and conflicts alike begin with the passionate contact between men and women. So, for Rousseau as much as for the other French Enlightenment philosophers, difference was the reason for policing and at the heart of civil society, but fascinated by the classical (and by his time idealized) republicanism of the ancient Greek and Roman writers, he rejected sociability as the foundation of (democratic) political association. His polity is the unitary expression of a group of men who do not form a society because they are defined by their identity, not by their difference. The policing role of women, so dear to many Salon visitors and Salonnie`res of Enlightenment Paris, ‘‘was a red flag for Rousseau’’ (as D. Goodman puts it) not only because it put men under the governance of women, but because it compromised masculine ‘‘natural’’ freedom and thus violated nature. As a consequence, Rousseau radically eliminated society from his ideal world of family and state. Civility, to him, was antithetical to an order based on nature. All necessary civil or even civic education, though, had to be secured by the (patriarchal) family which he conceived of as ‘‘natural education.’’ As Ernst Cassirer put it, Rousseaus ‘‘radical opposition’’ to the Enlightenment was grounded on a rejection of the idea that ‘‘all political and social enterprise must stand on the same foundation.’’
(Cassierer, 1954). And Ju¨rgen Habermas underlines that ‘‘Rousseau projected the unbourgeois idea of an intrusively political society in which the autonomous private sphere, that is, civil society, emancipated from the state, had no place’’ (Habermas, 1989). Unlike the ‘‘general will,’’ which Rousseau described as an emanation of individuals acting in legislative institutions, the ‘‘public sphere’’ constituting a ‘‘public opinion’’ was defined as a product of private exchange – and this was exactly what he despised as ‘‘depraved’’ or ‘‘degenerated’’ egoism and lack of ‘‘civic virtue.’’ A multiplicity of wills, in Rousseaus view, could be unified into a general will only when these wills issued from individuals who thought like ‘‘citizens’’ rather than ‘‘men,’’ i.e., ‘‘private persons.’’ The general will was thus a unification of subjectivity effected through the enactment of ‘‘virtue’’ within a clearly demarcated political sphere. For Rousseau it was therefore crucial that the process of voting in the legislature take place without prior discussion so as to avoid the ‘‘corruption’’ that emerges when ohne thinks about what others are thinking. The exchange of opinions and arguments, i.e., ‘‘communication’’ and ‘‘public opinion,’’ in contrast, stands for those processes of interaction that could lead to conflict, manipulation and personal interest. ‘‘Virtue,’’ in Rousseaus view, implies the active involvement of individuals in government and political decision making, whereas ‘‘communication’’ refers to sociability in a ‘‘civil (not civic) society.’’ Moreover, as Dena Goodman states rightly, Rousseau ‘‘drew a line in the sand between (natural) masculine freedom and civil (governed) society. He thereby contributed not only to the ‘‘feminization’’ of the notion of society but demanded a reconfiguration of society, polity, and the place of women in both’’ (Goodman, 2001). Rousseau rejected the idea of a differentiated (civil) society and notions of the state as a political sphere for the powerful few legitimized by it, while bringing the theory of gender difference at the heart of a society-based notion of civilization and used it to ground two separate and gendered spheres: the moral sphere of the family, whose soul was the natural virtue of women; and the public sphere of the commercial economy and the state, in which men were driven by rationality and civic virtue.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Most writers today agree that Rousseau is something like an anti-civil society thinker with an outspoken anti-modernist approach. Keith M. Baker f. ex. points out that to accept a Rousseauian discourse means to reject a discourse of modernity, in which social progress goes hand in hand with social difference and differentiation; it means to reject the
Civil Society Theory: Shils
very notions of civilization and society associated with women as being outside the political community of citizen-men. It means to reject the Enlightenment theory of history as a progress onto liberty, happiness, and civilization (Baker, 1990). And Dena Goodman underlines: ‘‘By eliminating society, Rousseau eliminated difference from political discourse’’ (Goodman, 2001). Still, Rousseaus Contrat social and his radical thinking of the sovereignty of the people cannot altogether be left aside in further discussions of civil society. If one considers, as M. Edwards does rightly, that there are different conceptions of ‘‘civil society’’ in present-day discourse, there are still some lessons to learn from Rousseaus writings. He of course decisively rejected any idea of society as associational life but he fostered obviously the concept of civil society as the ‘‘public sphere’’ – ‘‘a whole polity that cares about the common good and has the capacity to deliberate about it democratically’’ (Edwards, 2005). ‘‘Civil society’’ as a political and radically democratic gathering of ‘‘citizens’’ was and still is a vision of many civil society activists and supporters – albeit one has to consider the deeply anti-modern and anti-feminist (even: anti-diversity) strand in this tradition of classical republicanism. Finally, Rousseau is certainly the most outspoken Enlightenment thinker of the concept of ‘‘civil society as the good society’’ (Edwards, 2005) by moralizing politics and politicizing morals, public as much as private ones, males as much as females. This is probably the most critical point in his thinking (and the reception of his thinking) until dotay. Even if one doesn‘t necessarily agree with Starobinski and others who think that the mentality of the Revolution, especially the Terreur, was but a reflection of the thinking of Rousseau (Starobinski, 1988; Blum, 1986; Baker, 1990), one should seriously consider today the obvious weaknesses of his conceptualization of politics and order in terms of diversity (be it gender, race, sex or class, or any other possible source of inequality). His highly moralized discourse though – the ways in which he drew lines as sharp demarcations f.ex. between women and men, public and private, nature and culture, good and evil – can no longer be an example for any debate on politics or on civil society.
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▶ Civil Society Theory: Montesquieu ▶ Civil Society Theory: Paine ▶ Civil Society Theory: Smith
References/Further Readings Carol, B. (1986). Rousseau and the republic of virtue: The language of politics in the French Revolution. Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press. Daniel, G. (1992). Philosophy, sociology, and gender in the enlightenment conception of public opinion. In French Historical Studies, 17(4), 882–911. Dena, G. (1994). The republic of letters: A cultural history of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press. Dena, G. (2001). Policing society: Women as political actors in the enlightenment discourse. In Hans-Erich Bo¨deker/Lieselotte Steinbru¨gge (Eds.), Conceptualising woman in enlightenment thought (pp. 129–142). Berlin: Berlin Vlg. Ernst, C. (1951). The philosophy of the enlightenment. (Fritz C. A. Koelln, & J. P. Pettegrove, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Keith, M. B. (1990). Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French political culture in the eighteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Idem, Enlightenment and the Institution of Society. (1994). Notes for a conceptual history. In W. F. B. Melching & W. R. E. Velema (Eds.), Main trends in cultural history (pp. 95–120). Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi. Edwards, M. (2004). Civil society. Cambridge: Polity. Edwards, M. (2005). Civil society. In The encyclopedia of informal education, from www.infed.org/association/civil-society.htm. Habermas, J. The structural Transformation of the public sphere. An inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Berger etc., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jean, S. (1988). Jean-Jaques Rousseau: Transparency and obstruction (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Judith, S. (1969). Men and citizens: A study of Rousseau’s socialtheory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ju¨rgen, H. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. An inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society. (T., Burger, & F., Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Lieselotte, S. (1995). The moral sex. Woman’s nature in the French enlightenment (P. Selwyn, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Nannerl, O‘K. (1980). Philosophy and the state in France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Civil Society Theory: Shils Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Civil Society and Gender ▶ Civil Society History I: Antiquity ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society Theory: Aristotle ▶ Civil Society Theory: Ferguson
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FRANK ADLOFF Free University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Brief Biography of the Theorist The sociologist Edward A. Shils (1910–1995) – who worked in his younger years with Talcott Parsons but still managed
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to produce an independent theory of society – published several essays near the end of his life (Shils, 1997a) which deal with the concepts of civil society and civility and contain many important insights which have gone largely unnoticed in the current debates over civil society. Shils did not produce any monumental theoretical works. Instead he wrote many shorter investigations and essays which have had a significant impact on the debates within sociological theory (cf. Turner, 1999). He read widely, and his broad knowledge reveals itself throughout these shorter works. Shils was born in Philadelphia in 1910. He arrived at the University of Chicago in 1933, where he came into close contact with Louis Wirth and Robert Ezra Park, important members of the Chicago School (Bulmer, 1996). He soon secured a permanent position in Chicago – later also on the Committee on Social Thought – and taught there until his death. At the same time, Shils held various positions at English universities: from 1946 until 1950 he was a reader in sociology at the London School of Economics; in the 1960s a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge; from 1970 a fellow of Peterhouse in Cambridge and at the same time a member of the anthropology department at University College London. In the last years of his life, Shils was regularly invited to discussions at the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. It was in the context of these discussions that one of his central texts on civil society and civility appeared (Shils, 1991). Shils’ life and influence manifest a strong transatlantic connection. He was interested from a young age in the classics of European sociology and translated into English, for example, texts by Karl Mannheim and Max Weber (his methodological writings). Shils received many honors, among them the Jefferson Lectureship – a high accolade in the humanities in the USA – and in 1983 the Balzan award, an award similar to the Nobel Prize for fields without one. In 1962, he founded the journal Minerva in England. In the early 1950s, Shils was coauthor with the social theorist Talcott Parsons of such important works as ‘‘Toward a General Theory of Action’’ (1951) and ‘‘Working Papers in the Theory of Action’’ (1953). However, Shils had a stronger empirical orientation than Parsons and blazed his own paths, both while working with Parsons and after. The following quote documents Shils’ distance from Parsons’ attempt to lay out a general theory of society: ‘‘Theory will bear fruit in sociology only when it has been assimilated into the perception of concrete and particular events, and not as long as it is thought to be something which comes before and emerges from research’’ (Shils, 1957: 145). He gained recognition independent from
Parsons with an early military-sociological investigation, studied intellectuals and dealt with questions of modernization theory. In so doing he delved into fundamental problems of modernization theory in which Parsons was also involved (Joas and Kno¨bl, 2004: 442), namely with culture-theoretical questions and in particular with the relationship between power and culture. Here he systematically confronted Weber’s concept of charisma.
Main Lines of Argument Edward Shils’ (1972a) transformation of Weber’s concept of charisma is directed towards the question of the integration of modern societies. Max Weber too was not only interested in the ‘‘charismatic leader’’ and other exceptional cases, but also in the institutionalization of charisma and its integration into everyday life. However, Shils was the first to lay out systematically a concrete synthesis of charisma and everydayness. He brought together the late Emile Durkheim’s idea that every society regards something as sacred with Weber’s concept of the charismatic and proposed the thesis that one can find things, persons or institutions in all societies to which charismatic or sacred qualities are attributed (cf. Turner, 2003): ‘‘The attachment to the sacred cannot be evaded in any society. All societies regard as sacred certain standards of judgment, certain rules of conduct and thought, and certain arrangements of action. They vary only in the intensity and self-consciousness of their acknowledgment, the scope which they allow to the sacred, and the extent of participation in them’’ (Shils, 1958: 156). These institutions and symbols have a societally stabilizing function, because they express the bond to particular commonly shared values; they constitute the center of a society. These central and value-bound institutions – be they sacred or charged with charisma – are as a general rule esteemed, supported and acknowledged. In this way, Shils frees Weber’s concept of individual charisma on the one hand from its extraordinary, disruptive and transformative character, and on the other hand he also ascribed charisma to roles, institutions and symbols, and not only persons: ‘‘Where institutions, roles, persons, norms, or symbols are perceived or believed to be connected or infused with these charismatic powers, we say that they are perceived as charismatic’’ (Shils, 1972b: 110). According to Shils, the root of charisma lies in a cognitive as well as normative need for order, which he sees as anthropologically grounded. In particular, a society’s elites serve this need according to a (transcendental) order; and charisma is ascribed to them in the following manner (cf. Eisenstadt, 1995): initially the simple concentration of power in an institution incites the
Civil Society Theory: Shils
ascription of charisma, but this alone is not sufficient; there must also be a connection to a transcendent realm of values, for instance through a connection with the value of justice: ‘‘the justice of the Supreme Court is the link between the transcendent order and the earthly order’’ (ibid.: 134). The charismatic elements of a society’s center are endowed with esteem and deference. The most respected professions are those which stand nearest the society’s center (Shils, 1972d: 147), i.e., the society’s elites. Thus wealth can serve as the basis for societal recognition, esteem and deference, in so far as it goes hand in hand with a ‘‘commensurate lifestyle’’ which refers to recognized societal values. Solidified positions of deference also form the basis for social stratification processes: speaking Weberian, one could say that various corporative ranks are conferred with charisma – and thereby also deference – of varying intensity. Shils (1972c: 124f.) however reproaches Weber for being in essence only interested in the most intensive form of charisma – beyond the form it takes in everyday situations – and that he disregarded ‘‘the possibility of its dispersed and attenuated existence’’ (ibid.: 124). Weber negated the possibility ‘‘that charisma can become an integral element in the process of secular institutionalization’’ (ibid.: 125). However, the fact that Weber didn’t attribute an equal charismatic charge to all institutions of modern society – instead distinguishing between institutional complexes charged with varying intensities of charisma and between different historical threads – should not necessarily be seen as an error, rather quite the opposite. It should be emphasized that Weber saw a marked difference between the ‘‘pure’’ – i.e., extraordinary and revolutionary – forms of charisma and their institutionalized form – integrated into the everyday – and felt that this distinction should not be blurred, which is what Shils sometimes does. Every extraordinary charismatic relationship or authority is unstable and, for Weber, is confronted with the problem of how it can be perpetuated and be ‘‘transposed and bent into the ‘institutional’’’ (Weber, 1972: 661). For Shils, only through being bound to a charismatic center and the values to be found there can a modern, democratic and pluralistic society be integrated, for the tendency towards irresolvable conflicts of ideology and interest are inherent in such a society. A notable work in this context is his investigation – presented in 1953 together with Michael Young – of the coronation ceremony for the accession of Queen Elisabeth II to the British throne. Traditions, rituals, and ceremonies thus constitute for Shils a societally integrating cement. For Shils, there is no dichotomy of tradition and modernity; traditions are also to be found in modern societies.
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Whenever sacred or charismatic qualities are ascribed to them, social facts are clothed with the aura of tradition. Thus tradition and sacredness don’t die away in modernity; at the most they are sublimated. The appropriation and continuation of traditions are carried out principally by elites. Their positions of power and authority are ascribed with charisma and in this way they are also able to keep traditions alive. In this context, Shils also introduces the concept pair of ‘‘center’’ and ‘‘periphery,’’ which he construes not geographically or economically, but culture-sociologically. Each society has a center, which is defined through central values and notions of belief: ‘‘the center, or the central zone, is a phenomenon of the realm of values and beliefs. It is the center of the order of symbols, of values and beliefs, which govern the society. It is the center because it is the ultimate and irreducible; and it is felt to be such by many who cannot give explicit articulation to its irreducibility. The central zone partakes of the nature of the sacred. In this sense, every society has an ‘official’ religion, even when that society or its exponents and interpreters conceive of it, more or less correctly, as a secular, pluralistic, and tolerant society’’ (Shils, 1972e: 93). This value center is constituted and reproduced by elites; it radiates thereby into more remote ‘‘regions’’ – i.e., outwards into the periphery – where it thereby loses potency: ‘‘A society’s social, governmental, military, religious and cultural leaders cluster at the centre; followers, indifferent or alienated citizens, and disloyal dissidents are dispersed, or concentrate, at the periphery’’ (Bulmer, 1996: 14). Thus, unlike many social scientists of his time, Shils does not regard modern society as an anonymous mass society. Society is not something constituted by individuals atomized by self-interest, but is instead held together by ‘‘an infinity of personal attachments, moral obligations in concrete contexts, professional and creative pride, individual ambition, primordial affinities and a civil sense which is low in many, high in some, and moderate in most persons’’ (Shils, 1957: 131). Shils’ entire approach – and in particular his writings on civil society and civility – can be interpreted as a defense of liberal democracy, just as one can regard Michel Foucault’s and Ju¨rgen Habermas’ analyses as critiques of the same (see Turner, 1999). Seen in contrast to Carl Schmitt, Shils’ position is clear: as is well known, in the text ‘‘The Concept of the Political’’, Schmitt levels the critique that liberalism has transformed the political concept of struggle as well as the distinction between friend and enemy into the concept of (parliamentary) discussion. For Schmitt, liberalism is distinguished by the depoliticization and neutralization of societal spheres such as
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the market, religion, law, science, and culture. The liberal politics of discussion hold that these neutralized zones should not be sources of conflict; instead they should be withdrawn from the discussion. Indeed, according to Schmitt, such politics quickly become undemocratic whenever they refuse to make these neutralizations and demarcations objects of democratic politics. In defense of liberalism, Shils introduces into this debate the concept of civility. Civility excludes particular content from the political discussion – content which is thus depoliticized and neutralized. Shils sees rooted in liberalism the necessity that limits are drawn around politics: he considers a discussion without such limits to be destructive (cf. Turner, 1999). While for Habermas the problem of liberal democracy consists in the fact that not all possible issues are discursively fluidized, and thus that particular areas of the economy, technology, science, etc. are not made into objects of discursive confrontation, Shils reveals himself to be a defender of this liberal bearing. Civility presupposes that fundamental societal institutions and rules are consensually accepted and also that not everything is sucked into the maelstrom of political conflict: ‘‘the political system of freedom must, for the most part, be accepted by its members, at any particular moment, as given. It must be the product of a free acceptance in which a belief in the sacredness of the order as a whole is latent. The intrinsic and autonomous value of the other man, of the other party, and of the institutions within which they meet, be they the parliamentary body or the university or the system of industrial negotiations, must be accepted as given’’ (Shils, 1958: 157). Thus, for Shils, a free society also has to rely on traditions, in which this connection to sacredness is preserved and reproduced. A liberal democratic society which is at the same time a civil society embodies enough civility for ‘‘struggle’’ and special interest politics to be kept within certain limits through an orientation towards the common good. Thus a civil society can also not be based primarily on primordial ties; members of the society must see each other as fellow citizens and not as fellow kinsmen (Shils, 1997b: 71). The members of a civil society may belong to quite different social spheres, but they regard each other reciprocally as fellow citizens and relate themselves to the center of the society as a whole. Civility – or civic spirit – is the typical way of thinking and acting in a civil society, which expresses itself in the binding of individuals to the society as a whole. The central institutions – sacred and charged with charisma – are esteemed and supported, and members of the society recognize that they have to consider the whole society and the common good in their
actions. A liberal democracy depends on this consideration, and can only survive if it is maintained, such is Shils’ conviction. As civility is directed towards a society’s center, the forms and limits of a society are also affected. The orientation towards a common good functions best through the social conditions of nation and patriotism, whereby, of course, the danger also exists that these orientations could also slide into an uncivil nationalism. Every part of the society needn’t necessarily be equally civil. According to Shils, the center should possess a higher level of civility than the periphery: ‘‘A civil society is imperiled if there is a low degree of civility within and between its centers. [. . .] Incivility within the centers and among them breeds incivility in the citizenry (. . .)’’ (ibid.: 86). Particular institutional complexes are a necessary precondition for the existence of a civil society – e.g., representative government, competing political parties, regular elections, a secret ballot, universal suffrage, an independent judiciary, a free press, the freedom of association, independent educational institutions, private property and the freedom of contract – but these complexes are not sufficient conditions; there must also be a public civility. These institutional complexes also require that society is differentiated functionally, in other words that autonomous institutions and spheres of action exist which are clearly distinct from families, clans, and the state. More explicitly, in Shils’ own words, ‘‘the pluralism of civil society is twofold. Its pluralism comprises the partially autonomous spheres of economy, religion, culture, intellectual activity, political activity, etc., vis-a`-vis each other. [. . .] The pluralism of civil society also comprises within each sphere a multiplicity of many partially autonomous corporations and institutions; the economic sphere comprises many industries and many business firms; the religious sphere comprises many churches and sects; the intellectual sphere comprises many universities, independent newspapers, periodicals and broadcasting corporations; the political sphere many independent political parties. There are many independent voluntary philanthropic and civic associations, etc.’’ (Shils, 1997c: 330). The institutional autonomy of different spheres of action is a conditio sine qua non for the existence of a modern civil society. These are undergirded by ‘‘supporting institutions’’ – e.g., voluntary associations and coalitions which exercise the civil rights of association, assembly and representation or competition. The sociological question which then arises with regard to civility is in which institutions or sections of the population civility is more strongly anchored (cf. Pye, 1999). Universities, for example, are institutions which should be oriented towards the truth alone, and
Civil Society Theory: Shils
professors should thus stand outside the political conflicts of the day. Churches, straddling worldly and otherworldly aspects, can all the same become important actors in a civil society. The upper classes can display both a tendency towards the acceptance of responsibility and an orientation towards the common good as well as an at times harsh incivility. The working class and the lower middle class serve, according to Shils, mostly as the bulwarks of a civil society, as they rarely actively incite revolution or subvert civic order. Shils orients his concept of civility towards Montesquieu’s concept of republican virtues – for Montesquieu, virtue in a republic is love for that republic. For Shils, the virtue of liberal democratic societies is their civility. The link to Adam Ferguson here is also clear, since Ferguson warns on the one hand of despotic power and on the other hand of an excessive pursuit of private interests in the market economy. He analyses how the capitalist economy liberates and rewards self-interest. For Ferguson, it is essential that in a civil society politically engaged citizens fulfill their noncommercial, ethical ambitions. Part of these ethical ambitions are the ‘‘polished and refined manners’’ on which Shils places particular value. Civility is for Shils a bearing towards the society as a whole: ‘‘civility is an appreciation of or attachment to the institutions which constitute civil society. It is an attitude of attachment to the whole society, to all its strata and sections. It is an attitude of concern for the good of the entire society’’ (Shils, 1997c: 335). The actions of a particular person are to be characterized as civil when his individual consciousness has ‘‘been partly superseded by his collective self-consciousness, the society as a whole and the institution of civil society being the referents of his collective self-consciousness’’ (ibid.). This also implies that the dignity of others is honored equally – that one treats others with respect and regard, no matter what position they might hold. Political adversaries are consequently also regarded as members of the same political community, which is to go beyond courtesy and good manners. Civility is thus for Shils – once again with reference to Carl Schmitt – the opposite of a splitting of society into friend and enemy: ‘‘without such civility, a pluralistic society can degenerate into a war of each against all’’ (ibid.: 341). Here Shils refers, for the sake of example, to the conflicts in the Weimar Republic and in the Russian Czardom at the end of the First World War. Whether political adversaries can actually agree on a common good is not the crucial matter here; their reciprocal recognition as members of an ‘‘inclusive collectivity’’ is much more important. Civil society is, as it were, the institutional, cognitive and normative answer to that
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unavoidable fact of modernity, namely pluralism and individualism (cf. Shils, 1991).
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society While in the early 1990s Shils saw the future of civil society in Middle and Eastern Europe in a relatively positive light, his judgment of the European Union was more skeptical. National societies offer their members more possibilities for identification with the center and the common good, so that a single European civil society – and not merely several European national civil societies – still seems quite far away: ‘‘for Europe to become a single, albeit very differentiated, civil society, it will have to come forward much more prominently in the collective selfconsciousness of European individuals‘‘(Shils, 1997c: 355). The European Union is still confronted with this challenge today. In most debates over civil society these days, a sphereoriented definition of civil society is postulated. Thereby, civil society is understood as an independent sphere of society, which can be distinguished from the family, the state and the economy. Free associations are often regarded as the typical organizational form taken by this sphere – for Tocqueville, Putnam, Habermas, Dahrendorf and many others. On the other hand, there is an interaction-oriented and more normative definition, which refers less to a differentiated sphere of civil society than to a communitarian or republican perspective from which particular motives and modes of actions are normatively preferable. Civility and public or civic spirit are distinguished here as ‘‘virtuous’’ and seen as the epitome of action in a civil society. Shils’ particular contribution to the civil society debate is to propose a combination of sphere-oriented and interaction-oriented definitions of civil society. However, this is not to say that he simply combines these two perspectives. The sphere of civil society is for him not limited to the voluntary, self-organized sector of nonprofit organizations and associations. The autonomy of functionally differentiated spheres of action is for him the fundamental institutional precondition for civil society. But only through a civil bearing – which means more than just ‘‘good manners’’ – can a civil society come to fruition. For Shils, civility in a civil society means an orientation towards a sacred center of society; it is a matter of the realization of the ideals of a politics which is directed towards public compromise and understanding, agrees to nonviolence, acknowledges plurality and differences, and is oriented towards the common good.
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One of the few social scientists who have followed Shils in his fundamental considerations of the concept of civil society is the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. He gave Shils’ concept a discourse-analytic turn: civil society possesses for him certain cultural codes and narratives. In Alexander’s understanding – following Shils’– it is a matter here of a genuine cultural-symbolic sphere, a sphere of collective consciousness. This is structured according to the dichotomy of pure/impure or sacred/ profane. This cultural grid lies at the foundation of every culture: ‘‘just as there is no developed religion that does not divide the world into the saved and the damned, there is no civil discourse that does not conceptualize the world into those who deserve inclusion and those who do not’’ (Alexander, 1998: 98). A society consequently classifies according to dichotomous codes what it considers to be ‘‘good’’ civil society and what is excluded as ‘‘impure’’, ‘‘contaminated’’ or ‘‘uncivil’’. In contrast to Shils’ approach, Jeffery Alexander’s research program primarily amounts to a discourse-analytical reconstruction of what counts as civil or uncivil in a society, while thereby abstaining from any normative evaluation of the functionality of this distinction.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: Dahrendorf ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Civil Society Theory: Ferguson ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Montesquieu ▶ Civility ▶ Communitarianism ▶ Schmitt, Carl ▶ Uncivil Society ▶ Weber, Max
References/Further Readings Alexander, J. (1998). Citizen and enemy as symbolic classification. In J. Alexander (Eds.), Real civil societies (pp. 96–114). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bulmer, M. (1996). Edward Shils as a sociologist. Minerva, 34, 7–21. Eisenstadt, S. N. (1995). Power, trust, and meaning. Essays in sociological theory and analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 167–201. Joas, H., & Kno¨bl, W. (2004). Sozialtheorie. Zwanzig einfu¨hrende Vorlesungen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Pye, L. W. (1999). Civility, social capital, and civil society: Three powerful concepts for explaining Asia. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29(4), 763–782. Schmitt, C. (1976 [1926]). The concept of the political. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shils, E. A. (1957). Primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties: Some particular observations on the relationships of sociological research and theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 8(2), 130–145.
Shils, E. A. (1958). Tradition and liberty: Antinomy and interdependence. Ethics, 68(3), 153–165. Shils, E. A. (1972a). The constitution of society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. A. (1972b). Charisma. In E. A. Shils (Ed.), The constitution of society (pp. 110–118). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. A. (1972c). Charisma, order, and status. In E. A. Shils (Ed.), The constitution of society (pp. 119–142). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. A. (1972d). Deference. In E. A. Shils (Ed.), The constitution of society (pp. 143–175). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. A. (1972e). Center and periphery. In E. A. Shils (Ed.), The constitution of society (pp. 93–109). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. A. (1991). Was ist eine civil society? In K. Michalski (Ed.), Europa und die Civil Society, Castelgandolfo-Gespra¨che 1989 (pp. 13–51). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Shils, E. A. (1997a). The virtue of civility. Selected essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Shils, E. A. (1997b). Civility and civil society. Good manners between persons and concern for the common good in public affairs. In E. A. Shils (Ed.), The virtue of civility. Selected essays (pp. 63–102). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Shils, E. A. (1997c). The virtue of civility. In E. A. Shils (Ed.), The virtue of civility. Selected essays (pp. 320–355). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Shils, E. A., & Janowitz, M. (1948). Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 12(2), 280–315. Shils, E. A., & Young, M. (1953). The meaning of the coronation. Sociological Review I, 2, 63–81. Turner, S. (1999). The significance of Shils. Sociological Theory, 17(2), 125–145. Turner, S. (2003). Charisma reconsidered. Journal of Classical Sociology, 3(1), 5–26. Weber, M. (1972 [1922]). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Civil Society Theory: Smith LISA HILL University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Brief Biography of the Theorist Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a leading figure of the ‘‘Scottish Enlightenment’’ and, among other things, Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is best known as a pioneer of political economy but he was also a moral philosopher with a keen interest in social theory and human psychology. Smith’s first major work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) but he is better known for An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) which secured his reputation as the ‘‘father’’ of modern economics. Smith’s most
Civil Society Theory: Smith
influential ideas relate to his theory of ‘‘natural liberty,’’ the free market and his belief in the positive effects of selfinterest.
Main Lines of Argument Markets and the System of Natural Liberty. For Smith, the realm of uncoerced collective action was naturally very large and he regarded the market as almost synonymous with what would now be referred to as ‘‘civil society.’’ Smith perceived beneath the complex of seemingly arbitrary social arrangements and artificially imposed institutional constraints on human behavior a system of natural and spontaneous social and economic relations which, when left to itself, would function harmoniously. The existence of this self-organizing social and economic system is defended in Smith’s antirationalist account of the manner in which the general equilibrium of society emerges spontaneously from the seemingly random behaviors of individual actors. Rather than being the result of conscious planning and design, order is the product of subrational, internal processes played out at the micro-level of individual human action. Smith rejects such historiographic ‘‘fictions’’ as contractarianism, great legislator myths and the diffusionist theory of civilization and assumes that rationality and long-term, deliberate planning play only a minor role in the unfolding of human history. Instead, human drives secure social order. The most important of these drives is self-interest. Self-interest. Though he was neither the only, nor the first, to explain why benevolence could not sustain a modern, commercial society, Smith’s was, arguably, the most subtle account to date of the impracticality of benevolence as the basis for social life. In Smith’s spontaneous system of ‘‘natural liberty’’ each person is by nature the best judge of her own interest and should therefore be left unhindered to pursue it in her own way. She is able in this manner to achieve, not only her own best advantage, but that of society as well. It was this belief in a natural order that led Smith to make his celebrated statement that in pursuing their own advantage each individual was ‘‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’’ namely the general welfare and prosperity of the nation (1979 [1776], IV.ii.9: 456). Smith’s economic agent is consistently self-regarding, self-sufficient, utility maximizing, pecuniary, competitive, and acquisitive. Each person ‘‘is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person’’ therefore ‘‘it is fit and right’’ that we are all self-regarding creatures (1976 [1759], II.ii.2.1: 82). The ‘‘desire’’ of fortune and ‘‘of bettering our condition’’ is instinctive and ‘‘naturally’’ insatiable (1979 [1776],
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II.iii.28: 341). Self-preservation is the first task suggested by nature, reflecting the Creator’s desire for people’s physical safety, security, prosperity, and perpetuation (1976 [1759], VII.ii.1.15–1.16: 272; ibid., II.ii.2.1: 82). Such a task must be entrusted to utterly dependable ‘‘original and immediate instincts’’ because benevolence (or ‘‘beneficence’’) could never be relied upon to secure the welfare of a being so thoroughly dependent on things external to it. Without beneficence society may ‘‘still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed evaluation’’; society is no longer an intimate community of otherregarding agents locked together in necessitous and ascribed relationships but is bound together by contracts and ‘‘a sense of its utility.’’ Beneficence certainly makes life more pleasant but it plays, at best, a marginal role in the ultimate goals of human existence: survival, ‘‘the support of the individual’’ and the achievement of social recognition (1976 [1759], II.ii.3.2–3.3: 86). Yet Smith’s world is not a chaos of unbridled selfishness; due to the workings of temperate ‘‘sympathy’’ and the ‘‘impartial spectator,’’ social relations are spontaneously and adaptively harmonized. Social Physics: Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator. The ‘‘impartial spectator’’ is a moral faculty that works in concert with sympathy to monitor ‘‘passions and appetites,’’ constantly judging ‘‘how far each of them was either to be indulged or restrained’’ (1976 [1759], III.5.5– 5.6:165–166). Together sympathy and the impartial spectator limit conflict, regulate selfish drives and exact precise fulfillment of contracts; without them, society could not possibly function. Smith described the operations of the impartial spectator in the following terms: ‘‘We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behavior, and endeavor to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking glass by which [we] can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct’’ (1976 [1759], III.1.5–1.6: 112–113). Meanwhile, sympathy is not, as might be imagined, synonymous with beneficence, ‘‘pity,’’ or ‘‘compassion,’’ but ‘‘denote[s] our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’’ (1976 [1759], I.i.1.5: 10). The act of sympathizing involves placing ourselves in the position of the person under observation and imaginatively experiencing her state of mind. The person under consideration reflexively reciprocates and imaginatively adopts the perspective of those observing her in order to carefully calibrate and moderate her behavior accordingly. The impartial spectator is thus the mechanism by which one regulates her own and others’ behavior while the degree of sympathy registered determines the extent to which the impartial spectator either bestows or withholds social approval.
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In commercial transactions, sympathy is elicited by fair play and financial success. Striving and achievement is universally applauded but, no matter how intense the competition, there can be no ‘‘violations of fair play’’ and the laws of natural liberty at the risk of losing the muchdesired ‘‘sympathy’’ of the impartial spectator (1976 [1759], II.ii.2.1: 83). The successful and active commercial agent constantly seeks to augment ‘‘his fortune’’ but it is not for the sake of the ease or convenience afforded by wealth but in order to be regarded with sympathy and approval by our ‘‘fellows’’ (1976 [1759], I.iii.2.ii: 50–51).
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society The Organized State
Smith’s economic thought has been highly influential in shaping contemporary expectations of the state’s proper role in the economic realm. Given the self-organizing character of society and the economy, Smith regarded the organized state as, generally, an obstruction to social equilibrium and a thriving economy; conversely, an expanding free market is the main guard of civil society due to its role as a bulwark against the potentially noxious power of the state. Smith wrote that once ‘‘[a]ll systems either of preference restraint’’ have been ‘‘taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord.’’ On the belief that such a system was capable of spontaneously delivering economic prosperity, he famously advocated a small, unobtrusive state. Yet, though, ideally minimal, the state is absolutely necessary because there are some collective action problems that cannot be resolved by market mechanisms alone. Within ‘‘the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to,’’ namely, defence, justice, and public works or infrastructure (1979 [1776], IV.ix.51: 687–688). The provision of defence, both internal and external is necessary in order to maximize human happiness and permit commerce to flourish. The state should not only act to address the problem of ‘‘injustice or oppression’’ between compatriots but should also provide security from ‘‘violence and injustice’’ perpetrated against the nation by ‘‘other independent societies’’ (1979 [1776], V.i.a-b.39–44: 705– 708). When ‘‘[t]he natural effort of every individual to better his own condition’’ is unleashed under conditions of ‘‘freedom and security’’ the society will be prosperous and happy (1979 [1776], IV.v.b.43: 540). Another means for facilitating commerce lies in the provision of a system of justice to enforce contracts and grant patents and copyrights. Smith wrote that an organized system of justice underpinned by regular policing and military defence affords ‘‘to industry, the only encouragement
which it requires, some tolerable security that it shall enjoy the fruits of its own labour’’ (1979 [1776], I.xi.n.i: 256). Finally, the state is responsible for the erection and maintenance of public works like ‘‘roads, bridges, navigable canals’’ and harbors, all of which ‘‘facilitate the commerce of any country’’ (1979 [1776], V.i.d.1–3: 724). The Civil Society of Specialization and Strangership
Smith’s sociology of commercial life displays considerable originality. His observations on the effects of specialization were particularly striking and they influenced the work of such later thinkers as Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim (Hill, 2007). The drive to specialize –which is innate – plays a central role in Smith’s economic and social thought. Specialization, and the exchange culture to which it inevitably gives rise, leads to the development of a society where ‘‘every man. . . lives by exchanging’’ (1979 [1776], IV.1: 37). Over time, exchange has come to displace clan and familial displays of loyalty as the paradigmatic social interaction. Smith describes and endorses a community held together by amicable strangership and sustained by formal justice and cool virtues like probity, frugality, and punctuality. In moving from social intimacy, homogeneity, and the exigencies of security to a highly differentiated exchange culture, society has become more impersonal and yet at the same time there is more interdependence and mutual enablement than ever before (1979 [1776], I.ii: 30; I.ii.1–3: 25–28). A modern commercial society like Britain was affectively constituted as an ‘‘assembly of strangers’’ (1976 [1759], I.i.4.9: 23). Accordingly, classical ‘‘warm’’ virtues like charity, philanthropy, altruism, military valour, self-sacrifice, and especially benevolence were no longer sufficient to supply its members increasingly multifarious wants. The cooler, more temperate and reliable sentiments of prudence, propriety, and especially justice were best suited to that task (1976 [1759], III.6.9–6.11: 174–175). Smith thought that society could be adequately regulated and held together by cool virtues, the division of labor, a regular system of justice and police, and the social physics generated by sympathy and the impartial spectator. He approvingly describes an atmosphere permeated, not by the spontaneous vitality of benevolent warmth, but by the constancy of legal rules and the steady constraints of social decorum (Mizuta, 1975). Smith’s ideal (liberal-commercial) civil society is more pacific, orderly, and predictable than its ‘‘rude and barbarous’’ stadial predecessors (the hunting, herding, and agricultural stages) partly because its regulating mechanisms are generated outside intensely emotional and exclusivistic social units like the family, the village, the umma or the feudal estate. A diffusion of ‘‘probity and punctuality’’ ‘‘always accompan[ies]’’ the development of commerce;
Civil Society Theory: Smith
in fact, the more commercialized a nation, the more are its people ‘‘faithful to their word.’’ In a mass society regulated by formal institutions of justice people naturally become more prudent and circumspect in their dealings with others. Self-interest leads every member of commercial orders to protect her reputation and to scrupulously ‘‘observ[e] every engagement’’ (1978B, 327: 538). Social behavior is now learned more diffusely and impersonally through interaction with the world at large, in ‘‘societies,’’ ‘‘associations,’’ ‘‘companies,’’ and ‘‘clubs,’’ in the ‘‘bustle and business of the world’’ (1976 [1759], III.3.25: 146; ibid., I.i.4.10: 23). Civil society is composed of ‘‘civilised,’’ self-governing, private individuals where enmity and suspicion are neutralized and the particularistic alliances generated by sectarianism, tradition, archaic norms and social location are ‘‘dissolved’’ (Silver, 1989). Though Smith endorsed the idea of good citizenship, it is a comparatively meagre and tepid characterization, consisting mainly of a ‘‘respect’’ for laws, obedience to ‘‘the civil magistrate’’ and a generalized, though not particularly energetic, interest in ‘‘the welfare of the whole society’’ (1976 [1759], VI.ii.2.10: 231). Smith was not oblivious to the disadvantages of progress; he thought that commercialization, and in particular the growth of cities, could have a pernicious effect on moral character. Specialization also has a detrimental effect on moral character because it ‘‘sinks the courage of mankind and tends to extinguish martial spirit’’ (1978B, 331: 540). Neither was Smith oblivious to the problems of isolation and alienation that absorbed the minds of contemporaries like Adam Ferguson (see, for example, 1979 [1776], V.i.g.12: 795–796). But, although Smith recognized the moral and social disadvantages of commercial progress, he ultimately rejected the simple social forms admired by Ferguson in favor of large scale, non-particularistic communities based on civilised strangership, ‘‘calculation,’’ ‘‘self-interest’’ and regulated by impartial justice. In this increasingly differentiated, mass society it is social distance, not social intimacy, that Smith promotes. The new voluntaristic civil society is preferable because it lacks the intensity and exclusivity of archaic societies and is capable of naturally and exponentially widening the circles of amity and association beyond the narrow confines of kinship, clientage, and security alliances. This new world is one that has to be negotiated mostly by and between strangers; accordingly the fierce passions attendant on feudal alliances must be superseded by tamer and more open modes of interaction. Since all strangers are now potential contractees or role-pair candidates, and not potential enemies, the exchange culture is, and must be, calm, open, rational, impersonal, polite, flexible, voluntaristic, and rule-governed. Such an order is generated and
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sustained by the division of labor and a regular system of justice and defence. Both developments break down the particularistic constraints of class and clan thereby unleashing the enormous productive power of individual, autonomous agents. Citizens are no longer bound together by total forms of governance, the exigencies of security, or the restrictive ties of place and tradition, but move about freely, anonymously, and in a modular fashion. Concluding Comments
Contrary to Fergusonian and Christian accounts, it is not the ‘‘soft spark’’ of beneficence that makes social life possible in the modern age because advanced commercial societies are too unwieldy to be held together by a drive so inconstant and random as spontaneous affection. Commercialising society is regulated and sustained by the bonds of contract (the primary mechanism of association), a regular system of justice, the self-government generated by internal psychological mechanisms like sympathy and the impartial spectator and the mutually-enabling effects of the division of labor. Rather than tearing communities asunder (as per Ferguson’s account) specialization generates unprecedented levels of mutuality. Now associations are increasingly voluntaristic, egalitarian, and mutually beneficial; a matter of purely instrumental mutual ‘‘good offices’’ (1979 [1776], I. ii.2: 26). The knot of intimate compatriots celebrated by Ferguson is, on Smith’s interpretation, restrictive, oppressive, precarious, intermittently traumatic but generally ‘‘indolent,’’ monotonous and dull (1980: 251) compared to Smith’s rich new ‘‘strangership’’ of the commercial age with its endless possibilities for social and material exchange, personal development, liberty, mobility, refinement, comfort, prosperity, and economic growth.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Civil Society and Economy ▶ Civil Society–Business Relations ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society Theory: Ferguson ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Durkheim, Emile ▶ Social Cohesion
References/Further Readings Berry, C. J. (1992). Adam Smith and the virtues of commerce. Nomos, 34, 69–88. Hill, L. (1996). Ferguson and Smith on ‘‘Human Nature,’’ ‘‘Interest’’ and the role of beneficence in market society. Journal of the History of Economic Ideas, Adam Smith Special Edition, 4(1–2), 353–399. Hill, L., & McCarthy, P. (2000). Hume, Smith and Ferguson: Friendship in commercial society. In P. King & H. Devere (Eds.), The challenge to friendship in modernity. London: Frank Cass.
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Hill, L. (2001). The hidden theology of Adam Smith. European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 8(1), 1–29. Hill, L. (2007). Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and Karl Marx on the division of labour. Journal of Classical Sociology, 7(3), 339–366. Mizuta, H. (1975). Moral philosophy and civil society. In A. S. Skinner & T. Wilson (Eds.), Essays on Adam Smith. Oxford: Clarendon. Silver, A. (1989). Friendship and trust as moral ideals: An historical approach. European Journal of Sociology, 30, 274–279. Silver, A. (1990). Friendship in commercial society: Eighteenth-century social theory and modern sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 95(6), 1474–1504. Smith, A. (1976) [1759] The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D. D. Raphael and A. L. MacFie, (Eds), Oxford: Clarendon. Smith, A. (1978) Lectures on Jurisprudence, R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and L. G. Stein (Eds.), Oxford: Clarendon. Smith, A. (1979) [1776] An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon. Smith, A. (1980) Essays on Philosophical Subjects, I. S. Ross, (Ed.), Oxford: Clarendon.
Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ASPEN BRINTON Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Brief Biography of the Theorist Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a hallmark citation within contemporary civil society literature. Rarely does an academic work exploring the historical importance of civic associations finish without some reference to his work. Born in 1805 to an aristocratic French family, Tocqueville first traveled to America at the age of twenty-five. What began as a research trip to explore the American penal system resulted in his seminal work Democracy in America, appearing in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Tocqueville lived and wrote through an epoch of French history when the future of democracy in Europe remained uncertain, but when the spreading equality of conditions seemed to confirm American’s democratic destiny. The transition from aristocracy to democracy captured Tocqueville’s intellectual interest for his entire lifetime, creating a body of work recognized as philosophically valuable by both his contemporaries and posterity. The 12th edition of Democracy in America went to press as the Revolutions of 1848 spread throughout Europe, and one more edition would appear in 1850 before Tocqueville’s death in 1859. His place within the Western Canon has been secure for many decades, as is his place as a forefather of the contemporary civil society discourse. His ideas still spark impassioned and controversial debate about what
democracy is, what American’s role in the world might be, and how civic associations shape modern societies.
Main Lines of Argument The Associational History of the Americans
In the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s point of departure is the interface of immigrant settlers with the physical landscape of America’s unchartered territory. From this moment onward, Tocqueville’s observations are interwoven through the ‘‘novelty in the United States. . .that most vividly struck [him:]. . . the equality of conditions’’ (p. 9). When the early Americans came together to form an association, sail across the Atlantic, and build a new Puritan society, the basis of their covenant with one another was equality. From this origin, American democracy grew outwards, where associations helped to promote this ‘‘equality of conditions,’’ becoming part of the fabric of life holding people together on frontier lands without previously established governments, where one could observe ‘‘the birth and growth of that local independence which is still the mainspring and lifeblood of American freedom’’ (p. 44). Tocqueville’s enthusiastic descriptions of early townships and selfgovernment, contrasted with France’s aristocratic bureaucracy, form the first major foothold in Democracy in America for theorists and practitioners of contemporary civil society. Tocqueville described a world where liberty was balanced with duty, independence balanced with restraint, where The People governed effectively at the local level, turning to the state for assistance only rarely. It was indeed political associations, rather than civic associations, which occupied most of Tocqueville’s attention in Volume One. He expressed fascination with how Americans gathered together to fix common problems, to help those in need, to combat social ills, and to petition the government on behalf of minority interests. When elaborating upon the importance of political associations, Tocqueville articulates his well-known thoughts on the ‘‘tyranny of the majority.’’ He claims ‘‘freedom of association has become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority’’ (p. 192). Minorities gather together into groups to have their voice heard, utilizing the American tradition of forming associations to combat all sorts of practical problems, including political ones. The importance of associations in the history and social formation of the United States is a key aspect of Tocqueville’s analysis throughout his discussion of many topics, including of the institutional specifics of the democratic government, how federalism works, the spirit of the legal institutions (with clear influence from Montesquieu), as well as the maintenance of a democratic government
Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville
through the inculcation of proper mores, or what he calls ‘‘habits of the heart’’ (p. 287). Associations are not only essential to combat the tyranny of the majority within democratic governments, but Tocqueville also claims that associations help maintain the balance between the center and the periphery by being a counterweight to democracy’s natural tendency to create large central governments (p. 515). Situated in Volume One between the blessings of federalism and the habits of the heart born from America’s historical experience, associations in Volume Two come to occupy even more diverse roles within Tocqueville’s vision of democracy.
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associations; he evokes the distinction between civilization and barbarism, claiming that‘‘[i]f men are to remain civilized or become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed the equality of conditions spreads’’ (p. 517). In one of his mostcited quips, he also asserts that ‘‘feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, an understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another’’ (p. 515). Without ‘‘self-interest properly understood,’’ associations cannot flourish; without associations, self-interest will overtake ‘‘self-interest properly understood.’’ Civic Associations
Self-Interest and Self-Interest Properly Understood
One of the key problems in the transition from aristocracy to democracy for Tocqueville is the loss of aristocratic virtues in democratic societies. With the equality of conditions, there are no more heroes and exemplars to hold up above the rest, causing Americans to seek other avenues to distinguish the socially hurtful from the socially helpful. In Volume Two, Tocqueville claims that conditions of equality give rise to the idea that helping others is a way of helping oneself and sustaining public goods. He observes how ‘‘enlightened self-love continually leads [the Americans] to help one another and disposes them freely to give part of their time and wealth for the good of the state’’ (p. 526). He calls this phenomenon ‘‘selfinterest properly understood:’’ ‘‘[i]t does not inspire great sacrifices, but every day it prompts small ones; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous, but its discipline shapes a lot of orderly, temperate, moderate, careful, and selfcontrolled citizens. If it does not will directly to virtue, it establishes habits which unconsciously turn it that way’’ (p. 527). The habit of association is one such habit, turning the otherwise self-interested individual unconsciously toward the virtues of cooperation, where people come to recognize others’ interests as bound up with their own. It is just after Tocqueville’s discussion of the how Americans combat the pernicious effects of excess individualism, and just before his discussion of self-interest properly understood, where he inserts his most wellknow passages about the benefits of associations. Since ‘‘[d]espotism. . .sees the isolation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanence’’ (p. 509), by corollary the freedom-loving Americans have developed habits of association, whereby ‘‘as soon as common affairs are treated in common, each man notices that he is not as independent of his fellows as he used to suppose, and that to get their help he must often offer his aid to them’’ (p. 510). He observes how Americans of ‘‘all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions’’ (p. 513) turn towards
From these brief examples, one can understand why these particular pages of Democracy in America have received more attention from scholars and researchers of civil society than any other part of the 700-page tome. Even accepting that his whole oeuvre cannot be summed up through only the lens of civic associations, scholars very often come away from Tocqueville with a distinct impression that democracy would indeed be endangered without associations. The onslaught of equality, and the attending despotism, is inevitable for Tocqueville, so the line between civilization and barbarism really does seem to partly depend upon civic associations. Anyone who thinks that there is an important role for civil society organizations, nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits, charities, voluntary groups, or any other similar entity, will evoke these passages eagerly. Tocqueville is, without a doubt, a friend of civic associations. There are, however, scholarly consequences to omitting from analyses what comes before and after these statements on associations. Volume Two has its most optimistic moments in these pages, but slowly begins to slide into a darker, more melancholy, and increasingly pessimistic tone. Tocqueville uncovers the dark sides of democracy and the sometimes self-defeating habits of democratic peoples. The last chapter is entitled ‘‘What sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear’’ (p. 690). He admits that ‘‘despotism’’ is not quite the right word for the ‘‘brand of ordered, gentle, peaceful slavery’’ (p. 692) he is trying to describe, but he nonetheless ends on a note where it seems no number of flourishing civic associations could alone save the day. The logic of equality perpetuates this soft despotism, but so do the responses of governments, churches, families, schools, universities, newspapers, and each individual to that equality of conditions, with too many indirect and unintended consequences to fully enumerate here. This more pessimistic Tocqueville believed that religious associations were just as necessary as civic associations to save
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democracy from itself; he observed how changing family structures destabilized society; he knew democratic governments would have a tendency to grow too large, but even in celebrating local government, he was emphatic that the central government needed to regulate some of the irregularities and prejudices of isolated locales. As Tocqueville’s aim is not just to extol civic associations, but also to glimpse into the future of democracy, his analytical style often opens more doors than it closes, resulting in interpretations of Democracy in America that disagree with each other. For example, some will argue that Tocqueville extols civic associations because he advocates highly limited government involvement in social affairs, while others will point to the way he intertwines political associations, government, and civic associations as a recipe for moving a potentially estranged society closer to its democratic government. Tocqueville does in fact condone both paths, for different reasons at different moments, observing how local associations in modern democracies help prevent barbarism, but are not enough to ensure freedom in all cases. Overall, Tocqueville is searching for the right sort of relationship between government and civil society, where each supports the other and where self-interest is ‘‘properly understood,’’ including the state’s self-interest, the self-interest of civic associations, and the self-interest of individuals. Associations are not the only outpost of properly understood selfinterest; society cannot achieve the enthusiastic political participation of the township and the brotherhood of ‘‘renewed feelings and enlarged hearts’’ without the right sort of responsive democratic state, where the minority can petition the majority’s representatives and be heard, as occurs in the America he praises. So Tocqueville is both a theorist of civic associations as well as a theorist of the state. Referencing his famous American civic associations may have become cliche´, but his thoughts on government are reminders that every theory of civil society implicitly contains a theory of the state. Finding and building states supportive of civil society is a search that continues in contemporary democratization efforts, among other places. Tocqueville might have foreseen contemporary arguments that civil society helps make democracy work, but he also knew that democracy is much more than just a public sphere of vibrant civil society associations. The Sociological Roots of Democracy
While he is frequently used to substantiate the causal linkage between a robust civil society and a good democracy, Tocqueville would also ask us to remember that the democracy in Democracy in America is not procedurally disembodied from the place where it was born; beliefs,
traditions, and ‘‘habits of the heart’’ contribute significantly to democracy’s development. The preposition in Tocqueville’s title must be instructive; in America it is thought that all will be treated equally when people petition the government, so everyone has incentives to associate with others and petition together. Democracy dwells in a place and in a time for Tocqueville; if its development in other places follows a path structurally similar to America’s experience, then religion, history, and sociological knowledge will profoundly influence it. Tocqueville’s long description of American history, contrasted to the history of aristocratic France, suggests that both democracy and civic associations work differently in different places. There are boundaries to the range of possible ideas that can underlay democracy and genuinely peaceful associations operating within the modality of ‘‘self-interest properly understood.’’ Tocqueville’s description of the American frontiersman is but one of his more memorable claims about what has made democracy possible: ‘‘All his surroundings are primitive and wild, but he is the product of eighteen centuries of labor and experience. . . [so he plunges] into the wilderness of the New World with his Bible, ax, and newspapers’’ (p. 303). This frontiersman, even in a landscape naked of civilization, will set up civic associations and democratic townships based on those eighteen centuries of collective know-how.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society Tocqueville knew how specific the American experience was, and would caution everyone today that setting off into new territories will involve different tools, experiences, and memories, all capable of producing quite different sorts of societies and political systems. Implicitly Tocqueville has an explanation of why ‘‘democratization’’ can be frustratingly incomplete, rarely able to create democratic societies in the image of developed, Western democracies. Yet as with other ambiguities in Tocqueville’s thinking, the tension between the universal attributes assumed of contemporary democracy, and the particularities of America’s democracy, gives fodder for debate. He is cited as the forefather of ‘‘American exceptionalism,’’ which holds that American democracy was a phenomenon ‘‘entirely new in the world’’ (p. 412). On the other side, and more frequently cited within the literature on civil society, is the claim that associations are ‘‘schools of democracy’’ (p. 522), wherever and whenever democracy happens. These interpretations suggest that democracy can be universally inculcated regardless of history and landscape, as long as there are civic associations. Tocqueville does, after all, observe how men and nations are becoming more alike
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one another, and how ‘‘the gradual progress of equality is something fated’’ (p. 12). Yet citing only Tocqueville’s comments about associations as ‘‘schools of democracy,’’ and leaving aside his full theorization of democracy’s sociological roots, obscures Tocqueville’s observations about how particular habits of heart and certain frames of mind are necessary to conceive of democracy and civil society. Ideas and conceptions matter for Tocqueville, because ‘‘without ideas in common, no common action would be possible, and without common action, men might exist, but there could be no body social’’ (p. 433). Granting all ambiguities, Tocqueville can be characterized as a theorist of both state and civil society, concerned with both the purposive actions of associations and the fatalistic equality of conditions brought about by democracy, looking towards both history and the future. In Tocqueville’s bleaker America, ‘‘since the past throws no light upon the future, the spirit of man walks through the night’’ (p. 703). Even though these are his last words in Volume Two, the final message of Democracy in America remains more open. Tocqueville would like to see a world where the past is remembered to pave the way towards the future, where associations stem the tide against lonely and destructive self-interest, and where freedom is preserved. Despite pessimistic foreboding, his commentary on civic associations evokes a world that need not always be so dark. Citing Tocqueville as a theorist of civil society will always be, as it is today, an act of hope.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society History V: 19th Century ▶ Civil Society in the European Tradition ▶ Civility ▶ Freedom of Association ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations
References/Further Readings Armony, A. (2004). The dubious link: Civic engagement and democratization. Stanford University Press. Beem, C. (1999). The necessity of politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. New York: Harper & Row.
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Mill, J. S. (1974). On liberty. London: Penguin Books. Mitchell, J. (1995). The fragility of freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Skocpol, T. (1997) The Tocqueville problem: Civic engagement in American democracy. Social Science History, 21(4), 445–479. Tocqueville, A. (1969). Democracy in America. Translated by George Lawrence. J.P. Mayer (Ed.). New York: Harper & Row. Wolin, S. (2001). Tocqueville between two worlds: The making of a political and theoretical life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Civil Society Theory: Walzer EBENEZER OBADARE University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
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Civil society is a project of projects; it requires many organizing strategies and new forms of state action. It requires a new sensitivity for what is local, specific, contingent – and, above all, a new recognition (to paraphrase a famous sentence) that the good life is in the details. (Walzer, 1998: 143)
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The third place is the famous but not always easy to locate ‘civil society,’ where organizations of all sorts proliferate, and some of them are ours: environmentalists, feminists, defenders of civil liberties, advocates on behalf of minority groups, and so on. These are the ‘fragments’ of a left politics that still has not come together and may not come together anytime soon. But the fragments are important in themselves, the more the better, and the people who work in them constitute a kind of civil service of the left. Anything we can do to expand these groups is worth doing, even if many of them are wholly engaged in a rearguard, defensive politics. (Walzer: 2003) (emphasis added)
Brief Biography of the Theorist Michael Walzer, arguably one of the most nuanced social philosophers writing today, has enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career since receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1961. Following an initial 4-year stint at Princeton (1962–1966), and an even longer stay at Harvard between 1966 and 1980, professor Walzer has called Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study his institutional home since 1980. A contributing editor of The New Republic and editor of the left-leaning Dissent, Walzer’s
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work spans a stupendous array of topics in political theory and moral philosophy. Unsurprisingly for a thinker blessed with a light touch and searing insight, no part of Michael Walzer’s extensive work lends itself to easy characterization.
Main Lines of Argument This essay elaborates what might be called his ‘‘theory of civil society.’’ However, since it is open to debate whether Walzer’s views on civil society are elaborate and/or systematized enough to warrant the tag, ‘‘theory’’ here is used in a guarded sense. Thus, the allusions in what follows are to cogitations scattered in essays and articles on civil society, the public sphere, obligation, democracy, as well as just war, terrorism, justice, toleration, politics, the rule of law, citizenship, pluralism, and civil disobedience. While, in the case of some authors, this spread might be a problem, it is suggested that in Walzer’s case, and especially with regard to the subject of civil society, it couldn’t be more apt. One reason is that it is doubtful whether Walzer actually attaches any significance to an overarching theory of civil society, ‘‘an account of society’’ whose complexity, imprecision, and uncertainty he has lamented. This is not to say that he does not approach civil society with the right sort of moral seriousness. Rather, when Walzer ponders civil society – its meaning, uses, possibilities, forms, pathologies, dangers, inadequacies, et al – it is invariably within a larger context of his (intellectual and practical) engagement with what is generally, if often vaguely, referred to as ‘‘the good life’’ (see first quotation above). His writings on civil society must be appreciated against this background, and given their historicity; it seems safe to say that Walzer’s reflections on civil society in praxis prefigure the post-Berlin Wall revival of academic interest in the idea. To understand Walzer’s interest in civil society therefore, it helps to be cognizant of his intellectual bona fides, for it is clear that the vision of civil society that he espouses is both grounded in and animated by his combined scholarly interests and political convictions. Though it is easy to anticipate why it might raise hackles in some quarters, Walzer is best described as a modernizing social democrat, an unrepentant academic leftist who is nonetheless sensitive to the paradoxes of the real world (As he memorably put it in a 2003 interview, ‘‘I live on the left, but quarrel with some of my neighbours. . .’’ See ‘‘The United States in the World – Just Wars and Just Societies: An Interview with Michael Walzer’’ Imprints A Journal of Analytical Socialism Vol. 7 no. 1 (2003)). As a result, though he is fastidiously committed to, for instance, Politics and Democracy, it is always with some sort of
qualification – imagine politics with a small p and democracy with a lower case d. In this vein, democracy is a ‘‘good thing, and perhaps ought to be promoted worldwide, but never by governments (not even the most well-meaning), and only within the social space afforded by ‘‘international civil society.’’ Walzer does allow for exceptional circumstances of course, but insists that in principle, promoting democracy, especially via military intervention, is generally a bad idea. Walzer’s agnosticism about the merits of exporting democracy can be said to be informed by his intellectual understanding of what it requires to bring about ‘‘democracy.’’ First, he is sharply aware of the irony that democracy often takes root in unexpected ways and places. Second, given his practical experience of actual democracy in the United States and other western liberal democracies, he is able to see that nurturing democracy requires time, energy, and money. These, among other important reasons, explain the recurrent emphasis in his work on a good system of public education. For him, a good public education system, particularly one that encourages alternatives within it, is the best laboratory for preparing citizens for the challenges of social life in a diverse and democratic society. A good educational system makes for ‘‘equal citizenship’’ (Walzer, 2002: 66). However, although he underscores the need for an educated citizenry, Walzer is not one to be carried away by ‘‘citizenly virtue’’; thus his emphasis on the supervisory agency that, he argues, only the state is able to provide. For Walzer, a strong state is something of a moral necessity as soon as you have a fully-fledged capitalist system. This is essentially because, pace Adam Smith, some form of ‘‘policing’’ of ‘‘the invisible hand of the market’’ is always going to be needed given the propensity for fraudulent behavior and need to protect competitors against fraud and deceit. (Writing late in 2008 in the shadow of the global financial bust, it is difficult to see how anyone can seriously challenge this). But Walzer insists on a strong state for an altogether more profound reason, for which he deserves to be quoted at some length. For him, "
There is no community and no common good without social justice. Political societies cannot survive on evocations of citizenly virtue, responsibility, and fellow feeling. There must also be a commitment in practice to the weaker members. This is a commitment that only the state can make in a universalizing way. The stronger civil society is, the more the state can act indirectly to fulfill its commitment, seconding the direct activity of its citizens in their voluntary associations. But given the divisions of civil
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society, and the inequalities that appear naturally within it (of resources, numbers, competence, and so on), the state can never cease entirely to act in its own name, addressing the needs of all its citizens. A democratic state, rooted in the associational life of civil society, will also be continually active in fostering, subsidizing, and regulating the associations- so as to maintain a fair distribution of welfare and opportunity. (Walzer, 1998: 3) (emphases added)
At least two things are obvious in this excerpt: (a) the fundamental reason why Walzer places a premium on the existence of a strong state – it is the Uber-institution, able to guarantee the ‘‘common good’’ by ‘‘seconding’’ the activity of civil society; and (b) an indication of how Walzer conceptualizes civil society, above all its relation to the state. Before going into further detail on Walzer’s idea of civil society, a quick observation on the subject of the state and the significance of Walzer’s privileging of it is in order. Perhaps the most absorbing aspect of current academic debates on the consequences of globalization is the question of the state’s continued relevance. Many scholars have argued that the combined emergence of various transnational politico-economic forms and hybridized social identities signals the desuetude of the sovereign state as traditionally understood. Specifically, some doubt whether state sovereignty still carries yesterday’s normative purchase in today’s world of continual flows and seemingly inexorable deterritorialization. Contra these claims, Walzer insists that the state has not been ‘‘superseded’’ and remains potent, not least because ‘‘Identity politics, particularly in its nationalist version, is still focused on the achievement of sovereignty’’ (1998: 4). In any case, he argues, given the complexity of many of the issues thrown up by transnational processes (immigration policy, say) only the state has the resources and institutional capacity to successfully mediate because only it (the state) possesses ‘‘the power of closure’’ (1998: 4). Overall, Walzer seems to be suggesting that the fissures that are integral to civil society would always warrant the state’s moral oversight. In this vision, both civil society and the state are therefore mutually reinforcing.
Relevance for Present-Day Discourse on Civil Society This background helps put Walzer’s approach to civil society in a clear perspective. His basic idea can be summarized as follows: the West has lost some of its pluralist luster due, in large part, to the neglect of ‘‘the networks through which civility is produced and reproduced’’ (1991: 294); and neither the market nor nationalism
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(among other ‘‘rival ideologies’’) is in a position to provide a sustainable basis for the ‘‘good life.’’ So how is this lost sheen to be recaptured? The answer, Walzer believes, is to be found in what he calls ‘‘critical associationalism’’ (1991: 303) which is central to the idea of civil society. Why should we expect civil society to succeed where other approaches to ‘‘the good life’’ has failed? Walzer suggests that the fundamental strength of civil society lies in its ‘‘inclusivity’’: "
Associational engagement is conceivably as important a project as any of the others, but its greatest virtue lies in its inclusiveness, and inclusiveness does not make for heroism. ‘‘Join the associations of your choice’’ is not a slogan to rally political militants. And yet that is what civil society requires: men and women actively engaged- in state, economy, and nation, and also in churches, neighborhoods, and families, and in many other settings too. (1991: 303)
But inclusivity is not the only positive attribute that recommends civil society. Equality (and peaceableness) is another. According to Walzer, ‘‘Civil society simply is that place where the stakes are lower, where, in principle at least, coercion is used only to keep the peace and all associations are equal under the law’’ (1991: 300). Furthermore ‘‘the actual experience of civil society’’ not only works against both ‘‘the intolerant universalism of (most) religions’’ and ‘‘the exclusivity of (most) nations’’ (1991: 300), it also ‘‘challenges state power, most importantly when associations have resources or supporters abroad: world religions, pan-national movements, the new environmental groups, multinational corporations’’ (1991: 302). None of this of course should lead us into thinking that civil society is self-sufficient, a line of thinking that he deems ‘‘anti-political.’’ For Walzer, there is simply ‘‘no choosing civil society alone,’’ and while the latticework of associations may incorporate, it ‘‘cannot dispense with, the agencies of state power.’’ Its radical intent notwithstanding, Walzer’s affirmation of and faith in associations and associational engagement as the bedrock of civil society (‘‘the civility that makes democratic politics possible can only be learned in the associational networks’’) (1991: 302) is actually of ‘‘conservative’’ vintage. From Alexis de Tocqueville to Ernest Gellner, the ‘‘habit of association’’ is at the heart of western civil society theorizing, and a demonstration of the importance attached to it could be seen in the reaction that greeted Putnam’s assertion (1995) that Americans may have stopped ‘‘bowling together,’’ meaning that a previously sturdy associative bond was in danger of unraveling. In this imagination, the ‘‘denser’’ the social
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network of associations, the better, and though unlike some theorists Walzer insists that state agency is always necessary, even if only to ‘‘give a particular shape to the common life’’ (1991: 302); his basic assumption that associations are an inalienable prerequisite for the existence of civil society means that he has much more in common with mainstream understanding of civil society than is at first obvious. The point here is not to deny the risk to associational life in the West, or that it is not right to emphasize their (associations’) importance. The extensive post-Putnam literature on social capital, community, and communitarianism may diverge on several points, but there appears to be a broad consensus on the imperative to revivify the communal bond in western countries and create a communal spirit where the need may be acute. But this consensus begs some key questions: how important is a social network of associations to that project? Are associations the be all and end all of civil society in the way that they have been beatified by a section of the theoretical literature? Do associations of a contrary spirit count? Is inclusivity in associations necessarily a virtue? And finally, what about the thump and riot of quotidian life outside the corset of associations? Is that a part of civil society, or is it not? It is valid to argue that, in his insistence on the need for plurality (of people, cultures, and visions) in a liberal society, Walzer already anticipates these questions and the nonstructured kind of civil society thinking that they provide a basis for. After all, if he has enunciated the properties of ‘‘a democratic civil society,’’ it is because he takes for granted the possibility of a ‘‘non-democratic’’ one. Walzer also grants that we need not be involved all the time in our associations, that ‘‘we are likely to be members of many associations’’ (1991: 302–303), that civil society contains ‘‘organizations of all sorts’’ (see second quotation, above), and that the ‘‘different and uncoordinated processes’’ (Ibid) through which members control a democratic civil society ‘‘needn’t all be democratic’’ (1991: 303). Still, there are reasonable grounds for grousing with his treatment of associations and the problems that they pose, both for the moral life of societies in general, and our understanding of civil society in particular. For instance, what happens when associations are not inclusive, and can we really say that associations produce more engaged and better citizens without developing a moral typology of associations? What does more engagement mean and why should it result in ‘‘better’’ citizen-ness? These queries are raised in a nonmartial spirit, more as a pointer to the tensions inherent in a particular understanding of civil society, rather than as a direct
challenge to Walzer’s, for whom there is actually a mitigating circumstance – his is a rendition of civil society as ‘‘a civil service of the left,’’ meaning that it is specific and expressly ideologically animated. If Walzer enunciates a particular ideal of civil society, it is, presumably, only to the extent that it can be pressed into service in the struggle against inequality, for in a society of growing inequality, as he asserts, economic inequalities are potentially convertible to other forms of inequality. Walzer’s civil society is one among many projects for combating this challenge, and the problems with his idea of civil society are best seen as a perfect illustration of the impossibility of a single coherent narrative of the idea.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History of ▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Community, Types of ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Justice
References/Further Readings Cahoone, L. E. (2002). Civil society. The conservative meaning of liberal politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Ehrenberg, J. (1999). Civil society. The critical history of an idea. New York: New York University Press. Hall, J. A. (Ed.) (1995). Civil society. Theory history comparison. Cambridge: Polity. Kaviraj, S., & Khilnani, S. (Eds.) (2001). Civil society. History and possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, D. (Ed.) (2007). Thinking politically essays in political theory – Michael Walzer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Miller, D., & Walzer, M. (Eds.) (1995). Pluralism, justice, and equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Rosenblum, N. L., & Post, R. C. (Eds.) (2002). Civil society and government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Seligman, A. B. (1992). The idea of civil society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shaughnessy, M. F., & Sardoc, M. (2002). An interview with Michael Walzer. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21, 65–75. The United States in the world – just wars and just societies: An interview with Michael Walzer‘‘ Imprints a journal of analytical socialism Vol. 7 no. 1 (2003). Walzer, M. (1991). A better vision: The idea of civil society. A path to social reconstruction. Dissent, Spring(39), 293–304. Walzer, M. (1997). On toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press. Walzer, M. (Ed.) (1998). Toward a global civil society. New York: Berghahn Books. Walzer, M. (1982). Obligations essays on disobedience, war, and citizenship. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walzer, M. (2004). Arguing about war. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches
Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches JOHN KEANE The University of Westminster, London, UK
Introduction For nearly a century after 1850, the language of civil society virtually disappeared from intellectual and political life and, as recently as 2 decades ago, the term itself remained strange sounding and unfashionable, or was greeted in some circles by cynicism and hostility. Since then, around the world, the term civil society has become both a master category in the human sciences and a key phrase often used by politicians, corporate executives, journalists, charitable foundations, human rights organizations, and citizens.
Definition The renaissance of interest in civil society draws strength from its European roots, which are traceable to the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century development of the distinction between civil society and the state (Keane, 1998). During the revolutionary period 1750– 1850, the traditional language of civil society (societas civilis), which had until then referred to a peaceful political order governed by law, underwent a profound transformation. Contrasted with government, civil society meant a realm of social life – market exchanges, charitable groups, clubs and voluntary associations, independent churches and publishing houses – institutionally separated from territorial state institutions. This is the sense in which civil society is still understood today: it is a term that both describes and anticipates a complex and dynamic ensemble of legally protected nongovernmental institutions that tend to be nonviolent, self-organizing, self-reflexive, and permanently in tension, both with each other and with the governmental institutions that ‘‘frame,’’ constrict and enable their activities. In the contemporary period, the term civil society has proved useful in many fields of research, including the analysis of past phenomena, such as the uneven geographic distribution of absolutist states (Szu¨cs, 1988), or the emergence of modern forms of exclusion of women from public life (Pateman, 1988), or the ‘‘civilising’’ of European manners (Elias, 1978). The originally eighteenth century term has also been used to make new and different sense of contemporary social and political developments. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and
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elsewhere, the language of civil society was a vital ingredient in the resistance to totalitarian regimes after the crushing of the Prague Spring; and it has featured in most political efforts to push back or overthrow dictatorship, whether in Taiwan, Brazil, South Africa, or Iran. In most regions of the world, the language of civil society has also been applied to such disparate political phenomena as the decline and restructuring of welfare states, the rise of ‘‘free market’’ economic strategies, and the growth of social movements (Melucci, 1988).
Key Issues Various philosophical and political arguments have also been mustered against the suspicion that the term civil society is obsolete. The case for civil society has been wide ranging. It has included the observation that a civil society gives preferential treatment to individuals’ daily freedom from violence and other incivilities (Keane, 2004); claims concerning the importance of enabling groups and individuals freely within the law to define and express their various social identities, as equals who have feelings for others and, thus, the capacity for trust and solidarity (Alexander, 2006; Habermas, 1982). There is also the argument that freedom of communication is impossible without networks of variously-sized non-state communication media (Keane, 1990); and the insistence that politically regulated and socially constrained markets are superior devices for eliminating all those factors of production that fail to perform according to current standards of efficiency. In recent years, there have also been efforts to counter the suspicion that civil society is an ide´e passe´e by thinking unconventionally and constructively about the optimal conditions under which democratic institutions can survive and flourish globally, especially after a century plagued by revolutionary upheavals, total war, totalitarianism, dictatorship, and state dirigisme marked by dysfunctions caused by ‘‘the overreach of the state’’ (Chandhoke, 1995). For the first time in their history, the political languages of democracy and civil society have become conjoined. Democracy has come to mean a special type of political system and way of life in which civil society and government tend to function as two necessary moments, separate but contiguous, distinct but interdependent, internal articulations of a system in which the exercise of power, whether in the spheres of civil society or government, is subject to public monitoring, compromise, and agreement (Keane, 1988a, 1998). Seen in this novel way, democratization is defined as neither the extension of state power into the non-state sphere of civil society
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nor the abolition of government and the building of spontaneous agreement among citizens living within civil society. The unending quest for democracy, so it is claimed, must instead steer a course between these two unworkable and undesirable extremes. Democracy is seen as a never-ending process of apportioning and publicly monitoring the exercise of power by citizens within polities marked by the institutionally distinct – but always mediated – realms of civil society and government institutions. The revised understanding of democracy as more than simply government by means of periodic elections, party competition, majority rule, and the rule of law has had wide global appeal. Truly remarkable is the way the language of civil society has in recent decades traveled to virtually all regions of the globe. The global talk of civil society is evidently bound up with the dramatic growth, especially during the second half of the twentieth century, of nongovernmental business and civic organizations operating within and beyond the borders of territorial states. It is even possible that the global extension of the concept signals a first step in the long-term emergence of common frameworks of meaning and identity underneath and across state boundaries – a trend that resonates with, and practically reinforces, such trends as the globalization of communication media, the rebirth of international humanitarian law, and the growth of a shared (if diffuse) sense within nongovernmental organizations and publics at large that civilians have obligations to other civilians living beyond their borders, simply because they are civilians. A measure of the ‘‘emigration’’ of the term from its European birthplace is the way that the contemporary renewal of interest in civil society first began during the second half of the 1960s in Japan (Uchida, 1967; Hirata, 1969). In Latin America, neo-Gramscian versions of the concept of civil society were subsequently used as a theoretical weapon against dictatorship (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986). Scholarly studies of sub-Saharan Africa also emphasized how associational life – farmers’ organizations, lawyers’ and journalists’ associations, mineworkers’ unions, Christian churches and Islamic brotherhoods – are most likely to thrive in the presence of effective states; and how, paradoxically, weak states can become stronger – more effective at promoting the accumulation and better distribution of wealth, and improving their own legitimacy and power potential – by allowing a good measure of pluralism in associational life (Bratton, 1989). There have been as well many studies of Muslim-majority states guided by civil society perspectives (Norton, 1994 [1996]; Mardin, 1995).
International Perspectives Important controversies have erupted concerning how to translate the originally European term civil society into local Asian languages. Some Chinese scholars, for instance, prefer the term ‘‘citizen society’’ (gongmin shehui), while others prefer to speak of ‘‘civilised society’’ (wenming shehui) or ‘‘urban society’’ (shimin shehui). And in the Korean peninsula, recent analyses have highlighted the contrasts between the totalitarian state of North Korea, whose rulers appear to have enjoyed firm control of an obedient population, and South Korea, in which the long and bloody transition from the authoritarian rule of Syngman Rhee, toppled by a student uprising in 1960, has been fuelled by the vigorous rebirth of civil society, whose roots are traceable to the struggle against Japanese colonization (1910–1945) and the massive peasant rebellions, called the Tonghak Uprisings, of the late nineteenth century (Koo, 1993). The spreading popularity of the language of civil society, even the invention of the term ‘‘global civil society’’ (Anheier et al., 2001; Keane, 2003), has had many effects, including the multiplication of its different and sometimes conflicting meanings. The growing popularity of the term civil society has bred some confusion, and this implies the need for greater clarity and care in the way it is used. Three crisscrossing but different ways of wielding the category of civil society can be identified. Although these approaches sometimes overlap and complement each other, they also tend to produce divergent claims and should therefore be distinguished. Some writers use the term ‘‘civil society’’ as an idealtyp to analyze and interpret the empirical contours of past, present, or emergent relationships between social and political forces and institutions. The immediate or avowed aim of such empirical-analytic interpretations of civil society is not to recommend courses of political action or to form normative judgments. Rather, the language of civil society is used to develop an explanatory understanding of a complex sociopolitical reality by means of theoretical distinctions, empirical research and informed judgments about its origins, patterns of development and (unintended) consequences. Although empirical-analytic interpretations of civil society usually alter perceptions of what is or is not significant within any given reality, the term is mainly used for observational purposes: that is, to describe that reality, or criticize prevailing descriptions of it, in order better to clarify what is otherwise a potentially confusing and disorientating reality. The language of civil society can also be used in ‘‘pragmatic’’ ways, as a guide to formulating a social and political strategy or action program for achieving a predefined or assumed political good. In contrast to
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empirical-analytic-interpretative approaches, which are concerned with such intellectual tasks as naming, categorizing, observing, theorizing, comparing, and understanding, strategic usages of the term have an eye for defining what must or must not be done so as to reach a given political goal. The term civil society is bound up with efforts to calculate the tactical means of achieving or preserving certain ends. This pragmatic usage is traceable to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to recommendations, like Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense (1776), about how best to contest despotic power by establishing the earthworks of civil society. Recent comparative studies of the defeat of various forms of political despotism in southern Europe, Latin America and postcommunist countries develop this line of thinking (Linz and Stepan, 1996). They show the vital role played by civil society in the transition towards democracy, and its subsequent consolidation. A robust civil society can start transitions, help block reversals, generate political alternatives and keep post-authoritarian governments and states on their toes. Still other scholars and activists view the term civil society from a normative standpoint – in order to highlight the ethical superiority of a politically guaranteed civil society compared with other types of government. Since the eighteenth century, disputes about the normative status of civil society have flourished. Some thinkers (Georg Forster, Thomas Jefferson) have considered civil society to be the earthly expression of God-given natural rights. Others interpret the concept from within the framework of a theory of history that supposes either that civil society is a moment in the actualization of the ethical idea, of mind (Geist) actively working its way into the existing world (Hegel); or that civil society is a passing moment in the development and overcoming of modern, classdivided bourgeois society (as Marx and others within the communist tradition supposed). Other scholars have considered civil society as a spontaneous group-centered expression of ‘‘loving kindness and fraternity’’ (Durkheim, 1915). And there are thinkers (steeped in the originally conservative reverence for tradition) who interpret civil society as a customary, time-bound ensemble of precious institutions and practices that are confined to certain regions of the earth and perforce do not enjoy any metahistorical guarantee that they will flourish, let alone survive. These are just samples of the bewildering plurality of normative justifications of civil society, but they illustrate why some critics have been tempted to draw the conclusion that civil society is a muddled, essentially
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contested ideal (Seligman, 1992). Their conclusion plausibly highlights the polysemic quality of the term civil society, but both the complaint and the conclusion arguably abandon, prematurely, the possibility of normatively justifying civil society in fresh, publicly relevant ways. In particular, these critics fail to see that the plural structures of a civil society are best expressed through non-foundational normative justifications that recognize, and actively muster support and respect for, a multiplicity of normative ways of life. This is to say that the term civil society is a signifier of plurality, the friend and guardian of dynamic difference.
Future Directions Ethically speaking, civil society is not a First Principle; it is the precondition of freedom from any kind of First Principle. Attempts to build grand normative theories of civil society should therefore be doubted. For to speak of civil society is to warn against the harm caused by organized attempts to impose on others particular norms not of their choosing. When seen in this revised way, the civil society norm breaks with the bad monist habit of philosophically justifying ethical norms by referring back to a substantive grounding principle, such as the early modern notions of God-given justice, natural rights or the principle of utility, or more recent attempts to justify civil society according to such grounding principles as rational argumentation (Habermas) or knowledge of a ‘‘good which we can know in common’’ (Sandel). From this revised perspective, normative support for civil society has no need of so-called Absolutes. To the contrary: the choice to favor civil society implies suspicion of the moralizing faith in Grand Ideals such as the State, Nation, Progress, Socialism, Free Markets, God, Truth, or Ethics. Positively speaking, support for civil society implies the duty of citizens and policy makers to defend greater pluralism – to cast serious doubt on dogmatic, falsely universal norms by giving greater emphasis to the recognition of institutional complexity and public accountability as vital barriers against dangerous accumulations of power, whenever and wherever they develop. To speak favorably of civil society is not to plummet into so-called relativism, with its self-contradictory insistence that there are no certain or preferable guidelines in life. It is rather to be committed everywhere to the construction, preservation, and development of a legally protected nongovernmental order, whose diverse identities, mediated by representative mechanisms such as political parties and independent communication media, together ensure that hierarchies and abuses of power are checkable. The converse equally applies:
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anyone who does not recognize and respect the need for the institutions of civil society, government and their intermediaries, or who works actively against them, even to destroy them, is no friend of pluralism – and perhaps even its dangerous foe. Civil society, in short, is an actual or anticipated condition of possibility of the ongoing struggle for egalitarian diversity. Those who practically deny civil society in this normative sense are probably arrogant monists – and most likely manipulators, bullies, tyrants, or totalitarians.
Seligman, A. B. (1992). The idea of civil society. New York/Toronto: The Free Press. Szu¨cs, J. (1988). Les Trois Europes. Paris: L’Harmattan. Uchida, Y. (1967). Nihon Shihonshugi no Shiso-zo (Images of Japanese capitalism through the social sciences). Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten.
Civil Society, Violence and War MEGAN MEYER1, SIMON STACEY2 University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA 2 University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD USA
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References/Further Readings Alexander, J. C. (2006). The civil sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Anheier, et al. (Eds.) H., (2001). Civil society. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Bratton, M. (April 1989). Beyond the state: Civil society and associational life in Africa. World Politics, 41, 404–430. Chandhoke, N. (1995). State and civil society: Explorations in political theory. New Delhi, India: Sage. Durkheim, E. (1915). ‘L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout’. La mentalite´ allemande et la guerre. Paris: Armand Colin. Elias, N. (1978). The civilizing process: The history of manners (Vol. 1). New York: Pantheon Books. Habermas, J. (1982). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Hirata, K. (1969). Shimin-Shakai to Shakaishugi (Civil Society and Socialism). Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten. Keane, J. (1988a). Democracy and civil society. London/New York: Verso. Keane, J. (Ed.) (1988b). Despotism and democracy. The origins and development of the distinction between civil society and the state, 1750–1850. In Civil society and the state. New european perspectives. London/New York: Verso. Keane, J. (1990). The media and democracy. London/New York: Polity Press. Keane, J. (1998). Civil society: Old images, new visions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Keane, J. (2003). Global civil society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keane, J. (2004). Violence and democracy. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Koo, H. (Ed.) (1993). State and society in contemporary Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Linz, J. J., & Stepan, A. (1996). Problems of democratic transition and consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and post-communist Europe. Baltimore, MD/London: John Hopkins University Press. Mardin, S. (1995). Civil society and Islam. In J. A. Hall (Ed.), Civil society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge: Polity Press. Melucci, A. (1988). Nomads of the present: Social movements and individual needs in contemporary society. London/Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Norton, Augustus Richard. (Ed.) (1994 [1996]). Civil society in the middle east (Vol. 2). New York: Brill. O’Donnell, G., & Schmitter, P. C. (1986). Resurrecting civil society. In Transitions from authoritarian rule: Tentative conclusions about uncertain democracies (pp. 48–56). Baltimore, MD/London: John Hopkins University Press. Pateman, C. (1988). The sexual contract. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Introduction The early 21st century is a particularly appropriate time to review the relationship between civil society, violence and war. All have been transformed in the last century. Violence and war, though always endemic to human society, have become destructive in ways unimaginable in the past. States, organizations and even individuals can now marshal the means to do violence on a scale and of an intensity never before seen. The world’s most devastating wars were fought in the twentieth century. Ethnopolitical violence has increased dramatically since the end of the Second World War (Gurr, 1993), though some scholars claim that the total number of deaths per decade due to war and collective violence has been more or less constant since 1945 (Kaldor & Muro, 2003: 160). Terrorism has become a global scourge. At the same time, civil society has become a feature of the modern world that cannot be ignored. Scholars estimate that the number of The reach of civil society organizations (CSOs) has also broadened, and it is now no longer aspirational to talk of global civil society. The increasing density of civil society, and its spread across the world, means that it has never been as powerful as it is today. This article seeks to clarify the relationships between these important phenomena.
Definitions Civil Society
Other entries in this encyclopedia offer more comprehensive understandings and definitions of the concept of civil society than this entry can, but it is important that we provide the definition of civil society with which we will be working. Perhaps most important is the recognition that to use the term, as is commonly and uncritically done, as a synonym for civilized society, artificially
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delimits its scope. So we avoid defining civil society such that it has a positive normative denotation. (For one of many uses of the term in this normative fashion, see Annan, 2000; for doubts about this approach, see Ahrne, 1998; Alexander, 1998; Kaldor & Muro, 2003) Instead, we define civil society socio-locatively, as the sphere of actors, values, and institutions ‘‘that is analytically independent of- and, to varying degrees, empirically differentiated from’’ family, state and market (Alexander, 1998: 6). The advantage of this approach is that it does not predicate a social agent’s membership of civil society on whether that agent behaves violently or not, and we are therefore not definitionally prevented from considering the ways in which civil society is often involved in uncivil and uncivilized acts – acts, indeed, that sometimes amount to violence. However, it must be acknowledged that the most prolific employers of violence throughout human history have been states or proto-states (Turner, 1998; Human Rights Watch, 1995), and that when they were not directing this violence against other states, they tended to direct it at elements of their own civil societies. So, while we are concerned above to stress that civil society must not be defined so as to exclude the possibility that it commits violence, we do not want to be misinterpreted as suggesting that civil society and the state are anything like equal partners in the commission of violence. Indeed, it is CSOs that typically offer much of any resistance offered to statedriven violence, and seek to minimize or remedy the effects of violence. Violence and War
We will be concerned with only some forms of violence in this article – collective, sociopolitical forms. This is not, we should stress, to downplay the importance of other forms of violence – domestic violence or criminal violence, for example – nor to diminish the role of CSOs in combating and preventing them. With that caveat registered, one standard definition of violence is ‘‘deliberate physical injury to property or persons’’ (Gamson, 1990: 74). On this account, violent acts range from vandalism and arson, rock throwing, rioting and looting to beating, bombing, and killing. War is therefore a form of violence, perhaps the most destructive form, and we define it as the deliberate and organized direction of a state’s capacity for violence against another state. (But see Keegan, 1993 on the difficulty of defining war.) We are sensitive to Gamson’s contention that ‘‘[t]o use the term violence as a catch-all for unpleasant means of influence or social control confuses the issue’’ (1990: 74) and are therefore not considering what some have called ‘‘economic violence’’ (Chasin, 2004) or ‘‘economic warfare’’
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(Naylor and Blum, 2001) in this article. Also, we are concerned here with what might be called ‘‘hot’’ wars – wars in which violence is actually deployed – rather than ‘‘cold’’ wars, in which the threat of violence is not in fact realized. Because war is a form of violence, it can sometimes be difficult to decide whether a specific case is best considered violence or war. This is especially a problem when parties to a conflict include both the state and (perhaps multiple) militarized CSOs: such a case might qualify as a civil war, or may instead be an instance of more ‘‘regular’’ sociopolitical violence.
Key Issues While war and violence, in one form or another, have been constant features of human societies from the earliest times, civil society proper, on most accounts, has not existed until much more recently (Seligman, 1995). It is therefore mostly anachronistic to investigate the relationship between civil society and war or violence before, perhaps, the seventeenth century. There are only intimations in early human history of what might be regarded as civil society involvement in war and violence. Where such proto-civil society involvement activity has occurred, it tends to have been the work of churches and religious organizations (and occasionally individual authors or intellectuals), though the often close relationship between such institutions and rulers reduces the similarity of these organizations to a state-independent civil society as we define it (See Raaflaub, 2007). The growth and maturation of civil society in the last 200 years, however, coupled with the development of a secular human rights culture, has dramatically increased civil society’s engagement with violence, war, and war-making states. This section therefore focuses on this period, and mainly on the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Civil Society and War
CSOs both seek to influence debates about whether or not states should go to war, and also oppose and support declared wars, as well as specific practices of war. Although CSOs and individuals of all types play these roles, the press and academia/intellectuals are often among the most important civil society actors. Civil Society Against Wars
Opposition to war, declared or potential, can take many forms: organized letter-writing campaigns, mass protests (protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were the largest against any war), boycotts (e.g., of American products by some consumer groups in Europe in 2003, in protest against the invasion of Iraq), draft evasion/
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opposition and support for those evading or opposing conscription (Foley, 2003), and even violent resistance (Varon, 2004). The advent of globalization and improved communications even allows CSOs in one nation-state to mobilize against the wars or proposed wars of other nation-states; for instance, three million people are estimated to have marched in Rome against the US-led invasion of Iraq. Some research suggests that CSOs can achieve small gains: for example, Lebel (2008) argues that organizations of parents of dead Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers effectively mobilized to change IDF tactics in the 1990s. And resistance from civil society to the Vietnam War almost certainly played a significant role in bringing that war to and end (DeBenedetti, 1990). On the other hand, the largest antiwar protests in history did little to prevent the Iraq invasion. Assessing the efficacy of civil society opposition to (proposed) wars and military policy is difficult, and an under-researched issue. As a rebuttable generalization, however, it seems likely that the often overwhelming ideological, repressive and economic capacities of the state typically allow it to withstand many civil society challenges to its wars. Some CSOs seek not to prevent specific wars, but instead to lessen the frequency of war in general, to render it less destructive, or to build the infrastructure and capabilities necessary to lessen the damage it does. Some CSOs attempt to foster tolerance or communication between states in regions at risk of war, or try to spread the message of pacifism. Large, well-established organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom work to achieve world disarmament and the elimination of war, as well as other forms of violence. Other organizations have less ambitious goals, such as limiting the use of particularly damaging weapons: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, for example, operate programs designed to reduce the spread of nuclear and biochemical weapons. Still other CSOs, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, provide assistance to victims of war, whether soldiers or noncombatants. It is also argued that that civil society in general – and not antiwar CSO of the sort just described – may play an unintended role in preventing some wars. According to the democratic peace theory, democratic nation-states very rarely declare war on one another (For a recent review of the democratic peace theory debate, see Rasler and Thompson, 2005). It is a commonplace of both civil society studies and democratic theory that civil society
contributes to the survival and flourishing of democracy (for the classic statements, see Tocqueville 1966; Putnam, 1993). If this is true, and if the democratic peace theory is correct, then civil society deserves at least some of the credit for the paucity of wars fought between democracies. Civil Society for War
Civil society support for war and war-making also takes various forms. For example, neoconservative think tanks in the United States played an active role in supporting the US invasion of Iraq, and continue to try to influence the course of the war. Many media organizations also play significant roles, sometimes unwittingly, in disseminating pro-war attitudes, especially once wars begin (Murray et al., 2008). Similarly, civil society often plays an important role on the ‘‘home front.’’ In the United States, civil society mobilized during World War II to encourage resource conservation and recycling and to promote the buying of war bonds and a variety of prominent service groups united to establish the USO in 1941 (Winkler, 2000). The Effects of War on Civil Society
War often has implications for civil society, both negative and positive. On the one hand, states often restrict the activities of CSOs and citizens in times of war, either by altering their legal environment or by intimidation (Naidoo, 2004). At the same time, some CSOs cooperate so fully with states that they may be regarded as having been co-opted and as having forfeited their autonomy. Civil society can also become polarized and ineffective if CSOs take antithetical positions about a war. On the other hand, wars sometimes lay the groundwork for the expansion of civil society in subsequent years. For example, the incorporation of women into the work force during the Second World War in particular portended a much expanded role for women in civil society in the United States and in Western Europe in the postwar years (Winkler, 2000). There is even an argument to be made that warfare is indirectly responsible for the very existence of civil society. Tilly (1990) has suggested that the need to raise revenue to pay for military operations largely explains the genesis of the modern state, and as civil society is impossible to conceive of apart from a (wellfunctioning) modern state, it could be claimed that warmaking is responsible for the birth of civil society. Civil Society and Non-war Violence
Civil society may contribute to the prevention or diminution of collective violence and ethnic conflict within states, and to remedying the damage done by such
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violence and conflict. Violence of these types increased dramatically after the end of the Second World War, peaked in the early 1990s, but has modestly declined since (Gurr, 2000). While no definitive accounting yet exists of how many CSOs are dedicated to preventing violence, or to mitigating its effects, it seems safe to claim that a significant proportion of CSOs are involved in some way in such anti violence prevention, as well as with attempts to prevent terrorism. The Final Report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1997) identifies three categories of CSOs involved in violence prevention: (a) human rights and advocacy groups; (b) humanitarian and development organizations; and (c) mediation or ‘‘track two’’ groups that pave the way for formal peace processes in violent situations. Human rights and advocacy groups, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, can pressure governments to respect international human rights norms and refrain from the arbitrary use of violence (Clark, 2002), and can help preserve the space for violence-averting dialogue between potential antagonists. Such organizations often maintain offices in trouble spots, so are typically well-informed about developments in these areas, and can warn of emerging crises (Barnes, 2006). Human rights and advocacy CSOs can also play a role when violence ends, by establishing or contributing to transitional justice processes, supporting the rule of law and encouraging good governance. Humanitarian and development CSOs like Oxfam or CARE adopt, arguably, a somewhat less direct approach to violence prevention: these organizations concentrate on alleviating the background conditions that may lead to terrorism or ethnic violence, such as ignorance, radicalizing educational institutions, environmental degradation, resource scarcity and, especially, poverty. It is important to note, however, that claims about causal connections (and even positive correlations) between poverty/lack of education and violence/terrorism have been contested (Kreuger and Maleckova, 2002). These CSOs can also play a crucial role in the aftermath of violence (and war). Many of them are adept at working under the adverse conditions that characterize most post-conflict situation, and can meet the needs of victims and refugees – for medical treatment, shelter, nutrition – well before sometimes hamstrung or weak governments are able to. They may also be able to avoid the stigma of association with parties to the violence, though scholars have suggested that CSOs are not as neutral or free from outside influence as they may appear (Pearce, 1998). Finally, mediation CSOs like ‘‘The Elders’’ or ACCORD (the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes) can assemble
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adversaries, develop negotiation agendas, provide impartial fora for dialogue between them, and facilitate dispute resolution procedures. Some such CSOs can also bring moral pressure to bear on adversaries in order to bring them into the diplomatic process. All three categories of CSO are often global in scope, and capable of organizing action and cooperation on a very large scale. But there is a further role for civil society to play beyond the deliberate and self-conscious interventions by CSOs just described. Many theorists of civil society argue that perhaps the greatest contribution civil society can make to the prevention of violence is inadvertent: roughly, the claim goes, the mere existence of a thriving civil society, regardless of the focus and issue-orientation of the CSOs that make it up, is a force for peace and nonviolence, as well as democracy and the rule of law (Hadenius and Uggla, 1996; Azarya, 1992). While it may seem intuitive that civil society plays this role and has these effects, and while it is irrefutable that there are many circumstances where it does, there is also persuasive evidence to suggest that these are not the necessary outcomes of a vibrant civil society. First, Berman’s (1997) pioneering article, building on an insight from Huntington (1968), showed that in Weimar Germany high levels of civil society, when coupled with low levels of political institutionalization, actually contributed to the failure of representative democracy in Germany and the subsequent violence (and war-making) of the Nazi regime. That this was not an isolated incident has been confirmed by later work on Northern Ireland (Cormier and Couton, 2004) and Cote d’Ivoire (Maclean, 2004). In other words, both the nature of civil society, and the nature of the political context in which it operates, must be considered before the conclusion is drawn that a polity’s CSOs immunize it against political violence. Second, some CSOs are themselves intolerant and violent: in such cases, rather than simply failing to prevent violence by state or other social actors, they may be responsible for it themselves. Scholars who generally accept the thesis, or parts of it, that a strong civil society inhibits violence have nonetheless had to concede that CSOs have committed violence in Sri Lanka (Orjuela, 2003) Somalia (Harvey, 1998), India (Varshney, 2001) Nigeria (Ikelegbe, 2001), and Northern Ghana (Pul, 2003). Of course, this is not to suggest that the state is not culpable in such situations: Human Rights Watch documents the role of governments in fomenting, instigating and supporting communal violence among ethnic groups as a means to achieve a political objective (Human Rights Watch, 1995). But a romantic fascination with the potential of civil society for preventing violence should not blind us to its capacity to do it, as well.
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The Limits of Civil Society
Finally, even if CSOs were to work as efficiently, effectively and cooperatively as possible to prevent violence and remedy its effects, it is crucial to register that civil society simply does not possess the resources or capacity to ‘‘solve’’ the problems of violence or war. Indeed, civil society may perhaps not even be the prime mover in this regard. At a UN Security Council meeting on ‘‘The Role of Civil Society in Conflict Prevention and the Pacific Settlement of Disputes,’’ the President concluded that ‘‘The Security Council stressed the essential responsibility for conflict prevention rests with national governments’’ (United Nations, 2005). Even Kaldor, in a work entitled Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (2003), acknowledges that civil society will be only part of that answer to war. Her five point program involves strengthening international humanitarian law, establishing multilateral international law enforcement capacity, resolving local ‘‘wars on terror,’’ removing authoritarian regimes, and entrenching a commitment to global justice. While it is clear that there will be multiple roles for CSOs to play in bringing to fruition some parts of this ambitious agenda, it is equally clear that civil society cannot be expected to accomplish it on its own.
Cross-References
▶ Amnesty International ▶ Catholic Relief Services ▶ Civic Action ▶ Civil Society and Ethnicity ▶ Civil Society and Social Inequality ▶ Civil Society in Post-Conflict Scenarios ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Collective Action ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Human Rights Watch ▶ International Campaign to Ban Landmines ▶ International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement ▶ Peace and Conflict Resolution Organizations ▶ Schmitt, Carl ▶ Social Movements ▶ Uncivil Society
References/Further Readings Ahrne, G. (1998). Civil society and uncivil organizations. In J. Alexander (Ed.), Real civil societies: Dilemmas of institutionalization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Alexander, J. (1998). Bifurcating discourses. In J. Alexander (Ed.), Real civil societies: Dilemmas of institutionalization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Annan, K. (2000). Address at the opening of the signing conference for The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized
Crime. Palermo, 12 December 2000. Available at http://ungift.org/ docs/ungift/pdf/knowledge/Conv_Trans_Orga_Crime.pdf Azarya, V. (1992). Civil society and disengagement in Africa. In J. Harbeson, D. Rothschild, & N. Chazan (Eds.), Civil society and the State in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Barnes, C. (2006). Governments and civil society organizations: Issues in working together towards peace. Den Haag: European Center for Conflict Prevention. Berman, S. (1997). Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. World Politics, 49(3), 401–429. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. (1997). Preventing deadly conflict: Final report. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York. Chasin, B. H. (2004). Inequality & violence in the United States: Casualties of capitalism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Clark, A. (2002). Diplomacy of conscience: Amnesty International and changing human rights norms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cormier, J., & Couton, P. (2004). Civil society, mobilization and communal violence: Quebec and Ireland, 1890–1920. The Sociological Quarterly, 45(3), 487–508. DeBenedetti, C. (1990). An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Foley, M. S. (2003). Confronting the war machine: Draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Gamson, W. (1990). The strategy of social protest (2nd ed.). Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press. Gurr, T. (1993). Minorities at risk: A global view of ethnopolitical conflicts. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Gurr, T. (2000). Peoples versus States: Minorities at risk in the new century. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Hadenius, A., & Uggla, F. (1996). Making civil society work, promoting democratic development: What can States and donors do? World Development, 24(10), 1621–1639. Harvey, P. (1998). Rehabilitation in complex political emergencies: Is rebuilding civil society the answer? Disasters, 22(3), 200–217. Human Rights Watch. (1995). Slaughter among neighbors: The political origins of communal violence. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Huntington, S. (1968). Political order in changing societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ikelegbe, A. (2001). The perverse manifestation of civil society: Evidence from Nigeria. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 39(1), 1–24. Kaldor, M. (2003). Global civil society: An answer to war. Cambridge: Polity. Kaldor, M., & Muro, D. (2003). Religious and nationalist militant groups. In M. Kaldor, H. Anheier, & M. Glasius (Eds.), Global civil society 2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keegan, J. (1993). A history of warfare. New York: Knopf. Kreuger, A., & Maleckova, J. (2002). Education, poverty, political violence and terrorism: Is there a causal connection? NBER Working Paper No. W9074. Lebel, U. (2008). Civil Society versus Military Sovereignty: Cultural, political and operational aspects. Armed Forces and Society, 34(1), 67–89. MacLean, L. (2004). Mediating ethnic conflict at the grassroots: The role of local associational life in shaping political values in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. Journal of Modern African Studies, 42(2), 589–617. Murray, C. et al. (2008). Reporting dissent in wartime: British Press, the Anti-War Movement and the 2003 Iraq War. European Journal of Communication, 23(7), 7–27.
Civil Society–Business Relations Naidoo, K. (2004). Coming clean: Civil society organizations at a time of global uncertainty. The International Journal of Not-For-Profit Law, 6(3). Available at: http://www.icnl.org/KNOWLEDGE/ijnl/vol6iss3/ special_1.htm Naylor, R., & Blum, J. (2001). Economic warfare: Sanctions, embargo busting, and their human cost. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Orjuela, A. (2003). Building peace in Sri Lanka: A role for civil society? Journal for Peace Research, 40(2), 195–212. Pearce, J. (1998). From civil war to ‘Civil Society’: Has the end of the Cold War brought peace to Central America? International Affairs, 74(3), 587–615. Pul, H. (2003). Exclusion, association and violence: Trends and triggers in Northern Ghana’s Konkomba-Dagomba Wars. The African Anthropologist, 10(1), 39–82. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raaflaub, K. (2007). Introduction: Searching for peace in the ancient world. In K. Raaflaub (Ed.), War and peace in the ancient World. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Rasler, K., & Thompson, W. (2005). Puzzles of the democratic peace: Theory, geopolitics and the transformation of world politics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Seligman, A. (1995). The idea of civil society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge: Blackwell. de Tocqueville, A. (1966). Democracy in America. New York: Harper & Row. Turner, S. (1998). Global civil society, anarchy and governance: Assessing an emerging paradigm. Journal of Peace Research, 35(1), 25–42. Varon, J. (2004). Bringing the war home: The weather underground, the Red Army Faction, and revolutionary violence in the sixties and seventies. Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Varshney, A. (2001). Ethnic conflict and civil society: India and beyond. World Politics, 53(3), 362–398. Winkler, A. (2000). Home Front USA: America during World War II. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson.
Civil Society–Business Relations JAMES E. AUSTIN, ALNOOR EBRAHIM Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA
Introduction Civil society organizations (CSOs) and businesses have a long and diverse history of relationships, ranging from confrontation to collaboration. Over the past decade, there has been growing attention among scholars and practitioners to understanding the challenges and dynamics of civil society–business relationships. This increased interest has been especially pronounced internationally on issues of societal or public concern, such as environment, human
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rights, and globalization, but cross-sector collaborations have also spread broadly across the entire spectrum of CSO causes and business sectors. As companies have gone global in their operations, so too have their engagements with CSOs (Kulik, 1999; Bendell & Kearins, 2005). Civil society–business relations in the international context encompass those occurring in different countries and those crossing borders. Despite country-level variations, interactions between the two sectors occur almost universally. While the frameworks discussed in the subsequent sections appear to have considerable applicability across countries, cultural and institutional differences affect the interaction dynamics (Austin et al., 2004; Sanborn & Portocarrero, 2005).
Definition The range of civil society–business relations may generally be grouped into three categories or types: complementary, adversarial, and collaborative. All the three types are introduced briefly below, followed by a discussion on the adversarial and collaborative categories. The discussion’s use of the term CSO is broader than the terms nonprofit organization (NPO) or nongovernmental organization (NGO), as it includes a range of actors including religious organizations, labor unions, and self-help groups, to name just a few. All three terms are, however, often used interchangeably in practice. Types of Civil Society–Business Relations
Complementary relations involve separate coexistence among organizations in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors. This is a traditional framing of the sectors, with each sector serving a different function, and in which businesses and civil society organizations (such as nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations) are viewed as having little need to interact with one another. While each sector does have distinct functions in society, in practice, there is a growing overlap and interdependency across the sectors, leading to growing interactions. Adversarial relations are characterized by civil society organizations operating as ‘‘watchdogs’’ or ‘‘activists’’ seeking to hold businesses to account. In a global context, such relations are most apparent on issues of trade and investment, human rights and labor conditions, and environment and sustainable development. In adopting an adversarial stance, CSOs aim to get companies to change existing practices that they see as socially undesirable or to institute new practices that they consider to be socially enhancing, often by bringing media and public scrutiny to the activities of companies.
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Collaborative relations arise where CSOs and companies work together around some shared goals or agenda, often to address a social problem. These interactions range from purely philanthropic, in which businesses provide financial support to the activities of nonprofit organizations, to activities involving a much deeper integration of mission, strategy, and operations. A growing interest in collaboration is due in part to the recognition that the complexity and magnitude of major social problems, such as those of sustainable development and poverty, transcend the capacity of sectors to deal with them separately. Accordingly, the major emphasis below is placed on this third type of relations. Beyond the scope of this entry, there is a considerable literature on public–private partnerships (PPPs), which focuses on collaborations between governmental actors and either businesses or nonprofits or both. Some PPPs involve the private provision of public services carried out under commercial contract.
Key Issues Adversarial Relations
Adversarial or confrontational interactions among civil society organizations and businesses often arise from differing perspectives on what constitutes socially desirable behavior. This is especially apparent where business practices are viewed by CSOs as causing harm, for example, regarding human rights and labor conditions (e.g., sweatshop and child labor, blood diamonds, and displacement of indigenous peoples for infrastructure projects), environment and sustainable development (e.g., in the extractive industries of oil and mining, large dams projects, and genetically modified organisms), and on issues of trade and investment (e.g., agriculture subsidies and tariffs as well as structural adjustment policies). In the second half of the last century, the bulk of growth in the numbers of international nongovernmental social change organizations occurred in the arenas of human rights and the environment (Khagram, Riker, & Sikkink, 2002). The most traditional operational approach used by advocacy CSOs is the highly visible public pressure campaign. Two pivotal campaigns, both of which gained momentum in 1977, demonstrated the power of adversarial civil society advocacy. One was a series of disinvestment campaigns targeting companies and governments doing business in South Africa during apartheid. Faith-based institutional investors played a central role in the US campaign, a key component of which was establishing conditions for the equal treatment of employees regardless of race. These ‘‘Sullivan Principles,’’ developed by an African-American
preacher who was also on the board of General Motors at the time, were adopted by over 125 US corporations doing business in South Africa, with over 100 completely withdrawing operations from the country (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Principles; 3/23/2008]). A second highly visible campaign in 1977 focused on a boycott of Nestle´, launched by several groups concerned about the company’s aggressive marketing of infant formula in developing countries. The campaign centered on concerns about the health impacts on children of promoting milk formula over breast milk, and it was instrumental to the adoption, by the World Health Assembly in 1981, of an International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestle´_boycott; 3/23/2008]). A network of over 200 advocacy groups in more than 100 countries continues to monitor corporate marketing behavior and to push for the adoption, by national governments, of legislation based on the international code. More broadly, a variety of international NGOs have focused on the creation of standards and certifications, for example, on labor conditions, sustainable forestry, marine stewardship, and fair trade commodities (Conroy, 2007). From the standpoint of companies, such advocacy campaigns have often been seen as interfering with their business operations and hindering profitability. Yet they pose a serious challenge, particularly to businesses with broad brand-name recognition. As advocacy CSOs have grown in experience and effectiveness, they have combined specialized technical expertise (lawyers, policy analysts, and scientists) with elaborate networks (of other CSOs, public-interest lobbyists, regulators, legislators, media, and the Internet) in order to get their campaign messages out quickly. And while advocacy CSOs do not have the regulatory authority to require changes in corporate practice, their effectiveness stems from a degree of public legitimacy and moral authority that enables them to highlight conflicts between corporate profit motives and the social well-being of citizens. As such, they have been described as ‘‘civil regulators’’ (Zadek, 2004: 30). These confrontational interactions, imbued with considerable antagonism, have produced changes in business practices or in turning consumer preferences. In some instances, however, civil society actors have lost credibility either because they have used inaccurate information to make their case, or because their own legitimacy in speaking for the public good has come into question. For example, Greenpeace significantly overestimated the amount of oil stored in the Brent Spar oil platform, which Shell had proposed to sink in the North Sea in 1995. Yet in other instances, the intensified interaction emanating
Civil Society–Business Relations
from these processes have led businesses and nonprofit organizations to greater mutual understanding and to discovering areas of collaboration (Yaziji, 2004). The discussion below centers on this collaborative arena, which has led to a number of innovations in civil society–business relations. Collaborative Relations
Collaborative relationships can be further categorized into relationships that are philanthropic, transactional, or integrative (Austin, 2000a). ‘‘Philanthropic’’ relationships are benefactor–recipient interactions centered on the donation of funds or products from companies to nonprofit organizations. For example, corporate donations in the USA amounted to $15.69 billion or 5.1% of total giving in 2007 (Giving USA Foundation, 2008). Corporate giving in absolute inflation-adjusted terms has nearly tripled over the last 4 decades in the USA, amounting to about 1.1% of pre-tax profits. In comparison, ‘‘transactional’’ relationships focus on specific activities and involve the exchange of a broader range of resources, with value flowing in both directions. Sometimes these interactions are more commercial in nature, such as cause-related marketing or event sponsorships, whereby the business associates its name with the nonprofit’s name and cause. Often these relationships are financed from companies’ marketing budgets rather than their philanthropic funds. For example, fees earned by US nonprofits through cause-related and arts sponsorships rose to $1.6 billion in 2005, a 33% increase since 2000 (IEG, 2006). In other instances, the relationship is purely commercial and involves contracting the provision of goods and services. A third category of collaborative relationships can be termed ‘‘integrative’’ in which businesses and nonprofits become much more strategic and organizationally integrated in terms of mission, strategy, and operations. The relationship is more like an enduring joint venture than a transaction. Others have characterized these various relationship types as philanthropic, commercial, and strategic (Galaskiewicz & Colman, 2006). The discussion below considers the motivations for and evolution of collaboration, as well as emerging knowledge on the steps involved in building business– civil society collaborations. Motivations
From a theoretical perspective, the motivations for collaborations are often explained by: (1) resource dependency theory, whereby organizations interact with others in order to obtain important resources available only from
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the collaborating organization (Gray, 1989); (2) stakeholder management in which organizations collaborate with various stakeholders to manage the risks posed or advantages conferred by them (Andrioff et al., 2002); or (3) social issues, whereby organizations collaborate to address a particular social problem that crosses sectoral boundaries (Selsky & Parker, 2005). Empirical studies of cross-sector alliances reveal that motivations of companies to engage with CSOs can range from purely philanthropic to highly utilitarian (Austin et al., 2004). This motivational spectrum can be conceptualized into four distinguishable, but sometimes interrelated, categories: compliance which is dictated by legal obligations or expected standards; risk which is driven by the need to manage external threats; values which aim at fulfilling core organizational or individual beliefs; and, business opportunity which seeks to capture economic value (Austin, 2007). Analogously, the motivations of CSOs fall into three often interrelated categories: funds mobilization, in which partnerships enter in as a new source of revenue generation; capabilities enhancement, whereby partnering with corporations will enable developing better skills and organizational capacities; and mission attainment, stemming from congruency of goals and the capture of synergies that increase scale, scope, or quality. Evolution
Relationships are dynamic; they undergo significant changes over time. Retrospective analyses of enduring relationships reveal a ‘‘collaboration continuum’’ ranging across the above-mentioned philanthropic, transactional, and integrative relationships (Austin 2000a, b). Most collaborations start and remain in the philanthropic stage, but many move into more transactional activities, and a smaller number evolve into more complicated and strategic integrative relationships. There is nothing automatic about this progression along the continuum, and there can be regression as well. The dynamic depends on the decisions and actions taken by the collaborators. Nor are the stages discrete. Rather, as displayed in Table 1, there are multiple factors (e.g., level of engagement, importance to mission, magnitude of resources, type of resources, scope, interaction intensity, trust, managerial complexity, and strategic value) that characterize the relationships and their evolution. As the relationships evolve, each of these parameters might progress at different speeds, such that some characteristics might be more in the philanthropic stage, while others might be more transactional or even integrative. The utility of the continuum framework is that, first, it enables one to understand more fully the types of
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Civil Society–Business Relations. Table 1 The collaboration continuum (Austin, 2000a)
relationships that a company or CSO has in its ‘‘collaboration portfolio.’’ Second, it provides a basis for managing and evolving the relationship more effectively.
Stages of Collaboration
Reviews of several successful civil society–business collaborations by Austin (2000a) suggest four key stages in the process: starting alliances, handling the relationship, building the partnership, and managing the portfolio. They are summarized below. 1. Starting Alliances A fundamental starting point for collaboration is to identify congruent goals or areas of common interest. A common organizational problem is that partners have different ends or purposes that motivate the collaboration. While it is tempting for CSOs to assume that everyone should share their noble causes and for companies to assume that any CSO should want to partner with them, this is not often the case in practice. Experience from successful collaborations suggests that the closer the fit, the stronger and more sustainable will be the relationship, and that assuming or forcing a fit is likely to return to haunt the relationship later. Consultations with critical stakeholders do not necessarily seek complete congruency, but rather sufficient overlap to ensure compatibility and a basis for creating mutual value. Most fundamentally, partnering is about generating value, for the partners and society. A central component in trying to start a collaboration is formulating a value proposition for the other partner. Consequently, whether or not an alliance is created depends on a weighing of the benefits and costs embedded in those value propositions. Studies of collaboration practices reveal that the level of rigor of evaluating such propositions varies widely, and many aspects of the assessment are qualitative judgments
rather than quantitative calculations. The potential benefits range widely, generally increasing as a relationship moves from philanthropic to transactional to integrative. For companies, various benefits are reported. At the most basic level, there is the emotional gratification of helping others and a general enhancement of the company’s reputation as a good corporate citizen. More specifically and powerfully, engagement with a CSO and its cause can create a more intense relationship with a variety of key stakeholders: increased buyer preference and customer loyalty; opening up or development of new market segments; enhanced attraction, motivation, and retention of employees; greater credibility with and access to governmental authorities; greater support from local communities by an enhanced social and political ‘‘license to operate’’; and deeper social bonds with suppliers and distributors, which in turn strengthen the commercial relationship. In effect, the company can harvest a set of benefits that enhance its competitive advantage and organizational sustainability. These benefits, however, do not always accrue, and nor are they easy to measure. Analyses aimed at establishing quantitatively links between corporate social engagement and financial performance have produced ambiguous results (Waddock & Graves, 1997; Margolis & Walsh, 2001). Similarly, various benefits can accrue to the collaborating CSO. The philanthropic modality, of course, is premised on cash or in-kind contributions. As a relationship develops and involves other aspects of the business, the CSO’s capabilities are sometimes strengthened, e.g., through new management techniques, operating systems, communications methods and channels. Some nonprofits have gained greater exposure, credibility, and access to other funding sources, media, companies, volunteers, and distribution channels. But collaborations also come with costs, most visibly those associated with financial and material transfers, personnel time, as well as assumed risks. These include
Civil Society–Business Relations
the risks of the partner not delivering adequately the promised inputs or actions, or of inappropriate behavior outside of the collaboration that might damage reputation. In addition, there is the risk of mission drift on the part of CSOs. Generally, businesses have been able to assess the benefits and costs to the company of partnering, but the nonprofits have been better able to judge the social value emanating from the partnership (Austin et al., 2007). Starting a collaboration often also runs into the challenge of attaining cultural compatibility. Businesses and nonprofit organizations often have quite different organizational cultures, for example in terms of governance structures, decision-making processes, operating norms, time frames, values, and even language. This challenge calls for both sides to recognize that differences will exist, try to understand them, and be open to learning and adapting to the other’s ways. A certain amount of frustration is common. The cultural shift can lead to problems, with some observers noting that nonprofits adopting more managerial tactics tend to have more internal disagreements (Galaskiewicz & Bielefeld, 1998). The above steps in starting an alliance – identifying congruent goals, weighing benefits and costs, and attaining cultural compatibility – ultimately come down to setting partnering terms. These terms not only clarify the purposes of partnering but also establish respective responsibilities and accountability: Who will provide what and when. 2. Handling the Relationship Once a collaboration has been started, much of its effectiveness depends on how well it is managed. Three tasks appear to be particularly important: communicating, dealing with tensions, and ensuring accountability. Undercommunication and miscommunication are reported as common problem areas in partner relationships. Clear and sufficient communication is deemed to be central to building trust, which is the social glue that creates partnering cohesion. Trust, as practitioners commonly report, is earned by backing up one’s stated promises with the corresponding deeds. Credibility is a function of the capacity to deliver. In addition to communication between partners, importance is also given to communicating internally to employees and trustees so that they understand the purpose and importance of the partnership. Of similar import is communicating to external stakeholders, who in some cases view a crosssectoral alliance with suspicion because they do not understand its rationale. Tensions inevitably arise in relationships. Smart practices suggest that it is constructive for partners to try and identify potential areas of tension and discuss in advance
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how to deal with these in particular and others yet unforeseen. For example, there may be tensions around the relative imbalance of power stemming from different sizes and resource bases, or the use of each other’s brands or other communications to external audiences. Identifying tension areas, formulating decision rules, and establishing dispute processes appear to prepare both sides better for dealing with difficulties in a problem-solving mode. Additionally, strong alliances frequently designate a relationship manager who has the primary responsibility for managing the interaction with the partner. These actions appear particularly important in instances where major crises in the other organization or the collaboration itself emerge, as these are tests of the strength of the relationship and the capacity for joint problem solving. In strong alliances the partners identify ways to ensure accountability. Formal mechanisms of accountability include contracts or written terms and expected outputs of the collaboration. Formal accountability is also enhanced by transparency in producing and sharing information, evaluation both during and after key events, as well as options for sanction or withdrawal from the partnership should key expectations be violated. Informal mechanisms of accountability are equally crucial, and rely on processes to build and nurture trust among the players. These rely on the building of social and professional relationships, shared goals, and opportunities for answerability where parties can seek explanations for decisions taken (Ebrahim & Weisband, 2007). 3. Building the Partnership While many collaborations, particularly in the philanthropic stage, may remain relatively static, others seek to become more robust through generating greater value, scaling, or broadening. The amount of value generated in a partnership is partially a function not just of the amount of resources that the partners bring to bear but also the type (Austin, 2000a). When each organization contributes ‘‘generic resources’’ – those that any similar organization could provide, such as funds from companies or reputational credibility from CSOs – value is indeed created. Greater value is generated, however, when each partner mobilizes its ‘‘core competencies’’ – those key assets, capabilities, infrastructure, reputation, systems, and knowledge that are central to its success (Kanter, 1994). Leveraging these distinctive resources increases the possibilities and power for value creation. Still further value can be created through combining the core competencies of the business and CSO partners. The melding together of distinct sets of assets into new synergistic constellations provides a basis for creating innovative approaches to long-standing problems.
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Over time, greater benefits to the partners and society can be attained by increasing the scale of the collaboration. Growth, however, places greater demands on the partners’ organizational capabilities, so investing in strengthening institutional capacity appears to be a concomitant to scaling. Growing can occur in a variety of ways: bringing in other partners to expand the resource pool, stimulating others to replicate the current operations, or developing networks (Wei-Skillern, 2008). Increased impact and benefits might also occur by broadening the activities that the collaboration encompasses. This broadening often is the result of a mutual learning and discovery process. Over time partners deepen their understanding of each others’ capabilities and see opportunities for undertaking new joint activities. Their knowledge of the underlying social problems also grows, thereby opening new insights into how to attack those. Lastly, growing trust and collaborative capabilities enable the partners to take on distinct, more complicated, and perhaps riskier undertakings. 4. Managing the Portfolio Many companies and nonprofit organizations have multiple cross-sector relationships. The task then becomes one of managing their ‘‘collaboration portfolio’’ (Austin, 2003). The first step in portfolio management is to create a clear view of the contents of the collaboration inventory. This mapping exercise can usefully draw on the ‘‘collaboration continuum’’ discussed previously to categorize where different collaborations lie relative to philanthropic, transactional, and integrative relationship types. At the heart of portfolio management is achieving an optimum mix through balancing. Different collaborations can fulfill distinct functions. They also can impose varying levels of demand on managerial resources, hence requiring a balancing of capabilities against these requirements. There can also be different levels of risk exposure and reward gain. Wise risk management often seeks diversity of types and avoids overconcentration or dependence. Portfolios are dynamic. They are renovated or adjusted to fit changing objectives and varying performance of the assets in the holdings. This means that new collaborations will enter and others will exit. The starting of new collaborations has been discussed above. The ending of a collaboration poses distinct challenges. A certain interdependency has been created, so minimizing disruption is crucial. This implies sufficient advance notice and an exit process that is clear and provides enough time for appropriate adjustments to take place such that harm to the partners and the social beneficiaries is minimized.
Future Directions Civil society–business relations will continue to evolve in complexity and diversity. While the basic nature of adversarial and collaborative interactions described above can be expected to persist, there is a growing recognition by business and civic actors of the global and cross-sectoral nature of public problems. Responding to these challenges will require innovations in governance, operations, and financing through new sets of relationships not only among civil society and business, but also with governments. For example, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is a partnership among all three sectors and affected communities in order to finance international health. Global governance will also continue to evolve. The World Trade Organization, for instance, has become increasingly active in international trade disputes, such as those concerning agriculture and access to essential medicines. The new challenges facing business and civil society thus lie at systemic rather than sectoral levels. The new frontier for corporations may be in finding ways to integrate social value creation into their business models rather than separately as philanthropy. And CSOs may be similarly dared to seek solutions that craft private enterprise for the public good. More specifically, with growing interdependence and even convergence, businesses and CSOs will become much more adept at creating strategic alliances that produce and capture crosssector synergies.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Accountability, Partnerships, Social Enterprise ▶ Advocacy ▶ Civil Society – Business Relations ▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ▶ Greenpeace ▶ INGOs ▶ International Baby Food Action Network ▶ Partnerships ▶ Social Enterprise ▶ Stakeholders
References/Further Readings Andrioff, J., Waddock, S., Husted, B., & Rahman, S. (2002). Unfolding stakeholder thinking: Theory, responsibility and engagement. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf. Austin, J. E. (2000a). The collaboration challenge. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Civility Austin, J. E. (2000b). Strategic collaboration between nonprofits and businesses. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 29(1), 69–97. Austin, J. E. (2003). Strategic alliances: Managing the collaboration portfolio. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 1(2), 48–55. Austin, J. E. (2007). Sustainability through partnering: Conceptualizing partnerships between businesses and NGOs. In P. Glasbergen, F. Biermann, & A.P.J. Mol (Eds.), Partnerships, governance and sustainable development: Reflections on theory and practice. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Austin, J. E., Reficco, E., (2004). Social partnering in Latin America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Austin, J. E., Gutie´rrez, R., Ogliastri, E., & Reficco, E. (2007). Capitalizing on convergence. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 5(1), 24–31. Bendell, J., & Kearins, K. (2005). The political bottom line: The emerging dimension to corporate responsibility for sustainable development. Business Strategy and the Environment, 14, 372–383. Conroy, M. E. (2007). Branded!: How the certification revolution is transforming global corporations. Gabriola, BC: New Society Publishers. Ebrahim, A., & Weisband, E. (2007). Global accountabilities: Participation, pluralism and public ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galaskiewicz, J., & Bielefeld, W. (1998). Nonprofit organizations in an age of uncertainty: A study of organizational change. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Galaskiewicz, J., & Colman, M. S. (2006). Collaboration between corporations and nonprofit organizations. In R. Steinberg & W. Powell (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed., New Haven/London: Yale University Press.pp. 180–204). Giving USA Foundation (2008). Giving USA 2007. New York: American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel. Gray, B (1989). Collaborating. Finding common ground for multiparty problems. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. IEG (2006). IEG Sponsorship Report 2005. Chicago, IL: IEG, LLC. Also see www.sponsorship.com Kanter, R. M. (1994). From spare change to real change. Harvard Business Review, July–Aug., 96–108. Khagram, S., Riker, J. V., & Sikkink, K. (Eds.) (2002). Restructuring world politics: Transnational social movements, networks, and norms. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kulik, T (1999). The expanding parameters of global corporate citizenship. Report 1246. New York: The Conference Board, Inc. Margolis, J. D., & Walsh, J. P. (2001). People and profits? The search for a link between a company’s social and financial performance. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sanborn, C., & Portocarrero, F. (Eds.) (2005). Philanthropy and social change in Latin America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Selsky, J. W., & Parker, B. (2005). Cross-sector partnerships to address social issues: Challenges to theory and practice. Journal of Management, 31(6), 849–873. Waddock, S. A., & Graves, S. B. (1997). The corporate social performance-financial performance link. Strategic Management Journal, 18(4), 303–319. Wei-Skillern, J. (2008). The networked nonprofit. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6(2), 38–43. Yaziji, M. (2004).Turning gadflies into allies. Harvard Business Review, February, 110–115. Zadek, S(2004). The civil corporation: The new economy of corporate citizenship. London/Sterling, VA: Earthscan.
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Civility HELMUT K. ANHEIER1,2 1 University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany 2 Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany
Introduction Like civil society, the term civility has a long history in the social sciences (see Boyd, 2004) and the humanities (see Carter, 1998), and a history that reflects different uses and changes in meaning over time. Today, the term also overlaps with concepts such as civic engagement, civic mindedness, civic culture, even cosmopolitanism (Archibugi, 2003); and like these as well as the term civil society itself, it is a complex concept that can easily become normatively charged and used for different ideological purposes, either implicitly or explicitly. Differences in perspectives on what some see as a much needed normative foundation and others interpret as a moral bias are at the core of an emerging debate about the meaning, role, or function of civility in modern societies.
Definition Billante and Saunders (2002), having surveyed the growing literature on civility, suggest three elements that together constitute civility. The first element is respect for others, or in Shils’ words (1997: 338): ‘‘Civility is basically respect for the dignity and the desire for dignity of other persons.’’ The second element is civility as public behavior towards strangers, or in Carter’s terms (1998: 58): ‘‘Civility equips us for everyday life with strangers.. . . we need neither to love them nor to hate them in order to be civil towards them.’’ The third element is selfregulation in the sense that it requires empathy by putting one’s own immediate self-interest in the context of the larger common good and acting accordingly (Billante & Saunders, 2002: 33). Civility is learned behavior, embedded in the social and cultural codes of society, and requires positive reinforcement. Like social capital, in particular interpersonal and institutional trust, civility requires enactment, acknowledgment, and maintenance in actual social life. Civility is not a constant, but can be learned as well as unlearned, and increase and decrease over time. Understanding of civility as learned public behavior demonstrating respect for others while curtailing one’s immediate self-interest when appropriate, leads to the next issue: What is the role or function of civility?
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Here a look at history is very instructive. Elias (2000) suggests that the modern Western notion of civility began to form in the late Middle Ages, and emerged more fully in the sixteenth century. It involved a complex process of behavioral and institutional transformations, triggered by a demand for greater stability and predictability in social and political relations, including conflict management, as economic ties across localities and regions expanded. This civilizing process for creating and protecting nonviolent, institutional spaces began in the aristocratic court society first, trickled down to the emerging urban middle classes and bourgeoisie next, and increasingly encompassed larger and larger segments of society. ‘‘Polite society’’ became the norm. One could make similar arguments for other parts of the world as well, e.g., China, Japan, Persia, or Turkey, where political and economic development demanded violence-free zones and greater routinization and institutionalization of behavior, including conflict management. Civility, therefore, is important, because it helps social cooperation, and is vital for bridging social capital to operate in modern society. For Shils (1997) civility serves to locate different human beings as equal members of the same inclusive public, whereas incivility is a device of exclusion. Yet, there is a deeper purpose civility serves in modern pluralist societies, as Rawls (1993) and Hayek (1976) suggest. This purpose has to do with the relationship between means and ends or methods and objectives in diverse societies where people primarily follow their self-interest. Hayek (1976: 3) argues that the relative peace and nonviolence of diverse societies becomes possible because ‘‘individuals are not required to agree on ends but only on means which are capable of serving a great variety of purposes and which each hopes will assist him in the pursuit of his own purposes. Civility is one such method of collaboration.’’ Similarly, Rawls (1993: 147– 149) sees civility functioning as the ‘‘modus Vivendi’’ for reducing the collision of ‘‘unrestricted liberties’’ in modern, diverse society. One could make similar references to the notion of the public sphere as a violence free and equal space of communication (Habermas, 1991).
Historical Background The term civility derives from the Latin civilitas and civilis, meaning ‘‘relating to citizens,’’ and expressing, in its early use, not only the state of being a citizen of Rome but also the notion of being a good citizen with appropriate behavior. In the sixteenth century, the term shifted away from citizen status and began to emphasize formal politeness and courtesy in behavior and, increasingly, speech. As this change took place in the court societies of Europe’s interconnected aristocracy, the everyday
meaning of civility in English, French (civilite´) or German (Zivilita¨t) remained fairly close. At the same time, the term soon acquired elitist connotations by reference to behavior (etiquette) at court, and in aristocratic circles generally. According to Elias, civility became a mechanism of exclusion for the European upper classes who held themselves in higher esteem than others they ‘‘deemed as simpler and more primitive’’ (2000: 48; own translation). Civility became a privilege associated with elite status, and separated elites from others, be they members of the working class, farmers, or the poor. What is more, during colonialism, civility as a form of individual behavior became closely tied to the broader concept of civilization, and the notion that the West has a civilizing mission towards the world. The people and societies of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania were to be civilized and turned from ‘‘savages’’ into ‘‘civilized human beings.’’ This process involved diverse institutions (ranging from religion and the law to education to high culture) and organizations (ranging from the military to missionary societies and from corporations to finishing schools), and existed in a variety of frameworks (English or French Empire), but typically rooted to some sense of superiority. By the middle of the twentieth century, civility had become politically and morally implicated not only as elitist but also as fundamentally corrupt in the face of Western colonialism, two brutal world wars, and genocides. The critique of Western civilization implied a critique of civility, but mostly the term was seen as antiquated, snobbish, and reactionary at best. Gradually, however, the term moved into the cultural background of more egalitarian and affluent societies. While civility has not regained more currency in everyday language, it has reentered the discourse in the social sciences and the humanities. It did so in the wake of analyses about the changing social fabric of modern societies (Bauman, 2001), the alleged decline in social capital (Putnam, 2000), and a rise of social isolation, social vices, and crime (Bennett, 1995; Lane, 2000). The current treatment of civility detached the term from connotations with Western civilization and elitism, and links it to notions of community, sociability, and mutual dependence (Dekker, 200x; Misztal, 2001: 72), and responsibility and self control (Elchardus, 2008).
Key Issues Compared to the term civil society, research has neglected civility, and has generally failed to take adequate conceptual and empirical account of the term. This neglect resulted from an implicit treatment, perhaps even being taken-for-granted, of the adjectives ‘‘civil’’ and ‘‘civic;’’ and
Civility
a focus on civil society institutions and organizations rather individual behavior and dispositions. To remedy this neglect requires a reorientation of civil society research that makes the concept of civility explicit, and a refocus, indeed, broadening of the empirical approach taken. Civility is still primarily seen in the context of national societies, especially in its capacity to help ‘‘manage’’ diverse communities. However, in the context of globalization, civility could play a similar role in the many emerging transnational arenas of economy and society, including culture and politics. Civility, as often tacit, culturally embedded ‘‘agreements to disagree agreeably’’ allows for routinization of collaborative behaviors that may involve actors that are different in a variety of respects. Civility creates predictability, and builds social capital through successful encounters across national, cultural, political, economic, and linguistic borders. It promises to create the nonviolent, stable, and predictable zones for institutions, organizations, and individuals to operate and flourish in transnational contexts. An emerging global civil society is one important sphere in which such zones can be established, maintained, and grown, though it is not the only one. Businesses and governments can also serve as agents of the wider ‘‘civilising process.’’ Some authors like Ezzat and Kaldor (2007: 36–37) argue that civil society actors and organizations have a special duty in pointing out civility failures and taking corrective action accordingly. They call for ‘‘pre-emptive civility’’ that tries to create the mechanism and opportunities for communicating respect for one another, and write: ‘‘If global civil society is to have a mission at this historical moment of humanity, it would be to recapture the power of language and to regain its (civilising) role, providing a forum for deliberative democracy, re-rooting legitimacy in civil society, and highlighting the importance of politics of presence, not merely representation’’ (2007: 36). In other words, global civil society is to establish, defend, and build zones of non violence and social as well as cultural predictability to encourage debate and dialogue. The previous definition of national and global civil society focused on the ‘‘what’’ in terms of its constituent elements. It said nothing about the roles, contributions, or functions of what civil society is to achieve at local or transnational levels. Adding civility to the definition and making it explicit, we are not only addressing the ‘‘how,’’ e.g., Rawls’ modus Vivendi or Habermas’ public sphere notion, but also the ‘‘why.’’ In other words, civility offers the field of global civil society research potentially an explicit ‘‘independent’’ and ‘‘dependent variable’’: to what extent, under what conditions and how is civil
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society able or unable to create, maintain, and grow zones of non violence and predictability at local, national, international, and transnational levels?
Conclusion It becomes clear that such an understanding of civility and its role in civil society as well as in society at large involves more than the correction in terms of definitions suggested above. Research activities must follow suit and ‘‘map and measure’’ civility in terms of nonviolent zones of communicating respect, the range and depth of the modus Vivendi Rawls identifies, and the preemptive capacity of global civil society Ezzat and Kaldor suggest. So far, research has little to show when in comes to these issues, and the future empirical research agenda should address this deficit.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civil Society Theory: Habermas ▶ Civil Society Theory: Shils ▶ Cosmopolitanism ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Social Capital, Definition of
References/Further Readings Archibugi, D. (2003). Cosmopolitical democracy. Debating cosmopolotics. London: Verso. Baxi, U. (2002). The future of human rights. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Z. (2001). The individualized society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, W. (1993). The book of virtues. A treasury of great moral stories. New York: Simon & Schuster. Billante, N., & Saunders, P. (2002). Why civility matters. Policy, 18(3), 32–36. Boyd, R. (2004). Michael Oakeshott on civility, civil society and civil association. Political Studies, 52, Oxford: Blackwell.603–622. Calhoun, C. (2003). The consciousness of frequent travellers: Towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism, debating cosmopolitics. London: Verso. Carter, S. (1998). Civility. New York: Basic Books. Dahrendorf, R. (1994). Der moderne soziale Konflikt. Essay zur Politik der Freheit. Munich: DTV. Dekker, P. (200x). Zerreist das Soziale Band. Elchardus, M. (2008). Self-control. Notes on the emergence of symbolic society working paper. Department of Sociology, Free University of Brussels. Elias, N. (2000). The civilizing process: Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigation. Oxford: Blackwell. Ezzat, H. R., & Kaldor, M. (2007). Not even a tree: Delegitimising violence and the prospects for pre-emptive civility, global civil society: 2006/7. London: Sage. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayek, F. A. (1976). Law, legislation and liberty: Vol. 2, the mirage of social justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Keane, J. (2003). Global civil society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lane, R. (2000). The loss of happiness in market economies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Misztal, B. (2001). Trust in modern societies. London: Routledge. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone. The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Shils, E. (1997). Civility and civil society: Good manners between persons and concern for the common good in public affairs, the virtue of civility. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
Mission Initially established for the ‘‘mental, moral, and physical improvement of the inhabitants of Cleveland,’’ by 2008 the mission of The Cleveland Foundation had expanded ‘‘to enhance the lives of all residents of Greater Cleveland, now and for generations to come, by building community endowment, addressing needs through grantmaking, and providing leadership on key community issues.’’
Activities The Foundation focuses on seven ‘‘vital issues’’:
Cleveland Foundation ANTHONY FILIPOVITCH
Address of Organization 1422 Euclid Avenue, Suite 1300 Cleveland, OH 44115 USA www.clevelandfoundation.org
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Arts and culture Early childhood and youth development Economic development Advanced energy International relations Neighborhoods and housing Public education reform
Structure and Governance
The Cleveland Foundation was the first community foundation, and throughout its history has been a leader in shaping the form of the contemporary community foundation.
The Cleveland Foundation is incorporated as a public trust, managed by a board of 15 members representing the business community and the community at large. The daily operations are managed by a President/CEO, four vice presidents (Donor Relations, Governance & Administration, Programs & Evaluation, Chief Financial Officer) and a staff of 66 other people.
Brief History
Funding
Introduction
The Cleveland Foundation was formed in 1914 by Federick H. Goff, an estate attorney and President of the Cleveland Trust Co. He and the Cleveland Trust Co. developed a form of corporate trust to provide greater flexibility for his wealthy clients who wished to leave some of their wealth to charity, a trust that focused on the community in which it would act rather than on a specific use for the funds. In its early years, The Cleveland Foundation funded a series of Cleveland Social Studies which identified areas of specific need in the community. It also funded the Cleveland Metropark studies, which resulted in a chain of parks encircling the city – the ‘‘emerald necklace,’’ as it was called. In the 1930s, the Foundation was opened to other trustees than the Cleveland Trust Co. (which greatly enlarged its donor base) and received two significant gifts of $3 million each. In 1967, the Foundation began making grants to the City of Cleveland, opening the door to expanded public/private partnerships. These partnerships were significantly expanded under the leadership of Steven Minter, its president from 1983–2003.
The Cleveland Foundation at the end of 2007 held over US$2.2 billion in assets, and received US$59 million in new contributions. Its return on invested endowment was 8.36%. The Foundation used those resources to authorize almost 3,000 grants worth US$85 million.
Major Accomplishments Originally called a ‘‘community trust,’’ Frederick Goff ’s innovative perception was to pool permanent endowments from wealthy individuals into a charitable corporation which would be continuously managed by a board of directors for a broadly defined set of purposes that would benefit of a defined community. The model prior to this time was for individuals of wealth to create a trust in their wills to benefit in perpetuity a specific cause – which led to outdated and unattended charitable trusts, which Goff called the ‘‘dead hand of philanthropy’’ (Magat, 1989). Incorporated with a broadly defined purpose, the community foundation model permits the Board of Directors to adjust the mission to meet changing community needs. By managing an endowment composed of pooled
Climate Action Network
gifts from many donors, the community foundation broadens the base for charitable giving to the community and brings economies of scale to the process of grantmaking and fundraising. Within 5 years, the Cleveland model had been adopted in Chicago (Illinois), Boston (Massachusetts), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Minneapolis (Minnesota), and Buffalo (New York). Ninety years later, there are more than 700 community foundations in the United States, and an additional 365 in 37 other countries (The Cleveland Foundation, ‘‘About the Cleveland Foundation’’).
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Goff, Frederick
References/Further Readings Howard, N. (1963). A trust for all time: The story of the Cleveland Foundation and the Community Trust Movement. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Foundation. Magat, R. (1989). An agile servant. Washington, DC: The Council on Foundations. Tittle, D. (1992). Rebuilding Cleveland: The Cleveland Foundation and its evolving urban strategy. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Climate Action Network KRISTIAN KRIEGER
Address of Organization International Secretariat Charles-de-Gaulle Strasse 5 53113 Bonn Germany www.climatenetwork.org/
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Brief History The Climate Action Network was founded in 1989, initially with regional representations in Europe and the United States. The rationale behind its establishment was the coordination of the activities of nongovernmental organizations and the provision of a forum for the development of a joint strategy of NGOs for and during the Second World Climate Conference in 1990. Since then, CAN continues to act as coordination network for NGO activities at international climate conferences. It has expanded the number of regional nodes from the original two to seven, complemented by national representations, as well as an increasing number of member organizations.
Mission CAN’s mission focuses on addressing the issue of climate change. Reflecting its nature of a coordination network, it states as its mission ‘‘to support and empower civil society organisations to influence the design and development of an effective global strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ensure its implementation at international, national, and local levels in the promotion of equity and sustainable development.’’
Activities In accordance to its origins, CAN is mainly concerned with influencing international negotiation processes, e.g., by issuing network-wide press releases and producing the conference newsletter ECO. Some regional offices of CAN also engage in other forms of advocacy work. CAN Europe, for instance, produces position papers on a wide range of issues relevant for international climate policy negotiations, and runs an information service on climate change. Beyond this advocacy work at international negotiations, CAN offers its members tools to coordinate their strategies and activities. The network uses CANtalk as main coordination tool which is used to send out confidential messages to all members. Physical coordination between all networks members only commenced in 2000 with the first CAN summit.
Introduction The Climate Action Network (CAN) is a loosely coordinated worldwide network comprising more than 365 member nongovernmental organizations from 85 countries. It is ‘‘working to promote government, private sector and individual action to limit human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels.’’ Members include large international NGOs such as Greenpeace, WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature, and Friends of the Earth, as well as smaller groups from developing countries such as Terre Vivante from Mauritania and the Green Coalition from the Philippines.
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Structure and Governance The Climate Action Network is a decentralised network coordinating the exchange of information and NGO strategy on international, regional, and national climate issues. It is organized in seven regional blocs with individual regional coordinators and subsets of national organizations. Only the regional nodes in Europe and the United States have offices with full-time staff whilst coordinators of the other regional nodes are usually members in regional NGOs that took on CAN work in addition to their NGO duties. Apart from being active in the policy field of
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global warming, organizations that seek membership have to obtain supporting letters of two existing member organizations and respect unwritten guidelines of conduct.
Funding The funding sources of individual member organizations and regional representations of the network are diverse. CAN Europe received funding from the European Commission, the Oak and the European Climate Foundations, the Belgian Environment Ministry, and its member organizations.
Accomplishments CAN is particularly well-known for the publication of its daily newsletter ECO during climate negotiations.
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Friends of the Earth ▶ Greenpeace ▶ NGOs and Sustainable Development ▶ Transnational Forums and Summits ▶ WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature
References/Further Readings Duwe, M. (2001). The climate action network: A glance behind the curtains of a transnational NGO network. Reciel, 10(2), 177–189. Newell, P. (2000). Climate for change: Non-state actors and the global politics of the greenhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clubs and Clans MARY KAY GUGERTY University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Introduction Clubs and clans are common forms of associational life globally and are significant components of civil society in many communities and societies. But in academic and popular usage, both concepts suffer from a lack of conceptual clarity in their definition and measurement. Clubs and clans each represent a distinct form of collective action, varying in their structure, membership attributes, and goals. These different features may affect the impact of each form of association on civic engagement and civil society. Here we seek to differentiate between the two according to key structural features, highlighting the resulting impacts and interactions with civil society.
Definition Smith et al. (2006) define clubs as nonprofit groups whose principal goal is to foster social relations and sociability with secondary goals of service, leisure, or political involvement. Clubs are membership associations in which members share similar needs, attitudes, or interests (Lord & Elmendorf, 2008). Clubs tend to be relatively small-scale, local and involve face-to-face contact. Clubs may be informal, small and independent, or they may formal and part of a larger federated national or international organization. Classic examples of service clubs in the United States include the Kiwanis, Rotary International, and the Elks. Examples of social clubs include country clubs, book clubs, or garden clubs. Some clubs may have a self-help or self-improvement character. Thus rotating savings and credit associations around the world help members accumulate capital, while other savings clubs provide insurance for unforeseen expenses resulting from ill health or death. The study of clubs also forms an important literature in public economics and economists have a specific way of defining clubs to examine how collective action in clubs is maintained. Economists view clubs as voluntary groups whose members derive mutual benefit from sharing the costs of providing a joint good or service, or by sharing similar interests or affiliations (Cornes & Sandler, 1996). Clubs provide collective goods that can be shared by members, but which nonmembers are unable to enjoy. Because of the excludable nature of club goods, clubs are more likely to overcome classic problems of free-riding and under-provision since they can charge members for participation (Olson, 1965). Clubs must therefore develop and maintain rules for entry and fees for membership as well as sanctions for those who do not contribute. Perhaps the classic example of a club is the country club, but club analysis has been extended to many arenas including the study of voluntary regulation programs among firms and nonprofits (Gugerty & Prakash, forthcoming). The core features of the club concept are shared goals and provision, shared cost of provision, and some kind of barrier to entry or membership restriction. The term ‘‘clan,’’ is also used in different ways by different disciplines, but these definitions share a common core. Clans are networks of individuals who typically know each other personally and transact face-to-face. Kinship-based clans are closed, nonvoluntary systems in which individuals are linked by ties based on ascriptive characteristics (such as ethnicity, religion, or caste) that are relatively immutable, at least in the short-run. By this definition, clans are not voluntary organizations, since an individual can not choose which clan to join. Kinship ties may be based on blood relations, or they may be ‘‘fictive’’ ties based on another
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close relationship such as family alliances, neighborhood, or village. A clan is both an organization and an identity (Collins, 2004). The goals of clan organization are typically to promote the interests of the clan, and do not necessarily include civic engagement or public service. The dense ties that bind members of a clan together form the basis for social cooperation. The term clan has also been adopted to study the structure of cooperation within more formal production organizations. This conception builds on Durkheim’s idea of clan as form of ‘‘organic solidarity’’ that resembles a kin network but has a different basis for membership (Durkheim, 1933). Clan forms of organization support cooperation through the socialization of participants into their roles within an organization, so that organizational goals are congruent with individual goals (Ouchi, 1980). Norms of reciprocity and common values and beliefs, along with shared information about ‘‘the ways things are done’’ suffice to undergird cooperation and joint production without the need for constant performance evaluation. With goal congruence, managers need to spend less time supervising employees or developing complex contracts that try to align employee incentives with those of managers. In this way, clan forms of organization reduce the transactions costs involved in monitoring workers. Rather than promoting self-interest, clans in this conception can produce quality production in settings requiring a high degree of teamwork and characterized by uncertain, fluid, or changing technologies.
Historical Background and International Perspectives The literature on formal voluntary clubs is surprisingly sparse, given their prevalence in many societies. In the United States, modern service clubs have their origins in the colonial era, when merchant clubs were established to support businesses (Sieder, 1996; Charles, 1993). These clubs undertook service projects to enhance the economic appeal of towns and cities, similar in many ways to modern Chambers of Commerce (Wilke, 1997). Subsequently, men’s fraternal organizations were established to address social and religious ends. While membership was drawn from a wider range of occupations than in the merchant clubs, these fraternal orders were deliberately exclusive and members entered by invitation only (Hapgood, 1989). Fraternal orders met member social aspirations through a series of symbolic and secret rituals of brotherhood, but also offered members illness and death benefits. Lodges served the community interest by contributing to local charities. Membership in such societies began to decline in the early twentieth century, as employers began to offer
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insurance benefits and industrialization gave rise to a growing middle-class. Responding to greater leisure and income, new clubs formed around recreational pursuits. Women’s clubs and societies emerged as an outlet for educated to expand their social and public sphere, which translated into a great deal of civic activity (Charles, 1993). In response to these changes, the first Rotary club was founded in 1905, with the goals of increasing the business contacts of members and supporting community service (Charles, 1993). While Rotary and other clubs initially focused on the promotion of business interests, after World War I service took on a larger role, as middleclass men sought to assert their influence in their communities (Wilke, 1997). By 1995, however, Robert Putnam argued that civic participation and associational life in the United States was in marked decline, measured in part by substantial declines in participation in fraternal organizations, service clubs, parent-teacher associations and, most famously, bowling leagues (Putnam, 1995, 2000). Service clubs could be seen as uniquely American phenomenon, but service clubs have a large international profile as well. By 1930, Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions clubs had been established on every continent and by 1997 worldwide membership was reported to be nearly three million (Wilke, 1999). Perhaps because they were seen as incubators of middle-class values, informal social clubs often sprung among marginalized and excluded populations: African-Americans in the United States (Crewe & Reynolds, 2006), among immigrants (Mooney, 2003; Portes & Landolt, 2000) and among colonized populations (Newell, 2001). Clans historically formed the basis for social and economic organizations in many societies, but the expectation of many political scientists and sociologists was that clans were incompatible with modern society and that as modernization occurred, clans would wither away as loyalties shifted from family and village to state and nation (Huntington, 1968). However, in many modern societies clans persist as important forms of social organization. The ‘‘economy of affection,’’ in which informal forms of social organization permeate civic and political life, continues to persist in many societies (Hyden, 1980; Scott, 1976). Informally organized clans continue to resist state power over social order in many countries in the Middle East (Anderson, 1986) and in Central Asia (Collins, 2006). In many countries in Africa, the failure of colonial and postcolonial states to fully consolidate borders and permeate societies contributes to the influence of informal social organizations, such as clan, on civic life (Herbst, 2000). Many scholars of democracy argue that
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clan-based forms of social organization continue to impede democratic reform and economic growth in a number of countries (Lauth, 2000). Collins (2004) documents how clans in Central Asia have tended to ‘‘crowd out’’ other forms of association that might act as a counterweight to clan or state power. As a result clan politics tends to undermine civil and political liberties and may create a vicious circle in which clans vie to strip the state of productive assets.
Key Issues A large body of theoretic and empirical work seeks to understand how associational life is connected to civic engagement and civic vibrancy. The connection between participation and associations is often traced back to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville who emphasized how faceto-face interactions in civic associations undergirded American democracy in the mid-nineteenth century. Tocqueville argued that participation pulled people away from the closed, binding ties of family and kinship and encouraged them to develop habits of association and to work for the common good (Tocqueville, 1969 [1840]). Since then a number of ‘‘neo-Tocquevillians’’ have analyzed these arguments in more systematic fashion (Howard & Gilbert, 2008). These scholars propose a number of pathways through which associational life contributes to civil society and several characteristics of associational form and purpose that may matter for these contributions. First, participation in associations helps create social capital, conceived as the ‘‘norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement’’ that facilitate cooperation and generate trust (Putnam et al., 1993; Putnam, 2000). While the work of Robert Putnam is perhaps the best-known recent contribution to this literature, his work builds on the earlier contributions of Bourdieu (1980) and Coleman (1988). Bourdieu defined social capital as the opportunities and resources that accrue to individuals because of their membership in particular communities and as a result of investments made in individual and communal relationships (Portes and Landolt, 1996). Coleman viewed social capital as a resource lodged in interpersonal relationships that could be both a source of social control as well as a source for civic advancement. Putnam, Nanetti, and Leonardi’s (1993) research on civic life in Italy argued that participation in intensive, face-to-face, horizontally organized forms of association in the north Italy produced norms of generalized reciprocity and trust that could sustain collective action for collective benefit. Such cooperative experience, they argued, provided a template for future cooperation, overcoming classic dangers of free-riding and shirking (ibid; Olson, 1965).
The social capital argument makes several assumptions about the kind of associational life needed to create social capital. First, the social capital perspective argues that horizontal, democratic, ‘‘web-like’’ networks and associations contribute more to civic life than do more hierarchical, vertical forms of organization. Horizontal associations are more likely to foster norms of generalized trust: as interactions are repeated, reputations are built and social ties can be used to sanction or discipline noncooperators. Vertical or hierarchical associations are less likely to generate information and trust, because subordinates typically have less access to information and are less able to sanction superiors. In addition, open associations are thought to contribute more to civic life than more closed forms of association. Associations with a high degree of closure can create a form of thick trust that enhances cooperation among insiders, but this closure may also result in distrust of outsiders. As a result, it does not provide the basis for a more generalized civic engagement (Coleman, 1988; Wollebeck & Selle, 2002). These associations create ‘‘strong ties’’ that bind members together, rather than ‘‘weak ties’’ that connect and transmit information but do not encumber (Granovetter, 1973). In this view, associations are more likely to generate trust and shared norms when they are ‘‘bridging’’ rather than ‘‘bonding’’ organizations (Woolcock & Narayan, 2000). Associational life may also enhance civil society through the inculcation of civic and political skills (Cohen & Rogers, 1995; Verba et al., 1995). But the acquisition of civic skills may require active participation: attending meetings, writing letters, learning to mediate conflict. Active face-to-face participation, rather than passive participation, may be necessary for associational life to impact civic engagement. The specific goals of association may also matter for civil society and particularly for political engagement. The social capital argument rests on the assumption the associational participation affects the internal orientation of individuals, making them more likely to engage externally in ways that promote good governance and accountable institutions. But it is possible that participation in associations for one’s own pleasure and leisure does not directly translate to civic engagement (Fung, 2003). In addition, political engagement may be result only if associations are explicitly political in nature. Finally, association goals matter because associational life has a dark side (Theiss-Morse & Hibbing, 2005) and social capital can easily be ‘‘unsocial’’ in nature (Levi, 1996). Members of the Aryan Brotherhood or the Ku Klux Klan all attend meetings, elect officers, and make
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decisions democratically within the group, but without the external pursuit of democratic ends (Armony, 2004). Thus associational life can act to defend the status quo against demands for greater civic engagement or to undermine civil society through the pursuit of narrow group goals. In this case, horizontal organization within associations is not by itself a good metric by which to judge the civic contributions of associations. But, it is also possible that exclusive, hierarchical associations may nonetheless possess the potential to increase individual potential for civic engagement by fostering self-respect and self-confidence (Rosenblum, 1998).
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consist of dense ties, and involve face-to-face interaction. Clubs and clans tend to differ in their membership recruitment tactics and capabilities to promote bridging ties outside the group. On the face of it, clubs appear to be more potent incubators of civil society, but the impact of any particular club will depend on its particular constellation of characteristics. Not all clubs have bridging characteristics. Membership may be quite exclusive and club goals nondemocratic. Thus understanding the context of clubs and clans is critical to understanding their potential to contribute to civil society.
Future Directions Contributions of Clubs and Clans to Civil Society
In many ways, social and service clubs are the exemplars of social capital, at least according to Putnam’s early work. But social science literature is largely pessimistic on the ability of clans to build civic engagement and civil society since clans tend to promote communal norms and values and create ‘‘bonding’’ rather than bridging forms of networks and social capital. Trust tends to be particularistic and clan-specific: as some have noted, the ‘‘radius’’ of particularized trust is short (Fukuyama, 2000). Many kin-based clans tend to be narrow, exclusivist and relatively non-civic (Gibson, 2001). While clans promote norms of reciprocity that facilitate collective action, this reciprocity tends not to extend outside the clan. Table 1 summarizes the stylized characteristics of clubs and clans based on the discussion above. Clubs and clans share key features: they are typically horizontally organized,
Clubs and clans are forms of association in constant flux. Since the mid-nineteenth century, voluntary clubs in the United States have reinvented themselves numerous times and proliferated in many countries around the world. In the new century, new forms of cyber-connection may replace older face-to-face forms of association, but with as yet unknown impact. While participation in social and service clubs has declined in many western societies, participation in professionalized membership organizations has grown. Some scholars of civil society have argued that the passive involvement characteristic of this form of membership is less likely to produce social capital. From this perspective, these professionalized ‘‘tertiary’’ membership associations are essentially ‘‘advocates without members’’ and are less likely to provide hands-on experience or teach civic skills (Skocpol, 1999). Moreover, since the main method of contribution in
Clubs and Clans. Table 1 Stylized features of clubs and clans Characteristic Structure & maintenance
Clubs
Clans
Horizontal
Vertical and horizontal
Dense
Dense
Face-to-face
Face-to-face
May involve democratic or traditional authority
Tend to involve traditional basis for authority
Active participation
Active participation
Network ties based on shared benefits, shared goals Network ties based on personal loyalty and patronage Membership
Goals
Open but limited
Closed
Voluntary
Involuntary, based on ascriptive characteristics
Bridging & bonding
Bonding
Public service
Service of the clan
Member benefit
Member benefit
Social/recreational Political engagement
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these associations is typically financial, membership is skewed towards individuals with higher levels of education and income, in comparison to older secondary associations whose memberships often crossed class and occupational lines and provided civic opportunities to a wider crosssection of individuals (Skocpol, 2003). Others have argued, however, that large national organizations play a critical role in civil society by mediating collective identities and shaping public discourse (Minkoff, 1997). Other observers argue that the available data do not capture new forms of association – soccer leagues, health clubs, and motorcycle groups – that are replacing older forms of associational life in the United States (Schudson, 1996; Stengel, 1996). A number of scholars seek to identify the conditions under which informal associations such as clans may contribute in more positive ways to civic life. Where informal association goals exhibit congruence with state goals, informal institutions may have complementary effects on civic life. Such complementary outcomes have been observed in countries such as Chile and Costa Rica. (Helmke & Levitsky, 2003; Lauth, 2000). The clan metaphor in the study of firms underlines the positive productive capacity of clan forms of organization; the challenge is to develop crosscutting ties across clans that create a shared interest in a common civic life.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History of ▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society and Ethnicity ▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ Coleman, James ▶ Collective Action ▶ Durkheim, Emile ▶ Goods and Services, Types of ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ Mutual Organizations Mutual Societies ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Skocpol, Theda ▶ Social Capital, Definition of
References/Further Readings Anderson, L. (1986). The state and social transformation in Tunisia and Libya: 1830-1984. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Armony, A. C. (2004). The dubious link: Civic engagement and democratization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ayala, L. (2000). Trained for democracy: The differing effects of voluntary and involuntary organizations on political participation. Political Research Quarterly, 53, 99–115. Banfield, E. (1958). The moral basis of a backward society. Glencoe, IL/ Chicago: Free Press/Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago. Bates, R. (2001). Prosperity and violence: The political economy of development. New York: Norton. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le capital social: Notes provisoires. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 31, 2–3. Charles, J. A. (1993). Service clubs in American society: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Cohen J., & Rogers, J. (1995). Associations and democracy. London: Verso. Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95–121. Collins, K. (2004). The logic of clan politics: Evidence from the central asian trajectories. World Politics, 56, 224–261. Collins, K. (2006). Clan politics and regime transition in Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cornes, R., & Sandler, T. ([1986]1996). The theory of externalities, public goods, and club goods (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crewe, E., & Reynolds, S. (2006). Black Women’s Clubs: Mitigating the effects of inequality. Paper presented at the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, 2006 Annual Meeting. Durkheim, E. (1933). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press. Fukuyama, F. (2000). Social capital and civil society. IMF Working Paper 00/74. Conference Paper, IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms. Fung, A. (2003). Associations and democracy: Between theories, hopes, and realities. Annual Review of Sociology, 21(1), 515–539. Gibson, J. (2001). Social networks, civil society and the prospects for consolidating Russia’s democratic transition. American Journal of Political Science, 45(1), 51–69. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. The American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. Gugerty, M. K., & Prakash, A. (2008). Nonprofit Accountability Clubs: Voluntary regulation of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. Manuscript under review at Cambrdige Univeristy Press. Hapgood, L. A. (1989). Dimensions of service: The Kiwanis story. Chicago: Kiwanis International. Helmke, G., & Levitsky, S. (2003). Informal institutions and comparative politics: A research agenda. Paper presented at the conference Informal Institutions in Latin America, University of Notre Dame, April 23–24. Herbst, J. (1999). States and power in Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Herbst, J. (2000). States and power in Africa: Comparative lessons in authority and control. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howard, M. M., Gilbert, L. (2008). A cross national comparison of the internal effects of participation in voluntary associations. Political Studies, 56, 12–32. Huntington, S. P. (1968). Political order in changing societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hyden, G. (1980). Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an uncaptured peasantry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kaufman, J., & Tepper, S. J. (1999). Groups or gatherings? Sources of political engagement in 19th century American cities. Voluntas: International Journal of voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 10(4), 299–322.
Coady, Moses Michael Lauth, H. J. (2000). Informal institutions and democracy. Democratization, 7(4), 21–50. Levi, M. (1996). Social and unsocial capital: A review essay of Robert Putnam’s making democracy work. Political Studies, 24, 45–55. Lord, B. E., & Elmendorf, B. F. (2008). Are recreation organizations representative of all participants? Journal of Park & Recreation Administration, 26(1), 87–96. Minkoff, D. (1997). A producing social capital: National Social Movements and civil society. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(5), 606–619. Mooney, M. (2003). Migrant’s social ties in the U.S. and investment in Mexico. Social Forces, 81(3), 1147–1170. Newell, S. (2001). Paracolonial networks: Some speculations on local readerships in Colonial West Africa. Interventions, 3(3), 336–354. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ouchi, W. G. (1980). Markets, bureaucracies and clans. Administrative Science Quarterly, 25, 129–136. Portes, A., & Landolt, P. (1996). The downside of social capital. The American Prospect, 26, 18–23. Portes, A., & Landolt, P. (2000). Social capital: Promises and pitfalls of its role in development. Journal of Latin American Studies, 32, 528–547. Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy 6.1, 65–78. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. (1993). Making democracy work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenblum, N. (1998). Membership and morals: The personal uses of pluralism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schudson, M. (1996). What if civic life didn’t die? The American Prospect, 25, 17–20. Scott, J. C. (1976). The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sieder, R. (1996). Central America: A fragile transition. New York, NY.: St. Martin’s Press. Skocpol, T. (1999). Advocates without members: The recent transformation of American civic life. In T. Skocpol & M. P. Fiorina (Eds.), Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Skocpol, T. (2003). Diminished democracy: From membership to management in American civic life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Smith, D. H., Stebbins, R. A. et al. (2006). A dictionary of nonprofit terms and concepts. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Stengel, R. (1996). Bowling together. Time, July 22, 1996. Theiss-Morse, E., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Citizenship and civic engagement. Annual Review of Political Science, 8, 227–249. Tocqueville, de A. (1969 [1840]). Democracy in America. New York: Harper Collins. Uslaner, E., & Conley, R. (2003). Civic engagement and particularized trust: The ties that bind people to their ethnic communities. American Politics Research, 31, 1–30. Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady, H. E. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilke, T. A. (1997). Those benevolent boosters: Spatial patterns of Kiwanis membership in the United States. Journal of Cultural Geography, 17(1). Wilke, T. A. (1999). International expansion of the American-Style Service Club. Journal of American Culture, 22(2), 45–52.
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Wollebaek, D., & Selle, P. (2002). Does participation in voluntary associations contribute to social capital? The impact of intensity, scope, and type. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 31(1), 32–61. Woolcock, M., & Narayan, D. (2000). Social capital: Implications for development theory, research, and policy. World Bank Research Observer, 15(2), 225–249.
Coady, Moses Michael JIM LOTZ
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1882 in the Margaree Valley in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (Canada), Moses Coady led the Antigonish Movement, based at Saint Francis University (StFX) in that town from 1928 to 1952. Through it, thousands of poor fishermen, farmers, and miners learned how to break out of poverty and dependency through a program that combined adult education with the formation of co-operatives and credit unions. Coady entered StFX in 1903, becoming a college athlete and an outstanding student. Influenced by his double cousin, Father Jimmy Tompkins, he studied for the priesthood in Rome, and was ordained there in 1910. Returning home, Coady joined the faculty of StFX and helped Tompkins to organize the first People’s School on the campus in 1921. In that year, he also revitalized the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union. In 1928, StFX set up an Extension Department, headed by Coady. He took up his duties there after organizing the United Maritime Fishermen. Through the 1930s, Coady and his small staff set up study groups throughout Eastern Nova Scotia. The members practiced self-help, mutual aid, and local self reliance through creating credit unions and cooperatives. In 1939, Coady published Masters of Their Own Destiny, a visionary book on how to create what its author called ‘‘the good and abundant society.’’ Coady retired from StFX in 1952. He died in Antigonish in 1959, the year in which StFX established the Coady International Institute to continue his work in developing nations.
Major Contributions A tall, rugged-looking individual, Coady had a charismatic presence, an exciting teaching style, and the ability to simplify complex issues. Co-operatives had a long history in Nova Scotia. The genius of the Antigonish Movement lay in the way its leaders combined the creation of credit unions and co-operatives with an ongoing program of adult education. They encouraged members of study
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groups to ‘‘Listen! Study! Discuss! Act!’’ and supplied them with information on how to solve their problems. Coady, a powerful orator, inspired people by telling them that they could do ‘‘ten times what you think you can.’’ He urged consumers to use their buying power to make merchants responsive and accountable to their needs. Since 1959, the Coady International Institute has taught over 5,000 learners from developing nations how to tackle problems of poverty and exclusion.
Cross-References
▶ Cooperatives and Employee Ownership ▶ Credit Unions ▶ Tompkins, James John, Rev.
References/Further Readings Alexander, A. (1997). The Antigonish movement: Moses Coady and adult education today. Toronto: Thompson Educational Pub. Coady, M. M. (1939). Masters of their own destiny. New York: Harper and Brothers. Lotz, J., (2005). The humble giant: Moses Coady, Canada’s rural revolutionary. Ottawa: Novalis. Welton, M. (2001). Little Mosie from Margaree. Toronto: Thompson Educational Pub.
Coalitions and Networks JONATHAN FOX University of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Introduction Coalitions are partnerships among distinct actors that coordinate action in pursuit of shared goals. But what distinguishes them from other kinds of partnerships? The term is widely used to describe joint ventures in a wide range of arenas, most notably in international geopolitics or political party competition and governance. The literature on coalitions is dominated by discussions of war and peace, election campaigns, and parliamentary dynamics. Just as in war or politics, successful collective action in civil society often depends on the formation and survival of coalitions – insofar as the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts.
Definition In a review of the political science literature on ‘‘coalition theory and government formation,’’ Strøm and Nyblade define coalitions more broadly as ‘‘a team of individuals
or groups that unites for a common purpose’’ (2007: 782). Yet this formulation is so broad that it could describe most forms of collective action – and hence fall prey to ‘‘conceptual stretching’’ (Sartori, 1984). Clearly, coalitions involve collective action, but they involve collaboration between actors that remain distinct in some way (in contrast, for example, to fusion or a merger). Downs offers a more precise definition of coalition: ‘‘when two or more political groups or actors agree to pursue some common objective(s), pool resources . . . and actively communicate during joint action’’ (2008). He suggests that one of the most challenging questions involve the conditions under which adversaries sometimes cooperate. Many approaches to coalitions refer to interest-based collaboration involving instrumental behavior, often within a limited time horizon, in pursuit of tangible goals (e.g., to win a war, an election, or to pass legislation). From the viewpoint of civil society analysis, however, many actors that form coalitions are also value-based in their orientation. These values may well conflict with some of the instrumental behaviors and power imbalances that often characterize, for example, short-term campaigns. This latter view of coalition does not resonate with the verb to coalesce, which implies growing together – but it raises one of the main issues that arises when considering coalitions and alliances (a widely used synonym). One of the main challenges involved in defining coalitions is how to distinguish them from networks. Among the many definitions of network, few are tailored to civil society actors. Keck and Sikkink’s classic study offers a succinct formulation: ‘‘[N]etworks are forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange’’ (1998: 8). Both coalitions and networks vary empirically in terms of their respective degrees of centralization or decentralization. For organizational theorists, who distinguish networks from markets and hierarchies, coalitions would refer to a form of network. For civil society actors, coalitions refer to networks that are engaged in joint action. As Keck put it, ‘‘coalitions are networks in action mode’’ (cited in Fox, 2002).
Key Issues Coalitions Are Distinct from Networks and Movements
In practice, civil society discussions often use the term coalition interchangeably with movements and networks. Yet the three terms are not synonyms, and for analytical purposes it is useful to distinguish between them. Movements are always grounded in social networks,
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though only some networks generate movements (Diani & McAdam, 2003). In the process, labels can be confusing – some dense coalitions refer to themselves as networks. Some thin networks refer to themselves as coalitions. Some coalitions of disparate actors describe themselves as movements, overstating their degree of cohesion and shared collective identity; on the other hand, some movements may express themselves as coalitions of organizations. Meanwhile, the global justice movement has been described as a ‘‘movement of movements’’ (e.g., Sen et al., 2004). One way to frame the distinction between networks, coalitions, and movements is to consider each term as referring to a different point along a continuum of varying degrees of organizational density and social cohesion. This approach provides a useful lens for disentangling the various strands that come together in the ‘‘thickening’’ of civil society (Fox, 1996). Moreover, transnational coalitions face challenges that are similar to those faced by domestic coalitions – especially insofar as they cross class, gender, or racial boundaries (Bandy & Smith, 2005: 7). Both networks and coalitions involve interconnected systems of communication, grounding the emergence of a transnational public sphere. Yet while many networks involve shared goals among their participants, they do not necessarily involve joint action. Whether networks are face-to-face or virtual, they involve exchanges of information, experiences, and expressions of solidarity. Sometimes these exchanges generate networks of ongoing relationships. Sometimes these networks generate the shared goals, mutual trust, and understanding needed to form coalitions capable of collaborating on specific campaigns. But networks do not necessarily coordinate their actions, nor do they necessarily come to agreement on specific joint actions (as implied by the concept of coalition). Transnational movements are, in turn, distinct from both networks and coalitions. Movements imply a high degree of shared collective identity, for example, yet neither networks nor coalitions necessarily involve significant horizontal exchange between participants. Indeed, many rely on a handful of interlocutors to manage relationships between broad-based social organizations that may have relatively little awareness of the nature and actions of their counterparts. At the same time, some transnational movements achieve such a high degree of shared symbolism and collective identity that active members can identify strongly with each other in spite of very limited actual contact – as in the emblematic case of the anti-apartheid movement of in the 1970s and 1980s. For a paradigmatic contemporary coalition of
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transnational social movements, in which NGOs play a strictly support role, consider the Via Campesina experience (e.g., Borras et al., 2008; Desmarias, 2007). The concept of transnational social movements suggest a much higher degree of density and much more cohesion than is involved in networks or coalitions. The more precise term ‘‘transnational movement organization’’ suggests an organized membership base that is present in more than one country, as in the case of diasporic movements of organized migrants, or transnational federations that have organized affiliates (not just employees) in multiple countries, such as Amnesty International, Catholics for Choice, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Oxfam. The term transnational is stressed here to avoid confusion with the term ‘‘international NGO,’’ which is often misapplied to NGOs that are fundamentally national but are involved in international activities. Note that underscoring these distinctions between various degrees of density does not imply any judgment that more cooperation is necessarily better. On the contrary, realistic expectations about what is possible are critical to sustain any kind of collective action. Indeed, cross-border cooperation involves significant costs and risks that must be taken into account, depends heavily on finding both appropriate counterparts with whom to cooperate, and needs shared targets to inspire joint action (Fox, 2002; Khagram et al., 2002). As Table 1 suggests, transnational civil society exchanges can produce networks, which can produce coalitions, which can produce movements. Distinguishing between networks, coalitions, and movements helps to avoid blurring political differences and power imbalances within what may appear from the outside to be implicitly more homogeneous transnational movements. As Keck and Sikkink point out, transnational networks face the challenge of developing a ‘‘common frame of meaning’’ in spite of cross-cultural differences (1998: 7). In practice, such shared meanings are socially constructed through joint action and mutual understanding rather than merely through professed values and goals. Political differences within transnational networks are also not to be underestimated, in spite of apparently shared goals. Even those transnational networks that appear to share basic political-cultural values, such as environmental, feminist, indigenous, or human rights movements, often consist of actors who have very different, quite nationally distinct political visions, goals, and cultures. At the same time, national borders are not the only ones. For example, ecologists or feminists from different countries who share systemic critiques may have
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Coalitions and Networks. Table 1 Transnational civil society networks, coalitions, and movements Shared characteristics
Transnational networks
Transnational coalitions
Transnational movement organizations
Exchange of information and experiences
Shared
Shared
Shared
Organized social base
Some have bases, others do not
Some have bases, others do not
Counterparts have bases
Mutual support
Sometimes shared, from afar and sometimes strictly discursive
Shared
Shared
Material interests
Not necessarily shared
Sometimes shared
Sometimes shared
Joint actions & campaigns
Sometimes loose coordination
Shared, based on mutually agreed goals, often short-term, tactical
Shared, based on shared long-term strategy
Ideologies
Not necessarily shared
Not necessarily shared
Usually shared
Collective identities and political cultures
Often not shared
Often not shared
Shared political values, repertoires, and identities
Shading illustrates suggested degree of relationship density and cohesion
more in common with their cross-border counterparts than they do with the more moderate wings of their respective national movements. Networks Often Need Shared Targets to Become Coalitions
As Edelman notes, ‘‘networks beget networks’’ (2004). Yet one of the distinctive characteristics of network activity is ‘‘its dual quality as both a means to an end and an end in itself ’’ (Riles, 2001: 51, cited in Edelman, 2004). Coalitions, in contrast, are much more likely to be means to an end. This distinction raises the question of the conditions under which networks become coalitions, in the sense of sustaining joint action among members. The interestbased principle of ‘‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’’ may be enough to account for coalition formation among nation-states or political parties, but is often not sufficient to account for collaboration between civil society actors. Shared political ideologies certainly facilitate coalition formation, but are not a precondition – indeed, coordination between actors of differing ideologies distinguishes coalitions from movements, which involve shared worldviews and collective identities. What role, then, does ideology play in bringing together otherwise diverse actors? The menu of civil society ideologies shared across borders has changed over time, from the primary role played by religious, Cold War, and anticolonial worldviews in the mid and late twentieth century to now also include environmentalism, feminism, indigenous rights, and human rights, among others. Arguably, epistemic communities – transnational networks that share technical scientific, or professional worldviews – might also be seen as being
grounded in shared ideologies (Haas, 1992). Like other transnationally shared worldviews, their adherents include policy makers as well as civil society actors. In practice, apparently global ideologies are locally appropriated in distinct ways. As a result, few ideologies are shared homogeneously by social actors in different countries. Political Islam would be one of the most prominent contemporary examples. The notion of shared ideology goes far beyond shared goals, to include comprehensive visions of desirable futures, based on political cultures and values. In short, since ideologies are rooted in political cultures, few are shared across borders. Sometimes collaborative experiences can generate shared political values, cultures, and ideologies, but that level of unity is the result of the process of joint action, not the starting point. To explain most cross-border civil society partnerships, therefore, one must look beyond shared ideologies. Shared targets are key, though not all shared targets are either obvious or predetermined. Shared threats are the clearest candidate, as in the notable case of emblematic bearers of economic globalization, such as the WTO, the World Bank or NAFTA (e.g., Bandy & Smith, 2005; Edwards & Gaventa, 2001; Fox & Brown, 1998; Fox, 2002, 2005; Khagram et al., 2002). Shared targets can also be ‘‘politically constructed’’ – as in the case of efforts to build cross-border partnerships for fair trade. Shared targets are especially relevant for coalition building because they create opportunities for joint action – thus transcending expressions of solidarity to actively pursue shared goals. Yet shared targets do not necessarily provoke coalition formation. For a notable example, the US war in Indochina provoked protest in countries all over the world, yet
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there was little coordination between national antiwar movements. Civil Society Networks and Coalitions Are Based on Interests as Well as Ideas
Transnational advocacy networks are defined ‘‘largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values in motivating their formation’’ (Keck & Sikkink, 1998: 1). Indeed, many cross-border civil society relationships are motivated by shared worldviews. Other analysts claim that interests predominate, and characterize North–South civil society relationships as driven by competition in a ‘‘global morality market’’ (Bob, 2005: 4). In this view, well-endowed international NGOs provide the supply of support, while a myriad of local causes constitute the demand. In the context of this power imbalance, Bob argues that principles are insufficient to account for international NGOs’ choice of ‘‘clients,’’ and that they have ‘‘strong incentives to devote themselves to the challenger whose profile most closely matches their own requirements’’ (2005: 5). Bob’s framework is undermined by its assumption that the global marketplace of civil society issues is inherently fixed – if it could grow, then competition for support would not be a zero-sum conflict, as he suggests. In the context of the previous focus on shared targets as grounding the joint action associated with coalitions, one question is whether those targets are chosen based on ideas or interests. Moreover, coalition partners may share targets but bring different motivations, especially when coalitions reach across borders, classes, ideologies, or cultures (Rose, 2000). The 1999 labor–environmental coalition that protested the WTO in Seattle was a classic case. Further probing suggests that the ‘‘ideas vs. interests’’ frame for explaining the motivations of collective action is often a false dichotomy. For example, while human rights activists are certainly driven by strongly held values, many frontline rights defenders are also acting in self-defense – in the immediate interest of themselves and their communities. Conversely, the defense of worker rights – which for exploited workers is clearly grounded in self-interest, is also a value-based cause, often for those same workers. Consider a classic slogan from the early twentieth-century US labor movement: ‘‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’’ This idea is intended to convince people that self-interest is broadly defined, thereby challenging the dichotomy between ideas and interests. One of the main characteristics of sustained coalitions is that each party’s self-interest comes to be redefined through collective action, reciprocity, and deepened mutual understanding to create a broader sense of shared, common interests.
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Both Keck and Sikkink, and Bob concur that the different parties to cross-border civil society relationships are strategic in the framing, the content, and the targeting of their campaigns. Both approaches recognize power imbalances within North–South coalitions. Indeed, studies of domestic civil society campaigns would find analogous imbalances between national capitals and the provinces. Hertel’s study takes the discussion one step further in her study of the North–South tensions within transnational coalitions (2006). Her study of two human rights campaigns underscores the different repertoires that ‘‘receiving-end activists’’ use to either block or modulate Northern-led campaigns that are ostensibly on their behalf. Another approach to disentangling ideas and interests within coalitions involves distinguishing between coalitions that are issue-based, versus those that are constituency-based. In other words, some coalitions are driven by campaigning for or against a specific goal (or target), while others are based on the recognition that different actors share similar interests – without necessarily assuming a predetermined shared goal. The latter approach involves a coming together of counterparts, which are defined as actors that share similar social locations and political challenges in their respective societies (Fox, 2002). For example, while indigenous rights activists from around the world come from unique cultures, with their own distinctive histories of struggle, many face analogous dynamics of social and political exclusion. Sustainable Coalitions Require Clear Terms of Engagement
Coalitions, insofar as they involve coordinated action in pursuit of shared goals, are most sustainable when grounded in shared terms of engagement – such as the principle that each party should ‘‘agree to disagree’’ about a wide range of issues outside the scope of the coalition’s goals. More generally, realistic expectations are key. Yet many dimensions of mutual engagement often receive little explicit attention. For example, it is often a challenge to develop mechanisms for mutual accountability and transparency. Indeed, to the degree that civil society coalitions bring together disparate actors, they will have different expectations and definitions of mutual accountability (e.g., Jordan & Van Tuijl, 2006). Balanced decision-making processes are especially difficult to construct, especially across cultural and organizational divides. Who decides how representative each actor is? In a single membership organization, a one person, one vote principle is straightforward, but how is representation to be allocated in coalitions that include membership organizations of different sizes? If a simple majority rule were to
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always prevail, then organizations with smaller memberships and different ideas would feel excluded and have little incentive to participate. If the larger organizations see a need to keep the smaller ones onboard, for example, to ensure more ideological breadth or ethnic diversity, then they may well accept a one organization–one vote principle (e.g., the Congress for a People’s Agrarian Reform in the Philippines in the late 1980s). Similarly, how is decisionmaking power to be allocated in coalitions that are composed of NGOs, which may be of varying sizes, or have degrees of commitment to the campaign? Multi-sectoral coalitions also face this challenge, especially if they combine NGOs and broad-based membership organizations – each with very different political cultures and concepts of representation (e.g., the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, on the US–Mexican border). The terms of engagement underlying coalitions are also complicated by the role of money. Access to resources often shapes an organization’s capacity to sustain participation in coalitions – especially across distances. In some cases, under the influence of external funders, coalitions only exist because of access to resources. Sustainable Multi-sectoral Coalitions Depend on Cross-Cultural Interlocutors
Shared goals and targets are often not enough to sustain coalitions. Given the limitless possibilities for misunderstanding and conflict in coalitions which bring diverse actors together, cross-cultural interlocutors that can bridge the gaps between them are key. They are the ‘‘synapses’’ and ‘‘relays’’ that make communication possible. Tarrow calls them ‘‘rooted cosmopolitans’’ (2005). They must play the role of translator, both in the linguistic and the conceptual sense – in order to help each actor understand where the others are coming from. These communication skills are also crucial for establishing trust, insofar as by entering into a coalition, actors must trust their new partners to avoid actions that would put them at risk through guilt by association. To play this linking role, these interlocutors require both cultural capital and social capital. In the language of social capital, coalitions embody bridging social capital. In this context, the cross-cultural interlocutors are actors that play this bridging role. These interlocutors apply the glue that undergirds the ‘‘strength of weak ties’’ (Granovetter, 1973). Transnational Coalitions Are Long-Term Investments with Uncertain Payoffs
Networks that do more than exchange information from afar require human and material resources. Coalitions, because of their higher levels of coordination and joint
action, require even more resources to sustain (Fox, 2002). Less well-endowed groups must carefully weigh the trade-offs involved in transnational engagement. Aside from the travel costs and carbon footprint, every week that an activist spends in another country is a week not spent organizing on the ground at home. Yet private foundations are often more willing to fund international travel than grassroots organizing. Coalitions can also involve certain risks, insofar as one set of partners may or may not consult before making decisions that could be politically costly for the other. Local struggles that overestimate their international allies’ clout can pay a high price, as in the Ogoni case in the mid-1990s (Bob, 2005). On the positive side, investments in networks and coalitions often generate social capital, which can produce often unpredictable multiplier effects. But precisely because the empowering effects are difficult to assess, investments in coalitions compete with much more pressing demands, and with alternative investments that promise more immediate results. This calculus underscores the political economy foundations of coalitional engagement that can keep grassroots movements and NGOs apart. Grassroots movements are under pressure to deliver tangible results to their bases in the near term, while large NGOs can afford to make longerterm investments with uncertain results.
International Perspectives The resonance of terms like coalition and network differ across social and linguistic contexts. Their meanings often must be politically constructed, especially in societies with strong legacies of centralized, vertical forms of social organization. In the history of Mexican civil society, for example, long before electoral democratization, grassroots movements challenged the dominant corporatist form of aggregating membership organizations (literally called centrales). In response, local movements of the urban poor, peasants, teachers, and other workers forged linkages across regions permitting joint action without sacrificing their autonomy. These coalitions were called coordinadoras – literally ‘‘coordinating bodies’’ (Fox & Herna´ndez, 1992). Meanwhile, NGO activists in Mexico were adopting the term ‘‘red ’’ – a term that not only means network, but also net. As civil society strategist Gustavo Esteva pointed out, however – before the Internet – nets can be used to capture things (1987). Those zealous of defending their autonomy were wary of being ensnared – even in relationships that were supposedly horizontal. In response, in an effort to describe the kind of flexible mutual support, joint action and horizontal relationships that respect the autonomy of
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each participant, Esteva proposed the alternative term: hammock. Hammocks are flexible, they adapt to each participant’s particulars, they are portable, and are available as needed.
Future Directions Much of the literature on coalitions in general is relevant to understanding the dynamics that are specific to civil society actors. Yet the broader discussion tends to focus on coalition formation and maintenance – and much less on the question of under what conditions coalitions reach their goals. For political party coalitions, for example, the goal is straightforward – retaining institutional power. Civil society coalition goals are often quite different – for example, their strategies often attempt to influence the behavior of other actors, such as states, international organizations or private firms, whose actions in turn would either do less harm or more good. The various links in this causal chain complicate efforts to explain the impacts of civil society campaigns. Coalition partners may also differ over what kinds of impact count. For some, changing the terms of debate or official policies in national or international arenas may be the key battles, yet such victories often translate with great difficulty into tangible improvements on the ground. In some cases, local–global coalitions may win policy victories that only apply to future decisions, leaving the local partners still subjected to the results of past decisions that are not reopened (e.g., Clark et al., 2003). Coalition partners may also assess partial victories differently, depending on whether they have minimalist or maximalist expectations – and on whom they represent. International campaigners may declare victory and move on, while local organizers still face the task of making limited concessions meaningful at the community level. These differences over how to assess impacts reflect the broader challenge of addressing cultural, ideological, and interest-based differences within coalitions. In this context, leadership certainly plays a key role in encouraging the shared vision, mutual understanding, and respect for difference that are all required to keep disparate actors working together. Deep down, however, where one stands depends on where one sits.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Amnesty International ▶ Citizens Coalition for Economic Justice ▶ Collective Action ▶ Friends of the Earth ▶ Global Civil Society
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▶ Greenpeace ▶ International Campaign to Ban Landmines ▶ Jubilee 2000 ▶ Oxfam International ▶ Shack/Slum-dwellers International ▶ World Social Forum ▶ World Trade Organization
References/Further Readings Bandy, J., & Smith, J. (Eds.) (2005). Coalitions across borders: Transnational protest and the neoliberal order. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bob, C. (2005). The marketing of rebellion: Insurgents, media and international activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Borras, S., Edelman, M., & Kay, C. (Eds.) (2008). Transnational agrarian movements confronting globalization. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Clark, D., Fox, J., & Treakle, K. (Eds.) (2003). Demanding accountability: Civil society claims and the World Bank inspection panel. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Desmarais, A. (2007). La Via Campesina: Globalization and the power of peasants. London: Pluto Press. Diani, M., & McAdam, D. (Eds.) (2003). Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to collective action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Downs, W. (2008). Coalition. In W. Darity (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference. Edelman, M. (2004). When networks don’t work: The rise and fall of civil society initiatives in Central America. In J. Nash (Ed.) Social movements: A reader (pp. 29–45). London: Blackwell. Edwards, M., & Gaventa, J. (Eds.) (2001). Global citizen action. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Esteva, G. (1987). Regenerating people’s space. Alternatives, 12, 125–152. Fox, J. (1996). How does civil society thicken? The political construction of social capital in Rural Mexico. World Development, 24(6), 1089–1103. Fox, J. (2002). Lessons from Mexico–US civil society coalitions. In D. Brooks & J. Fox (Eds.), Cross-border dialogues: US–Mexico social movement networking (pp. 341–418). La Jolla, CA: University of California/San Diego, CA: Center for US-Mexican Studies. Fox, J. (2005). Unpacking transnational citizenship. Annual Review of Political Science, 8, 171–201. Fox, J., & Brown, L. D. (Eds.) (1998). The struggle for accountability: The World Bank, NGOs and grassroots movements. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fox, J., & Herna´ndez, L. (1992). Mexico’s difficult democracy: Grassroots movements, NGOs and local government. Alternatives, 17(2), 165–208. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. Haas, P. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination. International Organization, 46(1), 1–35. Hertel, S. (2006). Unexpected power: Conflict and change among transnational activists. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jordan, L., & Van Tuijl, P. (Eds.) (2006). NGO accountability: Politics, principles and innovations. London: Earthscan. Keck, M., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Khagram, S., Riker, J. V., & Sikkink, K. (2002). From Santiago to Seattle: Transnational advocacy groups restructuring world politics.
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In S. Khagram, J. V. Riker, & K. Sikkink (eds.), Restucturing world politics: Transnational social movements, networks and norms. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Riles, A. (2001). The network inside out. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Rose, F. (2000). Coalitions across the class divide: Lessons from the labor, peace and environmental movements. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sartori, G. (1984). Social science concepts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Sen, J., Anand, A., Escobar, A., & Waterman, P. (Eds.) (2004). World social forum: Challenging empires. New Delhi: Viveka Foundation. Strøm, K., & Nyblade, B. (2007). Coalition theory and government formation. In C. Boix & S. Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative politics (pp. 782–802). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tarrow, S. (2005). The new transnational activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Codes of Ethics and Codes of Practice MIRJAN OUDE VRIELINK1, COR VAN MONTFORT1,2 1 Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands 2 Court of Audit Public-Private Sector, The Hague, The Netherlands
Introduction Codes of ethics and codes of practice are found everywhere from nonprofit organizations, to professional and trade associations and to large multinationals (Wood & Rimmer, 2003). These have inspired worldwide an extensive body of research, mainly in business ethics literature. Most studies focus on American codes, but in the last two decades, a steady increase of literature on codes in other countries can be observed. In the course of history, a wide range of publicized scandals in government, business, social work agencies, universities, and other types of organizations have raised concerns about ethical behavior. The scandals each time have invoked a rise in popularity of codes, with the intention to visibly express corporate values and, as such, to guide the ethical behavior of employees, companies, or professions. The use of codes assists corporate and professional organizations in their ongoing relationship with society and helps them to balance their pursuit of autonomy and the public’s demand for accountability (Frankel, 1989; Higgs-Kleyn & Kapelianis, 1999). Modern organizations are allowed to pursue their mission and goals in return for accountability to shareholders/ stakeholders and, in a lesser extent, to the wider public. The nonprofit sector generally is conceived of as a ‘‘do-good sector’’; without civil society organizations, many important social issues would go unaddressed. Despite its better
reputation with regard to its ethics, in recent years, this sector is found to be no different from the public and private sectors (Ethics Resource Center, 2008). In part, this might be explained by the observation that in confronting with resource scarcity and as they age, nonprofit organizations become more bureaucratic and tend to adopt practices and goals that follow the fashions of their institutional fields rather than the logical dictates of their mission and core values (Rothschild & Milofsky, 2006, p. 138). Interestingly enough, this has not inspired a thread of research on codes of ethics and codes of practice from a civil society perspective.
Definition Codes of ethics and codes of practice are often used as synonyms, referring to their shared purported purpose, i.e., to articulate behavioral standards valued by an organization (c.f. Canary & Jennings, 2008, p. 265). They also appear under a variety of other names, such as codes of conduct, business codes, integrity codes, codes of honor, voluntary agreements, guidelines, and recommendations (Kaptein, 2004; Kaptein & Schwartz, 2007). For the purposes of this entry code, definitions are derived from the Dictionary of Civil Society, Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector. A code of ethics is defined as "
a statement of principles established by an organization and used to influence the professional conduct of its staff and members. Such a code of ethics is typically developed by a professional body or trade association, monitored by that body, and enforced by it, especially in field for which little or no governmental regulation is in place. In general, members must adhere to these rules and regulations in order to remain in good standing with the organization. (Anheier & List, 2005, p. 57)
A code of practice is "
an agreement among members of a professional association, umbrella group, or a single organization, in which they agree to act in a certain way. Such codes are typically developed in professions or trades that are not regulated by a governmental institution. (Anheier & List, 2005, p. 58)
Some scholars distinguish a code of practice from a code of conduct. A code of conduct is defined as a practical document of standards governing client relationship, and a code of practice, as a technical document setting standards for the members of a profession. The definition of a code of practice used in this entry encompasses both types of documents. Both definitions of Anheier and List refer to the involvement of a professional or trade association, which
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is typical of professional codes. It differentiates them from corporate codes, which are issued by and for individual companies (Pater & Van Gils, 2003, p. 265). Corporate codes can be conceived of as one of the layers of a larger system consisting also of codes on a meso-level, i.e., professional, industrial, and national codes, and macrocodes, i.e., codes for business that are developed by international institutions (Kaptein & Wempe, 1998; Kaptein & Schwartz, 2007). The presented definitions mirror the main elements of an often referred to definition of Schwartz (2001, p. 248) who describes a corporate code as ‘‘a written, distinct, and formal document that consists of moral standards used to guide employee or corporate behaviour.’’ A particular type of codes are governance codes that generally include principles or practices regarding board composition, the transparency of the information provided by the company, and the business community and/or professional associations within the business community. The definition of Schwartz draws attention to what a code consists of, to what or to whom it applies, and to its formal nature (cf. Pater & Van Gils, 2003, p. 764). Codes lay down standards – also referred to as a value system, aspirational ideals, guidelines, ethical principles, norms and beliefs, or ground rules – that help to understand what behaviors are morally acceptable or improper. They address employee behavior or an organization’s behavior and are laid out in a written, stand-alone and explicit document (Schwartz, 2004, p. 324). Though Schwartz’ definition typically is used to describe corporate codes, it bears a close comparison to professional codes (cf. Pater & Van Gils, 2003, p. 265). The purported purpose of codes of ethics and codes of practice is to guide employee, corporate, or professional behavior. According to Wood and Rimmer (2003, p. 186) research focuses upon five aspects of the ‘‘content’’ of codes of ethics: 1. Moral content – what are the prescribed actions and values? 2. Procedural content – how are codes enforced and violations dealt with? 3. Public ownership – how is the code publicized and among which stakeholders? 4. Adaptation – is the code a living document updated to meet changing conditions? 5. Company specificity – is the code tailored to the needs and culture of the organization? The stated principles and practices clarify to both insiders and outsiders what norms ought to govern behavior (see for categorizations of the various functions a code may perform, Schwartz, 2001, p. 255; Frankel, 1989,
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pp. 111–112). In addition to this, several scholars have discussed the adoption of codes as a result of symbolic isomorphism (Long & Driscoll, 2008) or for reasons of personal interest, such as promotion of public image (Ethics Resource Center, 1990) or avoiding legal consequences (Carasco & Singh, 2003; Canary & Jennings, 2008; Boulding, 2000).
Historical Background The distinction of professional codes and corporate codes is reflected in distinct bodies of research. Professional codes are of a much earlier date than corporate codes. Their prevalence and growth over time, however, is not very well recorded (Pater & Van Gils, 2003, p. 265). The first code of ethics addressed the professions of physicians and surgeons. It was proposed in a pamphlet published in 1794 by Thomas Percival of Manchester. Until then, professional ethics had nothing to do with formal codes; it was about character, honor and dishonor, virtue and vice (Baker, 1999). Percival drafted the code in response to a particular crisis arising from the mismatch between the personalized ethics of individual honor and the requirements for standardization inherent in a modern institution, the hospital. The proposed code of ethics replaced the language of oath and subjectivity with standards of conduct formulated in numbered duties, justified by the medical profession’s core collective responsibility to care for the sick. The code proposed by Percival was not an actual code of ethics, since writing such a code requires a statement of a sufficiently authoritative body, the profession itself (Davis, 1999). This occurred in 1808, when the Boston Medical Society adopted a code of ethics for its members. By 1847, the newly formed American Medical Association was the first national professional society to adopt such a code, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, codes had become the dominant form of professional ethics in the United States (Baker, 1999). The American Bar Association (ABA), for example, adopted its first code of professional ethics in 1908 and the accounting profession in 1907 (Backof & Martin, 1991, p. 101). By now, professional codes had become the dominant form of professional ethics. The adoption of corporate codes of ethics is of more recent date. Though there is little record of the dates of early corporate codes of ethics, literature shows a steady growth of codes of ethics in many companies in the United States. Cressey and Moore (1983) discuss what they then considered to be a temporary movement in the mid-1970s, pointing at a fast growth by 1976 followed by a decline in 1979 in the collection of codes in the Watson Library of the Conference Board in New York.
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Codes of ethics enjoyed renewed popularity during the late 1980s, as the Center for Business Ethics has shown. It conducted a survey in 1986, which found that of the 28% of respondents, 75% had corporate codes of ethics. Compared to the American trend the adoption of ethical codes in, for example, Europe, Canada, and Australia lags behind. By 1995, Berenbeim was reporting incidences of codes of ethics in over 84% of comparable US companies, 66% of Canadian, and 50% of European companies, and Wood, McClaren and Callaghan were quoting a rate of 33% for codes of ethics in Australia (Wood & Rimmer, 2003, p. 182). Based on recent studies conducted into the prevalence of codes in specific countries, Kaptein (2004) indicates that the percentages of large companies possessing codes rate from 78% in the United States, England, and India to 37% in Japan. His own study into the 200 hundred largest multinational firms in the world shows that 52.5% of them have a code.
Key Issues Research on codes of ethics and codes of practice is directed at various knowledge interests representing distinct lines of inquiry. One topic area that has received a great deal of research attention concerns the content of codes, including both normative as well as empirical studies. The normative studies are concerned with guidelines for developing and implementing a code, while the empirical studies mainly have resulted in inventories or content analyses of existing codes. A second line of inquiry that has gained much attention, mostly from an empirical point of view, deals with the effects of a code on employee, organizational or professional behavior. A third line of inquiry, which is still in its infancy, takes an interest in what mechanisms an organization can or should have in place or what obstacles have to be overcome to ensure a code actually is coming into practice in the organization. Within these three lines of inquiry, the focus usually is on either corporate codes or codes developed by professional associations. Studies seldom address both types (see, e.g., Somers, 2001; Pater & Van Gils, 2003). Helin and Sandstro¨m (2007) carried out a thorough and systematic review of empirical studies on corporate codes published from 1994 to mid-2005. They distinguish between content-oriented, output-oriented, and transformation-oriented studies, discussing the body of knowledge and main themes of each strand. Content-oriented studies map and sometimes compare the content of codes in explicit countries. The general pattern in the content-oriented studies is that codes are similarly designed and basically carry the same message. Also, several of these studies argued that in spite of
the intended purpose, the main motive is corporate self-defense, protection, and window dressing. Comparative studies have shown that American, Canadian, and Australian share this inward orientation on the corporation (Lefebvre & Singh, 1996; Singh et al., 2005). These studies also revealed some differences. For instance, Australian codes rely less on internal and external watchdogs compared to American codes, which primarily is explained by the different business cultures in these countries (Wood, 2000). Codes of corporations operating on the international market also have gained research attention. The studies focus on the content of international codes (Preble & Hoffman, 1999), and more recently on codification of business ethics in codes of transnational or multinational corporations (Carasco & Singh, 2003; Kaptein, 2004). The output-oriented studies reviewed by Helin and Sandstro¨m share a focus on (key factors that might explain) the effectiveness of codes in influencing actions toward ‘‘more ethical’’ behavior. The findings regarding the impact of codes point in different directions. Some studies, under different circumstances, identify a positive influence on perceptions and behavior of individuals or organizations (cf. Boo & Koh, 2001; Harrington, 1996; Kaptein & Wempe 1998; Kolk & Tulder, 2002), whereas others are inconclusive or contradict the acclaimed effect on behavior (Nwachukwu & Vitell, 1997; Farrell et al., 2002; Schwartz, 2001, 2004), suggest that codes play a mere symbolic role (Adams et al., 2001), constituting an important symbolic artifact (Stevens, 2004) or are used as window dressing (McKendall et al., 2002). Transformation-oriented studies concentrate on the adoption of codes, discussing what organizations need to overcome when implementing a code. They draw attention to issues such as the code’s relevance and consistency (Kaptein & Wempe, 1998; Snell & Herndon, 2004), the coupling of a code to a development process with a broad consultation (Montoya & Richard, 1994; Snell & Herndon, 2004), and procedures of communication, education, maintenance, and reinforcement (Kaptein & Wempe, 1998; Montoya & Richard, 1994; Somers, 2001). The key issues addressed by Helin and Sandstro¨m are consistent with findings of empirical research on professional codes (Somers, 2001, p. 185). But the typical involvement of a professional or trade association also adds new knowledge interests to this line of research. Scholars, for instance, have discussed the adherence to a profession’s or association’s code when its content conflicts with a corporation’s code (Higgs-Kleyn & Kapelianis, 1999), or with the reality experienced by members of the profession (Frankel, 1989, p. 113). Other issues
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dealt with are the (lack of) mechanisms to ensure that professional values are internalized (Somers, 2001, p. 194) and that infringements of professional codes are sanctioned (Bird, 1998). With regard to the latter, researchers raise particular concerns such as the reluctance of the profession’s members to report violations of the code (Frankel, 1989, p. 113) and whether, how, and to what extent codes can and will be enforced by professional societies (Bird, 1998; cf. Donabedian, 1993, p. 91–92).
Future Directions By the mid-1990s, most studies of codes of ethics and codes of practice suffered from a lack of information on how the codes were communicated in the organization and whether or not they were effective (Stevens, 1994). Helin and Sandstro¨m (2007) have shown that the knowledge gap has continued to exist in literature on corporate codes. A lot of studies still target the content of a code, often without explicit use of theory, but an equal or even greater interest is taken in the behavioral effects of a code. The latter predominantly focus on perceptions and behavior of managers or employees. From these studies it can be learned that there is still a great deal of uncertainty around whether codes are effective. Some studies have found that contextual factors inside or outside the corporation need to be taken into consideration, but little research has been conducted on why and how ethical codes become what they become over time. In order to develop the body of knowledge on codes, empirical research on different levels in the organizations is needed with sensitivity to how managers and employees translate the codes in practice. Moreover, targeting the knowledge gap seems to require a stronger explicit interest in theory and a greater reliance on qualitative research methods rather than data collection through surveys (Helin & Sandstro¨m, 2007, pp. 261–263). The body of knowledge on professional codes has progressed in a similar vein. After an initial focus on the content and adoption of professional codes, recent literature shows a growing interest in behavioral and contextual issues associated with the codes. The knowledge gap observed by Helin and Sandstro¨m is mirrored too. More research on understanding the processes embedded in the context in which codes operate is considered highly desirable (Somers, 2001), and a lack of theory identifying how professional codes are associated with ethical behavior is observed (Pater & Van Gils, 2003, p. 765). Also, most studies have focused on either a single association, or relatively few associations. Replication of such studies in a different industry or sector is desirable to assess the generalization of the results. Empirical data on the effects
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of professional codes reveal that, generally, the professional association is of limited value in regulating ethical behavior of professionals (Gunz et al., 2002; Somers, 2001). Based on previous research Pater and Van Gils (2003, p. 766) noted that professional codes are not likely to bring about positive effects, unless compliance with the professional codes is enforced by the organization in which professionals work. The value of an enforced professional code is to be found in its potential effects on the ethical climate rather than in its direct effects, since professional associations are not involved enough in the daily activities of member organizations to affect their ethical behavior (2003, p. 270). An interesting avenue for further research therefore would be to investigate the effects of various modes and methods of enforcement. Furthermore, it would be interesting to explore other ways in which professional or trade associations (can) contribute to ethical behavior, for example, by training members in dealing with ethical and professional issues or by establishing knowledge centers that collect and disseminate information about mechanisms that effectively ensure ethical behavior in professional organizations (Pater & Van Gils, 2003: 770). A third topic for further research stems from the definitions of a code of ethics and a code of practice this entry started with. The relationship between codes as a device for self-regulation (Schwartz, 2001) and governmental regulation addressed in these definitions has been understudied in literature on corporate and professional codes. Insights into this relationship are desirable, since in the last two decades new modes of regulation have been introduced that take the form of rule making by private organizations encouraged or on behalf of government authorities. To name just a few examples: coerced selfregulation (Black, 1996), mandated self-regulation (Rees, 1988), sponsored self-regulation (Huyse & Parmentier, 1990). Codes of ethics and codes of practice are considered as one particular form these new modes can take on (cf. Irvin, 2005). Since these new modes of regulation stimulate or enforce corporate and professional organizations to regulate themselves on behalf of public interests, this raises new research questions. For instance: How are codes processed when public interests differ from professional or corporate interests? And what parties should be involved in the development, monitoring, and enforcing of the codes? A final knowledge gap particularly pertains to the field of civil society studies. So far, the issues discussed in this entry did not call for a distinction between corporate and professional organizations in for-profit and nonprofit sector. However, a difference may be perceived when it
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comes to the substantive values and ethics, i.e., the objectives nonprofit organizations want to realize that are not being achieved through profit seeking or governmental organizations. Nonprofit organizations ‘‘are the organizational expression of their members’ ethical stance toward the world: nonprofit organizations, by way of their very existence and practices, convey a public statement of what their members see as a better, more caring, or more just world’’ (Rothschild & Milofsky, 2006, p. 137). The substantive values and ethics, however, are understudied and often overlooked in the research on nonprofit organizations (Rothschild & Milofsky, 2006, p. 139). An investigation of the prevalence and content of codes of ethics and codes of practice could provide more insight into these values and ethics. This in turn may help the nonprofit sector to meet the growing demand for accountability, while holding on to its pursuit for autonomy. Externally imposed accountability systems may suppress the mission-driven natures of nonprofit organizations (Ethics Resource Center, 2008, p. 25; cf. Rothschild & Milofsky, 2006, p. 139; cf. Sidel, 2005, p. 804), harming the premise of the nonprofit sector.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Good Governance ▶ Governance, Organizational ▶ Nonprofit Management ▶ Professional Associations ▶ Self-Organization ▶ Social Trust
References/Further Readings Adams, J. S., Tashchian, A., & Shore, T. H. (2001). Codes of ethics as signals for ethical behaviour. Journal of Business Ethics, 29, 199–211. Anheier, H., & List, R. (2005). A dictionary of civil society, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector (Vol. 1, Pt. 4, pp. 57, 58). New York: Routledge. Backof, J., & Martin, C. L. Jr., (1991). Historical perspectives: Development of the codes of ethics in the legal, medical and accounting professions. Journal of Business Ethics, 10, 99–110, 199. Baker, R. (1999). Codes of ethics: Some history. Retrieved September 4, 2008, from http://ethics.iit.edu/perspective/pers19_1fall99_2.html Bird, S. J. (1998). The role of professional societies: Codes of conduct and their enforcement. Science & Engineering Ethics, 4, 315–320. Black, J. (1996). Constitutionalising self-regulation. Modern Law Review, 59(1), 24–55. Boo, E. H. Y., & Koh, H. C. (2001). The influence of organizational and code-supporting variables on the effectiveness. Teaching Business Ethics, 5, 357–373. Boulding, M. E. (2000). Self-regulation: Who needs it? Health Affairs, 19(6), 132–141.
Canary, H. E., & Jennings, M. M. (2008). Principles and influences in codes of ethics: A centering resonance analysis comparing pre- and postSarbanes-Oxley codes of ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 80, 263–278. Carasco, E. F., & Singh, J. B. (2003), The content and focus of the codes of ethics of the world’s largest transnational corporations. Business & Society Review, 108(1), 71–94. Cressey, D. R., & Moore, C. A. (1983). Managerial values and corporate codes of ethics. California Management Review, 25(4), 53–77. Davis, M. (1999). Writing a code of ethics, Perspectives on the professions, a periodical of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions (CSEP), Illinois Institute of Technology, Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall. Donabedian, B. (1993). Accounting self-regulation and the enforcement of professional codes. Journal of accounting and public policy, 12, 87–112. Ethics Resource Center. (1990). Creating a workable company code of ethics. Washington DC. Ethics Resource Center (2008). The Ethics Resource Center’s 2007 national workplace ethics survey. Farrell, B. J., Cobbin, D. M., & Farrell, H. M. (2002). Can codes of ethics really produce consistent behaviours? Journal of Managerial Psychology, 17(6), 468–490. Frankel, M. S. (1989). Professional codes: Why, how, and with what impact? Journal of Business Ethics, 8, 109–115. Gunz, H. P., Gunz, S. P., & McCutcheon, J. C. (2002). Organizational influences on approaches to ethical decisions by professionals: The case of public accountants. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, 19(1), 76–91. Harrington, S. J. (1996). The effect of codes of ethics and personal denial of responsibility on computer abuse judgments and intentions. MIS Quarterly, September, 257–278. Helin, S., & Sandstro¨m, J. (2007). An inquiry into the study of corporate codes of ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 75, 253–271. Higgs-Kleyn, N., & Kapelianis, D. (1999). The role of professional codes in regulating ethical conduct. Journal of Business Ethics, 19, 363–374. Huyse, L., & Parmentier, S. (1990). Decoding codes: The dialogue between consumers and suppliers through codes of conduct in the European community. Journal of Consumer Policy, 13, 253–272. Irvin, R. A. (2005). State regulation of nonprofit organizations: Accountability regardless of outcome. Nonprofit and voluntary Sector quarterly, 34, 161–178. Kaptein, M. (2004). Business codes of multinational firms: What do they say? Journal of Business Ethics, 50(1), 13–33. Kaptein, M., & Wempe, J. (1998). Twelve Gordian knots when developing and organizational code of ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 17, 853–869. Kaptein, M., & Schwarz, M. S. (2007). The effectiveness of business codes: A critical examination of existing studies and the development of an integrated research model. Journal of Business Ethics, 77, 111–127. Kolk, A., & van Tulder, R. (2002). The effectiveness of self-regulation: Corporate codes of conduct and child labour. European Management Journal, 20(3), 260–271. Lefebvre, M., & Singh, J. B. (1996). A comparison of the contents and foci of Canadian and American corporate codes of ethics. International Journal of Management, 13(2), 156–170. Long, B. S., & Driscoll, C. (2008). Codes of ethics and the pursuit of organizational legitimacy: Theoretical and empirical contributions. Journal of Business Ethics, 77, 173–189. McKendall, M., DeMarr, B., & Jones-Rikker, C. (2002). Ethical compliance programs and corporate illegality: Testing the assumptions of the corporate sentencing guidelines. Journal of Business Ethics, 37(4), 367–383.
Coleman, James Samuel Montoya, I. D., & Richard, A. J. (1994). A comparative study of codes of ethics in health care facilities and energy companies. Journal of Business Ethics, 13, 713–717. Nwachukwu, S. L. S., & Vitell, S. J. (1997). The influence of corporate culture on managerial ethical judgments. Journal of Business Ethics, 16, 757–776. Pater, A., & Van Gils, A. (2003). Stimulating ethical decision-making in a business context: Effects of ethical and professional codes. European Management Journal, 21(6), 762–772. Preble, J. F., & Hoffman, R. C. (1999). The nature of ethics codes in franchise associations around the globe. Journal of Business Ethics, 18, 239–253. Rees, J. (1988). Self-regulation: An effective alternative to direct regulation by OSHA? Policy Sttudies Journal, 3, 602–614. Rothschild, J., & Milofsky, C. (2006). The centrality of values, passions, and ethics in the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 17(2), 137–143. Schwartz, M. S. (2001). The nature of the relationship between corporate codes of ethics and behaviour. Journal of Business Ethics, 32, 247–262. Schwartz, M. S. (2004). Effective corporate codes of ethics: Perceptions of code users. Journal of Business Ethics, 55, 323–343. Sidel, M. (2005). The guardians guarding themselves: A comparative perspective on nonprofit self-regulation. Chicago-Kent Law Review, 80, 803–837. Singh, J., Carasco, E., Svensson, G., Wood, G., & Callaghan, M. (2005). A comparative study of the contents of corporate codes of ethics in Australia, Canada and Sweden. Journal of World Business, 40, 91–109. Snell, R. S., & Herndon, N. C. (2004). Hong Kong’s code of ethics initiative: Some differences between theory and practice. Journal of Business Ethics, 51(1), 75–89. Somers, M. J. (2001). Ethical codes of conduct and organizational context: A study of the relationship between codes of conduct, employee behavior and organzational values. Journal of Business Ethics, 30, 185–195. Stevens, B. (1994). An analysis of corporate ethical code studies: ‘‘Where Do We Go From Here?’’. Journal of business ethics, 13, 63-69. Stevens, B. (2004). The ethics of the US business executive: A study of perceptions. Journal of Business Ethics, 54, 163–171. Wood, G. (2000). A cross cultural comparison of the contents of codes of ethics: USA, Canada and Australia. Journal of Business Ethics, 25(4), 287–298. Wood, G., & Rimmer, M. (2003). Codes of ethics: What are they really and what should they be? International Journal of ValueBased Management, 16, 181–195.
Coleman, James Samuel JOHANNES MARX
Basic Biographical Information James Coleman was born May 12, 1925, in Bedford, Indiana. He started his academic education studying chemistry at Purdue University in 1949. After a very brief career as a chemist, he decided to study sociology at Columbia University. His academic environment was
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quite illustrious: Among his teachers were Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert K. Merton, and Seymour Martin Lipset, and during his studies he became well-acquainted with renowned sociologists such as Peter M. Blau, Daniel Bell, Alvin S. Gouldner, and Immanuel Wallerstein. After earning his Ph.D. in 1955, Coleman worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, before he became assistant professor in Chicago. In 1959, he founded the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Coleman returned to Chicago in 1973 where he had the unique opportunity to discuss his ideas with the members of the famous Chicago School of Economics. James Coleman died on March 25, 1995 in Chicago, Illinois.
Major Contributions Coleman is one of the most outstanding, outspoken, and controversial American sociologists. He sought to explain social phenomena by employing both mathematical models and quantitative methods. He was interested in laying methodological groundwork, developing theoretical frameworks and testing them empirically. He is just as renowned for introducing the rational choice approach to sociology as for the famous Coleman Report on the educational system in the United States, for analyzing the micro–macro transition in sociological explanations as for his research on social capital. Coleman was one of the earliest users of the term social capital. He defines social capital ‘‘by its function. It is not a single entity, but a variety of different entities having two characteristics in common: They all consist of some aspect of social structure, and they facilitate certain actions of individuals who are within the structure’’ (1990, p. 302). Like other capital forms social capital is productive helping individuals achieving specific goals that would not be accessible without this resource. Coleman’s work on social capital became a major theoretical reference for Robert Putnam’s work on social capital and for the rational choice strand of the social capital literature. For many years during the 1980s, Coleman and Gary S. Becker hosted an interdisciplinary seminar, the famous ‘‘Becker-Coleman-Seminar,’’ on rational choice theory in the social sciences, featuring among their regular participants renowned microeconomists such as Ronald Coase, Richard Posner, Daniel Friedman and George J. Stigler. In 1989, Coleman established the interdisciplinary journal ‘‘Rationality and Society’’ as a platform for publications on the impact of rational choice theory in sociology. His magnum opus, ‘‘Foundations of Social Theory,’’ focuses on the application of rational choice theory on questions of social structure. On the basis of
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Collective Action
methodological individualism, Coleman seeks to explain complex social phenomena such as social trust, authority, collective action problems, norms, and social capital. In contrast to classical microeconomists, though, Coleman does not devise actors as atomistic individuals but as embedded in a social context. Thereby, Coleman provides an economic foundation for sociology and, thus, introduces economic methods to the analysis of questions of social life.
Cross-References
▶ Collective Action ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of
References/Further Readings Clark, J. (Ed.) (1996). James S. Coleman. London: Falmer Press. Coleman, J. S. (1993). The impact of Gary Becker’s work on sociology. Acta Sociologica 36(3), 169–178. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Collective Action STEVE PFAFF, SARAH VALDEZ University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Introduction Collective action lies at the heart of any vibrant civil society because civic engagement requires individuals to work together as part of a group. In plural societies, political parties, interest organizations, voluntary associations, and religious congregations serve an important role. Putnam et al. (1994) said these associations all help to ‘‘make democracy work.’’ Meyer and Tarrow (1998) characterize contemporary postindustrial societies as ‘‘social movement societies’’ in which interest organizations and protest groups are nearly ubiquitous. Too often, however, collective action is taken for granted by civic activists and prescriptive theorists of civil society alike. It is easy to assume that, because people belong to groups with common interests, the members of that group will act in concert to achieve those interests. These assumptions are challenged by collective action theory.
Definition Developing out of rational-choice theory, the theory of collective action asserts that even if there are widely-shared group interests, cooperation and voluntary
contribution to realize them does not necessarily result (Hardin, 1982). Actors are assumed to be self-interested and rational, acting intentionally to realize their individual interests at minimal cost. Even if coordinated mobilization behind a common goal occurs, members of a group will be tempted to contribute little or nothing and rely on the efforts of others. Few potential beneficiaries will voluntarily pay costs or hazard risks to advance the cause. Even those that willingly participate are expected to be opportunistic, seeking advantages that benefit them individually even if it detracts from the provision of widely desired collective goods. This need not mean that people act only in heedless self-interest because rational egoists are expected to be constrained by the rules imposed by institutions, by the availability of information, and by the opportunity costs of foregoing one course of action by choosing another. Interest organizations in civil society face the greatest hurdles when they are interested in the production of public goods. Public goods are things which groups want that are nonexcludable (noncontributors cannot be denied its enjoyment easily) and nonrivalrous (i.e., my enjoyment of the good is not in rivalry with your enjoyment, hence there is no ‘‘crowding’’ effect that diminishes the value of the good the more that others exploit it). Examples of such public goods could include public safety, clean air, public broadcasting, and so on. In addition to public goods, there is another class of collective goods which is important in this discussion. Common-pool resources are nonexcludable but rivalrous goods (and thus prone to overexploitation by self-interested rationalists). Such common-pool resources include, for example, fisheries, potable water, broadcast airwaves, and other resources which are limited, not privately owned, and not easily enclosed. Garrett Hardin (1968) famously described the failure to prevent or contain the selfish exploitation of such resources as the ‘‘tragedy of the commons.’’
Historical Background At least since Mancur Olson’s (1965) seminal work, The Logic of Collective Action, social scientists have identified social dilemmas that must be overcome in order for voluntary activity to be reliably or efficiently produced. Olson’s work dispelled commonly held beliefs about collective action. First, it helped to reveal the fallacy of group composition, that is, the mistaken notion that if something is in the collective interest of the group, then rational members of that group will act to produce that thing. Olson’s theory showed why members of a group do not necessarily act together simply because they have a shared goal. Rather, in many instances rational actors are unlikely
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to contribute to the production of a collective good unless they are somehow coerced or compensated for their effort. This is an important correction to many streams of thought, such as those associated with Karl Marx, which posit that collective action emerges naturally among groups of people with similar interests. Collective action theory also broke with the field of collective behavior, which generally treated participation in protest and social movements through the lens of crowd psychology or explained it by reference to irrational factors such as frustration, resentment, and aggression.
Key Issues Free Rider Problem
The social dilemma which presents a problem for civil society is twofold. Firstly, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve collective goods that would be shared equally among all, including people who do not contribute, because they can take advantage of the goods without incurring any personal costs. For instance, one need not petition, march, or donate money for the cause of clean air if others are doing so because if they achieve their goal, everyone will have equal access to cleaner air, regardless of their contribution. Secondly, rational, selfinterested individuals will be prone to overexploit common resources. Hardin’s (1968) classic example concerns a shared pasture. It is in each member’s self-interest to place as many animals possible on the shared parcel, quickly leading to depletion of the resource, which is in nobody’s long-term interest. Therefore, individuals acting in their own interest harm the collective interest. So, rather than contributing to a group effort to obtain public goods and using one’s fair share of common-pool resources, rational individuals will seek to avoid paying costs for a good that would be shared more or less equally among all group members, and will be motivated to take more of their share of common resources (if only because they fear if that if they don’t, others will). Thus there is often a conflict between what would be optimal for individuals and what would be optimal for the group and it is generally more advantageous for an individual to take a share of a collective good without ever making a contribution to providing it. This is called the free rider problem. It is worst where the size of the group is large and there is no coordinating organization to monitor and control contributions. If left unaddressed, the tendency toward ‘‘free riding’’ will result in the suboptimal production of public goods or the tragedy of the commons as shared resources are inefficiently exploited.
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Nevertheless, it is known that in practice public goods are sometimes produced and common resources are used efficiently. Collective action is not impossible, despite the social dilemmas it confronts. Following the general logic of Olson’s theory, a rational actor will be most likely to contribute to collective action when: (a) the actor is coerced into contributing to the collective good and punished when she fails to contribute or opportunistically exploits it (what might be called the Hobbesian solution); (b) the actor is compensated through selective incentives, or benefits for cooperation, that are divisible and only available to those that help produce the collective good (what might be called the Smithian solution); or (c) when a resourceful third party subsidizes the production of the collective good, for example, by paying the costs of coordinating or organizing collective action. By themselves, these solutions remain unpersuasive because they have simply pushed back the free rider problem; i.e., an organization that would enforce norms, provide selective incentives, or subsidize collective action would itself be the result of prior collective action that resulted in an organization for the promotion of collective goods. Likewise, the normative solution – a group has norms that deter free riding – so often favored by sociologists and anthropologists is unpersuasive because the creation and enforcement of norms against free riding are themselves collective goods. This is referred to as the ‘‘second-order’’ free rider problem – a proposed solution to free riding which is not immune from the same collective action dilemmas that encourage free riding (Heckathorn, 1989). The implication is that collective action is far less likely to occur than had generally been acknowledged by sociologists and political theorists. But Olson’s theory may be overly pessimistic. Under some circumstances collective action is commonplace and some groups manage to avert the tragedy of the commons (Ostrom, 1990). In general, early models of collective action were too pessimistic because they assumed that all actors are rational egoists with uniform preferences for collective goods. To address this problem, some researchers began to modify the standard motivational assumptions of collective action theory. One set of explanations focused on the role of trust (particularly that produced by group solidarity); the other on preference heterogeneity. Theories focusing on trust predict that collective action is most likely to occur in groups linked by strong social network ties and rich in social capital. Theories focusing on difference predict that collective action is most likely among socially heterogeneous groups in which actors have varying resources and different preferences for the collective good.
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Trust and Social Capital
In many cases, voluntary cooperation is contingent on what an actor thinks others will do. If an actor thinks that others will free ride on her efforts, she may be less likely to contribute herself. Likewise, if achievement of a collective good requires extensive collective action and an actor expects that a sufficient number of others will not contribute, she will also refrain, no matter how great her preference for the good. So how do actors overcome the problem of contingency? Individuals belonging to the same social categories are likely to have shared interests. However, the organizational structure of groups can facilitate or hinder the flow of information necessary to alert individuals of their shared interests and allow them to monitor others’ contributions to the group. Homogeneity among individuals may facilitate collective action because people who are similar to each other are likely to have common interests or objectives and share a large stock of common knowledge that informs their expectations. Without the confidence that others are reliable contributors, civil society groups will be unable to overcome the free rider problem. Hence, some theorists posit that in tightly-knit communities, small groups, and intimate settings, free riding and opportunism should be much less common than in large, relatively anonymous groups. James Coleman (1990) argues that actors are well aware of the free rider problem. In trying to achieve common ends, actors have clear incentives to withdraw or defect; but often compliance does occur and people do make fair contributions, even excessive or altruistic contributions. They volunteer, risk their lives, and contribute great sums, and so on, in order to achieve some common good. Given principles of rationality, why would they do that? Coleman shows that, in practice, actors try to assure each other that they will not cheat or defect from a common enterprise by signaling a willingness to comply. They can make informal compacts, or agreements, to follow the rules. What makes these compacts credible? Compacts are supported by enforceable social norms. But norms are themselves public goods, only effective if they are backed up by some kind of sanction. The problem with sanctions is that they also impose costs, which often deters actors from sanctioning the free riding or defection of others. In everyday life, ordinary social actors have resources that help them organize collective action and make norms effective (Ostrom, 1990). For one thing, they are generally embedded in the webs of social relations that define communities. In communities, actors have information about others and robust expectations about the likely
reactions of others to situations. If people value their place in community, social incentives such as reputation may persuade them to cooperate and the possible loss of status may effectively sanction free riding, as Chong (1991) explored in the case of the US civil rights movement. Rational action theorists expect that dependence on a group for desired goods and the closure of social networks helps to overcome free riding by monitoring and sanctioning defection or cheating (Hechter, 1987). In a closed social network, the costs of sanctioning and monitoring are reduced and the incentives for compliance are raised (Coleman, 1988). If social ties are valuable, actors will be reluctant to jeopardize them by ignoring group norms. By contrast, marginal social positions may be poorly regulated, difficult to sanction and therefore unlikely to generate group solidarity. Everyday exchange in social life generates social capital, social relationships that enhance the production of desired goods or the accomplishment of goals. Such capital is a potential resource for the achievement of collective goods as well as individual ends. Zeal is most likely to form in closed groups where members reinforce collective interests, so group norms and opportunities to exit or defect are closed off. Closed groups may even succeed in instilling individual preferences that are consistent with collective preferences. In these situations, self-interest is difficult to discern from altruism as other group members reward those that act zealously to achieve the common good. But for zeal to thrive, individuals must be socially encapsulated such the costs of defecting are high or they are unaware of exit options. Social capital can refer to either social networks that enable action or facilitate exchange, or to the capacity of a group to act together because of its solidarity – density, reliability, extent of mutual obligations, and so on. Social capital typically works when an actor can call on another actor for assistance in producing a collective good or to facilitate an exchange with a third actor (such as the government) that is a potential supplier of that good. Cook et al. (2005) illustrates how social capital can facilitate collective action by contrasting the structure of cooperation in agrarian societies characterized by hamlets and small towns versus industrial and postindustrial cities characterized by large towns and cities. In the village, generalized trust is unimportant because the enforcement of norms is straightforward, due to the fact that monitoring and sanctioning are easy and everyone shares a stock of common knowledge that makes compacts credible. In cities, by contrast, generalized trust is important because monitoring and sanctioning are difficult and most actors are strangers to each other. If barriers to trust cannot be
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overcome in urban societies, it may be very difficult for citizens to achieve collective goods. This is why theorists of democracy argue that civic attachments formed in settings such as neighborhoods, churches, labor unions, clubs, sports teams, and small-business associations are so important for robust civil society. In short, trust matters for collective action by forming the expectations actors reach concerning other’s likely contribution to producing collective goods. Trust is most likely to facilitate collective action where (1) actors have information about other’s interests; (2) information is available to assess another’s character or disposition; (3) actors have an interest in maintaining a reputation for trustworthiness and make moral commitments. Preference Heterogeneity and the ‘‘Critical Mass’’
If everyone who stands to benefit by collective action is prone to free ride, production of the good will be suboptimal regardless of the magnitude of the demand for the good. If, however, some potential beneficiaries are willing to bear greater costs than others, then they will not free ride and will also tolerate some free riding by others. Prior collective action theory generally assumed that cooperation is most likely where social actors are alike and share uniform preferences for collective goods. However, Marwell et al.’s (Marwell and Oliver, 1993; Marwell et al. 1985) important innovation in collective action theory emphasizes the role of difference among actors. There is much evidence to suggest that collective action crystallizes around a small, devoted segment of the group that undertakes initial action. Collective action is most likely to get started by those alert and resourceful actors who are willing to pay the relatively high costs of initiating and coordinating collective action. This small segment of actors is likely to deviate from the average group member in their level of dedication to the cause, willingness to contribute time and resources, or useful skills and knowledge. Therefore, collective action is most likely to arise in groups which have a diverse membership in terms of individual resources, alertness, and level of preference for the collective goods. Threshold imagery is a useful way to explain how within-group heterogeneity can facilitate broad participation in collection action (Granovetter, 1978). An action threshold refers to an individual’s propensity to participate in collective action. The segment of the group willing to initiate action has a threshold of zero, meaning they will act regardless of other participants’ contribution to the shared goal. This may be because they are especially interested in the collective good or because they fear that if they do not move first and contribute more than others,
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collective action will fail. Oliver (1984) describes them as the sort of people that might declare ‘‘If I don’t do it, nobody else will.’’ At the other end of the spectrum are those with a 99% threshold – they will undertake action only after everyone else has. Most group members can be expected to fall between these two extremes and will engage in a collective effort once a certain number of others have already acted, although each individual’s threshold varies according to the situation. How such thresholds are distributed across a group is enormously important for that group’s capacity for collective action (Schelling, 1978). Mass participation is expected when threshold levels are clustered near the low end of the threshold distribution because a few highly interested and resourceful individuals will initiate action, which stimulates more individuals to act, and a cascade occurs, with waves of actors joining in as their thresholds for action are met. However, when many members’ thresholds are on the high end, only low levels of participation are expected. A few individuals may initiate action, but most members’ thresholds will not be met so they will never join in. If all group members have only a low level of interest in the collective good and high thresholds, then it is quite likely that collective action will never get started at all. Collective Action in Social Movements
Collective action theory rejects the proposition that people involved in nonmainstream groups, such a social movements or new religious groups, are necessarily irrational, deviant, or socially marginalized. Collective action theory maintains that participants in such movements are driven generally by grievances or dissatisfaction, since otherwise the costs associated with movement participation are difficult to justify. The likelihood of collective action occurring also depends on the resources and opportunities available to groups (Tilly, 1978). One can conceive of the relationship between established political actors and their insurgent challengers in terms of two struggles: (1) a contest to set the costs and perceived benefits of collective action; and (2) a contest over the means to mobilize and sustain collective action (Lichbach, 1994). Social movements are thus often initiated by political entrepreneurs that are adept at marshalling resources, instilling confidence in followers, and discrediting opponents. The resource mobilization theory of social movements highlights how existing resources, or resources which are contributed by third parties to political contention, influence a group’s ability to organize and act collectively. Economic resources matter because they may be used to provide selective incentives to group
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members, thereby inducing them to act in the group’s interest. Furthermore, funds can be used to hire a professional staff; thereby eliminating the need to for a critical mass to form on its own. However, nonmaterial resources are also important to collective action. For instance, the amount of time each member is willing and able to devote to group goals is important, as are the ideas and skills that they can muster. In addition to the availability of resources, political structures affect the likelihood of collective action. Different types of regimes are likely to encourage different types of collective action because movement leaders adapt their strategies for obtaining goals to the environment around them (McAdam et al., 1996, Tilly, 1978). In general, highly despotic states monopolize the resources of collective action and severely repress challengers, making dissident collective action unusual and limited to dedicated cadres willing to endure very high costs. Democratic, plural polities allow for a wide distribution of resources and facilitate challengers, making for collective action that is common and extensive. Hence, closed political regimes allow citizens very little access to the polity, whereas open regimes allow routine access through activities such as voting, lobbying, or petitioning. Strong, repressive regimes are likely to stifle contentious collective action and have an underdeveloped civil society. Weak, repressive regimes are likely to limit civic activity and generally undermine collective action. However, any collective action that does emerge is likely to be contentious mobilization against the state because the movement may be perceived as likely to topple the weak regime. On the other hand, completely open regimes allow citizens free access to the polity, so routine civic engagement is less costly than contentious mobilization. Therefore, these societies tend toward high levels of collective action, and thus a vibrant civil society. High levels of contentious mobilization are most likely in regimes that fall between these two extremes. In moderate regimes that are neither fully repressive nor fully open, the lack of institutional political opportunities creates incentives for dissenting groups to organize outside and against the regime because, unlike in an open regime, the chances of achieving goals within the system are poor. At the same time, moderate levels of repression fail to deter the most dissatisfied groups, which is generally not the case under a strong, repressive regime.
Future Directions As originally formulated, collective action theory made several incorrect assumptions and was too pessimistic concerning the possibilities for collective action. Social
scientists working in the tradition of collective action theory have not only identified the many obstacles that hinder collective action but also factors that may enable it. As they have struggled to understand how the social dilemmas that complicate collective action can be resolved, theories of group behavior have become more realistic and complex. Moving forward, empirical researchers will need to continue to test and refine theories of collective action. This often presents evidentiary challenges since they often lack the reliable individual-level data required to cast light on the motivation for participation in collective action. Usually the best one can do is to probe the self-reported motives of participants retrospectively. Theoretical progress has been made through simulation studies, which have shown the effects of thresholds, reciprocity, and institutions on the emergence of collective behavior. However, convincing empirical tests of computer simulation models are few. One fruitful avenue for explaining the motives behind collective behavior may be experimental studies (see e.g., Henrich et al., 2004) (Fehr and Gintis, 2007). Drawing from methods used in psychology and economics, researchers have replicated the individual and collective incentive structures that influence collective action through laboratory experiments by, for example, giving subjects a sum of money that can either be pocketed (thereby satisfying the individuals’ immediate self interests) or pooled into a common fund which is multiplied (creating a public good in everyone’s interest, so long as no one free rides). Yet another mode of gaining insight into the mechanisms behind collective action may be through ethnography or longitudinal surveys similar to those done to study the emergence of solidarity in business and organizational environments. Finally, researchers should continue to explore how institutions such as norms emerge in social life and how pro-social behavior evolves through interaction. A combination of methods – simulations, experiments, comparative and historical studies, and ethnographies – will contribute much to the existing knowledge about why and when people are likely to act in concert to achieve shared goals.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Associations, Definition and History of ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Coleman, James ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Commons ▶ Goods and Services, Types of
Coluche
▶ Interest and Pressure Groups ▶ Labor Movements/Labor Unions ▶ Lobbying ▶ Olson, Mancur ▶ Political Organizations ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Movements ▶ Social Trust
References/Further Readings Chong, D. (1991). Collective action and the civil rights movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94(Suppl.), S92–S120. Coleman, J. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cook, K. S., Hardin, R., & Levi, M. (2005). Cooperation without Trust? New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Fehr, E., & Gintis, H. (2007). Human motivation and social cooperation: Experimental and analytical foundations. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 43–64. Granovetter, M. (1978). Threshold models of collective behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 83(6), 1420–1443. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248. Hardin, R. (1982). Collective action. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hechter, M. (1987). Principles of group solidarity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Heckathorn, D. (1989). Collective action and the second-order free-rider problem. Rationality and Society, 1(1), 78–100. Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., & Gintis, H. (2004). Foundations of human sociality: Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. New York: Oxford University Press. Kollock, P. (1998). Social dilemmas: The anatomy of cooperation. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 183–214. Lichbach, M. (1994). The rebel’s dilemma. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Marwell, G., & Oliver, P. (1993). The critical mass in collective action: A micro-social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marwell, P., Marwell, G., & Texeira, R. (1985). A theory of the critical mass. I. interdependence, group heterogeneity, and the production of collection action. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3), 522–556. McAdam, D., McCarthy, J., & Zald, M. (1996). Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings. New York: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, D., & Tarrow, S. (Eds.) (1998). The social movement society. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Oliver, P. (1984). If you don’t do it, nobody else will: Active and token contributors to local collective action. American Sociological Review, 49(5), 601–610. Oliver, P., & Marwell, G. (2001). Whatever happened to critical mass theory? A retrospective and assessment. Sociological Theory, 19(3), 292–311. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R.Y. (1994). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schelling, T. C. (1978). Micromotives and macrobehavior. New York: Norton. Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley.
Coluche ANAEL LABIGNE
Basic Biographical Information The man who would be known as Coluche was born Michel Colucci in 1944 in Paris to a working class family of Italian immigrants. School did not spark Coluche’s passion, and he left with only the basic certificate in 1958. He later entered the army, but was released in 1965. He then worked as a florist and began singing on cafe´ terraces and in cabarets, where he took on his stage name, Coluche. Along with several colleagues, Coluche participated in the creation of the first theater-cafe´, le Cafe´ de la Gare. Their unusual, irreverent style brought him and the troupe notoriety. From his very modest beginnings, Coluche became a popular comedian and actor – as well as a political figure – well known for a style of humor that brought political and social ills to the fore and touched his audiences. Coluche died in 1986 in a motorcycle accident.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Coluche’s irreverent comedic style brought social and political issues to many audiences and into the homes of millions of French television viewers. No type of racial, social, or sexist prejudice was left untouched. In the late 1980s, Coluche announced he would run in the French presidential elections the following year. Though some thought it to be another one of his gags, others took his candidacy seriously. Eventually, as his popularity among voters grew, pressure and criticism from his rivals caused him to withdraw. Coluche, who had himself spent time ‘‘on the street’’ and now lived the good life, was struck by the incredible amount of food that was thrown away, despite the fact that many people did not have enough to eat. In 1985, Coluche founded ‘‘Les Restos du Cœur – Relais du Cœur’’ (Restaurants of the Heart – Relay of the Heart), which collects and distributes food, money, and clothes to the poor and homeless. Today there are centers all over
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France. Later, he launched the first ‘‘Tourne´e des Enfoire´s’’ (Tour of the Losers) to raise funds for this association. In 1988, two years after Coluche’s death, Coluche’s law was passed to allow donors to deduct charitable contributions from their taxes. The difference with this law is that the charitable deduction permitted small contributors (the most numerous) to benefit from the same tax breaks as big contributors.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Cultural Organizations ▶ Civil Society and Social Inequality ▶ Fundraising
References/Further Readings Boggio, P. (2006). Coluche. L’histoire d’un mec. Paris: Flammarion, from www.coluche.fr
Comite´ europe´en des associations d’inte´reˆt ge´ne´ral ▶ CEDAG
Commercialization and For-Profits in Disguise HOWARD P. TUCKMAN Fordham University, New York, NY, USA
Introduction The commercial activities of nonprofits went largely unrecognized by policymakers, foundations, and academics for many years, despite the existence of a variety of business ventures that involved partnerships between nonprofits and for-profit enterprises (e.g., Skloot, 1998). For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has sold copies of photographs from its collection since it opened its first sanctioned shop in 1908 and some museums have hosted commercial galas in their galleries. In part, this lack of recognition reflected the limited amount of available information on these for-profit activities and, in part, it reflected a focus by researchers on the prime mission of the sector as the provision of public goods (Weisbrod, 1988). The situation is changing with the growth of commercial activities within the nonprofit sector. In the late 1970s,
this situation was fueled by a variety of factors including the rising costs of service provision due to the double-digit inflation and cutbacks in funding by the Reagan administrations, pressures for nonprofits to exercise greater selfsufficiency, and the growth of the supply of new nonprofits relative to the supply of corporations and foundations willing to support them. By the year 2001, these pressures were compounded by the September 11 debacle with its focus on charitable efforts to address the problems created by this disaster, and into the decade by limited government support due to channeling of funds for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the rise of social entrepreneur based funding with its focus on the application of business practices to nonprofits seeking financial support, by growing numbers of consultants and advisors encouraging nonprofits to seek new revenue streams and offering techniques for doing so, by the recent oil induced rise in prices that have substantially raised the costs of doing business, and by the 2008 banking crisis which will likely shrink the pool of donor funds available for charitable purposes. The list is a long one and it foretells an environment in which nonprofits will continue to face serious fund-raising challenges.
Definition In every day use, commercialism refers to the process of applying business or commercial methods to an organization, usually implying adoption of the profit motive as a prime raison d’etre. The problem is that many nonprofits have exhausted their existing sources of revenue and this leads for a search for new revenue sources to foster stability and growth. One such source is engaging in the same type of commercial activity that for-profit firms are involved in which creates the risk that nonprofits start to copy nonprofits both in terms of the goals they pursue and the way that they provide products and services. The hiring of managers from commercial enterprises may hasten this process and ultimately undermine the fundamental justification for an organization’s special status as a nonprofit organization. What is a for-profit in disguise (FPID)? Essentially, it is a nonprofit that has financial rather than altruistic motives for its existence (Weisbrod, 1998). Such an organization maximizes its profits and uses the resulting surplus to enrich its officers and directors through higher than normal compensation and/or the provision of benefits that bring power and/or prestige to its managers. This behavior is a violation of the mission of nonprofits and it can lead to severe consequences including loss of nonprofit status and possible prosecution for illegal behavior. There is no simple formula for determining when a nonprofit crosses the line and becomes a FPID. While examples of nonprofits
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established to benefit their founders can occasionally be found in newspapers, the more prevalent way that a nonprofit becomes a FPID is when it slowly increases the number and type of its for-profit activities over time. Its initial foray into commercial activities may not initially interfere with its basic mission but as it begins to emulate its for-profit competitors it may drift from its initial mission, eventually undermining the justification for its existence as a nonprofit (Tuckman & Chang, 2006). A nonprofit hospital may add a parking lot, a convenience store, diagnostic facilities, a nursing home, health clubs, and rehab facilities. To run these activities, it hires people from the for-profit sector and adopts normal business practices in its commercial enterprises. Over time it expands its commercial activities and it may create hybrid enterprises that consist of separate for-profit and nonprofit enterprises and if the for-profits come to dominate the time of the parent, it runs the risk of losing sight of its mission. Hybrid structures enable nonprofits to enter the for-profit world and compete with other for-profit entities, paying taxes on their earnings and ultimately putting their profits at the disposal of the nonprofit that is typically their parent owner. It can be extremely difficult to judge the point when such an organization becomes a FPID. While many nonprofits have the incentive to commercialize, only a limited number are actually able to do so. Tuckman (1998) lists four conditions that are likely to give rise to a nonprofit’s successful decision to commercialize: 1. The nonprofit must feel a need for additional revenues and perceive that the sale of its outputs will provide a viable means to realize its goals. 2. The nonprofit’s governing board must decide that the pursuit of profits from the sale of outputs is consistent with, or at least does not substantially interfere with, the mission of the organization. 3. The nonprofit must have products suitable for sale in the marketplace. 4. Consumers must be willing to purchase the products offered by the nonprofit. The existence of these conditions suggests that the FPID problem will not exist throughout the nonprofit sector but rather in those areas where commercialism is feasible and the administration begins to seek out and provide commercial products and services. It is unlikely to be found in providers of services to abused wives, hospices, homeless and/or animal shelters and more likely to exist for art galleries, educational institutions, health care providers or research facilities, and museums.
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Historical Background Religious groups are the major originators of nonprofits, especially private schools, and this is a key reason why we find many nonprofit organizations in the education and health sectors. Religious organizations are unlikely to have the objective of maximizing profits but rather maximize the amount of religious faith they can produce or the number of religious adherents they reach. There are several advantages that these entities possess relative to for-profits in the field of education. They often have several advantages to offer such as a semicaptive audience consisting of children with a specific religious preferences, families who have trust in the school, volunteer, or lower cost (than for-profits) labor, and a reputation for quality built around their religious order that attracts students. This allows them to continue recruiting based on the differentiated product they provide even if they lose their cost advantage; and they may even be politically powerful enough to secure government subsidies. Many of these advantages motivate choice especially in countries outside the United States and Europe (James, 1998). Note, for example, the strong presence of Jesuit schools in India and the Philippines which is a reflection of the importance that the order places on providing quality education to people who might otherwise lack access. Nonetheless, this has not kept some religious institutions from engaging in commercial activities, such as conducting clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. Other forces have also affected the development of the nonprofits and their mission and these also affect the ability to become a FPID. For example, after 1865 in the United States, strong advocates for the newly developing private business corporations actively created nonprofit colleges and universities to recruit and educate students who would form a pool of skilled and educated manpower, gather, structure, and analyze new social and economic data, and support the spread of new technologies on a national scale. For these entities, the goal was not maximization of profits but maximization of the quantity and quality of a newly trained labor force. By 1910, the demand for middle management had created a compelling market demand for business education and many nonprofits responded with new programs following the creation of Harvard Business School in 1908 (Daniel, 1998). Interestingly, almost one hundred years later, the educational sector consists of government, nonprofit, and for-profit institutions, some intent on undisguised profit maximization. The extent to which nonprofit maximizing behavior is affected by competition is important and large
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differences in competitive conditions exist by industry. For example, in the United States, child day care centers are about 60% nonprofit and 40% for-profit; theater companies are 48% for-profit and 52% nonprofit, and hospitals 65% nonprofit and 35% for-profit. In industries where nonprofits coexist with nonprofits, pressures exist to bring prices closer in line with for-profit competitors, as well as to provide similar services but many studies have shown that differences in the behavior of nonprofits exist when put in competition with forprofits (Brown & Slivinki, 2006). The challenge for both members of the sector and for policymakers is how to balance pursuit of a social mission against the need for new revenues to sustain their activities. Data provided for the United States indicate that the number of hybrids is quite small (Tuckman, 2008). The threat of for-profits in disguise entering the nonprofit sector is of less concern than the fact that the line between nonprofits and for-profits blurs to the point where the rationale for retaining the nonprofit sector can become an issue for public policy. This is especially the case for as nonprofit collaboration with corporations takes new and creative forms (Austin et al., 2007).
Key Issues Greater Specificity to the Mission Statement
Many mission statements are written in broad, unfocused, and all-encompassing terms, making it difficult to tell when the activities of a nonprofit are causing it to drift away from its intended mission (Tuckman & Chang, 2006). For example, a hospital with the mission of ‘‘improving the health of the population’’ can define multiple activities under its mission umbrella, some of which can involve largely commercial activities. In their pure form, nonprofit social missions require the provision of collective goods, goods that provide benefits to society at large, such as care for the poor, research that yields benefits to society, community services, and campaigns to educate the public. Provision of the same commercial service at the same price that a for-profit offers is not always a valid action for a nonprofit and if all of its activities are treated this way, even though it is carrying its mission, it may not be acting in the social interest yet limited oversight is usually provided as to what constitutes a valid mission statement. As a result, individual nonprofits and their boards are largely free to judge whether an activity is mission appropriate. As Weisbrod (1998) suggests ‘‘the challenge for public policy may well be to find alternative revenue sources that would make it possible for nonprofits to act less like private firms, at least in terms of choice
of outputs and target populations, and to concentrate more on their mission-related activities.’’ Mission Drift
Mission drift is difficult to capture even in the best of circumstances. It can be intentional, as when a nonprofit consciously decides to redirect its activities in a new direction, when it is influenced to seek a new direction through government or donor pressure or it may be unintentional, as when thought is not given to the effects of commercial activity and the organization gradually addresses its output of goods and services to a different mission over time (Tuckman & Chang, 2006). In the best of circumstances, it is difficult to identify because alternative activities can support the same mission and, in some situations, the same mission can be filled by either nonprofits or for-profits and the difference between nonprofit and for-profit methods for carrying out a mission may not be easily observable. Tuckman (2006) lists several behaviors that are a cause for concern. Administrators are driven by personal gain to spend so much time on for-profit activities that they lose sight of the ‘‘central role of providing socially valuable but privately unprofitable services, administrators reallocate their efforts to commercial activities at the expense of charitable activity, pressures from for-profits cause nonprofits to neglect significant segments of their previously served population, conflict of interest develops between the goals of the nonprofit and the goals of its commercial endeavor, dollars raised for charitable purposes are used as venture capital for for-profit activities, and charitable dollars are used to bail out failed businesses or for-profit projects.’’ Some of these activities are precluded by law but others are permitted. At present, it is largely up to the Boards of Directors to create a means for monitoring these activities in the United States and to take responsibility for monitoring them; especially in large diverse businesses like universities and hospitals, this is not easy. How Much Cross-Subsidization is Enough
Perhaps, the strongest rationale for pursuing commercialization is the theory of cross-subsidization which suggests that when revenues from donors, gifts, and other charitable sources are insufficient, nonprofit administrators opt to enter commercial businesses to create a larger profit that can be used to finance the production of desired goods and this leads to pricing policies different from those of for-profits (James, 1998). The model assumes administrators act benignly and use profits from commercial activities to subsidize the amount public goods and services they produce. It does not recognize that their
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behavior can be altered by exposure to business practices or that administrators will use funds to subsidize their own income or to provide themselves with shares in the new commercial entity. It also provides little explanation for when a nonprofit will choose a hybrid form and how it will choose among competing commercial activities. Clearly, there is a need for further research and applied studies as to how much cross-subsidization takes place and what boundaries should be placed on this. The Role of Changing Technology
Weisbrod (1998) notes that many of the industries in which commercialism is heavy (as reflected in partnerships, M & A, and conversions), there is a significant impact from institutional or technological change. In some cases, these affect the ideal size at which a nonprofit should produce, in others the ability to reach out to a new or existing constituency, and in others to better market and collect donations. Technological changes are particularly important where they make price financing more feasible and it may also be the case that the advantages to the nonprofit form, consisting of tax and subsidy benefits have lessened. Public policy would be greatly benefited if we better understood situations where some of the constraints on these nonprofits have been lifted, making it possible for them to act more like for-profits. Understanding the Hybrid Organization
Although hybrid nonprofits represent a small percentage of the total nonprofit community, they are important because of the role that they play in blurring the line between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Tuckman (2008) lists several reasons for creation of a hybrid with a for-profit subsidiary. First, many nonprofits need to protect their assets, especially when undertaking unrelated-business income generating activities. Second, segregation of assets may be helpful in attracting donors who would otherwise be concerned that their gifts would be used in unacceptable ways; e.g., dissipated on operations or spent on purposes other than the donor intended. Third, subsidiaries may be useful in targeting assets to specific groups. For example, a hospital may set up a separate subsidiary to provide hospice services. Fourth, we have noted above that too much commercial activity in a nonprofit may endanger its tax status and setting up a new for-profit entity can avoid this. Fifth, multiple subsidiaries may create the opportunity to share the salaries of senior management across multiple entities. This can lead to personal enrichment. Sixth, hybrid structures enable the nonprofit to separate employees with different talents, skills, and career goals. Finally, creation of a hybrid structure may be desirable if it creates greater
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flexibility for a nonprofit to work with a for-profit partner. These are all important considerations that suggest that a role exists for this type of organization. The problem is that we do not have either the data or the processes available to monitor the growth of these organizations and this suggests that they will go largely unnoticed, despite the fact that this is where many FPIDs are most likely to be located.
International Perspectives For-profits in disguise pose issues for public policy when they use their nonprofit status to obtain special benefits such as tax exemptions, lower postal rates, and exemption from antitax laws and use the savings for private gain. Each country has its own laws regarding how an entity qualifies for nonprofit status, what benefits accrue from having this designation, and how financial reporting should take place. For example, the European Union has several common features in the way its treats its nonprofits; they cannot distribute profits for private gain, should have formal legal status and be independent with respect to government and business, and have the purpose of playing a social role. Travaglini et al. (no date) find that nonprofit entities sell goods and services in EU countries and that financial statement regulation of nonprofits is ‘‘seriously inadequate,’’ suggesting that if FPIDs exist in these countries they may not be easily identified. In Spain, they find that the financial statements of nonprofits are insufficient to meet user needs because they use a model designed for business enterprises. In Italy, nonprofits must prepare annual financial reports but they need not make them public and the reporting structure is in need of clarification and standardization. In Russia, membership fees, donations, and other contributions are the key revenue sources for a majority of nonprofits and many earn profits from the various business activities they can legally engage in; sales are about 35% of their revenue (Livshin, 2005). Interestingly, the tax laws do not allow organizations that make contributions to deduct them from taxable profit but they allow special purpose revenues to be exempt from the profits tax on nonprofits. In 2001 nonprofits were required to pay the value added tax and in 2002, the profit tax was extended to all non special purpose revenues and the amount of business expenses could not be deducted in calculating the tax. These, as well as other factors, such as conditions unfavorable to the development of civil society, lack of stability, and deep contradictions in both the existing tax legislation and the way it is implemented, strongly reduce the incentives both to create both nonprofits and FPIDs. Finally, in some countries nonprofits have chosen to give up their nonprofit status to become for-profits. Austin
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et al. (2007) report, for example, that Bolivia’s top financial institution Banco Solidario S. A. began as a nonprofit micro finance nonprofit and evolved into a for-profit commercial bank after finding that it could secure more income and implement best practices better as a for-profit. Similar situations have existed for health care institutions in the United States who found the need for capital sufficient to motivate a change from for-profit to nonprofit.
Future Directions Salamon et al. (2000) calculate that globally nonprofits earn 57% of their income from commercial sales and only 13% from private donations. Given the forces described above, the need for funding will grow in the future as will the organizational changes that nonprofits will undergo as technological change continues to revise the best way for nonprofits to finance and deliver their services. The blurring of the lines between the sectors will continue as policymakers, donors, and other interested partners struggle with defining and controlling the conditions under which a nonprofit morphs into a for-profit in disguise.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Brands/Branding ▶ Civil Society and Cultural Organizations ▶ Civil Society–Business Relations ▶ Hybridity/Hybridization ▶ Legitimacy ▶ Mission ▶ Nonprofit Organization ▶ Partnerships ▶ Religious Organizations ▶ Social Enterprise ▶ Values
References/Further Readings Austin, J. E., Gutierrez, R., Ogliastri, E., & Reficco, E. ( 2007). Capitalizing on Convergence. Stanford Social Innovation Review, winter. Brown, E., & Slivinski, A. (2006). Nonprofit organizations and the market. The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Daniel, C. A. (1998). MBA: The first century. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. James, E. (1998). The nonprofit sector in comparative perspective. In B. A. Weisbrod (Ed.), To profit or not to profit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Livshin, A. (2005). Current issues of the development of nonprofit economy in Russia. Public Management. Electronic Journal Issue, v6. Salamon, L., Wojciech Sokolowszci, M. S., & List, R. (2004). Global civil society: An overview. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society. Skloot, E. (1998). Enterprise and commerce in nonprofit organizations. In B. A. Weisbrod (Ed.), To profit or not to profit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Travaglini, C., Supino, E., Furentes, J., Perdomo, J. F., Perez, E. F. (no date). Accounting Regulation for Nonprofit Organizations in Italy and Spain: Towards a European Perspective. SRN-id1079454(1). Tuckman, H. P. (1998). Competition, commercialization, and the evolution of nonprofit organizational structures. In B. A. Weisbrod (Ed.), To profit or not to profit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuckman, H. P. (2008). The Strategic and Economic Value of Hybrid Nonprofit Structures. In Joe Cordes (Ed.), A New World of Innovation and Adaptation. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Tuckman, H. P., and Chang, C. F. (2006). Commercial activity, ‘‘Technological Change and Nonprofit Mission.’’ In The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weisbrod, B. A. (Ed.) (1998). To profit or not to profit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs (The Filer Commission) ALICIA SCHORTGEN
Introduction The report of the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs (Filer Commission) is often touted as the founding document of America’s modern nonprofit sector. Named for committee chair John Filer, Chief Executive Officer of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company in Hartford, Connecticut, the Filer Commission carried out the most thorough study of the US nonprofit sector to date. The commission brought together a diverse group of representatives from nonprofits and government as well as scholars and private businesspeople for the 2-year project.
Brief History The Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs was founded in November 1973 to study the role of philanthropic organizations in the American public policy landscape. Congressional hearings leading up to the Tax Reform Act of 1969 called into question several aspects of philanthropic behavior in the United States including the nonprofit sector’s financial independence and the appropriateness of tax deductibility. The Filer Commission Report was officially presented to Congress in December 1975.
Activities During the Filer Commission’s 2-year term, 85 studies were conducted to explore a variety of philanthropic concerns. Economists, sociologists, and other consultants
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prepared reports on topics including domestic and international policy analysis related to charitable activity as well as taxpayer giving behavior. The Commission convened a series of meetings across the United States to garner feedback from experts and concerned stakeholders. All of these activities informed the Giving in America report as well as the supplemental Filer Commission materials.
Structure John H. Filer chaired the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs for the entirety of its research and reporting efforts. The commission’s final membership consisted of 26 members representing myriad stakeholders. The Filer Commission’s overall structure was somewhat fluid, but the final report of the commission recognized 120 participants including consultants and researchers.
Funding Nonprofit policy activist John D. Rockefeller, 3rd privately funded the Filer Commission.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions The Filer Commission Report, Giving in America: Toward a Stronger Voluntary Sector, is a 220-page report detailing the role of the charitable sector. The report, coupled with its five volumes of supplemental research reports and other materials, remain the most thorough study of nonprofits to date. The Commission’s 19 recommendations were divided into three main categories: (1) Broadening the Base of Philanthropy; (2) Improving the Philanthropic Process; and (3) A Permanent Commission. While the commission was most successful in maintaining the status quo of policies affecting charitable organizations including preserving tax deductibility of donations, John D. Rockefeller 3rd and other commission participants sought to promote the findings of the Filer Commission through Congress and various administrative agencies. The death of John D. Rockefeller 3rd in July 1978 stymied the efforts of Filer report supporters, and with the formation of the organization now known as Independent Sector, the Filer Commission officially disbanded.
Cross-References
▶ Independent Sector ▶ Filer, John H. ▶ Tax Deductions for Charitable Contributions in the US ▶ Tax Exemption, Justifications for
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References/Further Readings Brilliant, E. L. (2000). Private charity and public inquiry: A history of the Filer and Peterson commissions. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs. (1975). Giving in America: Toward a stronger voluntary sector. Washington, DC: Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs.
Common Law and Civil Society MATTHEW TURNOUR1, MYLES MCGREGOR-LOWNDES2 1 Neumann & Turnour Lawyers Brisbane, Brisbane, QLD, Australia 2 Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Introduction Common law does not (yet) recognize civil society as a unique legal sphere separate from public and private law in the way that civil society is now recognized as a separate space in some disciplines (Anheier, 2004). Civil society is therefore protected, enabled, regulated, and sometimes allowed preferences by the common law scattered throughout its various public and private divisions.
Definition The common law is usually described as unwritten law. It is the law developed by judges from the customs of the people expressed in judgments of courts of law and equity. It is therefore quite different both in substance and procedure from the civil law which is codified. The civil law had its origins in the Roman law codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian while the genesis and early development of the common law is traceable to the unwritten customs of England. English judges heard and decided cases keeping in tune with the principles set out in earlier cases which were considered to be statements of the accepted norms of England at the time. The reports of these judgments led to the development of a body of law, which came to be known as the common law because it was common throughout England and Wales. These unwritten laws developed by the courts of England from precedents, traveled with English settlement to other parts of the world and now underpin the jurisprudence of over 100 jurisdictions (McPherson, 2007). The strict application of these common law rules sometimes resulted in injustice and so principles developed, initially, within religious courts to moderate the unfair outcomes that
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could result from the strict application of the common law. These moderating principles applied by religious courts became known as the principles of equity or simply as equity. Over time the principles of equity were applied in courts that also applied the common law. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there are, then, two components of what is commonly called common law. The first component is the common law itself and the second component is equity. As common law emanates from the judgments of courts, it stands in contrast to statute law which emanates in written form as Acts of Parliament. The common law is often also divided between those aspects that regulate the relationship of the citizens with the government, called public law, and those aspects that relate to the relationship among citizens, called private law.
Historical Background The common law protection of the freedom of citizens from government upon which civil society depends, predates the Magna Carta signed by King John of England in 1215 (Brooks, 1998). In that context the right to freely associate was limited to freedom of religious expression. The common law regulation of civil society as private relations between citizens also traces in part to religious expression. The religious concept of the ‘‘pious use’’ was the forerunner of the modern concept of charitable trust by which courts of equity ensured that gifts for public purposes were applied for those purposes. The formation of associations independent of government and the private control of such associations are traceable to medieval guilds. Whilst these were initially not dependent upon government for corporate status, during the reign of the Tudors that changed. Arguably, because associations are a rival to sovereignty (Jacobsen, 1980) it suited the Tudor sovereigns to require all associations to be dependent upon the sovereign for legal status. The formal development of the common law into an articulated body of law is due in no small part to the work of William Blackstone who was the first Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford University. His Commentaries published in the 1760s (Blackstone, 2007) were the first substantive attempt to set out in an organized way the common law of England. Blackstone’s Commentaries became the source text for the common law not only in England but also in the United States, and indeed across the common law world. As the common law was considered to be the expression of the customs of the people, it was once presumed that an Act of Parliament did not intend to change the common law. The position in the United Kingdom and most other common law countries now is that an Act of
Parliament may extinguish even fundamental common law rights, immunities, and freedoms, provided the Act of the Parliament is clear and unambiguous (see, for instance, the judgment of Lord Hoffmann in R v Secretary of State for the Home Department; Ex parte Simms [2000] 2 AC 115 at 131–132, cited with approval by Chief Justice Gleeson of the High Court of Australia in Al-Kateb v Godwin [2004] 219 CLR 562 at [19], by Justice Kirby in Attorney-General (WA) v Marquet [2003] 217 CLR 545 at [180] and Chief Justice Elias and Justice Tipping of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in R v Pora 2 NZLR 37 at [53]).
Key Issues The common law is the foundation for many aspects of civil society. However, civil society as a concept is not recognized by the common law, so it is necessary to approach the protection, enabling, regulating, and sometimes preferring of civil society participation from within the accepted branches of the common law. Three branches of the common law are discussed in this section: first, the common law constitutional foundations for freedom of association; second, the laws of contract that provide the tools for governance of civil society organizations; and third, the principles of equity applying to charitable trusts. Constitutional Law
Whilst the right to freely associate for religious purposes has a long and contested history predating the Magna Carta, it is arguable whether there is a right to freedom of association independent of the right to freedom of religion at common law. The common law does not enshrine a right to public meetings and so participation in such civil society gatherings is arguably entirely dependent upon written, statutory, or Constitutional protections. Constitutional law protections of freedom to associate have their genesis in the English common law, but in the twenty-first century these rights are almost invariably expressed in written Constitutions and Bills of Rights (see, for instance, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Schedule B to the Canada Act [UK] 1982, c.11). Australia is the only common law country without some form of Bill of Rights but even the Australian Constitution provides basic freedom of religion protections (Section 116). Whilst it is difficult in common law history to separate freedom of association in civil society generally from religious freedom in particular, by the time Blackstone wrote his Commentaries in the 1760s he was able to point to certain well-recognized fundamental rights and it was these common law rights which subsequently found their way into various written ‘‘constitutions’’ of which the Constitution of the United States of America was the
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first. The most recent formulation of the right to associate finds expression in the South African Constitution. The preoccupation with religious freedom sometimes to the exclusion of the more general freedom of association in civil society is typical of the law in many common law countries. The common law rights, freedoms, and immunities of citizens to participate freely in civil society have also languished because of the codification of these common law rights in written Constitutions and Bills of Rights. This is because there has not been a need for reference to the common law protections because contests over such matters have been decided usually in the context of the relevant written Constitutional framework. Consequently, the common law applying generally to civil society fell into abeyance. Civil society is dependent upon the freedom to associate free of government controls but as the common law presently stands, conduct of a civil society organization is dependent upon government. This is because in most common law jurisdictions civil society organizations are dependent upon the government to enable corporate form to be taken. A corporate form is required because unincorporated associations are not recognized by the common law as capable of contracting, holding property, or engaging in litigation in their own right. In the United States there have been developments to both recognize and harmonize the law in relation to unincorporated civil society organizations (Joint Project to Create a Harmonized Legal Framework for Unincorporated Nonprofit Associations in North America, 2007). The European Court of Justice recognizes unincorporated associations (e.g., The United Communist Party of Turkey v Turkey [1998] Eur Court HR 1) but there is not yet common law recognition of unincorporated associations as separate legal entities, independent of their membership or office-bearers. So the right at common law to freely associate in civil society is presently dependant entirely upon the level of freedom not taken away by the parliament through legislation, while the formation of civil society organizations is entirely dependent upon government control of incorporation. Contract Law
The part of private law that enables and regulates civil society is found principally in the laws of contract. The common law courts have not always been ready to interfere in the internal management of civil society organizations but when they have, the courts have tended to affirm that the common law recognizes the constitution of an association as a contract between members. The laws regulating corporations, in particular corporations without shares are also important. The common law provides the
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basis for the laws that regulate meetings in civil society. Whilst the common law does not enshrine a right to public meetings, it does provide the rules for conduct of meetings. More generally, it provides the legal infrastructure underpinning participation in civil society by providing the rules governing meeting procedures for civil society organizations. In common law countries the rules of meetings are now often regulated by statute law but there remains a residual body of common law from which these statutes are often derived and which fills the gaps where there are not statutory provisions. The common law therefore provides not only the foundation for membership rights but also the principles by which civil society organizations must be governed. The principles of contract apply in very specific ways to the relationship between members and officebearers. In this context, the rules of equity operate to ensure that when persons are in control of resources on behalf of civil society organizations as office-bearers, they utilize those resources only for the purposes of the civil society organization and not for personal private benefit. Purpose Trusts
The branch of the common law that provides the legal infrastructure for the pursuit of charitable purposes, and thus the pursuit of a significant proportion of civil society purposes, is equity. Charitable trusts are a concept unique to equity. There is not a civil law equivalent. Equity recognizes as a general principle that a person or corporation can hold the full legal interest in something but that the thing must be used only for the benefit of another particular legal person or purpose. This relationship between the person holding the thing and the person or purpose to benefit is called a trust. Trusts for charitable purposes have proved very useful to civil society participants as vehicles for pursuing public-benefiting purposes. This important role for trusts is still the case in the United Kingdom, but is now less significant in the USA. The importance of charitable trusts as vehicles for the pursuit of civil society purposes is of varying significance in other parts of the common law world. The equitable principles that define charitable purposes are often the gateway to entitlement to preferences such as income tax exemption under statute law across the common law world and so the common law definition of charities is often very important (Luxton, 2001). As civil society organizations pursuing charitable purposes are likely to be able to access preferences that other civil society organizations are not, the definition of what is, and what is not, a charity in this context becomes important. But the definition of charities is, for historic reasons, quite technical and difficult. Many common law countries have had inquiries
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into the definition of charities in the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. In Australia, Barbados, Scotland, England, and Wales that has led to the common law definition of charity being expanded by statutes adding a broader range of civil society purposes to the definition of charitable purposes. The effect has been to enlarge the scope of civil society organizations enjoying the preferences that were formerly limited to civil society organizations that satisfied the common law definition of charities.
International Perspectives The common law is remarkably consistent in relation to civil society issues across the world. Differences in the way civil society is enabled, regulated, and granted preference tend to flow from statutory additions and variations to the common law. This may be because the common law is in a relatively retarded state of development in relation to civil society in general. There are two international factors now driving common law development. The latter part of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a body of international law founded on international covenants. The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed an international response to terrorism. Both of these developments have had implications for the development of the common law applying to civil society. The common law applying to civil society has developed slowly according to its own rules over almost a millennium. But the internationalization of law crystallized in part with the entry of Great Britain into the European Community; and submission of the common law courts in Great Britain to the European Court of Justice brings with it significant challenges for common law judges. There is now a duty on common law judges to interpret and develop the common law in a manner consistent with Great Britain’s treaty obligations having regard to European civil law and international law principles (O’Halloran, 2007). This is likely to lead to further development of the common law applying to civil society. The internationalization of trade has led to the development of the common law dimensions of the laws of contract in ways that are more compatible with civil law. These developments could provide some guidance as to how the common law related to civil society might be similarly developed. At a more specific level it might be that by retracing the equitable principles into their religious heritage a juncture can be found from which civil society concepts at common law can be developed in a manner more consistent with the civil law – and more consistent with the development of conceptions of civil society in other disciplines.
The war on international terrorism has created challenges for civil society association and philanthropic giving. Freedom of association and freedom of philanthropic giving is increasingly regulated and controlled by government. This is due in part to resolutions of the United Nations Security Council. Beginning in 2001, the United Nations Security Council passed a series of resolutions calling upon member states to monitor, control, and seize funds collected for terrorist acts (Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts SC Res 1,373, UNSCOR, 4385th mtg 0155743 [2001]2005). The legislation which followed in many common law countries has created concerns amongst civil society commentators (Sidel, 2005) and human rights lawyers (Barker, ) which in turn has reawakened an interest in civil society rights, freedoms, and immunities protected by the common law in many common law countries. The interplay of these civil society rights with the common law was discussed in an Australian case. An Indian national, Dr. Haneef was arrested on terrorism-related charges in July 2007. In a subsequent deportation hearing the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia held that ‘‘freedom is not merely what is left over when the law is exhausted’’ but that ‘‘the common law . . . has its own set of constitutional rights, even if these are not formally entrenched against legislative repeal’’ (Minister for Immigration & Citizenship v Haneef [2007] FCAFC 203, Unreported, Black C. J., French and Weinberg J. J., 21 December 2007 [113], citing Allan, 1983). The scope of these freedoms is likely to be further tested and developed in the coming years and Australia may well prove to be an important jurisdiction in that development because it does not have a Bill of Rights.
Future Directions The challenges confronting the common law in relation to civil society include how the common law can develop a body of law recognized as unique to the space of a civil society similar to the way that public law developed as a body of law for the sphere of relationships between the citizen and government, or the way that divisions of private law such as contract developed to facilitate relationships in the private sphere. To resolve those issues, marking out of the space for civil society, in a way that goes beyond charity at common law, and additions to charitable purposes by statute may be required. Conceptually, freedom of association is a logical development of the common law from religious freedom. As the law protecting freedom of association in most common law countries is expressed in written form as Constitutions and Bills of Rights, contests over these
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rights and freedoms have found expression in cases on the interpretation of written Constitutions not the common law. The emergence of International Covenants beginning with the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the adoption of those International Covenants by common law countries into their domestic laws have provided fresh impetus for revisiting the common law foundations of civil society rights, freedoms, and immunities. This is because it is now necessary to bring these common law foundations into harmony with International Covenant obligations. The question is how the common law might be so developed having regard to its dependence upon its own precedent and the principles to emerge from that precedent. When considering these issues the extent of the regulation of civil society will be an integral issue for resolution (Garton, 2005). Development of the common law in relation to these rights, freedoms, and immunities may involve a return to the foundations articulated by William Blackstone before written Constitutions and Bills of Rights became popular. Future directions are also likely to be significantly informed by international law developments in countries that are not subject to the common law. Domestic developments or developments in other common law countries will be important but broader international trends, of which the response to international terrorism is but one example, are increasingly likely to shape the future of the common law applied to civil society.
Blackstone (2007). Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, from http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/ avalon/blackstone/blacksto.htm; 28/09/2007. Brooks, C. W. (1998). Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. London: Hambledon Press. Garton, J. E. (2005). The regulation of charities and civil society. King’s College. London: University of London. Jacobson, A. (1980). ‘‘The private use of public authority: Sovereignty and associations in the common law.’’ Buffalo Law Review, 29, 600–665. Joint Project to Create a Harmonized Legal Framework for Unincorporated Nonprofit Associations in North America (2007). ‘‘Statement of principles.’’, from http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/ hunaa/2007july_principles.htm; 7/10/2007. Luxton, P. (2001). The law of charities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McPherson, B. (2007). The reception of English law abroad. Brisbane: Supreme Court of Queensland Library. O’Halloran, K. (2007). Charity law and social inclusion: An international study. New York: Routledge. Sidel, M. (2005) ‘‘Fallout from the war on terror’’. Yale Global Online, from http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id = 5865; 22/02/ 2007.
Cross-References
Introduction
▶ Associations, Definitions and History of ▶ Charity Law ▶ Citizenship ▶ Freedom of Association ▶ Government–Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History ▶ Tax Exemption, Justifications for ▶ Tax Policy ▶ Third Way ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Allan, T. R. S. (1983). ‘‘Parliamentary sovereignty Lord Denning’s dexterous revolution.’’ Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 3, 22–33. Anheier, H. (2004). Civil society measurement, evaluation, policy. London: Earthscan. Barker, I. (2005). ‘‘Human rights in an age of counter terrorism.’’ Australian Bar Review, 26, 1–20.
Commons ROGER A. LOHMANN West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA
Intellectual and academic interest in commons has grown across a broad front of sciences and disciplines since the late 1960s, aided perhaps by the growing realization that sciences and academic disciplines are important forms of commons. Much of that interest arose from the publication of an essay in Science (Hardin, 1967) that asserted a ‘‘tragic’’ dynamic in the problem of private communal natural resource utilization, for which the only viable solution was said to be public ownership. Although little known by civil society researchers, Hardin’s analysis – like nearly contemporaneous work by Mancur Olson (1965) – detailed what has since become known as the ‘‘free rider problem’’ as key to the alleged tragedy. In the ensuing 4 decades, researchers and theorists in environmental and life sciences, economics, law, history, political theory, agriculture, sociology, and numerous other theoretical and applied disciplines have invoked diverse models of commons, common-pool resources (CPRs) and common goods as ways to frame an increasingly broad range of practical and theoretical issues. The literature on
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commons problems has grown so dramatically that reviewing it completely would require several large volumes and the cooperation of scholars from dozens of disciplines. The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) is an interdisciplinary research society formed in 1989 exclusively for work on the topic (www.iascp.org/).
Definition A common (or commons; the s ending is often applied indiscriminately to singular and plural usages) can refer to any economic, political, social, and legal institution or natural or organic process that enables joint, shared, mutual, or collective natural or social action by agents to affect a ‘‘pool’’ of shared or jointly held or mutually controlled resources. Commons are of historic and contemporary interest across a wide variety of empirical and theoretical problems and issues in nature and civil society, including environmental resource issues (Hardin, 1968), governance problems (Ostrom, 1990), and voluntary action and philanthropy outside markets and states (Lohmann, 1992a; Van Til, 2000). A common can be an actual, existing natural or social object (such as an ocean, a property or a philanthropic foundation), a unit of analysis or theoretical formalism (e.g., an ideal type) or an element or figure in an abstract logical construct (as in the ‘‘commons tragedy’’ or prisoner’s dilemma games), used to highlight or isolate natural, political, social, economic, or legal phenomena for closer analysis. There are several important collateral terms to consider as well. In interdisciplinary commons theory, commonpool resources (CPR) is a key term, referring to a collection of resources affected by and facilitating action (physical or social) by a plurality of agents. In political and economic theories, the term common goods is sometimes used to characterize real or intended products, outputs, goals, or desired end states of common (aka, community, or collective) action. In such cases, common goods are related to terms like public goods, general welfare and public interest, but embody a fundamental ambiguity – sometimes connoting shared resources, at other times the presumptive or aspirant good associated with particular commonpool resources and sometimes used synonymously with those terms. Sometimes reference is to a single commons (e.g., a world’s ocean or atmosphere) and at other times to the connotation that a class of commons are all alike in some way. In some cases, it can seem awkward to use the term commons without preceding it with the article. One can find instances to support just about any position on this.
Historical Background In civil society, the issues involved have long been associated with the general will (volonte´ ge´ne´rale) as first set forth by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For civil society scholars in the USA, the underlying issue is also reminiscent of the Lippman-Dewey debate that began in the 1920s over Lippman’s advocacy of ‘‘the public interest’’ and Dewey’s espousal of multiple ‘‘public interests’’ (Dewey, 1927; Lippman, 1955). In general, however, the importance of commons for civil society has only come into clear focus in the past 3 decades.
Key Issues In contemporary civil society theory, exclusion, and rivalry are generally considered to be the two primary characteristics distinguishing public and private goods. (See Anheier (2005) for particular clear discussions of this issue.) Commons (as in Table 1) can be fitted into this scheme as two types of intermediate (often styled as quasi-public and quasi-private) goods mixing public and private characteristics. Membership associations and philanthropy (defined in Robert Payton’s colorful phrase as the private pursuit of public goods) fit this characterization well. The use of groups in the subtitle of Olson’s work (‘‘public goods and the theory of groups’’) introduces a second ambiguity as well. Although in commons theories, the term is almost always applied to sets of agents, groups can be simple aggregations, or sets of socially interacting entities. Some groups of agents engaged with common resource pools are sets of inanimate objects, insects, or animals and other clusters completely outside the domain of civil society, while others are human social groups interacting within the civil society context. The implications of the differences between natural/physical and social groups has not been explored or well tracked in commons theories. Currently, there are many different disciplinary, professional, and cultural approaches to the study of commons, many of them not cognizant of one another. Thus, Hess (2000, p. 8) accurately notes that the commons theory presented in Lohmann (1992a) was developed with little reference to the body of work presented through the IASC. A review of Lohmann (1992a) Commons. Table 1 Public, private, and two types of common goods Non-exclusion
Exclusion
Non-rivalry
Public good
Club good
Rivalry
Community good
Private good
Commons
characterized this as the ‘‘search for common ground’’ between a civil society/third sector approach and the common goods economics of Ostrom, et al. (Krashinsky, 1995). Contemporary work on natural resource commons or common goods economics is generally still not informed by recent research and theoretical perspectives on voluntary associations, and nonprofit organizations or other recent work on civil society. Natural, Human-Directed, and Artificial Commons
In an attempt to locate civil society commons studies relative to the larger body of commons research, a literature review of a large body of recent work on the commons was conducted. Unfortunately, space limitations demand that only a small, illustrative portion of the identified studies can be cited here. (A single representative study is cited in each case to support the point. For a more comprehensive listing of studies, contact the author at
[email protected].) Table 2 offers a simple model of the most important of these distinctions. A substantial body of work on commons exists in which natural, physical ‘‘common resource pools’’ are impacted by nonhuman ‘‘agents’’ (the box on the far right). There are, for example, studies fitting the concept of the commons to the electromagnetic spectrum and human gene pool (Lim, 2006), ‘‘galaxy associations’’ (Gurzadyan & Mazure, 1998), geothermal energy (Kerr, 1991), microbial populations (Maclean, 2003), and plant water use (Zea-Cabrera, et al., 2006). Each of these studies works within the basic commons model of a shared resource pool and an identified natural ‘‘agent’’ or process of ‘‘agency’’ responsible for affecting the distribution of resources from that pool. There is also a large body of work (represented by the middle box in Table 2) on human-natural environment interfaces (Roberts & Emel, 1992) and interspecies conflict and population density (Rankin, 2007). One of the most widely studied topics of interest to commons researchers is in the broad area of conservation, environmental, and evolutionary biology and natural resource management and spatial issues (Princen, 2008).
Commons. Table 2 Artificial, directed, and natural resource pools Common resource pools Artificial (humanly created) Resource pools (ARPs)
Natural resource pools directed by human agents (DNRPs)
Natural resource pools (NRPs)
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Much recent work on the commons specifically engages human social institutions impacting natural resource pools. Historical investigations, for example, tend to focus on real, actual instances of past and present common agricultural lands and practices, which existed in England and Wales. There is a widespread, and false, belief that common field agriculture was limited primarily to England and Wales in the late middle ages, and that is of historical interest only. This is probably owing to the important and notorious ‘‘enclosure’’ movement of the sixteenth century. This and widespread belief in the ineluctably ‘‘tragic’’ nature of common resource pool management are perhaps the two greatest errors associated with commons theory. Accounts of commons have also been reported in countless other nations and cultures. English common law has engendered a rich vocabulary of practical and legal terms with precise (often agricultural) meanings, like common fields, common pasturage (the right to graze animals on common land), estover (the right to collect wood from smaller trees), piscary (common rights to fisheries), tubary (the right to collect sod), and mast (the right to turn out pigs in a harvested field in the fall). Common problems in law also extend beyond common arable fields to maintenance of shared fence lines and the broader issue of, in Ellickson’s (1991) phrase, ‘‘how neighbors settle disputes.’’ Armitage (2008) reviews governance arrangements that ‘‘should connect community-based management with regional/national government-level management, link scientific management and traditional management systems, encourage the sharing of knowledge and information, and promote collaboration and dialog around goals and outcomes.’’ Huge literatures address common field agriculture throughout the world, and such human-environmental interactions as fisheries. Historic commons figure importantly in what Karl Polanyi (2001; first published in 1941) termed ‘‘the great transformation’’ and in analyses of public welfare and charity systems (e.g., Piven & Cloward, 1993). Many of these studies emphasize local and community referents, and reinforce the sense of an intermediate stage between the public domain of the nation state and the purely private domains characterized by alienation, property ownership, exclusion, and rivalry. (The domain of civil society and the third sector. Dowsley (2008) notes the failure of both ‘‘top-down’’ (statist) and ‘‘bottom-up’’ approaches and calls for development of ‘‘multilevel’’ governance capacities. Readers who follow issues in information technology, and in particular, open-source debates, are no doubt aware of the continuing impact of commons
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models there (Lessig, 2001). One of the important issues in current copyright debates, for example, involves efforts to privatize knowledge and corresponding efforts for the attempted identification of knowledge commons (Hess & Ostrom, 2006). Work on these lines has led to vast increases in the number of web sites incorporating commons themes, in particular those associated with the ‘‘open-source’’ movement. Two examples are particularly important. Apache is probably the most popular opensource web server on the Internet, operating roughly half of all known web sites, for example. The data trove where Apache code ‘‘applets’’ are archived is known as the Apache Commons (commons.apache.org). At least as significant (at least for authors) is the Creative Commons licensure approach to copyright and intellectual property (creativecommons.org). The use of the term ‘‘commons’’ to signify a group-directed, collectively held, common resource pool appears deliberate in both cases, and has generated a large and growing literature (Benkler, 2006). In both cases, these examples conform to the previously identified common resource pools, drawn upon by various human and electronic agents. Likewise, medical and health care research have taken interest in the commons along a variety of paths including studies of health (Woolf & Stange, 2006), emergency medicine (Lewis, 2004), pathology (Kerr et al., 2006), public health campaigns (Guttman & Ressler, 2001) ‘‘health commons’’ in New Mexico (Kaufman et al., 2006) and Swedish health services (Saltman & Bergman, 2005) and more. In a manner consistent with historical and contemporary studies of pastures, fisheries, and other agricultural institutions and local community orientations, a large body of commons studies also take specific geographic and community foci, on such topics as African pastoralism, the Anasazi in the Southwestern USA, an area in the USA heartland termed the Buffalo Commons, ‘‘open’’ cattle ranges in Ethiopia and northern Norway, fish mining in Egypt, groundwater in West Texas, grasslands in Inner Mongolia, and folkways in Maya Lowlands. In addition, the environmental movement has provoked concern with global commons including oceans, atmosphere, and Antarctica but also world systems and global commons as public goods (French, 1992). Commons studies have also looked at a broad variety of topics more directly related to the role of commons in civil society: Most important, perhaps, is the rapidly growing literature on governing the commons (Ostrom, 1990). Yoon (2000) detailed a companionate concept termed the anticommons to describe cases of multiple rights to exclude. Harrington (2004) applied the commons
model to civic life to suggest ‘‘an alternative analytical framework for civic engagement based on small-group interaction.’’ Carlsson and Berkes (2005) developed the concept of co-management as ‘‘a continuous problemsolving process, rather than a fixed state, involving extensive deliberation, negotiation, and joint learning within problem-solving networks.’’ Antoci et al. (2006) examined firms and nonprofit organizations as commons, with particular focus on trust and learning. Macy (2003) fit the commons model to collective action and the dilemma for organizers of balancing ‘‘the efficacy problem’’ and ‘‘the free rider problem.’’ Casas-Corts et al. (2008) examined knowledge practices of social movements. Other recognized civil society topics approached as commons include: collective intelligence, cooperation, discourse, folk ecology, the future, narcissism, professional environments, prosocial behavior, reputation, social issues, trans-generational altruism, universities, and volunteering among other issues and topics. While the defining elements of shared resource pools and agents (together with appropriate identification of causal mechanisms, or agency) may be both necessary and sufficient in consideration of natural commons, some additional explanation is necessary in the cases of common resource pools coming under the influence of human agents. While each of these (and other) instances involving human agents, and especially those involving the concerns of civil society, involves its own distinct, particular characteristics, it is also possible to identify certain general themes and characteristics of human, social commons (Lohmann, 1992a). In general terms, one may speak of these as the social organization of commons. Social Organization of Commons
The structures of agents and resource pools in natural commons is a matter completely outside this concern. The social organization of human-directed common resource pools of natural resources and social commons completely organized and directed by human social action shown graphically in Table 3 raise several interesting questions. Most notable, perhaps is the question of what can be said about the social organizations that create, direct, and control CRPs? The remainder of this article addresses a social organizational perspective on commons problems in civil society, with particular attention to those involving associations, foundations, social movements, some nonprofit firms and other forms of collective and voluntary action (see Table 3). In Governing the Commons (1990), Elinor Ostrom offered eight design principles for governing commons: they require (1) clearly defined boundaries, (2) there
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Commons. Table 3 Common resource pools in civil society Common resource pools ARPs
DNRPs
Meaningful
Instrumental
Expressive/spontaneous
Mission/purpose
Associations/commons
Nonprofit firms/benefactories
Lifeworlds
Systems
Vol. assns.
Clubs & congreg.
Prof. assns.
Charities
must be proportional equivalence between benefits and costs, and provision must be made for (3) collectivechoice arrangements, (4) arrangements for monitoring, (5) graduated sanctions, (6) conflict resolution mechanisms, (7) minimal recognition of rights to organize, and (8) nested enterprises. While these desiderata offer a fairly convincing case supporting a general rational-choice model of commons, their implications for commons in civil society, including voluntary, mutual, and membership associations, cooperatives, nonprofit organizations and foundations, have yet to be clearly delineated. Given the prominence of such artificial and humanly directed common resource pools, it is somewhat surprising how little sustained attention has been given to the question of their social organization in the commons literature. Lohmann (1992a) is apparently the only source to examine this issue from the standpoint of general social and economic theory. In that account, common resource pools, or shared resources, are one of three basic, defining conditions of a social commons. Also important are groups of voluntary, uncoerced participants and mission, or a shared sense of goals or purpose. When such pluralities of human agents control one or more common resource pools directed by a sense of mission several things are said to happen over time. First, a sense of philia, or camaraderie, or fellow-feeling will develop among the members; a development which itself can become a powerful resource for the commons. The resulting trust and networks of relationships that evolve form a distinctive and important form of social capital. This proposition brings two large and otherwiseunrelated bodies of theory and research together: commons theory and social capital theory. At the same time, groups of voluntary participants, possessed of purpose and shared resources can also be expected to evolve an emergent moral order, consisting of operating and procedural rules (e.g., by-laws), status systems (e.g., officers, membership requirements), rituals (e.g., initiation and office-transition rites) and other
NRPs Natural processes
Mutuals
Colonies Foundations
NP firms
more powerful instruments including mission and vision statements, manifestos, philosophies, histories, and intentional communities and ways of life. In the process of forming such moral orders, story telling, narrative, and other similar constructive processes are very important to social commons. As part of this process, individual participants may experience mild to profound modifications in their sense of personal identity. Thus, becoming a scientist or social scientist, a programmer, a Christian or Buddhist, a Shriner, Elk, or Moose or a computer hacker, are all examples of identities arising out of participation in commons. In the case of social commons, at least three important forms of common-pool resources can be identified: One is money or fungible financial resources (occasionally including important amounts of credit as well as cash). Also particularly important in the case of religious organizations, colleges, museums, libraries, and other types of civil society organizations are collections of objects. Such collections differ from business inventories in that they are not collected for sale or distribution; the objects are valued for themselves and not for their exchange value. Thus, the term ‘‘priceless’’ applied to such objects is often meant to connote not only that it is extremely valuable or not for sale, but also that its nonmonetary value is utmost in importance. Finally, one of the most intriguing forms of commonpool resource found in social commons are repertories of social skills, practices, methodologies, and other social behaviors. Focusing on repertories as a form of commonpool resource open many possibilities for joining commons theory to a broad variety of social science insights. For example, the sociologist Charles Tilly has identified important changes in the role of repertories of contention in eighteenth and nineteenth century social movements. Likewise, one of the important theorists of social capital, Pierre Bourdeau also offered an important study of practices that can be applied here. The strong emphasis on methodology in various social science research specialties
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represents an important form of repertory as a commonpool resource for research. All of these different types of resources and others are to some extent fungible, or convertible from one form to another, in commons: Thus, cash can be used to hire employees, purchase objects for a collection, or as tuition for training to acquire new repertories. At the same time, collections can be used to attract large and small payments from patrons, and form the basis for all manner of repertories to evolve (archeological excavation and restoration, curation, propagation, preservation, and myriad other distinct and identifiable repertories have evolved around different types of collections). An important discovery of commons theory has been that some forms of repertory that are not initially viable commercially (because no markets for them exist) can be developed and refined by nonprofit, voluntary, or nongovernmental organizations in possession of common resource pools. In some cases, for reasons not yet fully explained but at least hinted at by Ostrom’s design principles, some of commons-devised repertories become commercially viable while others do not. Thus, many forms of home health and education services were first developed with common-pool resources and later became commercially viable. In some sense, commercial art galleries and companies selling classical music recordings are likewise dependent upon the prior existence of art museums and symphony orchestras to shape, develop, and educate tastes and preferences which art and music consumers can then act upon. Commons as social organizations and common resource pools are also important in processes of government formation. Public funds may not be available, for example, for the complex and elaborate repertories and social capital that a President, Prime Minister or Governor must engage to form a new government following an election. Identifying, recruiting, and vetting suitable candidates are typically tasks undertaken by mixtures of political parties, interest groups and other factions, utilizing common resource pooled funds donated – often by those expecting to receive some consideration from the new government. (As this is written, the new Obama administration is engaged in an exceptionally open and public example of this process of government formation.) A staggering variety of terms exist for different types of commons as social organizations: Groups, associations, clubs, societies, fraternities, sororities, sodalities, peer, and friendship groups, parties, campaigns, and many other terms are used to describe pluralities of persons gathered together outside the bounds of the political state or
economic markets for various shared, collective, or mutual purposes. Foundations are an important form of legally constituted and formally organized common resource pool in contemporary civil society. Some forms of common resource pooling are purposely temporary: in addition to government formation, festivals, fundraising campaigns, religious pilgrimages are notable examples. In the USA, Section 501 of the US Internal Revenue Act is one major enabling statute for legal recognition of a wide variety of common resource pools, some of them taxable, others not. Similar enabling legislation exists in most countries today. In the USA, public law regulating commons tends to focus heavily on taxation and other financial matters: Laws typically spells out the conditions under which financial resources may be pooled and held, conditions for defining membership and participation, and allowable circumstances for distributions from common resource pools, whether fisheries, forests, or philanthropic foundations. ‘‘Property,’’ ‘‘contract,’’ ‘‘lawful purpose,’’ and the ‘‘right of association’’ which explicitly includes both ‘‘peaceable assembly’’ and petitioning government for ‘‘redress of grievances’’ (aka advocacy) are important concepts around which the legal institutions for enabling common resource pooling are established. Such legal principles obviously do not apply to natural commons, but only to social commons in which human agents are paramount in importance, and perhaps to a lesser degree to human-directed natural resource commons. Common Goods
Lohmann (1992a) sets out to link a distinctive type of output or good labeled common goods as the product of production based on common resource pools and to establish common goods as a third category of goods located between public and private goods (see discussion of Table 1). The originally stated view of common goods as a single category now appears somewhat dated; it is now clear that there are not one, but two categories of goods that can be located in the intermediate position between public and private goods. (Both were, in fact, mentioned in Lohmann, 1992a, but only common goods were dealt with in an extended manner.) Generally, civil society theorizing can follow the lead of economists and differentiate public goods from private goods on two grounds. (Anheier, 2005, pp. 117) Private goods are said to be rivalrous and exclusive: That is, in buying a new, lightweight, high-mileage auto I must compete with a variety of independent rivals (other buyers) who can, under different circumstances show disinterest or bid the price up. Likewise, once I buy my auto, it is
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mine and I can exclude others from driving or riding in it if I so choose. By economic convention, public goods are said to be non-rivalrous and nonexcludable. The atmosphere and the ocean are simply there and useable or not. In civil society, however, many forms of good are only partially public and yet not fully private: Rivalrous, but not exclusive; Exclusive but not rivalrous. For much of the past several decades, this condition has been hedged in many civil society discussions with phrases like ‘‘quasiprivate’’ goods and ‘‘semipublic’’ goods. The prospect of common goods as an intermediate form thus appeared quite appealing a quarter century ago (Lohmann, 1992a, 1989). This differentiation of rivalrous, nonexclusive (communal) goods from non-rivalrous, exclusive (club) goods is also a key to understanding the importance of commons theory for civil society. In actual point of fact, common resource pools (CRPs) in civil society are not restricted to any particular type of good. They can be used to produce all four types of goods shown in Table 1. Thus, for example, the common resource pool of a private, or voluntary charity or faithbased organization may be utilized to make financial payments or provide services to various types of poor, ill, or other clients. As such, this constitutes production of an important form of private good. In US law and the English Poor Law tradition, efforts are made to carefully restrict such purposes (e.g., for the poor or sick, for educational purposes) by carefully defining the mission of such commons. Increasingly, such production of private goods is in the hands of commercial, market-oriented firms, or quasi-commercial nonprofit firms, including tuition-based colleges, hospitals, and other nonprofit service vendors. Conversely, social clubs, membership organizations, and a bewildering variety of other associations are engaged in the production of (non-rivalrous, excludable) club goods, which may be available only to members as ‘‘member benefits’’ and non-rivalrous, often largely on the basis of disinterest on the part of nonmembers. Thus, members of stamp-collecting clubs may have exclusive access to certain first-issue stamps; a fact that may be of overwhelming disinterest to noncollectors. Noncollectors wishing to share in the benefit are encouraged to join and thereby become eligible. Club goods are significantly different from private and public goods but also from communal goods, like various bodies of knowledge. An abstraction one might term the social organization of the calculus serves to illustrate the point. Calculus (like Shakespeare or Mandarin or Sumerian history) is an esoteric but widely studied and important body of knowledge. First developed by Newton
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and Liebnitz and passed from teacher to student in mathematics, the sciences and engineering since that time, calculus knowledge might at first be thought to be the club good of a peculiar kind of club: the international society of those-who-know-calculus, as it were. However, calculus is in several important senses, nonexcludable. Just about anyone on the planet could, with a little effort, have access to a calculus textbook. There is no practical limit on the number of people who may know calculus, and an person’s knowledge of calculus in no way excludes, limits, or restricts any other’s ability to learn it; in fact, if one is willing to teach another, it facilitates it. However, the club of those-who-know-calculus is, like many forms of knowledge, rivalrous in an important opportunity cost sense. Thus, calculus may be a rivalrous good in the important sense that life is limited and the cost of my learning calculus may be having no time available to study Shakespeare, Mandarin, or Sumarian history. Thus, calculus knowledge is not strictly speaking, a club good but rather a communal good because of the effort-cost involved in learning it and the exclusion resulting from the fact that not everyone will have time or wherewithal to do so. Finally, many common resource pools (particularly philanthropic foundations) may be devoted to public goods, summarized in Payton’s phrase, ‘‘the private pursuit of public good.’’ Historically, this may be an artifact of efforts to overcome the effects of social change on philanthropic purpose and the ‘‘dead hand of philanthropy’’ also addressed by the cy pres legal doctrine. Regardless of the origins, however, it is clear that public goods in foundations find expression through the mission of these important organizations. Thus, many of the nearly 75,000 foundations existent in the USA today and comparable others elsewhere in the world have broad, global mission statements which truly express their commitment to delivering such public goods as civic education, scientific advancement, curing diseases, eliminating poverty and disaster relief.
Future Directions Research in the last 2 decades has established that common resource pools come in three basic varieties. One of these, natural resource pools, is of little interest to civil society studies except as a subject for research support from common resource pools at foundations and elsewhere. The other two, humanly created or artificial common resource pools and humanly directed natural resource pools, are both of significant interest to civil society studies. Current research on these covers a bewildering variety of topics, issues, and questions, some of
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which are mentioned in this article. Certain underlying similarities are evident in the social, economic, and political structures surrounding and controlling these two types of common resource pools. The theory of the commons is important to civil society studies because it offers a way to understand certain underlying similarities between voluntary associations, nonprofit, voluntary, and nongovernmental organizations, foundations, fundraising campaigns, and other forms of social organization found in civil society. Such entities tend to involve voluntary participation and shared missions as well as shared resources, and to demonstrate certain forms of institutionalization processes, including the emergence of philia, trust, networks, and other forms of social capital, and the evolution of distinct, and indigenous moral orders. The theory is also important because many of the forms of civil society organization are built around common resource pools, composed of financial resources, collections, and behavioral repertories of great variety. Lastly, common resource pools in civil society are utilized in the production of all four forms of goods: public, club, common, and private. For all of these reasons and more, scholars of civil society need to become more aware of the research being done in commons studies.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definition and History of ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Civil Society Theory: Dewey ▶ Civil Society Theory: Rousseau ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Collective Action ▶ Endowment, Definition and Management of ▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Goods and Services, Types of ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations ▶ Mission ▶ Polanyi, Karl ▶ Public Benefit and Public Good ▶ Social Capital, Definition of
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. K. (2005). Nonprofit organizations: Theory, management, policy. London/New York: Routledge. Antoci, A., Galeotti, M., Russu, P., & Zarri, L. (2006). Generalized trust and sustainable coexistence between socially responsible firms and nonprofit organizations. Chaos Solitons Fractals, 29(3), 783–802. Armitage, D. (2008). Governance and the commons in a multi-level world. International Journal of the Commons (Online), 2(1), 7–32.
Baden, J., & Noonan, D. S. (1998). Managing the commons (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Carlsson, L., & Berkes, F. (2005). Co-management: Concepts and methodological implications. Journal of Environmental Management, 75(1), 65–76. Casas-Cort, M., Osterweil, M., & Powell, D. (2008). Blurring boundaries: Recognizing knowledge-practices in the study of social movements. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58. Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. New York: Holt. Dowsley, M. (2008) Developing multi-level institutions from top-down ancestors. International Journal of the Commons. 2. 1. January, 2008. 55–74. Ellickson, R. C. (1991). Order without law: How neighbors settle disputes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. French, H. F. (1992). From discord to accord. World Watch, 5(3), 26–32. Gurzadyan, V. G., & Mazure, A. (1998). Galaxy associations’ as possible common features of galaxy clusters. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 295(1), 177–187. Guttman, N., & Ressler, W. H. (2001). On being responsible: Ethical issues in appeals to personal responsibility in health campaigns. Journal of Health Communication, 6(2), 117–136. Hardin, G. (1967). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248. Harrington, B. (2004). Tiny publics: Small groups and civil society. Sociological Theory, 22(3), 341–356. Hess, C. (2000). Is there anything new under the sun?: A discussion and Survey of studies on new commons and the Internet. In Constituting the Commons, the eighth biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, IN: Indiana. Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (2006). Understanding knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Kaufman, A., Derksen, D., Alfero, C., DeFelice, R., Sava, S., Tomedi, A., Baptiste, N., Jaeger, L., & Powell, W. (2006). The health commons and care of New Mexico’s uninsured. Annals of Family Medicine, 4(Suppl. 1), s22–s7; S58–S60. Kerr, B., Neuhauser, C., Bohannan, B. J. M., & Dean, A. M. (2006). Local migration promotes competitive restraint in a host–pathogen ‘‘tragedy of the commons.’’ Nature, 442, 75. Krashinsky, M. (1995). In search of common ground about the commons. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 5(3), 311–316. Lessig, L. (2001). The future of ideas: The fate of the commons in a connected world (1st ed.). New York: Random House. Lewis, R. J. (2004). Academic emergency medicine and the tragedy of the commons defined. Academic Emergency Medicine: Official Journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, 11(5), 423–427. Lim, H. A. (2006). Multiplicity yours: Cloning, stem cell research and regenerative medicine. Silicon Valley, CA: World Scientific Books. Lippmann, W. (1995). The public philosophy. New York: Mentor. Lohmann, R. A. (1989). And lettuce is non-animal: Toward a positive economics of nonprofit action. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 18(4), 367–383. Lohmann, R. A. (1992a). The commons: New perspectives on nonprofit organizations and voluntary action. The Jossey-Bass Nonprofit Sector Series (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Lohmann, R. A. (1992b). The commons: A multidisciplinary approach to nonprofit organizations, voluntary action and philanthropy. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 21(3), 309–324.
Communitarianism Maclean, R. C. (2003). The tragedy of the commons in microbial populations: Insights from theoretical, comparative and experimental studies. Heredity, 100, 233–239. Macy, M. (2003). The mobilizer’s dilemma: Crisis, empowerment, and collective action. Social Forces, 81(3), 979–998. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action; public goods and the theory of groups. Harvard Economic Studies (Vol. 124). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. The Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, E., Gardner, R., & Walker, J. (1994). Rules, games, and commonpool resources. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1993). Regulating the poor: The functions of public welfare (Updated ed.). New York: Vintage Books. Polanyi, K. (2001). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our Time. Beacon Paperback (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Princen, T. (2008). Notes on the theorizing of global environmental politics. Global Environmental Politics, 8(1), 1–5. Rankin, D. J. (2007). Resolving the tragedy of the commons: The feedback between intraspecific conflict and population density. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20(1), 173–180. Roberts, R. S., & Emel, J. (1992). Uneven development and the tragedy of the commons – competing images for nature-society analysis. Economic Geography, 68(30), 249–271. Saltman, R. B., & Bergman, S.-E. (2005). Renovating the commons: Swedish health care reforms in perspective. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 30(1–2), 253–75. Van Til, J. (2000). Growing civil society: From nonprofit sector to third space. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Woolf, S. H., & Stange, K. S. (2006). A sense of priorities for the healthcare commons. American journal of preventive medicine, 31(1), 99–102. Yoon, Y. (2000). Symmetric tragedies: Commons and anticommons. Journal of Law and Economics, 43(1), 1–13. Zea-Cabrera, E., Iwasa, Y., Levin, S., & Rodrı´guez-Iturbe, I. (2006). Tragedy of the commons in plant water use. Water Resources Research, 42.
Communitarianism AMITAI ETZIONI The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
Definition Communitarianism is a social philosophy which maintains that societal formulations of the good are both justified in normative terms and supported by social science findings. Communitarianism is often contrasted with classical liberalism, a philosophical position that holds that each individual should formulate the good
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autonomously. Communitarians examine the ways shared conceptions of the good (values) are formed, transmitted, enforced, and justified. Hence, they are interested in communities and the moral dialogues they engage in, historically transmitted values and mores, and the societal units that transmit and enforce values, such as the family, schools, voluntary associations from social clubs to places of worship, and interpersonal rituals and holidays. Communitarians view the self as ‘‘embedded’’ in the community rather than as a freestanding agent. They find that individuals who are well-integrated into communities are better able to reason and act in responsible ways than isolated individuals. However, they also recognize that if social pressures to conform rise to high levels, they can undermine the individual self. Liberal theorists argue that the self may deal with the community as another environment, whose inputs or signals individuals take into account like other incoming information, but they still heed their own preferences. Communitarians show that communal influences penetrate individuals below the level of awareness and shape their preferences.
Historical Background The term ‘‘communitarian’’ was first introduced in 1841 to mean ‘‘of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a community or communistic system; communitive.’’ It was infrequently employed from then until the mid-twentieth century when it gained attention first in academia and then in public discourse, in reaction to the excessively individualistic eras of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Although all communitarians uphold the importance of the community, they differ in the extent to which their conceptions are attentive to liberty and individual rights. Early communitarians, most of whom were sociologists, like Ferdinand To¨nnies and Robert Nisbet, stressed the importance of closely knit social fabric and authority. In the 1980s, philosophical communitarians Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer criticized the excessive individualism of classical liberalism. Asian communitarians argued that to maintain social harmony, individual rights and political liberties must be curtailed. They also favored relying heavily on the state to maintain social order (for instance, leaders and champions of the regimes in Singapore and Malaysia), beyond strong social bonds and moral culture (for instance, as Japan does). Asian communitarians also hold that the West’s notion of liberty actually amounts to ‘‘anarchy’’; that strong economic growth requires limiting freedoms; and that the West should not use its idea of legal and political rights to chastise other cultures that have inherent values of their own.
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In the 1990s, Responsive Communitarians such as Amitai Etzioni, Philip Selznick, William Galston, Mary Ann Glendon, and Jean Bethke Elshtain emphasized the need to balance commitment to the social good with respect for individual rights, and to reconcile the promotion of social virtue with liberty. They issued a platform (1991) endorsed by a wide range of leading academics, public intellectuals, and elected officials, published a quarterly (The Responsive Community), and formed a communitarian network. They have been credited with having influenced leaders of different persuasions in a number of Western countries: Tony Blair and David Willetts, Bill Clinton and Jack Kemp, among others.
Key Issues While a carefully crafted balance between liberty and social order defines a generic concept of the good society, communitarians point out that the historical-social conditions of specific societies determine the rather different ways a given society in a given era may need to change to attain the same balance. Thus, contemporary Japan requires much greater tolerance for individual rights, while in American society excessive individualism needs to be curbed. Studies indicate that Americans in the 1980s often avoided speaking up on moral issues. The work of Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) has been particularly influential here, demonstrating the rise of first expressive and then instrumental individualism, and their negative effects. Many Americans, and to some extent members of other Western societies, embraced the liberal ideology that what is morally sound is to be determined by each individual, and that one should not judge the acts of others. Large increases followed in crime, drug abuse, and divorce, as well as a general loss of trust in public institutions and legitimate authority and fraying of social bonds. Responsive Communitarians argue that neither human existence nor individual liberty can be sustained for long outside the interdependent and overlapping communities to which all individuals belong, nor can any community long survive unless its members dedicate some of their attention, energy, and resources to shared projects. They find that the exclusive pursuit of private interest erodes the network of social environments on which all depend, and is destructive to democratic self-government. According to Responsive Communitarianism (Etzioni, 1993, 1996), the preservation of individual liberty depends on the active maintenance of the institutions of civil society where citizens learn respect for others as well as self-respect; where people acquire a lively sense of their personal and civic responsibilities, along with an
appreciation of their own rights and the rights of others; where they develop the skills of self-government as well as the habit of governing themselves, and learn to serve others – not just self. Responsive Communitarians stress the importance of the social fabric as compared to the power of the state, and argue that moral voices achieve their effect mainly through education and persuasion, rather than through coercion. Responsive Communitarianism assumes that societies have multiple and not wholly compatible needs, in contrast to philosophies built on one core principle, such as liberty for libertarianism. A good society is based on a balance between liberty and social order, and between particularistic (communal) and society-wide values and bonds. This school of communitarianism stresses responsibilities people have for their families, kin, communities, and societies – above and beyond the universal rights all individuals command, the focus of liberalism. A Communitarian Approach to Civil Society
Communitarians and students of civil society often deal with the same subjects. Above all, both stress that there is an important human ‘‘space’’ that is neither state-based nor political. When one considers a small polis, one could readily collapse the distinction between state and society, and cause relatively limited damage to political and social analysis. However, such a reduction of two essential concepts to one is much more troublesome when one deals with much larger and more complex societies. Nevertheless, there is a common tendency to confound state and society by folding into the ‘‘political’’ numerous processes, actions, and institutions that are inherently social. This is evident, for instance, when citizenship (a legal status that defines one’s legal obligations to the state and one’s legal rights that the state is expected to protect and honor) is equated with membership (a social status the defines one’s membership in one or more communities or associations, the moral responsibilities one has toward other members of one’s community and the common good, and the moral claims that others have of him). Paying taxes, serving in the armed forces (when there is a draft), and – in some countries – voting are the obligations of citizens. The constitution or basic laws enumerate rights citizens have vis-a`-vis the state. In contrast, donating to charity, volunteering, caring for one’s friends and family (above and beyond one’s legal obligations), collaborating with neighbors, being tolerant of people of different background and habits (above and beyond what the law prescribes), pursuing social justice, working to protect the environment – these are all matters that concern membership, not citizenship.
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The distinction between citizenship and membership is especially important if one recognizes that the relationship between the state and society is somewhat akin to that between the state and the individual. The more the state takes over functions once discharged by communities, voluntary associations, and families, the weaker society will become. In contrast, the more the state generates opportunities for social actors to initiate and sustain their own action, the more viable the society will become. If, for instance, the government starts sending professional grief counselors, licensed and trained by the state, to the homes of people who have lost a loved one, this is likely to weaken friendship ties, those of neighbors, of religious groups, and of extended families. In contrast, public policies that recognize both the need for the state to attend to numerous social as well as personal needs (especially those of the more vulnerable members of society or citizens in vulnerable phases of their lives) and the need to avoid undermining social actors are those that build on the difference between the political and the social. To put it differently, one reason to cherish the distinction between the social and the political is to ensure that the social will not become the political. Social conservatives maintain that it is the role of the state (the core and focus of the political realm) to promote not merely citizenship but also the good person, not only skills needed to participate in the polity but also social virtues – those that make the society a good one. George Will, for instance, argues that people are selfindulgent by nature: left to their own devices, they will abuse their liberties, becoming profligate, and indolent. The state needs to restrain them. Other conservatives assert that in the name of ‘‘national greatness,’’ people need a ‘‘strong national government’’ that will be a ‘‘shaper’’ of citizens and help them cope with the weaker angels of their nature. Religious social conservatives have long been willing to rely on the state to foster behavior they consider virtuous. They favor banning abortion and pornography, making divorce more difficult, and outlawing homosexual activities. Additionally, both religious and secular social conservatives have strongly advocated longer, more arduous prison terms for more individuals and more kinds of crime, especially favoring life sentences without the possibility of parole, and death sentences. Harsh penalties are often applied to people of whose consumption and business the state disapproves (a large proportion of those in jail in the United States are there for nonviolent, drugrelated offenses) rather than for endangering public safety or failing to discharge their duties as citizens. These are not good-citizen issues but good-person issues.
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The term ‘‘the good state’’ appropriately summarizes the social conservative position because the state here is not viewed as an institution that threatens to debase people or undermine liberty, and hence must be constantly contained, as in the liberal position; but as an institution that can be entrusted with making people good. That is, although social conservatives do not suggest that the state is inherently good, they do hold that it – and hence the political – can do good by fostering virtue. Addressing the same sociohistorical conditions that led to the rise of the contemporary social conservative position, Responsive Communitarians have advocated a fundamentally different approach which rejects state regulation of most moral behavior, under most circumstances. Communitarians advocate state restraint because they believe that the society should be the main agent responsible for promoting moral behavior, relying on education, persuasion, and leadership rather than the law. Granted, developing and sustaining a good society does require reaching into what is considered the private realm, shaping behavior that does not directly relate to the state or to the state-mediated relationships with one’s fellow citizens. A good society, for instance, fosters trust among its members not solely or even primarily to enhance their confidence in the government, but to cultivate a better society, one in which certain types of conduct are preferred over others by the community, rather than leaving it to each individual to judge what good behavior is. Similarly, a good society fosters substantive values other than trust such as stewardship toward the environment, charity for those who are vulnerable, marriage over singlehood, having children, and showing special consideration to the young and elderly. These are all specific goods with regard to which the society, through its various social mechanisms, prefers one basic form of conduct over all others, and all concern the private realm. All this, however, does not mean that all or even most private matters need to be subject to societal scrutiny and normative suasion. One major way the communitarian position differs from the totalitarian, authoritarian, theocratic, and social conservative ones is that although the good society reaches into the private realm, it seeks to cultivate only a limited set of core virtues rather than having an expansive or holistic normative agenda. For example, American society favors being religious over being atheist, but is rather ‘‘neutral’’ with regard to which religion a person should follow. There are no prescribed dress codes (e.g., no spartan Mao shirts), correct number of children to have, places one is expected to live, and so forth. In short, a key defining characteristic of the good society is that, in contrast to the liberal
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state, it creates shared formulations of the good, but the scope of the good is much smaller than that advanced by government-centered societies, either of the secular (Soviet style) or religious kind (Iran, Taliban), or of social conservatives. To put it differently, the relationship between the political and the values of the society is deeply affected not merely by whether there are shared formulations of the good – but also by how encompassing these formulations are. Communitarians have long argued that politics is and ought to be engaged in the formulation and fostering of a core of shared values. An even cursory review of the politics of free, democratic societies shows that this empirical claim is a valid one. Such deliberations as a rule do not lead to cultural or civil wars. On the contrary, the absence of a broad array of shared values – for instance, between Jewish and Arabic citizens of Israel – is one key reason that such groups find it particularly difficult to resolve conflicts that arise for other reasons. Moreover, the law, never morally neutral, is at its best when it reflects widely shared moral values rather than imposing the values of one group (the majority included) on the general population.
Future Directions The Democratic candidates in the 2008 presidential election campaign in the United States have echoed key communitarian themes. Hillary Clinton (1996) has long held that to raise a child takes not just parents, extended family, friends, and neighbors, but a whole village. Barack Obama (2006) has been particularly extensive in his communitarian expressions, arguing that American individualism is, and has always been, bound by a set of communal values, on which, he writes, every healthy society depends.
Cross-References
▶ Civility ▶ Civil Society Theory: Walzer ▶ Citizenship ▶ Etzioni, Amitai ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ To¨nnies, Ferdinand ▶ Values
References/Further Readings Bell, D. (1993). Communitarianism and its critics. Oxford: Clarendon. Bellah, R. (1985). The habits of the heart. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clinton, H. R. (1996). It takes a village: And other lessons children teach us. New York: Simon & Schuster. Durkheim, E. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life (Karen E. F., Trans.). New York: Free Press.
Etzioni, A.(1993). The spirit of community. New York: Touchstone. Etzioni, A. (1996). The new golden rule. New York: Basic Books. Etzioni, A., & Bloom, J. (Eds.) (2004). We are what we celebrate: understanding holidays and rituals. New York: New York University Press. Obama, B. (2006). The audacity of hope. New York: Crown. Responsive Communitarian Platform (1991), from http://www.gwu.edu/ ccps/rcplatform.html.
Community Chest of Korea SANG PEEL PARK
Address of Organization 1-17 Jung-dong, Joong-gu 100-120 Seoul South Korea www.chest.or.kr
Introduction/Brief History Community Chest of Korea (CCK) was established in 1998 by legislation promoted by many welfare movement organizations. CCK has strengthened the role of civil society in the welfare system for the last 10 years. It has grown to become Korea’s largest community-impact charity. Now it is a national network of 16 locally governed organizations that work to create lasting positive change in the community and people’s lives. CCK seeks to engage individuals, businesses, and local organizations to cultivate a culture of sharing in the community. It is a member of United Way International, a global network of nonprofit fund-raising organizations with 46 national members.
Mission/Objectives CCK’s mission is to empower the underserved and improve lives by spreading a culture of sharing in the community. It attaches importance to improving the lives of individuals and changing the community through the establishment of a voluntary donating culture.
Activities Its major activities are campaigns to promote the ‘‘happiness of sharing,’’ fund-raising, grant making, philanthropy research, conferring social contribution prizes, etc.
Structure and Governance CCK is structured with an honorary chairperson, chairperson, board of directors, executive committee, and
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secretary general. The executive committee has four parts: planning, fund-raising, allocation, and public relations. Under the secretary-general, there are two divisions, planning & management and project. Each division has four departments, which are composed of several staffs. CCK has also 16 district subdivisions, each of which is self-governed. It is not free from varied official interventions, though it has a widespread partnership with government.
Funding As of 2007, CCK fund-raised approximately US$267 million. The sources of donations are corporate (67.8%), nonprofit and religious group (11.8%), public organization (4.7%), and individual and other (15.7%). CCK can also issue lotteries to meet its own operating expenses by the permission of the national government.
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subject of significant debate that goes to the heart of the meaning of community, development, and civil society. A key issue that arises with CDOs is whether local organizations using local resources can materially improve the lives of community residents in the face of state and market restructuring. Addressing this question is complicated by the lack of a general consensus on what these organizations are or the meaning of their activity. Indeed, the very words that make up the term ‘‘CDO’’ are highly contested and frequently debated. Nonetheless, these issues do not operate equally everywhere at all times. CDOs have a historical trajectory and some consensus on defining them has developed in some places. For example, in the United States, CDO mostly refers to organizations that engage in the physical redevelopment of neighborhoods. However, that definition is historically and geographically specific and, in addition, continues to be debated even in the United States.
Major Accomplishments
Definition
CCK has contributed to the spread of a donative atmosphere and the construction of a sharing culture in Korea for the short period of the last 10 years. It has given support to community development, social welfare, relief of North Korean environmental damage, emergency service, and other public activities.
Community development organizations are organizations that leverage local knowledge and resources, sometimes in combination with external resources, in order to materially improve the lives of community members. According to an industry survey conducted in 1998, there are 3,600 community development corporations (CDCs) in the United States and there is probably a comparable number worldwide. The population of CDOs has exploded since the 1970s when nation-states began withdrawing from direct development activity and as localities began to resist large-scale, technocratic, and unaccountable development activity. In addition, economic restructuring around the world has created plenty of material deprivation that needs to be addressed. Generalizing much beyond this point is difficult. However, the point of engaging in specifically community development activity is to recognize and utilize locally available resources to leverage other improvements. These resources vary from one community to another, which necessarily results in organizational diversity within the CDO population. Nonetheless, there has been a rationalizing trend in the field of community development, which has made it possible to generalize about CDOs in particular times and places. Prying apart the terms ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘development’’ provides a window onto the diversity of organizations that exists under the umbrella term ‘‘community development.’’ ‘‘Community’’ is an oft-invoked category that has variously been used to define an identity, underpin critique, and describe social relations. It is rarely clear which use of the term is being referenced in community development. By extension, CDOs have claimed to serve
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Korea ▶ United Way
Community Development Organizations MICHAEL MCQUARRIE University of California–Davis, Davis, CA, USA
Introduction Community development organizations (CDOs) operate worldwide to leverage local assets and resources for the general benefit of local residents. In doing this work, CDOs have benefited from significant philanthropic support, have become models for the use of civil society organizations to facilitate economic development, and are innovators in imagining new ways of organizing and supporting local socioeconomic relations. Because of their prominence and oft-cited success, CDOs are the
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populations that share a given identity (e.g., recent Vietnamese immigrants to the Bay Area), they have situated themselves in a critical position relative to states and markets (e.g., when they claim that community-controlled development is superior to market forces or state activity), and they operate in communities that are built upon specific network ties and geographic propinquity. Even when CDOs are specific about what community they intend to serve, the very notion of community often masks the diverse identities and interests that actually prevail in the group in question. However, in looking for a usable definition of community, a useful place to start is to define it as a group of people connected by identity, geography, or networks of interpersonal social relations. This connection often leads to group-specific norms, practices, resource endowments, and resource deficits. Because community development has defined itself against state-led development, the most common meaning of community for CDOs is geographic and local, though the other understandings noted above are also prevalent. Like ‘‘community,’’ ‘‘development’’ is a term that has multiple and contested meanings that confuse the issue of defining CDOs. For example, in the Western humanist tradition, development has often referred to efforts to close the gap between existence and potential. While this can be understood in material terms, it can also be understood in terms of cognition, creativity, self-realization, and authenticity. Indeed, historically speaking, CDOs have often tried to ‘‘develop’’ these softer attributes. For example, the effort of settlement houses to culturally integrate recent immigrants in the early twentieth-century United States was based on a ‘‘soft’’ understanding of development. Immigrants needed social skills more than economic resources to successfully integrate. Often, development understood in these terms can underpin critique and efforts to transform society in ways that would be impossible through addressing material needs alone. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s community developers informed by the ‘‘Black Power’’ movement in the United States argued that personal development for AfricanAmericans required, not integration, but the development of autonomous African-American cultural and economic institutions, even at the cost of material deprivation. Today, development most commonly refers to either the material improvement of the lives of members of a community or to the physical development of a given geographic community. Despite increasing consensus around material understandings of development, there are still differences that are contentious both among CDOs and between CDOs and related organizational fields. Finally, recent spikes in commodity prices and concerns about the wasteful nature of modern consumer society has resulted in an increasing
emphasis on development that is sustainable, that is, development that does not result in unnecessary burdens on the carrying capacity and resources of the planet. It should be clear that community development has numerous meanings and analytically emphasizing any one of them in order to describe an organizational population can be problematic. Nonetheless, organizational actors do use more precise understandings and, today, the most common usage refers to the use of local resources and knowledge to materially improve communities and develop assets that can be further leveraged to build wealth. This orientation to community development often places particular emphasis on self-help activities, leveraging social capital, and community participation in defining development goals and implementing programs. However, it must be recognized that each proposed definition includes some and excludes others who claim to be developing communities. While these distinctions are frequently practical, they are also, at times, political and intentionally exclusionary. CDOs are organizations that work to develop communities using community input and locally available resources. Community development corporations (CDCs), which focus on housing and physical development, are the most prominent type of CDO in the United States. Neighboring organizational fields that are sometimes considered CDOs would include: cooperative businesses, community development financial institutions, community-based service providers, for-profit developers, and community organizing groups. These organizations are all understood to provide key building blocks of a healthy civil society. They engage in development activity that is not best undertaken by markets or states and they actively build the capacity of communities to materially improve their circumstances.
Historical Background Community development has historical roots in the intellectual traditions of cooperative socialism, anarchism, utopian Christian communities, and technocratic interventions designed to improve community life. These early roots were manifested in utopian socialist and Christian communities that attempted to isolate themselves from market society and cooperatives that were more integrated with modern society. All of these traditions were responding to the problems of systemic forces, such as the state and market, and attempting to organize communities around locally organized social relations. Current CDOs have their roots in a more specific reaction to state-led development efforts and the inability of market mechanisms to meet the needs of many. These criticisms came to a head in the 1960s and 1970s when the limits of both state-led development and market mechanisms became apparent around the
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world in the form of worldwide recession and a general crisis of technocratic and bureaucratic management. Moreover, in the Global South the very concept ‘‘development’’ was subjected to extensive criticism because as a concept and model it did not recognize the specificity of local culture and seemed to measure all societies against a standard set by the United States. In the Global North state-led development was accused of bureaucratic mismanagement, cultural insensitivity, and a lack of accountability to affected populations. Organizations that self-identified as CDOs in this period were usually development engines for local corporate leaders and real estate developers. It was in this context that a form of community development emerged that emphasized local participation, leveraging local resources, and a critique of state-led development. This criticism did not always emerge from civil society or communities. Indeed, the first community development corporations (CDCs) in the United States were established by the Title VII amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Furthermore, various ‘‘War on Poverty’’ programs initiated during the Johnson administration began to emphasize the importance of local organizations that would be more responsive to community needs than top-down bureaucracies. This process was extended with the ‘‘New Federalism’’ of Richard Nixon, an approach to government which resulted in shrinking federal bureaucracies and an increasing reliance on nonprofit organizations for the provision of social services. These two developments led to the first significant growth of CDOs and the development of community development corporations with a particular focus on physical development. The devolution of service provision into communitybased organizations and philanthropies was given another large boost during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (1980–1992). This was the product of two related developments: first, large cuts in federal urban and social service programs, and, second, a valorization of civil society organizations and voluntary activity in the provision of these functions and services. By the 1990s, the idea that civil society organizations were better suited to development activity was not just entrenched in the United States, but throughout much of the world. In the United States CDOs were the recipients of significant government funding as well as philanthropic dollars and, consequently, the population of CDOs has exploded since the 1980s. A similar explosion in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in development activity has occurred around the world. Ironically, the withdrawal of state support has caused CDOs to increasingly rely on market mechanisms for the achievement of their goals. This is most evident in the United States where CDCs have become increasingly rationalized around
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physical development that is designed to attract new investment rather than directly serve existing populations. The dynamic occurs more broadly with an increasing programmatic emphasis on entrepreneurship and competitiveness in an increasingly global economy.
Key Issues The main issues that arise with CDOs fall along two axes. The first is the relationship between CDOs and other organizations and systems that are organized at scales beyond the community, such as the market, the state, and other civil society organizations. The second set of issues revolves around the issue of CDO relations with the communities in which they operate. The central question here is whether CDOs are expressive of community needs and desires or whether they are organizations whose primary goal is organizational survival, a goal that warrants drawing on resources from outside the community. Despite the claim to be community-based organizations, CDOs are an organizational population that is heavily dependent upon outside investment, whether that investment comes from private sources, government, or philanthropies. Most importantly, deindustrialization in the Global North and structural adjustment programs in the Global South can have a huge impact on affected communities, an impact that CDOs can only hope to mitigate rather than reverse. For example, after two decades of trying to rebuild real estate markets in poor neighborhoods via the production of newer, more desirable housing, the recent credit crisis has resulted in renewed neighborhood crisis even in areas with a healthy CDO population. The issue here is the viability of development using community resources alone. If such development is viable, then the cost of organizations that are more rationalized around externally determined priorities can seem high, especially if it comes at the price of the ability of communities to determine their own priorities and needs or if it stifles the creativity of civil society organizations like CDOs. On the other hand, if external resources are necessary for community development, the relationship of CDOs to external institutions and organizations is essential and the rationalization of programmatic goals more desirable. In the case of state investment, as states retrench or reallocate resources, the result can be local economic crises or booms. However, states also have a more immediate impact on CDOs themselves, which are often heavily dependent on government funding which is variable over time. While states have generally come to acknowledge the role of civil society organizations in community development activities, they do not always provide resources that correspond with need. There is an additional problem. To the degree that CDOs come to be dependent upon
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government funding there is a danger that the voice and interests of community members can be marginalized. If the latter is the case, then the overall effect of devolving development activity onto CDOs has been to replace large, centralized bureaucracies with small, localized ones without altering the instrumentality and hierarchy of the policy-implementation apparatus. The other relevant extra-local institutions for CDOs are philanthropies and, over the last 20 years, intermediary organizations. Since states have been retrenching even while they have come to rely on CDOs, an increasing burden has been placed on philanthropies for funding CDO activity. While foundations have made a large commitment to CDOs, a commitment that has been essential for the growth of the CDO population, this commitment has not been unproblematic. For example, foundations are often interested in quantifiable results and observable material improvement. This has probably aided a general rationalization of CDO activity around the production of housing and commercial development that might not have otherwise occurred. Increasingly, foundations are limiting the grants available while increasing their willingness to invest in development deals. This general shift in funding availability limits the scope of activity for CDOs even as it makes some activity more viable and easier to undertake at scale. A related issue is that as community development activity has been rationalized it has prompted foundations to spin off intermediary organizations. Intermediaries use their control over retail funding to actively intervene in CDO activity in order to increase CDO capacity and increase the ability of CDOs to achieve programmatic goals. The Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Enterprise Foundation are prototypical community development intermediaries in the United States and have provided a model for the growth of intermediary organizations in a number of programmatic fields around the world. There are also a number of issues surrounding CDOs themselves and their relationship with the communities in which they operate. The most basic of these questions is whether CDOs are organizations that are strategically acting to ensure their survival and growth or expressions of a community’s needs and desires? In the former case, CDOs should be expected to gravitate toward more stable sources of funding and resources, and to rationalize themselves around the tasks that enable them to secure those resources. In the latter case, the organizational population should be expected to be diverse and transient – reflecting variation in the communities themselves and the relative lack of secure resources. There is a larger civil society question here. If CDOs are civil society organizations, then they are useful because they generally accomplish tasks and facilitate social
relationships that would not be available with market and state forms of organization. If not, they are really just nonprofit extensions of the state and market. In this case the question is functional: What do CDOs actually add to the organizational mix that makes them worthwhile? Naturally, there is a third possibility: CDOs are interstitial. That is, they are neither pure expressions of community nor fully rationalized organizations and their effectiveness comes from their ability to connect systemic needs and resources with community needs and desires. These issues are related to another question that has dominated scholarly discussion of CDOs. If civil society is valuable in part because of the possibility that is inherent to its plurality and diversity, the issue of rationalization is a central concern. Indeed, if plurality and diversity are essential then the goal would be to have CDOs that can help people create new social relations in their communities even if that entails disrupting existing social relations. On one side of this issue are those who are concerned about whether CDOs promote or limit community civic engagement. On the other are those who argue that CDOs are social movement organizations that challenge social relations that are harmful or destructive to communities. There is nothing about CDOs that suggests they are inherently one or the other. What is in question is the role that specific CDOs play in specific communities and the historical trajectory of the organizational population over time. In general, it seems fair to say that, in comparison with the 1960s, CDOs in the United States have experienced significant rationalization around the goal of physical redevelopment. There is nothing inherent or necessary about this and it seems reasonable to imagine that this might change in the wake of a massive credit crunch and decline in housing values. Regardless, these questions organize a series of related concerns in the scholarly literature on CDOs. Are CDOs instruments to manage and co-opt political radicalism? Or do they facilitate the expression of community desires at the systemic level? Are they flexible, creative, and adaptive? Or are they increasingly rationalized and technocratic? Are they expressions of community control and self-help that make up for the absence of functioning markets? Or are they instruments that facilitate the introduction of market mechanisms? These are key questions for which there is no single answer.
International Perspectives Many of the key issues that arise in the literature on American and European CDOs also arise internationally. The biggest difference is the cultural meaning of these organizations and their activity in the Global South. For example, the meaning of the terms ‘‘community’’ and
Community Development Organizations
‘‘development’’ is different in many parts of the world. Integration with a global economy centered on the Global North and its history of imperialism and resource exploitation has altered the meaning of terms that might seem relatively innocuous. ‘‘Development,’’ for example, is unobjectionable as a value in Christian theology. However, when it is used as a justification for transforming property relations and disrupting communities the meaning of the term necessarily changes. In many parts of the world, development has come to be associated with disruptive economic transformations. These issues are compounded when the advocates of community development are international aid agencies that have ideas about community and development that are oriented to the needs of funding agencies or the sentiments of a donating public in the Global North. For example, a CDO might be engaged in a project to protect local wildlife in order to create an attraction for tourists and create jobs for the local community. In the Global North where people are dependent upon wage income for survival this is a reasonable approach. In the Global South such a project might be understood as an appropriation of community resources to serve the goals of an organization that is responding to the needs of people who are unconcerned with local residents. Moreover, such projects may end up serving the needs of local elites or the state – the very opposite of common positive understandings of ‘‘community.’’ In scenarios such as this one, community development can be understood as serving the needs of a very distant ‘‘community’’ rather than helping local communities develop their own resources for their own improvement. On a more positive note, CDOs in the Global South are far less dependent on legal sanctioning and monetary resources than such organizations in the Global North. Organizations are less regulated and less rationalized which, ironically, means that they are potentially more able to realize civil society’s promise to deliver innovations that make use of community social capital. The Grameen Bank, famous for its microlending to the poor of Bangladesh, is an instructive example. Both the developmental leverage that small cash loans can have and the ease with which the bank can provide them cannot be matched in much of the Global North. This is not a management issue. Microlenders in the United States, for example, usually have to borrow the funds at market rates which results in usurious interest to those they intend to serve. At the same time, the amounts necessary to have an economic development impact are much larger due to the marginal utility of noncash resources in the Global North.
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Future Directions Many of the research questions discussed above have not produced definitive answers; nor should they be expected to. However, it is worth asking the question of whether researchers are producing designs that are likely to yield good answers to these questions and, unfortunately, too often the answer is ‘‘no.’’ Research on CDOs is heavily dominated by case studies of either exemplary organizations or organizations that reveal a dynamic in a particularly good way. Another prominent mode of research is to pool data from a variety of CDOs and then make generalizations based on that data. For example, there are studies that interpret community development entirely through the understandings of the community developers themselves. There are others that make interpretations entirely on the basis of structural relationships such as funding sources. In generalizing, studies often analytically obliterate the real diversity of CDOs. A key question for future research is not simply to pick one of these methods of analysis or restate an old line of argument. At this point, the goal should be to integrate the insights to be gained from these various approaches. In meso-level studies it is possible to study subjective meanings alongside structural relationships and good organizations alongside bad ones. On a related point, much current research starts from the assumption that CDOs either represent the communities they operate in or are determined by systemic and organizational imperatives. Only infrequently has research on CDOs attempted to objectify this question and answer it systematically. Another key question is whether community development really is effective at achieving the goal of development. As civil society has become a prominent issue of academic concern, questions about CDOs have revolved around things such as civic engagement, social capital, and political pluralism. Community development has been a key tool for policy makers for several decades now, yet the question of whether such work actually accomplishes development goals is rarely tackled head on. Certainly a number of CDCs operate in communities that are impoverished. On the one hand, this is certainly good; they operate where they are needed. On the other hand, if they are in the poorest areas why are those areas not becoming less poor? One answer is that these communities would be much worse off without CDCs. This might be true, but there are no notable studies that attempt to analyze this question objectively. Nor are there studies that attempt to compare the effectiveness of community development to, say, direct subsidies to individuals or state-led industrial or development policies.
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Cross-References
▶ Civil Society–Business Relations ▶ Cooperatives, History and Theory of ▶ Credit Unions ▶ Ford Foundation ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Government–Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Grameen Bank ▶ Intermediary Organizations and Field ▶ NGOs and Socioeconomic Development
References/Further Readings Campfens, H. (1997). Community development around the world: Practice, theory, research, training. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cnaan, R., & Milofsky, C. (2007). Handbook of community movements and local organizations. New York: Springer. Crush, J. S. (1995). Power of development. London: Routledge. Ferguson, R. F., & Dickens, W. T. (1999). Urban problems and community development. Washington, DC: Brookings. Marwell, N. P. (2004). Privatizing the welfare state: Nonprofit communitybased organizations as political actors. American Sociological Review, 69, 265–291. Medoff, P., & Sklar, H. (1994). Streets of hope: The fall and rise of an urban neighborhood. Boston, MA: South End Press. National Congress for Community Economic Development (1995). Tying it all together: The comprehensive achievements of communitybased development corporations. Washington, DC: NCCED. Rubin, H. J. (2000). Renewing hope within neighborhoods of despair: The community-based development model. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Selznick, P. (1949). TVA and the grass roots: A study in the sociology of formal organization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stoecker, R. (1997). The CDC model of urban redevelopment: A critique and an alternative. Journal of Urban Affairs, 19, 1–22. Walker, C. (2002). Community development corporations and their changing support systems. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.
Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) LAWRENCE S. CUMMING
Address of Organization P.O. Box 221 Woodstock, 7915 South Africa www.cdra.org.za
Introduction The Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) is a distinguished specialist nongovernmental organization which enjoys a solid reputation at home
and abroad. Now over 2 decades old, it has worked with over 600 organizational clients throughout Southern Africa and beyond.
Brief History The CDRA came into being in 1987 at the height of the South African anti-Apartheid struggle, in company with a great many other civil society organizations born during that historic era. Its founders’ purpose was to support a wide variety of both welfare and development initiatives. It is rooted in what it terms ‘‘a progressive and humanist approach to social justice and change.’’ (All references: CDRA website.)
Mission/Objectives/Focus Area In the words of its Mission Statement, CDRA aims ‘‘to help bring about and support authentic and coherent development practice amongst people, organizations and institutions working towards those forms of social transformation that most benefit the poor and marginalised.’’ The Association does this through contributing to the effectiveness and efficiency of organizations. It places a high value on diversity and counteracts the use of power to undermine, exploit and diminish creative potential. The CDRA’s broad social purpose is to ‘‘contribute to building a society that is sustainable and civil’’ by employing ‘‘organizing principles, processes and practices that promote inclusion, dignity and development.’’
Activities The CDRA works in South Africa, other parts of the Southern Africa region and sometimes beyond. It aims to build capacity in organizations in ways that enable all parts to contribute to the enlargement of the whole. Its work includes organizational consultancy, ‘‘accompaniment’’ in establishing qualitative learning processes inside organizations and training in social development practice. It also conducts evaluations and other forms of social research that demand the active involvement of all the parties in a system. Other projects include facilitated dialogue and action research processes intended to enable rigorous peer learning from experience, sharing and improving practice. The CDRA seeks to ‘‘generate a practitioner voice on matters that shape the development sector, to develop relationships and a culture in the sector that support continuous improvement and to record and disseminate the results of these for a wider audience.’’ The scope of CDRA’s engagements encompasses small community based initiatives, networks, and associations and large institutions (mainly donors) with global reach.
Community Foundations of Canada/Fondations Communautaires du Canada
It has also done limited work with branches of the South African Government. The content of CDRA’s initiatives is very broad, addressing both urban and rural development, youth development, women’s organization, health, welfare, environment, HIV/AIDS, policy making and research, nonformal education, grant making, children’s rights, human rights, gender, and other themes.
Structure and Governance The CDRA is governed by a ten person Board of Directors. The staff team includes ten practitioners, of whom four have been with the organization for over 10 years.
Funding The CDRA budget is roughly R5.5 million per annum. Just under one third of this is generated through the provision of services. The major portion of its funding is supplied by foreign donors. The Association believes that this form of wealth redistribution is fully appropriate, provided that the civil society organizations are able to ‘‘operate in an ethical, values-based manner.’’ Over the years, the CDRA has consistently promoted this view to donors while building meaningful and constructive relationships with them.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Southern Africa ▶ Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History
References/Further Readings Community Development Resource Association. ‘‘About us,’’ an overview of CDRA’s history and work, from http://www.cdra.org.za SANGONET. A development information portal for NGOs in South Africa, Community Development Resource Association, from http://www. sangonet.org.za
Community Foundations of Canada/ Fondations Communautaires du Canada SHARILYN HALE
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Introduction Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) is a national membership organization for community foundations across the country. Supporting the community foundation movement as a way to enhance community vitality, CFC offers resources and publications to established and developing foundations, provides a framework for national partnerships and engages in public awareness and policy initiatives to promote philanthropy and community foundations.
Brief History While the first community foundation in Canada was established in Winnipeg in 1921, CFC was established in 1992 as a unifying and supporting resource to the increasing number of community foundations emerging across the country. Since its founding, CFC’s membership has grown from 25 to 165 community foundations which hold more than $2.9 billion CDN in shared assets, positioning them among the largest donors in Canada.
Mission/Objectives CFC’s mission is to build stronger communities by enhancing the philanthropic leadership of community foundations. With an emphasis on long term resources for long term solutions, CFC aims to assist community foundations to build their endowments and enhance donor services, promote philanthropy and the role of community foundations as stewards of community assets and nurture Canadian philanthropic leadership.
Activities CFC helps build capacity among community foundations and encourage effective philanthropy to best meet broadly defined community need. In pursuit of its mission, CFC combines three key portfolios including national programs and partnerships, publications and resources, and public policy initiatives. Examples range from their annual Vital Signs checkup which measures the vitality of communities across the country, and numerous how-to publications on effective and accountable foundation administration and best practices, to position papers and studies on trends and issues within the community foundations movement.
Address of Organization
Structure and Governance
75 Albert Street, Suite 301 Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5E7 Canada www.cfc-fcc.ca
CFC is a registered Canadian charity. It is governed by a Board of Directors with 15 members comprised of community leaders and representatives of the community foundation movement in Canada. Led by a CEO, a staff
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of 13 run the day to day operations of the organization with the support of six regional representatives.
Funding In fiscal year 2007, CFC’s operating budget was $2,718,000 CDN. This was supported in large part by membership fees and donations as well as project sponsorship/grants and earned revenue through publications and sales.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions A major contribution that CFC makes each year is Vital Signs. First published in 2007, it compiles data on social and economic trends evidenced across the country, then assesses how communities are faring as a result. This annual community checkup not only draws attention to pressing social issues but also provides a responsive framework for community engagement initiatives, grant making and social planning.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Philanthropy in North America ▶ Umbrella Organizations
References/Further Readings Sacks, E. W. (2008). Community Foundation Status Report. WINGS, from http://www.wingsweb.org/information/publications_community.cfm
UK company, incorporating either as a private company limited by guarantee (CLG), or a private company limited by shares (CLS), or a public limited company. The defining characteristics of the CIC are intended to make it particularly suitable for community-based social enterprise – those that wish to work for community benefit within the relative freedom of the noncharitable company form, but with a clear commitment to a nonprofitdistribution status. CICs are subject to the general framework of company law.
Historical Background The activities of the Social Enterprise Unit and the Social Enterprise Coalition have played a role in promoting a huge interest in social enterprise in the United Kingdom – this can be seen in outcomes such as the development of strategies for social enterprise and new legislation to facilitate the creation of new locally based social enterprise through the community interest company (CIC). The Bill (legislative act) received its Royal Assent in October 2004. There followed a detailed consultation on draft regulations with the social enterprise sector, and the new legal form was available for use in July 2005. During the first year of its operation, over 360 companies were registered as CICs, and by the end of July 2008 around 1980 had been formed.
Key Issues The distinguishing features of the CIC are as follows:
Community Interest Companies ROGER SPEAR The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Introduction The community interest company is a new legal form for UK social enterprise. It is one of a series of new legal forms arising in Europe specifically for social enterprise, although many social enterprise still use traditional nonprofit or other legal forms that allow trading.
Definition The community interest company (CIC) is a nonprofitdistributing social enterprise providing benefit to a community. Such enterprises currently operate in areas such as childcare, social housing, leisure, and community transport. The CIC is a new variant of existing forms of
● The need to satisfy a community interest test, confirming that the enterprise will pursue purposes beneficial to the community and will not serve an unduly restricted group of beneficiaries. The test is that of a reasonable person judging if the CIC’s activities would benefit the community. ● Exclusions from CIC status: Political parties, companies controlled by political parties, and political campaigning organizations. ● Charitable status: CICs will not be able to have charitable status, but charities can establish CICs as subsidiaries. ● Annual reporting: CICs must produce company reports containing key information relevant to CIC status, lodged with the public register of companies. ● An asset lock – CICs will be prohibited from distributing profits they make to their members; and a CIC’s residual assets, when it is wound up, will not be distributed to its members, rather they will pass to another similar organization with restrictions on profits distribution like another CIC or a charity.
Community Philanthropy
● CICs limited by shares can pay dividends to ‘‘investor shares,’’ subject to a cap regulated by the Regulator; but a CIC limited by guarantee, cannot make such distributions; limits on conventional interest payments on fixed term debt will not be applied. ● The Regulator approves applications for CIC status, receives copies of the community interest company reports and polices the requirements of CIC status, including compliance with the asset lock. The CIC Regulator will have close links with the Registrar of Companies. ● CICs are required to provide an additional annual community interest company report to the registrar of companies; this covers: what the CIC has done during the year to benefit the community; the steps, if any, that the company has taken to involve in its activities its stakeholders; information about payments related to its financial instruments, and the remuneration of its directors.
International Perspectives Since the Italian social cooperative legislation of the early 1990s, there has been a wave of social enterprise legislation across Europe (with some developments further afield in South East Asia and South America). See below for a brief overview with approximate numbers of enterprises formed, where data is available: ● Italy: Social cooperative (1991 Type A + B) 7000+ ● Portugal: Social solidarity cooperative (1996/8 Type B) 500+ ● Spain: Social initiative cooperative (1999 Type A + B) ● Spain: Work integration enterprise (2007 Type B) ● Greece: Limited liability social cooperative (1999 Type B mental health) ● France: Collective interest cooperative society (2002 Type A + B) 94 ● Poland: Social cooperative (2006 Type B) ● Belgium: Social finality enterprise (1996 All types) 400 ● Finland: Social enterprise (2004 Type B) 69 Often this legislation has paralleled the two types of social enterprise in the Italian legislation – type A and B – the former is for the provision of social, educational, or health services, the latter for the integration of disadvantaged people into work. But some countries have adopted quite restrictive forms of legislation, either in terms of target groups (e.g., Greece – mentally ill people), or in terms of its requirements (e.g., in France a tightly specified form of multi-stakeholder involvement). In contrast the UK model is marked by its high flexibility and by its
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option of accessing external finance through shareholding structures – albeit regulated.
Future Directions After 3 years on the statute books, the CIC legislation has clearly seen popular approval, gauged by the numbers of CICs formed. As time passes it should be possible to gather more information on the effectiveness of some of its characteristics, in particular community stakeholder involvement, and external investor involvement. So far very few annual community interest company reports have been produced so it is not possible to judge how effectively the community interest has been served. And while this UK social enterprise legislation has been distinctive in facilitating access to external investors (via ‘‘investor shares’’ and the use of company limited by share structures), it is yet to be seen whether this will have been effective; the asset lock may present difficulties for certain investors to arrange exit strategies from their investment in a CIC.
Cross-References
▶ Charity Law ▶ Cooperatives and Employee Ownership ▶ Social Enterprise
References/Further Readings http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/third_sector/social_enterprise.aspx http://www.cicregulator.gov.uk/index.shtml
Community Philanthropy XI ZHU, DAVID KNOKE University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Introduction Community philanthropy involves raising resources within and for members of a community, whether defined by geography or by identity. Although initial efforts in the United States can be traced back to the nineteenth century, the most rapid expansion occurred in the last half of the twentieth century. European community philanthropy took off in the last 2 decades, particularly in Eastern Europe after the collapse of state socialism left holes in the public welfare safety net. Community philanthropy has generally lagged behind in developing nations. Formal organizations engaged in community philanthropy display a diversity
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of forms and governance structures. As with most charitable institutions, achieving financial sustainability and accountability are enduring issues. The dearth of rigorous empirical studies of community-philanthropic organizations, particularly international comparisons, should be seen as an opportunity for future advances in understanding this important civic activity.
Definition Among several competing definitions of community philanthropy, two are noteworthy. Bernholz, Fulton, and Kasper (2005, p. II) defined it as ‘‘the practice of catalyzing and raising resources from a community on behalf of a community.’’ The European Foundation Center’s definition (EFC, 2004, p. 5) stated that ‘‘community philanthropy is the act of individual citizens and local institutions contributing money or goods, along with their time and skills, to promote the well-being of local people and the improvement of the community in which they live and/or work.’’ Both definitions emphasize activities intended to promote the betterment of a community and to improve quality of life for people of a community. In each definition, community can be defined in various ways. During the early years of community-philanthropic practice, it was used exclusively for geographically bounded communities. However, community can also be defined in terms of issues or identity. One prominent development in community philanthropy over the last 3 decades was the emergence of new forms of organization that aim at improving conditions in issue- or identity-based communities. One difference between these definitions is that the first specifies the source of philanthropic resources as ‘‘from a community,’’ while the second definition does not limit where the resources come from. Given the diversity of contemporary community philanthropy organizations (CPOs) and the communities they represent, and the reality of many communities receiving resources and support from other communities or international CPOs, the boundary of the resource pool should be expanded to include any donors, volunteers, and organizations contributing to the common good of a community. The EFC (2004, p. 5) distinguished two kinds of community philanthropy: informal and formal. Informal community philanthropy is anecdotally based, involving activities ‘‘such as citizens and local businesses helping other residents in times of crisis.’’ Formal community philanthropy, on the other hand, is more organized and involves activities by CPOs that collect, manage, and utilize resources to promote community well-being on a long-term basis. This entry focuses on formal community
philanthropy where CPOs are important vehicles to ‘‘nurture, sustain and enhance community development, and make it possible for individual citizens to have a larger impact at local level than when they act alone’’ (EFC, 2004, p. 5).
Historical Background Philanthropic activities in communities existed probably in every culture and in almost all historical periods. Although the tradition of generous giving and taking care of others has different social roots in diverse communities, the existence of philanthropy is almost a universal phenomenon (Ilchman et al., 1998). In the United States, where institutionalized community philanthropy originated, Bernholz et al. (2005) identified four distinct eras in the history of community philanthropy: the early era, the institutionalization era, the democratization era, and the age of commercial charity. In the early era (before 1900), charitable helping existed in many geographic, religious, or ethnic communities. Some embryonic CPOs were established during this era. For example, the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, whose mission was to aid Jewish women in financial crisis, was founded in 1819 in Philadelphia. It is considered as the oldest Jewish charitable organization in the United States. By a conservative estimate, one in ten American males belonged to fraternal and benevolent societies and lodges in 1910 (Beito, 2000). In addition to providing such direct mutual benefits as insurance, scholarships, and burial funds, fraternal societies fostered their members’ social capital in the form of opportunities for making business contacts, learning leadership skills, and building moral character. Nevertheless, in the early era, community philanthropy was largely informally organized. Institutions started to emerge, but functioned only as ‘‘secondary to the shared identity and commitment within groups’’ (Bernholz et al., 2005, p. 4). The institutionalization era (1900–1929) began with the creation of many formal CPO structures for community. Some of these institutional structures still exist and continue to play an important role in today’s community philanthropy. The first community foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, was founded in 1914 by Frederick Harris Goff in Cleveland, Ohio. ‘‘Goff’s idea was a community-oriented foundation where charitable individuals could establish permanent funds that would be available to respond to current and future community needs’’ (Guo and Brown, 2006, p. 268). This powerful organizational form spread quickly to Canada, and later around the world, and has become the most prominent form for organizing community philanthropy. During the Great Depression and World War II, community philanthropy
Community Philanthropy
slowed down substantially. Following the war, the democratization era (1950–1990) witnessed many significant social and political changes, especially the human rights movements. Community philanthropy adapted to these changes by focusing on building institutions for self-help by identitybased groups, including various ethnic groups, women, and gays and lesbians (Bernholz et al., 2005). Before the 1990s, community philanthropy was primarily a territory of the nonprofit sector. According to Bernholz et al. (2005), the establishment of Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund in 1991 launched the current era of commercial charity. Since then, the entrance of commercial firms as direct participants has transformed, and will likely continuously change, the landscape of community philanthropy. Offering a range of professional services, commercial funds provide donors with an opportunity to manage their giving and realize their charitable goals more directly. This change challenges community foundations, the major players in community philanthropy, to adjust their strategies and redefine their roles in the community. In nations around the world, community philanthropy developed out of various social and historical contexts. An explosive growth of community philanthropy outside North America, particularly taking the form of an international community foundation movement, occurred over the last quarter of the twentieth century. In Europe, the first community foundation was established in 1976 in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom had a long tradition of private and secular community philanthropy, which declined during the nineteenth century with the rise of the social welfare state (Sacks, 2000). Interest revived with the new community foundation movement of the late 1970s, and quickly developed after the Community Foundation Network (formerly known as the Association of Community Trusts and Foundations) was formed in 1991. In Central and Eastern Europe, community philanthropy emerged after the collapse of communist regimes and was spurred by declining state provision of social services. The first community foundation in former communist countries was established in Slovak Republic in 1994, followed by foundations in Poland, Russia, and many others (EFC, 2004). Overall, Europe experienced rapidly expanding community philanthropy since the 1990s. The number of CPOs in Europe grew from about 30 in 1994 to more than 530 by 2004 in at least 18 European countries (EFC, 2004). In postcolonial Africa, philanthropic organizations traditionally receive most of their funds from international organizations and donors. However, local giving and community philanthropy are growing in many countries (WINGS-CF, 2005). The Kenya Community Development
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Foundation (KCDF), founded in 1997, aimed to strengthen communities to mobilize local resources and build capacities to address and meet local needs. Several community foundation-like organizations were built in the late 1990s in many African nations, such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ghana, Uganda, and South Africa (WINGS-CF, 2005). Development of community foundations in South America, Asia, and the Pacific followed a similar time line as in Europe and Africa. Most countries began their efforts to build organized community philanthropy in the 1990s. One exception was Australia whose first organization, the Victorian Community Foundation, was established in 1983.
Key Issues Organizational Forms
Involvement of formal philanthropic organizations is a defining characteristic of community philanthropy. A community philanthropy organization ‘‘is an independent non-governmental organization designed to gather, manage and redistribute financial and other resources useful for the community’s well-being, and to do so in ways that engage the community’’ (Mayer, 1999, p. 1). Diverse forms of CPOs coexist in the contemporary community philanthropy field, with the following comprising the most prominent types: Community Foundation: WINGS-CF (2005, p. 6) defines community foundations as grant-making organizations that ● Seek to improve the quality of life for all people in a defined geographic area ● Are independent from control or influence by other organizations, governments, or donors ● Are governed by a board of citizens broadly reflective of the communities they serve ● Make grants to other nonprofit groups to address a wide variety of emerging and changing needs in the community ● Seek to build a permanent resource for the community, most often through the creation of endowed funds from a wide range of donors, including local citizens, corporations, governments, and other foundations and nonprofits ● Provide services to donors to help them achieve their philanthropic goals ● Engage in a broad range of community leadership and partnership activities, serving as catalysts, conveners, collaborators, and facilitators to solve problems and develop solutions to important community issues
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● Have open and transparent policies and practices concerning all aspects of their operations ● Are accountable to the community by informing the general public about their purposes, activities, and financial status on a regular basis United Way: ‘‘United Way is a movement of community chests and similar organizations that mobilize and allocate financial and volunteer resources in their communities’’ (Anheier & List, 2005, p. 276). United Way, originating in the United States during the late nineteenth century, developed into an international network of local nonprofit organizations across the world that adopted its essential values and characteristics. A United Way organization is a volunteer-led, nonprofit organization that leads, supports, and participates in collective, inclusive community efforts to identify the root causes of key issues, to build capacity and mobilize resources, and to create positive, long-term social change in the local community (United Way International, 2008). Today, United Way International is the peak organization that leads the movement and sets the global membership requirements. Giving Circle: Giving circles are a recent form of philanthropy in which a group of donors pool their funds and other resources and collectively agree on which causes or organizations to support. Giving circles range in size and structure from shared giving circles (small, informal groups of acquaintances often meeting at a potluck dinner or wine tasting) to large, formal social investment clubs (often hosted or sponsored by a community foundation). A survey conducted on a sample of 61 giving circles found that more than 5,300 donors had raised almost $32 million and given about $23 million in grants, suggesting that giving circles represent a growing trend in American philanthropy (Rutnik & Bearman, 2005, p. 6). The primary benefits of giving circles are that ‘‘they provide grantmaking and other support to the community; they allow donors to learn together; they cultivate philanthropists; and they build community’’ (Rutnik & Bearman, 2005, p. 12). Identity-Based Fund: Identity-based funds, also called focus funds, seek to improve conditions in nongeographic communities defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity-based distinctions. These organizations are typically grassroots philanthropies that raise funds from members of the dispersed communities they serve and are usually constituentdirected. For example, the Horizons Foundation based in the San Francisco Bay Area offers education and support programs to increase philanthropic participation in causes favored by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities.
Hometown Association: Hometown Associations (HTAs) are philanthropic organizations formed by immigrants in the United States who ‘‘seek to support their places of origin, maintain relationships with local communities, and retain a sense of community as they adjust to life in the United States’’ (Orozco, 2003, p. 1). Currently, HTAs exist mostly in Mexican immigrant communities in the United States and usually fund projects intended to alleviate poverty in their communities of origin. Increasingly, HTAs are engaging in advocacy on political and social issues in their US communities of residence (Americas Program, 2003). In addition to the five forms described above, community philanthropy support organizations (CPSOs) are another emergent type of player in community philanthropy. CPSOs help CPOs in their start-up period by assisting local leadership and building organizational capacity. CPSOs also solicit public support and improve the legal and financial environments for community philanthropy (Mayer, 1999). In Central and Eastern Europe, the emergence of institutional community philanthropy was often fostered by a national CPSO. In Africa, some pioneering CPOs (e.g., KCDF in Kenya) fulfilled the role of CPSOs in cultivating the development of local philanthropic organizations. Enabling Environment
Favorable legal and tax environments can play an important role in encouraging community philanthropy. The development of US community philanthropy especially highlights the impact of these environmental factors. Sacks (2000) pointed out that the accelerated growth of American community foundations after 1970 was largely triggered by the Tax Reform Act of 1969. This legislation granted public charities the advantage of larger tax deductions and looser government regulation, which made them a preferable vehicle for charitable giving. Such conducive legal and tax arrangements exist in many countries. But, such arrangements are still underdeveloped in some other countries. An international comparative study revealed that, in practice, more than half of the countries with CPOs have insufficient tax incentives for individual or corporate donors. Nor do these countries give special organizational tax-exempt status to their CPOs (WINGS-CF, 2005). In some countries, legal systems can impose restrictions on what organizational form community philanthropists can use. For example, in Croatia, registering community foundation is difficult because of restrictive legal requirements. Therefore, only initiative groups have been formed so far in Croatia to organize local philanthropy.
Community Philanthropy
Traditions and public attitudes toward charity are also important enabling factors for community philanthropy. In Central and Eastern European countries, where formerly communist governments were responsible for social services, changing people’s mindsets toward philanthropy and volunteerism has proved to be the most challenging task for community leaders (Mayer, 1999). On the other hand, in countries with a long tradition and wide acceptance of charity, such as Brazil and South Africa, community philanthropy has developed to some degree even though the legal and tax environments are not favorable. Sustainability
Sustainability refers to the ‘‘long-term survival, performance and impact’’ of philanthropic projects (Anheier & List, 2005, p. 260). The traditional CPO model, especially for community foundations, is to achieve financial sustainability by building permanent endowments. This model allows a CPO to meet the community’s current needs with revenues generated from its endowment while keeping the principal intact so that the CPO can operate on a long-term basis. Some practitioners also believe that an endowment provides a CPO with credibility, reliability, and independence (St. John, 2006). Although important, a permanent endowment is not required for CPOs to be sustainable. For example, the United Way relies on annual local fund-raising and flowthrough grants to achieve philanthropic goals. Even within the community foundation sector, knowledge about how big a sustainable endowment is necessary remains underdeveloped. One study found that, compared to their counterparts in the United States, European community foundations have much smaller endowments (EFC, 2004). Many philanthropic professionals have learned that sustainability cannot be achieved solely with financial resources. Engagement and leadership are crucial ingredients of successful community philanthropy. CPOs can make a significant impact only when they develop a deep understanding of, and connection to, the communities they serve. As St. John (2006) reflected, ‘‘the only form of community philanthropy that is ultimately sustainable is one that builds upon the indigenous impulse and traditions of philanthropy that exist in every culture, religion and human heart.’’ Accountability
In recent years, scandals about investment fraud and unethical use of funds by CPO leaders have raised increasing concerns about CPO accountability. For nonprofit organizations, the accountability issue has multiple facets, including fiscal honesty and avoidance of fraud, good governance,
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adherence to mission, and demonstration of their effectiveness (Brody, 2002). Different stakeholders have different interests in holding CPOs accountable. Donors want to ensure that their donations will be used properly and their charitable objectives can be fulfilled. Communities and grant recipients want resources to be allocated effectively and fairly, key issues to be addressed promptly, and public interests to be taken into account. Internally, board members and staff are held to achieve accountability through their activities. At the same time, CPO staff members have an interest in accountability because they want to ensure the survival, thriving, and integrity of their organization (Keating & Frumkin, 2003). Maintaining high standards of accountability can sometimes be challenging for CPOs. Because CPOs are accountable to many different stakeholders, which stakeholders’ interests should be given priority is not always clear. For example, Frumkin (1997) discussed the case of Buck Trust, in which a donor who passed away had stipulated a narrow geographic boundary inside of which her donation could be used. However, an unexpected growth of her estate triggered a rancorous dispute between her charitable intention and the community foundation’s mission to serve a much wider community.
International Perspectives Several studies conducted by international associations of foundations – such as the Council on Foundations, the EFC, the World Initiatives for Grantmaker SupportCommunity Foundations (WINGS-CF), and the Transatlantic Community Foundation Network (TCFN) – have produced rich information about the histories and current situations of community philanthropy in various countries (Sacks, 2000; EFC, 2004; WINGS-CF, 2005; TCFN, 2007). These studies indicate a similar and upward trend for community philanthropy around the globe since 1990, as indicated both by the growing number of new CPOs and an increasing public awareness of the concept. Sacks (2000) declared that the major factors driving this growth were the collapse of communism, the decline of welfare states, and the end of large programs operated by major international funders. Cross-national comparisons, however, lead to a consensus that each country has a unique environment for community philanthropy. Government type and expenditures, taxation, acceptance of the philanthropic concept, and a culture of giving are among the important factors shaping variation in community philanthropy at the local level. The community foundation has diffused as the dominant organizational form in most parts of the world, with noticeable national adaptations. Institutional innovations have
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emerged in local contexts as well. For example, percentage philanthropy, in which taxpayers may designate a specified percentage of their income tax to support nonprofit organizations, is an innovative form of community philanthropy in Central and Eastern Europe.
Future Directions Current knowledge about community philanthropy derives largely from research by practitioners and consultants in the field. These sources reflect the historical development of the field as a whole as well as experiences of particular organizations. Topics covered by current research include philanthropic environments, diffusion, and adaptation of different organizational forms, learning and development of CPOs, and models of sustainable operation. Some writers offered suggestions for the future development based on their analyses of the changing environment for community philanthropy (see Bernholz et al., 2005). In short, current knowledge about community philanthropy mostly answers the question about what has already happened. A social research that explains the relationship among different aspects of the phenomena is still lacking. For example, at the organizational population level: What factors explain the diffusion rate in the adoption of an innovative organizational form? At the community level: Is the degree of acceptance for community philanthropy affected by community social structure, as Putnam (2001) suggested? At the organizational level: Does governance structure affect CPO performance? Sociological theories of nonprofit organizations and sectors (DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990) offer some hints for answering such research questions. However, testing theories with quality data remains a great, urgent opportunity for researchers in the field of community philanthropy.
Cross-References
▶ Cleveland Foundation ▶ Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Giving Circles ▶ Goff, Frederick Harris ▶ United Way ▶ WINGS
References/Further Readings Americas Program (2003). Mexican hometown associations, from http:// americas.irc-online.org/pdf/series/05.hta.pdf (Downloaded 08/24/ 2008). Anheier, H., & List, R. (2005). A dictionary of civil society, philanthropy and the non-profit sector. London: Routledge.
Beito, D. (2000). From mutual aid to welfare state: How fraternal societies fought poverty and taught character. Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/ hl677.cfm. (Downloaded 09/06/2008). Bernholz, L., Fulton, K., & Kasper, G. (2005). On the brink of new promise: The future of U.S. community foundations. San Francisco: Blueprint Research and Design, Inc. http://www.blueprintrd.com/ text/foc_ FINALfutureofcommunity_complete.pdf (Downloaded 08/12/2008). Brody, E. (2002). Accountability, effectiveness, and public perceptions. In L. Salomon (Ed.), The state of America’s nonprofit sector (pp. 471–498). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press/Aspen Institute. Brown, D., & Moore, M. (2001). Accountability, strategy, and international nongovernmental organizations. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 30(3), 569–587. Bullain, N. (2004). Explaining percentage philanthropy: Legal nature, rationales, impacts. International Journal of Non-for-Profit Law, 6(4), from http://www.icnl.org/knowledge/ijnl/vol6iss4/art_3.htm Downloaded (08/24/2008). DiMaggio, P., & Anheier, H. (1990). The sociology of nonprofit organizations and sectors. Annual Review of Sociology, 16, 137–159. EFC (2004). Community philanthropy watch: Europe 2004. Brussels, Belgium: European Foundation Center, from http://www.efc.be/ ftp/public/CPI/Report.pdf (Downloaded 08/17/2008). Frumkin, P. (1997). Fidelity in philanthropy: Two challenges to community foundations. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 8(1), 65–76. Graddy, E., & Morgan, D. (2006). Community foundations, organizational strategy, and public policy. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 35(4), 605–630. Guo, C., & Brown, W. (2006). Community foundation performance: Bridging community resources and needs. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 35(2), 267–287. Ilchman, W., Katz, S., & Queen, E. (1998). Philanthropy in the world’s traditions. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Keating, E., & Frumkin, P. (2003). Reengineering nonprofit financial accountability: Toward a more reliable foundation for regulation. Public Administration Review, 63(1), 3–15. Mayer, S. (1999) Community philanthropy in Central/Eastern Europe. Flint, Michigan: Charles Steward Mott Foundation, from http://www.mott.org/~/media/pdfs/Legacy%20Publications/Special/ communityphilanthropy%20pdf.ashx. (Downloaded 07/20/2008). Orozco, M. (2003). Hometown associations and their present and future partnerships: New development opportunities? Washington, DC: Agency for International Development, from http://www.thedialogue.org/PublicationFiles/final%20USAID%20HTA%20Report.pdf (Downloaded 08/20/2008). Putnam, R. (2001). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rutnik, T., & Bearman, J. (2005). Giving together: A national scan of giving circles and shared giving. Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, from http://www.givingforum.org/s_fohttp://www.givingforum.org/s_forum/bin.asp?CID = 5892&DID = 9583&DOC = FILE.PDF (Downloaded 09/06/2008). Sacks, E. (2000). The growth of community foundations around the world. Washington, DC: Council on Foundations, from http://www.wingsweb.org/download/CFGrowth_English.pdf (Downloaded 08/24/ 2008). St. John, S. (2006). Questioning the conventional wisdom. Alliance Magazine, March 2006, from http://www.alliancemagazine.org/free/html/ mar06e.html (Downloaded 08/17/2008).
Community, Types of TCFN (2007). The future of community foundations: A transatlantic perspective. Brussels, Belgium: TCFN/Bertelsmann Stiftung, from http://www.tcfn.efc.be/download.php?d = 356 (Downloaded 08/12/ 2008). United Way International (2008). http://uwint.org (Downloaded 08/24/ 2008). Walenhorst, P. (Eds.) (2001). Building philanthropic and social capital: The work of community foundations. Gu¨tersloh, Germany: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers. WINGS-CF (2005). 2005 community foundation global status report. Brussels, Belgium: Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker SupportCommunity Foundations, from http://www.wingsweb.org/download/GSR2005_p1a.pdf (Downloaded 08/24/2008).
Community, Types of HEATHER DOUGLAS RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Introduction With the urbanization, industrialization, and globalization of contemporary society, nostalgia has grown for the traditions of community (Delanty, 2008). Community is a vital dimension in modern society and a key element of social organization. The notion of community suggests positive aspects of society and connections with others, ‘‘good things’’ that will improve individual well being and bring benefits to society as a whole. Community has emotional overtones. It indicates familiarity, social and emotional cohesion, and commitment. It implies a degree of attachment and belonging and a common sense of identity. Community is anticipated to offer beneficial contributions to build a strong and vibrant society. Although it is difficult to identify precisely what a community, it is recognized that many different kinds of community exist. Different communities are based on diverse arrangements of associations and types of connections. Relationships may be personal or at a group level. Interactions may be physical, ideological, or virtual. The degree of commitment and involvement may be strong or weak. The feelings of connection among community members may be positive or negative. Clearly there are different types of community, and the variety means it is important to have a clear understanding of which type of community is being discussed.
Definition No agreed definition exists of exactly what constitutes a community. Community can be considered as a
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theoretical concept and a philosophy, such as ‘‘community spirit’’ or ‘‘connected community.’’ Alternatively community may be considered as a practice of engaging and connecting with others for instance ‘‘creating community’’ or ‘‘building community.’’ Often community is used as a substitute term for locality, but community exists well beyond physical places. Indeed, Hillery (1955) identified 94 different types. Brint (2001) suggests communities are connected primarily through common emotions and personal interests in one another. He defines communities as ‘‘aggregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who are bound together principally by relations of affect, loyalty, common values, and/or personal concern (i.e., interest in the personalities and life events of one another).’’ This definition is, however, a little romantic by not attending adequately to negative aspects of communities. Community is not always positive, proactive, and committed. Not all community interactions are friendly; yet strong communities can exist even if relations are not amicable, or the aim is not to benefit others, or the motivation for interaction is not moral. A community may be defined as a set of meaningful social connections in a group of any size where members have some interest in common and a degree of common intention. A community is social. It is a web of some kind of relationships. A community operates within certain boundaries that are agreed among members either tacitly or explicitly. Each community establishes traditions and patterns of behavior which may be implied or written as rules. Members of a community share some kind of a bond such as location, interests, background, or identity, situations or experiences. Thus a community is a social institution, that is, a stable structure and agreed set of procedures and conventions that provides social order and meaning (Scott, 2001: 34). An alternative definition of community is more functional and focused on the purpose of the activity. For instance Porter (2006) defines a virtual community as an ‘‘aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported and/or mediated by technology and guided by some protocols or norms.’’ This definition has some merit. It considers the special nature of the shared interests along with protocol and norms, and as in Brint’s definition above, it implies aspects of a relationship. Many virtual communities are social exchanges shared by people who may, or may not, be able to identify respondents. Porter’s definition, however, has limitations in that not all virtual communities are connected to business.
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Community Typologies Many different types of community exist. Each type has different characteristics, purpose, membership requirements, and traditions of interactions. Each community institutes accepted arrangements of engaging with other members, establishes customary forms of relationships, and determines particular conventions for interactions and ways of maintaining contact. Researchers, policy makers and practitioners have a clearer understanding of different types of communities if they are systematically and precisely defined; however, few typologies of communities have been published. This is quite surprising given the lack of consensus regarding appropriate definitions, or agreement on categorization. To¨nnies distinguished two types of communities. On the one hand was the simplicity of village life (community or Gemeinschaft); then there were complex social relationships in urban environments (society or Gesellschaft). In To¨nnies’ view, these two kinds of communities had alternative and opposing characteristics. Community is relatively childlike, where interactions are close and frequent among small numbers of familiar residents and members have a common way of life and beliefs. In community, traditions and systems of interactions are relatively stable. In contrast, [urban] society is proposed as mature social relations where interactions are more distant and infrequent among a large number of relatively unknown citizens whose lifestyles and beliefs are different and change constantly. This view has some merit as an analysis of the rapidly changing urban culture of the time. It still offers a useful starting point to study rural and urban populations, but it is less relevant to distinguish among the many and varied types of communities that exist in urban and rural areas. By the middle of the twentieth century, different types of communities were classified according to rituals, density of relationships, and involvement with organized activities particularly in small groups (Brint, 2001). Less tangible cultural elements also categorized different types of communities, particularly common belief systems and the perception of similarities among the population. Hillery (1955) identified elements that characterized communities as geographic area, kinship, self sufficiency or separateness, common lifestyle and type of social interactions (Marshall, 1998: 97–98). Worsley (1987) organized Hillery’s elements into an early typology of three different community types. Locality forms the foundation of the first kind of community. Neighborhoods, villages, and some bounded urban areas can be identified by residents and outsiders as a community, thus they have a ‘‘sense of place’’ (Stedman, 2002). In a second type of community, members share some
common features and have some sense of collective identity. This is sometimes called a ‘‘sense of community’’ (Kim & Kaplan, 2004). The sense of community may be based on an identifiable characteristic such as ethnicity, or a common experience of disadvantage, or to those who belong to a particular profession. The third type of community is established by common feelings, understandings, and sense of belonging among members who establish a ‘‘community spirit’’ (Etzioni, 1993; Rovai, 2002). Members have a sense of connection based on a network of relationships and interactions which may or may not be through physical interactions. The relationships are mostly positive and reciprocal, but not always. For example, this type of community is evident among those who have a strong commitment to a cause. Worsley’s typology extends earlier concepts and the two types of communities proposed by To¨nnies, but it is still very general. Delanty (2008) suggests four ways of conceptualizing community. First, community may be viewed as social connections, identity, and a sense of belonging. A second approach may imply social and spatial disadvantage that requires recognition and a response from government. Third, community may be envisaged as organized political and collective action for change and improvement for an identified group of disadvantaged people. Finally, community may be conceptualized beyond traditional concepts of place, and positions social relationships within imagined ideological or technological environments. Others have proposed typologies of specific types of communities. For instance, Schubert and Borkman (1991) outline a typology based on organizational structures. While this is only intended to apply to self-help groups, it offers some helpful concepts to consider a broader range of types of communities. The two dimensions of this typology (internal power and authority systems and external dependence on resources) result in five types: Unaffiliated, Federated, Affiliated, Hybrid, and Managed. This typology is helpful to understand the different organizational systems, but it relates more to communities of organizations than to other types of communities, for instance, it has limited applicability to virtual communities. Wellman (2002) describes three iterations of modern community. The first is traditional, closely knit communities that Wellman describes as ‘‘Little Boxes.’’ These traditionally place-based communities have tight, dense ties among members, the community is tightly bounded, and regular interactions among residents provide a wide range of social support and companionship (1999: xiii). In essence, these traditional communities are similar to To¨nnies Gemeinschaft. These traditional communities have transformed into ‘‘Glocalized’’ networks in
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which clusters of households are linked both locally and globally. In Wellman’s view, modern community now has become ‘‘Networked Individualism’’ where individual members are sparsely linked without regard to physical space. These contemporary networked communities are loosely bounded, that is, most ties are not within a single locality. Interaction occurs between a minority of members, and communities provide a limited range of social support and companionship to members. Although the interactions among members of contemporary communities are not visible, they are no less important in the contribution they offer to the well-being of individual members. Brint’s (2001) typology is one of the few available to classify distinctly different types of contemporary communities. The foundations of his community typology are (1) physical interactions among members, (2) the frequency and priority placed on interactions among members, and (3) the primary motivation for interaction. Brint’s typology has four levels of variables with alternative options at each level: ● Basis of relationship: geographic or choice ● Reason for interaction: activity or belief ● Location of other members: concentrated or dispersed in space ● Amount of interaction: frequent or infrequent Eight community types emerge from these alternatives: Geographic communities: 1. Small-scale communities of place and neighborhood groups 2. Local friendship networks, primarily activity-based 3. Communes and collectives 4. Local friendship networks, primarily cultural Choice-based communities: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Activity-based elective communities Belief-based elective communities Imagined communities Virtual communities
Brint’s typology attempts to provide a systematic process to organize communities. It assists to understand some of the varieties evident in contemporary communities: however, there are some limitations. This classification system does not explain different types of membership systems. It does not cover many contemporary communities, such as the specialized community of education and learning practice (Barton & Tusting, 2005; Wenger, 1998). Likewise the dark side of community does not fit
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readily into this framework, for instance crime syndicates which have strong, bounded connections that are not necessarily based on friendships, activities, or beliefs. In addition, socially oppressed or excluded communities – such as the homeless or slaves are not easily accommodated into Brint’s typology. The addition of some of these concepts into a new typology would assist to further clarify different types of communities. In essence, the characteristics of the community members and system of interactions differentiate different types of communities. These structural and intangible cultural characteristics are equally applicable to distinguish various types of modern communities, for instance virtual communities; however they are insufficient to classify the many different types of modern virtual communities.
Historical Background The notion of ‘‘community’’ can be traced to Aristotle’s concept of polis. This was the public arena in which debates could occur to refine concepts of higher virtues and other qualities, such as happiness and the common good. During the Enlightenment, vigorous debates and reviews of social systems reemerged. Ferdinand To¨nnies ([1897] 1951) usually is credited with articulating the concept of community as a system of social interactions occurring in an identifiable space. To¨nnies compared and described nineteenth century life, and proposed modern society was in transition from village to urban settings. Since educated people of this time were expected to know English, French, and German, there was considerable interaction and transfer of information between scholars, enabling other early sociologists to extend the notion of community. Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim investigated the social transformation of traditional communities associated with industrialization and urbanization. Durkheim scrutinized modern social relations in organizations such as the church and care institutions. He proposed community as sophisticated and complex interactions with religion as a bonding mechanism that sets norms of behavioral interactions and ties communities together. Weber also examined religion although he is better known for his work describing the internal communities entrenched within large bureaucracies. Marx concentrated on the emergence of capitalism and examined the divisions in society and disruptions to social traditions and relationships during urbanization. The hub of sociology moved to the United States as the two World Wars interrupted academic life in Europe. Many early community researchers in the United States and elsewhere undertook place-based studies, with the
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Chicago School leading the way in urban ecology techniques. Studies such as those by Gans (1962) and Young and Wilmott (1960) provided rich descriptions of community life. These studies painted rich, in-depth understandings of activities, functions, and rhythms of life in villages, small towns and rural communities. Warmth and supportive social connections are described as a core part of small community life, but studies also identified a variety of divisions, conflicts, and social stratification in communities that on the surface appeared cohesive. Later studies commenced during the expansion of sociology in the 1970s examined fringe communities, such as gays, street dwellers and community activists. In general these studies are less concerned with categorizing different types of communities than in describing the functioning and relationships among community members. The nature of community continues to be debated. Contemporary community is shaped by cognitive and symbolic structures that are not necessarily underpinned by interactive spaces or social intimacy. Community may result from imaged or virtual connections as described by Benedict Anderson (Anderson, 1991). Contemporary liberal democratic societies are organized within particular political structures and economic conditions which influence societal arrangements. The qualities of civil society and social organization, meaningful relationships and moral life, communitarianism, liberalism, and economic exchange, are proposed by authors such as Amitai Etzioni, John Rawls, Francis Fukuyama and Robert Putnam. Communities are recognized as not being homogenous in their social or economic arrangements. Rather, communities vary in structures, specific practices and different arrangements of behaviors (Little, 2002). Communities may be havens of citizen commitment to the common good, but they exhibit vices as well as virtues. There is growing recognition that each community is unique and organic, and that fostering and developing systems relevant to each particular situation can be beneficial.
Key Issues Community is not a place or an aggregation of population, but a mode of relating (Calhoun, 1998). Community can be understood as the life people live in dense networks of relationships. Communities institutionalize arrangements for individual actions, and provide measures for conflicts to be resolved (Habermas, 1998). It can be considered as a system for change: structure, problems, development, and action (Sussman, 1978). A community implies a sense of belonging, connection, communication, and interaction. Attachment to a
community confers benefits and improves well being (Brown et al., 2003). Belonging to community is viewed almost as a necessity to have a meaningful life. For example, Kegley (1997) writes about engaging with ‘‘genuine community’’ as a means of improving individual well being by strengthening knowledge, intentionality, and enlightenment. In this sense, community is a substitute for spirituality, a way of engaging in and understanding a greater force for good that offers guidance and personal philosophy for living. In general this is proposed as an individual benefit, however the ‘‘health’’ of different types of communities also varies (Kawachi et al., 1999). Communication is suggested as the core element that binds a community together (Miller, 1992). The process of engaging and building connections within a community is described as ‘‘building community.’’ A sense of community connection can be built among members either accidentally, or via a deliberate and informed process. Systematic and deliberate community building involves thinking, feeling, and doing. Kelly and Sewell (1998) describe this method of community building as using ‘‘head, heart, or hand.’’ Head is a capacity for knowing: a logical, rational, thinking connection based on a judgment of anticipated benefit to the person or others for whom there is a close attachment. Heart is a facility for feeling: enacted with a sense of purpose, commitment, and emotion. Hand is a competence of doing: a service based on various techniques to achieve a result. While these may be combined as pairs of actions, combining as all three is much more powerful and successful to form a strong and stable attachment to a community of choice. The process can be applied to build all types of contemporary communities, even those that may have no physical interactions, or those without a positive goal. Some types of communities function well and have good connections among members. Other types build connections among members aimed not to accomplish social cohesion, but rather have negative antisocial goals and aim to achieve social disruption. Dark types of communities are strongly oppressive or exploitive and result in systematic social exclusion of those who do not conform to an expected behavior or condition. The foundation of exclusionary types of communities may be class, race, or nationality, gender, sexuality, disability, or possessions. Anderson (1991) expands on ‘‘imagined communities’’ formed around nationality that build a sense of purpose, and then may engage in nationalistic endeavors such as invasions or ethnic cleansing. Weiss and Friedman (1995) provide a comprehensive overview of exclusionary community based on gender. Likewise Paoli (2003) describes the mafia crime brotherhood as an exploitive
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community. When oppression is not considered legitimate, however, the oppressed may bond into their own tight knit community to offer mutual support or engage in counter actions. Over time, communities change. The activities, membership, and ways of interacting may alter. Communities may falter and fold, or evolve into new forms. Many lament that community is disappearing in modern, industrialized western societies. For instance, Brock (2008) insists modern communities are fragmented and at odds, with people living in their ‘‘own worlds.’’ The loss of community is tied to a supposed depletion of social capital where fewer citizens now belong to civil society organizations (Putnam, 1995). There is no doubt physical interactions occur less regularly among residents, especially in modern cities: however others are less despondent that community is in decline, but suggest instead that new types of community are emerging. Contemporary communities are qualitatively different from traditional place-based communities. Contemporary communities rely less on regular physical interactions, than on virtual contact that informs the member and fulfills a need for information or interaction. A sense of community may be established among members even when contact is irregular and members never meet. The need for meaningful relationships is now provided by virtual friendship communities rather than from regular interaction with a close knit family. Virtual communities offer members a sense of belonging, communication media, and personal benefits. Members who belong to social network systems, virtual dating and chat communities are as much involved in their communities as residents of traditional neighborhood communities. Virtual communities exist around common interests without members ever needing to meet physically. The common interests are diverse, for instance ham radio operators, world wide book crossing exchange groups, or professional communities of practice connected via the Internet.
Future Directions A gap is apparent between understanding community as a practice of physical and social interactions, and considering community as a political philosophy. Frequently the extent of diversity and pluralism in communities is neglected. There is a clear need to develop a new typology of communities to help organize and understand the variation evident in different kinds of communities. Modern communities are a network of relationships which form around an interest or other aspect members have in common. Each community evolves particular
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conventions of behavior and actions. This concept helps to understand the variation in connections among members of different types of contemporary communities, but offers little to help appreciate the differences that distinguish one type of community from another. Membership of each type of community varies: it may be established by voluntary association, or conferred by existing members. Communities may be established by geography or choice; they may be based on activities, actions, or beliefs. Different kinds of community result in various arrangements of interactions, exchanges, and relationships, and the various kinds of community offer different kinds of contributions to daily life. With so many iterations of community types, an agreed typology would be very useful to assist researchers and practitioners alike to extend understanding of how various types of communities form, function, and fold.
Cross-References
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Collective Action ▶ Communitarianism ▶ Cyber-Communities ▶ Community Development Organizations ▶ Durkheim, Emile ▶ Etzioni, Amitai ▶ Identity ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Self-Help Groups ▶ Social Cohesion ▶ To¨nnies, Ferdinand ▶ Uncivil Society ▶ Weber, Max
References/Further Readings Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. London: Verso. Barton, D., & Tusting, K. (Eds.) (2005). Beyond communities of practice: Language power and social context. Learning in doing: social, cognitive and computational perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brint, S. (2001). Gemeinschaft revisited: A critique and reconstruction of the community concept. Sociological Theory, 19(1), 1–23. Brock, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Brown, B., Perkins, D. D., & Brown, G. (2003). Place attachment in a revitalizing neighborhood: Individual and block levels of analysis. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23(3), 259–271. Calhoun, C. (1998). Community without propinquity revisited: Communications technology and the transformation of the urban public sphere. Sociological Inquiry, 68(3), 373–397.
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Delanty, G. (2008). Community. Milton Park/Abingdon/Oxon: Routledge. Etzioni, A. (1993). The spirit of community: Rights, responsibilities, and the communitarian agenda. New York: Crown. Gans, H. (1962). The urban villagers: Groups and class in the life of Italian Americans. New York: Free Press. Habermas, J. (1998). The inclusion of the other: Studies in political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hillery, G. A. (1955). Definitions of community: Areas of agreement. Rural Sociology, 20(2), 111–123. Kawachi, I., Kennedy, B. P., & Wilkinson, R. G. (1999). Crime: Social disorganization and relative deprivation. Social Science & Medicine, 48(6), 719–731. Kegley, J. A. K. (1997). Genuine individuals and genuine communities. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Kelly, A., & Sewell, S. (1998). With head heart and hand: Dimensions of community building. Bowen Hills, Brisbane: Boolerong Publications. Kim, J., & Kaplan, R. (2004). Physical and psychological factors in sense of community – new urbanist Kentlands and nearby orchard village. Environment and Behavior, 36(3), 313–340. Little, A. (2002). The politics of community: Theory and practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marshall, G. (Ed.) (1998). Oxford dictionary of sociology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, B. (1992). Collective action and rational choice – place, community, and the limits to individual self-interest. Economic Geography, 68(1), 22–42. Paoli, L. (2003). Mafia brotherhoods: Organized crime, Italian style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, C. E. (2006). A typology of virtual communities: A multidisciplinary foundation for future research. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 10(1), 631–5171. Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Rovai, A. P. (2002). Building sense of community at a distance. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 3(1), 1–16. Schubert, M. A., & Borkman, T. J. (1991). An organizational typology for self-help groups. American Journal of Community Psychology, 19(5), 769–787. Scott, W. R. (2001). Institutions and organizations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stedman, R. C. (2002). Toward a social psychology of place – predicting behavior from place-based cognitions, attitude, and identity. Environment and Behavior, 34(5), 561–581. Sussman, M. B. (Ed.) (1978). Community structure and analysis. Westport, CT Greenwook Press. Toennies, F. ([1897] 1951). Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft (community and society) (Charles P. Loomis, Trans.). New York: Harper. Weiss, P. A., & Friedman, M. (Eds.) (1995). Feminism and community. Philadephia: Temple University Press. Wellman, B. (1999). Networks in the global village: Life in comtemporary communities. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wellman, B. (2002). Little boxes, glocalization, and networked individualism. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2362, 337–343. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Worsley, P. (1987). New introductory sociology. London: Penguin. Young, M., & Wilmott, P. (1960). Family and kinship in East London. London: Harmondsworth.
Compagnia di San Paolo ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization C.so Vittorio Emanuele II, 75 10128 Torino Italy www.compagnia.torino.it
Introduction An Italian banking foundation with approximately 80 staff members, Compagnia di San Paolo is a private, nonprofit organization that promotes research, education, the arts, cultural, and landscape heritage, health, and social assistance. Although it is deeply rooted in Torino and works mainly in the regions of Piedmont and Liguria, in Northwestern Italy, the Compagnia plays a significant role in national, European, and international projects, often in cooperation with other major foundations.
Brief History In 1563, the same year that Torino was established as the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, seven citizens of Torino founded the Compagnia di San Paolo with the dual purpose of offering a support program to the general public, which at that time was afflicted by extreme poverty, and blocking the expansion of the protestant reformation. The brotherhood drew a wide membership from merchants, lawyers, state officials and craftsmen, and soon was able to increase its numbers. By the end of the sixteenth century, the activities of the brotherhood were identified by their social and humanitarian nature. Some of the group’s early activities worked to promote ethical loaning practices, offer a dowry to underprivileged women (sustainable income for that time period), and provide assistance to impoverished nobility. Falling subject to wartime expenditures, the Compagnia was dissolved in 1802 and replaced by publicly appointed boards. However, a significant portion of the new ‘‘beneficence committees’’ was made up of the foundation’s officers, who, with their previous experience, ensured continuity of the foundation’s work. With the Restoration, the Compagnia was entrusted in 1814 with providing health services for the city’s impoverished classes. In 1867, the Compagnia established the Credito Fondiario, a mortgage credit institute.
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After acquiring the assets of the Banca Agricola Italiana in 1931, the Istituto di San Paolo expanded through Piedmont and Liguria. The next year, the Government conferred on the Istituto di San Paolo di Torino the statute of a public-law credit institute, which reflected its commitment to simultaneous credit and charity. Twenty years later, the name was changed to Istituto Bancario San Paolo di Torino. In 1991, in a process involving many other State-controlled savings banks, the ‘‘Amato-Carli’’ bill transformed the bank into a joint-stock company owned by a foundation, and the Compagnia di San Paolo foundation was thus re-created. Subsequently, other bills provided for the new banking foundations to sell their majority control of the banks. By 2000 the Compagnia was a fully fledged, private foundation.
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Accomplishments Among the foundation’s most notable areas of impact is its continuous support of the arts. Major cultural and arts-related projects organized by the foundation include the Exposition of the Holy Shroud in 2010, celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unity in 2011, as well as continued support of the main museums and cultural centers in Torino.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in the European Tradition ▶ Foundation, Operating ▶ Philanthropy in Europe
References/Further Readings Mission/Objective/Focus Area The work of Compagnia di San Paolo is driven by its mission to support works of public interest and social well-being, particularly in the fields of scientific, economic, and legal research, education, art, and culture, and health; and to provide assistance to, and protection of, less-privileged social groups.
Cavallo, S. (1995). Charity and power in early modern Italy. Benefactors and their motives in Turin, 1541–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gastaldo, P. (2007). Let’s not forget the past – A commentary on Italian philanthropy rediscovered. Effect Magazine, 1(16). MacDonald, N., & Tayart de Borms, L. (Eds.) (2008). Philanthropy in Europe: A rich past, a promising future. London: Alliance Publishing Trust.
Activities Within its programming areas, the Compagnia defines its objectives through multi-annual and annual programs, and it both makes grants to organizations and directs its own programming. The foundation’s work and support falls into six areas: Education, The Arts, Conservation, and enhancement of Cultural Heritage and Actvities and Landscape heritage, Health, Welfare Policy, and Special Projects.
Structure and Governance The Compagnia’s Governing Bodies are the Consiglio Generale, which decides the priorities, programs, and objectives of the foundation, the Chair, the Management Committee, which provides administrative oversight, the Board of Auditors, and the Secretary-General, who is at the head of the Compagnia’s operating organization.
Funding A significant portion of the foundation’s assets is invested in one single stock, Intesa Sanpaolo which was, as of December 28, 2006, was acquired by Banca Intesa SpA. Intesa Sanpaolo provides a range of credit and financial products and services to its customers in Italy and internationally. At the end of 2007, the overall value of the foundation’s financial activities amounted to €9.12 billion.
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Compassion FEISAL A. YUNIS Cairo University, Al-Haram, Giza, Egypt
Introduction Compassion is one of those versatile concepts that have very wide applications in many areas of modern life. In recent years, there has been quite an upsurge of interest in advocacy and study of compassion. In a literature search spanning the period from January 1980 to July 2008, the following data bases were searched: Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete, EconLit, EconLit with Full Text, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Humanities International Index, MasterFILE Premier, MLA Directory of Periodicals, PsycARTICLES, PsycEXTRA, and PsycINFO. A total of 17,198 entries were found covering very wide constellations of issues involving compassion, such as religion, healing, selfcompassion, compassion fatigue, compassion among members of the caring professions, the politics of compassion, and the economics of compassion. Globalization has had a tremendous impact on the limits and practice of compassion. In a globalized world,
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disasters and other forms of human misery are widely popularized and exposed through a mass media that follows events instantaneously. There is no excuse for not providing help and compassion out of ignorance of the misery of those in need any more. Civil society is playing a positive role in promoting compassionate interference in areas of conflicts and disasters. It can be said now that there is a global network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that makes its business the practice of global compassion. Examples are Doctors Without Borders (Me´decins sans Frontie`res), Save the Children fund, Oxfam, Amnesty International, and the like. All these organizations consider compassion as their main objective, and concentrate efforts on the more practical side of compassion, i.e., providing help and support to those who need it the most, irrespective of who they are where they are.
Definition The compact edition of the Oxford Dictionary defines compassion as ‘‘[s]uffering together with another, participation in suffering, fellow feeling, sympathy.’’ The modern psychological view of compassion is not much different. VandenBos in the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Dictionary of Psychology (2007) defines compassion as ‘‘a strong feeling of sympathy with another person’s feelings of sorrow or distress, usually involving a desire to help or comfort that person’’ (p. 203). In this sense, compassion implies a social interactive process that involves sharing pain and misery at an emotional level, motivated by strong feelings of empathy. It also implies cognitive beliefs about the seriousness of the suffering of fellow humans, and that the suffering does not serve a useful function. Porter (2006) determines the marking features of compassion as ‘‘the graveness of a situation in which persons or groups experience serious pain, anguish, torture, misery, grief, distress, despair, hardship, destitution, adversity, agony, affliction, hardship, and suffering’’ (p. 100). Compassion belongs to a group of concepts, all related to unselfish behavior, notably altruism, empathy, and sympathy. The APA dictionary defines altruism as ‘‘an apparently unselfish concern for others or behavior that provides benefit to others at some cost to the individual’’ (p. 40). It does not necessarily require sharing the suffering or the existence of a jeopardized state, like an illness or a disaster. In the same dictionary, empathy is defined as ‘‘understanding a person from his or her frame of reference rather than one’s own, so that one vicariously experiences the person’s feelings, perceptions and thoughts’’ (p. 327). Like compassion, empathy
involves the sharing of feelings, but it is not restricted, as compassion is, to the partaking of negative feelings. It does not imply, in itself, any desire for action for helping. Sympathy, however, does. One of its meanings mentioned in the dictionary is ‘‘a capacity to share in and respond to the concerns or feelings of others’’ (p. 916). However, in another meaning, it is ‘‘feelings of concern or compassion resulting from an awareness of the suffering or sorrow of another’’ (p. 916). In that sense, it is almost synonymous with what is meant by compassion, and this explains why the two words are frequently used interchangeably. It seems that, while compassion does not require face-toface communication to take place, sympathy does. Compassion is more public, and this is emphasized in the use of the concept in the political and economic sense. Some writers like Hoijer (not dated) reserve the concept of compassion for compassion with the suffering of others in the public sphere, claiming that the other three concepts do not include the same public and political dimensions as the concept of compassion.
Key Issues Religion
The relationship between religion and compassion is not simple. On the one hand, all religions value compassion very highly; Buddhism even put compassion as the ultimate value. On the other hand, the empirical data relating compassion and religion are scarce. A study reported by Brooks (2004) examined this issue. Using the US General Social Survey (GSS) data, he found that religious people are far more likely than secularists to have compassionate feelings. This fact remains true regardless of age, race, education, sex, marital status, and income. Looking at religious teachings one can find that all religions insist on compassion as a central value guiding the behavior of the believers. Buddhism is the one religion most associated with the concept of compassion in recent times. As described by the Dalai Lama (1997), genuine compassion is based on the shared human desire to be happy and to eliminate suffering. Through the recognition of this fundamental equality and commonality, one develops a sense of affinity and closeness, and based on that, one will generate love and genuine compassion. Wisdom complements compassion and determines its intensity and depth. The ultimate compassion, or what the Dalai Lama called the third type, is the nonobjectified compassion, accompanied by insight into the ultimate nature of reality, where one can see the nature of sentient beings, and that insight reinforces one’s compassionate
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attitude toward sentient beings. In the Dalai Lama’s view, compassion is also based on reconciliation and respect for others’ rights and opinions. In Jewish prayers, God is referred to as ‘‘Ha-rachaman’’ (the compassionate one) and as ‘‘Av harachamim’’ (Father of compassion). The heart of Judaism is the principle mentioned in chapter 19 of Leviticus: ‘‘That which is hateful to yourself, do not do unto others.’’ It is the basis of commitment to human responsibility and social justice. The concept of ‘‘tzedakah’’ (charity) in Judaism, as in Islam, extends from common charity to include the more encompassing human responsibility. Charity is an obligation rather than a choice. The highest level of charity, according to the great Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides, is to strengthen the hand of the poor to help them become independent. Compassion is the core value emphasized in Christianity. In his life, as described in the New Testament, Jesus felt compassion for all those in jeopardized situations. Compassion in Christianity is not just restricted to feelings, but rather extends to actions: to heel and to save. Jesus restored sight to the blind, created bread for the hungry, and raised the dead. In Islam, compassion is mentioned from the outset of the very first pages. In fact, whenever one starts reading the introductory ‘‘basmalah’’ or invocation of every Quranic ‘‘Soura’’ (chapter), one finds the name of God intertwined with that of the ‘‘Compassionate.’’ As Abdul Gayoom (2002) stated, the foundations of sharia (Islamic Law) are based on compassion and mercy. No soul is asked to bear more than it possibly could. In everything that the Almighty had commanded, whether it involved an obligation toward Him or toward others, the convenience of the people and their needs and welfare was taken into consideration. In social dealings, the rights of neighbors, relatives, parents, and wives are based on compassion, and extend even beyond humanity to other creatures of God. Like Judaism, the duty (Farida) of ‘‘Zakat’’ is more than just mere charity. It is an obligation to be compassionate in the most positive sense. Compassionate Care
Lately, there has been a surge of interest in what is called ‘‘optimal healing environment’’ (OHE). This is a new medical paradigm, which promotes the idea that optimal medical care should balance the need for rigorous scientific principles, evidence based treatments, and rationality with the need for kindness, love, and compassion. Compassion has always occupied a central place in nursing care. In fact, many professionals consider compassion as the ‘‘heart of nursing’’ and nursing’s most
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precious asset. Looking into how nurses conceptualize compassion, Hudacek (2008) found nurses report that compassion is to go beyond hands-on skills and techniques to alleviate suffering and pain through empathic concern and to be emotionally and physically present. However, some writers like Schantz (2007) see the meaning of the concept, as it applies to nursing, as neither clearly defined nor widely stressed in contemporary everyday nursing practice. Schantz notices that the concept of compassion as related to nurses changes over times and contexts and she reviews the changes from compassion to empathy and caring. It is, in her opinion, even devalued with the increased reliance in technology and the changes in nursing education. But the hard core of nurses and nursing professionals still believe that compassion is the ultimate value in nursing. In 2008 Hudacek published the findings of a study that aimed at identifying the dimensions of care in nursing practice. Participants were 200 nurses from different countries. Participants were asked to describe one caring practice that made a difference in her/his life and in the life process of a patient she/he has cared for in the past. The study was designed to help the nurse to reflect on the meaning of care. The stories were analyzed and seven dimensions of caring that define professional nursing practice were found: caring, compassion, spirituality, community outreach, providing comfort, crisis intervention, and going the extra distance. All of the nurses in the study, irrespective of where they live in the world, reported compassionate caring. Carl Rogers (1961) was the therapist who contributed most to transferring psychotherapy from a patientcentered endeavor to the care for the human person. Starting from an existential and humanistic standpoint, he emphasized empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard as the necessary and sufficient conditions for successful psychotherapeutic encounters. In some more progressive forms of psychotherapy like Family Systems Therapy and Transactional Analysis, compassion becomes the core of therapy. As Hutnik (2005) describes: ‘‘[P]sychotherapy is the compassionate caring for the mental well-being of another person’’ (p. 399). With more patients suffering from more or less existential problems and long-term difficulties in adaptation, techniquebased psychotherapeutic methods are not very effective. What the patient needs is compassionate understanding and supportive presence in his/her life. A developing trend in psychotherapy focuses on linking Buddhism and Buddhist values, mainly compassion and mindfulness, with modern psychotherapeutic theory and technique. A book edited by Gilbert (2005) concentrates on
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enriching cognitive behavior therapy, the more popular psychotherapeutic technique of today, with compassion, as manifested in Buddhist teachings, as well as in psychological theories of attachment and prosocial behavior. While the central concern of religion is compassion toward ‘‘all sentient beings,’’ psychotherapy is mainly about helping the person to be compassionate toward ‘‘Self.’’ Gilbert (2005) believes that depressive patients are self-punitive and lack the capacity for self-soothing. If it is possible to train them to be kind to themselves, recovery will be more complete. Compassion Fatigue
It has been well documented that professionals involved in the care of trauma victims, people with mental or physical health conditions, severely handicapped persons, or any other individuals in jeopardized conditions are at a greater risk of developing emotional and physical symptoms. Figley (1995) labeled these symptoms as ‘‘compassion fatigue.’’ The work on compassion fatigue is an extension of the work on trauma victims. Traumatic experiences usually result in emotional and mental symptoms. These were first labeled as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the third version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association (1980). Figley draws attention to the fact that the suffering from PTSD is not restricted to those who have first-hand experience of trauma, but extends to others who are in close contact with them. He labels this empathic suffering from the experience of others ‘‘Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder (STSD),’’ which he defines as ‘‘the natural consequent behaviors and emotions resulting from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other – the stress resulting from helping or wanting to help a traumatized or suffering person’’ (p. 7). He coins the term ‘‘compassion fatigue’’ to refer to this syndrome. The symptoms of compassion fatigue are similar to those of PTSD, except that the patient does not experience the traumatic event. They cover recollections of events, dreams, reliving the experience, avoidance, or numbing of reminders of events, and different signs of persistent arousal, as well as changes in the patient’s relationships to himself/herself, family, friends, and community. Self-compassion
The first account in the psychological literature of selfcompassion was that presented by Kristen Neff (2003a) as an alternative to self-esteem in explaining psychological health. Like compassion, self-compassion ‘‘involves being touched by and open to one’s own suffering, not avoiding or disconnecting from it, generating the desire to
alleviate one’s suffering and to heal oneself with kindness. Self-compassion [as described by Neff] also involves offering nonjudgmental understanding to one’s pain, inadequacies, and failures, so that one’s experience is seen as part of the larger human experience’’ (p. 87). According to Neff, self-compassion entails three basic components: (a) self-kindness, i.e., being kind to oneself and not being self-critical; (b) common humanity, the person perceives his/her experience as a part of the wider human experience, making him/her more connected and less isolated; and (c) mindfulness, the balanced awareness of one’s thoughts and feelings and not overidentifying with them. Neff argues that self-compassion is not related to selfishness and being self-centered because it is part of being compassionate to others; it is, in a way, ‘‘part of the human condition, and that all people – oneself included – are worthy of compassion’’ (p. 223). Neff (2003b) developed a scale to measure selfcompassion. Factor analysis resulted in six dimensions of the concept: self-kindness, self-judgment, common humanity, isolation, mindfulness, and overidentification. Inter-factor correlations were all highly significant and second-order factoring resulted in a general robust factor of self-compassion. In another study by Neff, Rude, and Kirkpatrick (2007) positive correlations were found between selfcompassion and a number of positive mental health variables: happiness, optimism, positive affect, wisdom, personal initiative, curiosity and exploration, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Furthermore, it correlated negatively with negative affect and neuroticism.
International Perspectives The Politics of Compassion
According to Sznaider (1998), public compassion has two dimensions. The first relates to democratization processes in which equality is central. The second relates to the market society where exchange of goods and services unintentionally extends the moral concern for strangers. Compassion became more prominent in politics after the fall of the Soviet Union and the introduction, by former president George Bush, of the concept ‘‘new world order,’’ where international action is no longer guided by ideological differences between capitalism and communism. Ho¨ijer (2003) states that there is an increased political willingness to interfere in political conflicts, crossing national sovereignty when there is an assumed risk of human rights violations or victimization of civilian population. Ignatieff (1998) describes two models characterizing the present situation: the new nationalism with ethnic
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claims and conflicts, and a moral universalism that is based on human rights. Politicians are no longer motivating international intervention in the rhetoric of political ideologies or power interests, but in the rhetoric of human rights and global compassion. Territorial and economic claims may be in the hidden agenda, but are not mentioned. Wars against Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and so on are waged for their crimes against civilian populations and persecutions of minorities. This is supported by extensive media coverage of distant suffering that has become part of ordinary citizens’ perceptions of conflicts and crises in the world. Nongovernmental organizations that work solely in conflict areas and interfere across borders out of compassion are mushrooming. Business is exercising ‘‘corporate compassion’’ through humanitarian sponsoring by giving money and other resources to social and humanitarian aid. This, as Ho¨ijer (2003) points out, may be discussed as a cynical exploitation of human suffering, or an expression of true compassion. Smith (2004) dismissed the motives for aid offered to poor African countries by the US government under the slogans of compassionate conservatism as a policy to guarantee oil supplies from this resources-rich continent. There is a small body of research concerning compassion and political attitudes. A study by Brooks (2004) shows that conservatives have slightly more compassionate attitudes than liberals. For example, they are three percentage points more likely to say they have tender, concerned feelings for the less fortunate than liberals. Religious practice interacts with political attitudes. In expressed compassion, secular liberals are less compassionate than religious conservatives. What is more striking is the fact that religious liberals are 24 points more likely to feel compassionate toward the less fortunate than the secular conservatives.
Future Direction There are other areas of compassion not covered in this brief article that are expected to assume high level of importance in the future. Compassion in economics, in organizations, with animals, and education for compassion, are all but a few examples. From what has been seen so far, it seems that one is faced with an extremely illusive, complex, and multifaceted concept. To develop a coherent theory of compassion, research into its psychosocial correlates is in order. Work on personality characteristics conducive of compassion, on the relationships between compassion and other prosocial behaviors, and socialization for compassion is needed. This work will need more effort in designing measures to tap different behaviors described as compassion. The genesis of
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compassionate behavior must lie in the brain circuitry and early learning experiences. These need to be researched and elucidated. In real life, globalization is expected to continue to make compassion a legitimate justification for cross-boundary interference. As the process of universal compassion is taking hold of international politics, there is a need to base compassion on universal, secular, and humanitarian values, rather than specific religious experiences.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Amnesty International ▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Dalai Lama ▶ Me´decins Sans Frontie`res ▶ Oxfam ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Save the Children ▶ Zakat
References/Further Readings Abdul Gayoom, M. (2002). Islam: A religion of justice, tolerance and compassion. Paper Presented to the Conference, ‘‘This is Islam.’’ The Academy of Islamic Research of the Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt. Brooks, A. C. (2004). Compassion, religion, and politics, from http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_157/ai_n6237450/print?tag = artBody;col1 (visited: July 14, 2008) Dalai Lama (1997). Healing anger: The power of patience from a Buddhist perspective. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications. Figley, C. R. (Ed.) (1995). Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Gilbert, P. (2005). Compassion: Conceptualizations, research and use in psychotherapy. Hove, East Sussex: Routledge. Ho¨ijer, B. (2003). The discourse of global compassion and the media. Nordicom Review, 24(2), 19–29, Also from http://www.nordicom.gu. se/common/publ_pdf/32_019-030.pdf (visited July 12. 2008) Hudacek, S. S. (2008). Dimensions of caring: A qualitative analysis of nurses’ stories. Journal of Nursing Education, 47, 124–129. Hutnik, N. (2005). Toward holistic, compassionate, professional care: Using a cultural lense to examine the practice of contemporary psychotherapy in the west. Contemporary Family Therapy, 27, 383–402. Ignatieff, M. (1998). The warrior’s honor. Ethnic war and the modern conscience. New York: Henry Holt (cited by Hoijer, not dated). Neff, K. (2003a). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self & Identity, 2, 85–101. Neff, K. D. (2003b). The development and validation of a scale to measure Self-compassion. Self & Identity, 2, 223–250. Neff, K. D., Rude, S. S., & Kirkpatrick, K. L. (2007). An examination of self-compassion in relation to positive psychological functioning and personality traits. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 908–916.
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Porter, E. (2006). Can politics practice compassion? Hypatia, 21, 97–123. Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person. Boston, MA: HoughtonMifflin. Ruiz, P. O., & Mi’nguez, R. N. (2001). Global inequality and the need for compassion: issues in moral and political education. Journal of Moral Education, 30, 155–172. Schantz, M. L. (2007). Compassion: A concept analysis. Nursing Forum, 42, 48–55. Smith, C. (2004). Old wine in new barrels. Index of Censorship, 1, 60–65. Sznaider, N. (1998). The sociology of compassion: A study in the sociology of morals. Cultural Values, 2, 117–139. VandenBos, G. R. (2007). APA dictionary of psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Comte, Auguste STEVE VAN ECK
Basic Biographical Information Auguste Comte was born Isidore Marie Auguste Franc¸ois Xavier Comte to a Catholic family in Montpellier, France, on the 17th of January in 1798. He is famous for contributing the notion of positivism, among other theories, and coining the term ‘‘sociologie,’’ prior to his death on the 5th of September in 1857. As a boy, Comte attended the Lyce´e Joffre academy before pursuing academic studies at the University of Montpellier and the Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris. In 1816, while at the engineering and sciences academy, the Ecole Polytechnique, Auguste Comte led a protest of students against the manners of one of the tutors and was expelled. Upon his expulsion, Comte found himself befriending some of the leading intellectuals of France – the ideologues – as they were then called, including Marie Antoine Condorcet, whom Comte would later call ‘‘my immediate predecessor.’’ In that period he steeped himself in the works of Adam Smith, Jean-Baptise-Say, and David Hume, and began working on a model of a future society, inspired by his time at the Ecole Polytechnique, where a new elite of scientists and engineers governed the masses. He met Comte de Saint-Simon, and became his secretary and student. Comte de Saint-Simon brought Comte into the intellectual limelight of early nineteenth century France, in which Comte developed his theories of positivism. In those arguments he was among the first to introduce the term ‘‘sociologie’’ and ‘‘altruism.’’ He introduced the term ‘‘altruism’’ in these arguments to describe a definitive formula of human morality in which people have a moral obligation to their instincts of benevolence.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Comte sought in his philosophy to outline a science of human behavior, what Saint-Simon called a ‘‘social physiology.’’ Comte termed this science ‘‘sociologie’’ and insisted that like other sciences, it have its own methods. He also argued the development of these scientific methods for understanding social behavior would develop as other scientific methods had, that the methods of sociology would develop in alignment with the progress of the human mind, a notion that Comte shares with Condorcet. Between 1830 and 1842 he developed and published his six volume ‘‘Course of Positive Philosophy,’’ which expands on the development of new scientific methods for sociology, and introduced the Law of Three Stages, which includes the notion of Positivism, his most outstanding contribution to the field of civil society. The argument of the law of three stages holds that each science proceeds through three successive stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific (or, positive). Comte instructed that progression from one stage to the next is both inevitable and irreversible; yet perfect positive knowledge is never achieved. In his work, Comte longed for a period when civilized nations would realize their development towards a society on a scientific understanding of human’s innate altruistic nature, and a society where altruistic systems prevailed over egotistical and materialist ones.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Hume, David ▶ Civil Society Theory: Smith ▶ Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy
References/Further Readings Marvin, F. S. (1965). Comte, the founder of sociology. New York: Russell & Russell. Wilson, M. V. (1924). The social-political philosophy of Auguste Comte.
Consumers International FLORIAN REHLI
Address of Organization 24 Highbury Crescent London N5 1RX UK www.consumersinternational.org
Contracts and Contract Regimes
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funding, such as for example funding through the European Union Commission. CI’s annual turnover is approximately US$5,500,000.
Consumers International (CI) is the world federation of consumer groups. This international nongovernmental organization (INGO) has more than 220 member organizations in some 115 countries.
Accomplishments
Brief History
In 1985, the United Nations’ General Assembly adopted the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection, following a long advocacy campaign by Consumers International.
The organization was founded in 1960 as the International Organization of Consumers Unions (IOCU) by national consumer organizations in order to globalize and strengthen the defense of consumer rights. It shortened its name to Consumers International in 1995. In 2006, CI went through a fundamental internal reform process and has reviewed its organizational design and strategy.
Mission CI is a powerful international movement to protect and empower consumers worldwide, fighting for the satisfaction of basic consumer rights. In particular, CI strives to generate access to safe and sustainable goods and services for customers worldwide.
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Federations, Nonprofit ▶ IANGO ▶ INGOs
References/Further Readings CI. (2007). Summarised financial statements and annual report 31 December 2006. London: Consumers International, from http:// www.consumersinternational.org/shared_asp_files/GFSR.asp?NodeID= 97163, 5/12/2008. Hilton, M. (2008). Prosperity for all. Consumer activism in an era of globalization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sim, F. G. (1991). IOCU on record: A documentary history of the international organisation of consumers unions, 1960–1990. New York: Consumers Union.
Activities To pursue its mission, CI is campaigning for the rights of consumers across the world. On the national level, CI works with national member organizations to influence governments and to raise grass roots support. Internationally, CI cooperates with global institutions such as the World Health Organization and acts as a global watchdog on the behavior of international corporations. Through publications and press work, CI tries to raise awareness about purchasing choices of consumers. To these ends, CI also organizes the World Consumer Rights Day and assigns, since 2007, the so called Bad Company Award.
Structure and Governance CI globalized its structures relatively early and maintains regional offices in Santiago de Chile, Kuala Lumpur, Harare, and London at present. CI is governed by a Council of 20 representatives of full member organizations elected from the organization’s membership. The Council appoints an eight member Executive to which some responsibilities are delegated. The staff is lead by a Director General. CI is a founding signatory to the International Organizations’ Accountability Charter.
Funding A large part of CI’s income is generated by membership fees. The rest is financed through public and private
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Contracts and Contract Regimes STEVEN RATHGEB SMITH University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Introduction Government contracting with private nonprofit service agencies has emerged as a central government strategy to address urgent social problems in many countries. Indeed, government’s primary response to a wide variety of social problems including emergency relief, AIDS, community living for the developmentally disabled and chronic mentally ill, job training for the disadvantaged, and foster care, has relied heavily upon government contracting. This reliance on contracting has in turn profoundly affected government policy, the governance of nonprofit agencies receiving contracts, and the relationship of citizens to government and nonprofit agencies. Over time, contracting also affects the politics of social and health services and encourages government to restructure its relationship to contract agencies and their clients. This chapter examines the growth of government contracting with nonprofit agencies with a particular focus on
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the impact on agencies, clients, and the politics of human services. The basic argument of this article is that contracting over time changes the internal management and the political behavior of human service agencies. In recent years, contracting has also promoted greater competition in human services, leading to further organizational changes and responses as nonprofit agencies strive to compete for clients and contract dollars in an increasingly crowded field of organizations providing services.
Definition Contracting with nonprofit organizations has unique characteristics that distinguish it from other types of contracting (such as contracting for garbage collection or water). First, many nonprofit agencies provide complex services – such as residential care for the chronic mentally ill or foster care – with uncertain, contested outcomes. Second, many nonprofit programs such as home care, counseling, hospice care, and workforce development are very labor intensive; thus it can be difficult to achieve productivity gains and/or significantly reduce costs over time. Third, the clients of nonprofit agencies may be unable or unwilling to exercise their own voice to register complaints with services, although increasingly client input and feedback is sought. Fourth, many nonprofit agencies with government contracts, especially newer community-based agencies are undercapitalized, particularly compared to for-profit firms. Undercapitalization, in turn, can create serious problems for agency cash flow, infrastructure development, political influence, and longterm sustainability. Fifth, government contracting with nonprofit agencies often exists in a market environment where little genuine competition exists. A major reason is that many communities simply lack a sufficient number of service organizations to create effective competition. However, many nonprofit service agencies are quite specialized, so even in regions with many agencies, significant competition may not exist. These characteristics of contracting with nonprofit service agencies create complicated principal-agent problems which affect the relationship between government and nonprofit agencies. In this framework, which originated in economics, a principal (e.g., government) employs an agent (e.g., a nonprofit agencies) to deliver a service (see Alchian & Demsetz, 1972; Pratt & Zeckhauser, 1985; Donahue, 1989; Van Slyke, 2007). This principalagent perspective usefully calls attention to the problem of ‘‘information asymmetry’’ in a contracting relationship. Government as the principal has an incentive to monitor the performance of their agents – nonprofit agencies. However, monitoring is difficult because agencies have
an incentive to portray their organizations positively to government. The resolution of this information asymmetry can be quite costly, especially since the program outcomes are often uncertain, long-term, and contested. The principal-agent framework suggests an approach to the understanding of contracting with nonprofit agencies that is based upon a hierarchical model whereupon a powerful principal employs an agent to achieve specific purposes. This situation in turn creates potential goal conflicts between the principal and the agent on questions on programmatic, financial, and informational issues. The vision of a hierarchical model was at least in part at the root of the initial resistance of many nonprofit agencies to government contracts in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s (see Coughlin, 1965; Perlmutter, 1969). Many agencies especially sectarian agencies were concerned that government contracts would compromise their autonomy and independence, especially since many agencies regarded their mission as distinctly private and quite separate from government. A related concern was voiced that government accountability demands and accompanying regulations would be onerous and unreasonable, thus diverting resources and staff and volunteer resources from providing quality programs (Hartogs & Weber, 1978). Also, some scholars and agency staff worried that government contracts would lead to professionalism and higher costs, undermining the voluntaristic component of nonprofit social and health agencies (Hartogs & Weber, 1978; Meyer, 1983; Glazer, 1988). One alternative to the hierarchical model was articulated by Kramer (1982, 1987) who suggested that government and nonprofit service agencies were ‘‘mutually dependent’’ upon each other: government needed the agencies to provide services and the nonprofit agencies relied upon government contracts for the resources to provide services. The basic conclusion was the government faced constraints on its ability to impose inappropriate regulations or requirements on nonprofit agencies. And the agencies for their part needed government funding so they faced incentives to cooperate with government and not subvert government priorities or intentions. Overall, Kramer suggested that concerns about agency autonomy were overblown, especially since monitoring and regulation was often weak and lax (also, Salamon, 1987; Hartogs & Weber, 1978; Perlmutter, 1969). Lester M. Salamon’s partnership model of government–nonprofit relations is consistent with this approach articulated by Kramer (Salmon, 1987). In practice, though, the actual effects of government contracting with private nonprofit agencies are more complex. Fundamentally, government and nonprofit agencies
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have important differences in organizational norms. James Q. Wilson (1967) observed that organizations are guided by five critical imperatives: equity, efficiency, responsiveness, fiscal integrity, and accountability. But nonprofit agencies and government weigh these criteria differently. Nonprofit agencies are typically created by ‘‘communities’’ of people interested in a particular problem or cause such as community development, homelessness, or juvenile delinquency. Thus, the volunteers and staff of the nonprofit view the first priority as being responsive to this community (Smith & Lipsky, 1993). A community mental health center may regard its primary responsibility as serving people with mental health problems in a defined geographic area. Or a halfway house for youth may regard its primary constituency as at-risk youth who have not been involved in serious criminal activity. The primacy placed on responsiveness can lead to conflict with government because government places greater emphasis on equity as a guiding norm. Government officials face the challenge of justifying their allocation decisions given that the demand for government funding and services inevitably exceeds demand. Consequently, government officials are pressured to develop equitable and fair standards to guide their allocation decisions. These standards are especially evident in social and health services where government has increasingly strict standards of eligibility. For instance, government funded welfare-to-work programs require that the contract agency only serve clients who are eligible under the new TANF guidelines. Medicaid-funded programs for the mentally ill have very strict eligibility requirements on who is eligible to be served as well as very specific expectations on reimbursable services. The differences in guiding norms between government and nonprofit organizations create two vexing dilemmas for the contracting relationship. First, nonprofits tend to be more accepting of client difficulties and situations. And, they are more likely to be interested in serving a client rather than evaluating the specific effectiveness of the service. By contrast, government cannot be so accepting and increasingly is focused on outcomes and extensive eligibility documentation. Second, nonprofits – due to their emphasis on responsiveness to a specific community of interest – may reject clients who are regarded as incompatible with their mission. For example, faith-based nonprofits might reject individuals who do not embrace their particular faith. Or nonprofits might reject clients with chronic mental illness because the nonprofits regard its mission as serving people with less serious mental disorders. In both types of dilemmas, government and nonprofits may clash over the appropriate boundary between government and
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nonprofit responsibility, especially if government is providing most of the funding for the nonprofit program. Over time, the government-nonprofit contracting relationship can be regarded as a ‘‘contracting regime’’ whereupon government and nonprofit agencies develop a common set of assumption to guide their relationships. The regime concept – which was originally applied in the field of international relations – suggests that two parties are mutually dependent upon each other so that each party cannot easily exit the relationship. However, an equally important aspect of regimes is that one party is typically much more powerful than the other. In the case of contracting regimes, government tends to be the more powerful partner and is in a position to dictate programmatic and financial expectations even in the face of opposition from their contract agencies (Smith & Lipsky, 1993; Considine, 2003; Considine & Lewis, 2003). For example, government child welfare department and several nonprofit child welfare agencies may develop specific norms about acceptable practice, referral policies, and reimbursement rates. These norms then guide the behavior and strategic management of the government departments and the nonprofit service providers. In this relationship, government is able to drive the evolution of these norms given their resources and political influence and the relative absence of alternative funding sources for nonprofit services. Contracting regimes also tend to operate based upon trust among the two parties, despite this power imbalance. Contracts are often relational and long-term even in instances where competitive bidding is required (Smith & Smyth, 1996). This ‘‘relational contracting’’ does not preclude differences of opinion or outright conflict but it does underscore the stability of many contracting arrangements and the importance of cooperation among the two parties (Deakin & Michie, 1997; Ring & Van de Ven, 1992; Van Slyke, 2007). But this cooperation occurs within a framework established by the more powerful partner. For instance, nonprofit organizations may cooperate with government on a contract for community care for the chronic mentally ill; but the standards of care, financial regulations, and outcome measures are still set largely by government. Put another way, a nonprofit agency, by its decision to contract, indicates a willingness to cooperate with government on the implementation of a government program. Consequently, relational contracting does not capture the substantive character of typical contracting relationships since relational implies equity in decision making and power which tends to be atypical in contracting between government and nonprofits.
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Key Issues Government contracting has profound effects on the management of nonprofit agencies, especially by shifting the agency to a more professionalized, corporate style management. This model has several key features: larger, more professionalized boards of directors; a risk management approach to financial and programmatic decisions; an emphasis on a lean management infrastructure; and a flexible workforce. To an extent, this corporate management style reflects the growth of many nonprofit organizations from small community based organizations to large multiservice agencies; the resultant programmatic complexity, regardless of the revenue source, drives a change in management style and approach. However, government contracting policies in many countries including performance based contracting have promoted this shift. From the perspective of nonprofit agency, contracting occurs in a very uncertain environment that is fraught with frequent delays in payments, cash flow challenges, low payment rates, and an increasingly competitive funding environment. Not surprisingly, agencies respond with changes in their approach to organizational management in order to sustain their agencies in this turbulent environment. The extent of this shift varies depending upon the contracting regime and the characteristics of the nonprofit organization. Smaller agencies with a singular focus may choose to remain less corporate in their approach. Other agencies may want to professionalize their boards but lack to connections and resources to attract a different mix of board members. This more corporate style of management is also evident in changes in the staff composition in many nonprofit contract agencies. In the USA, the hallmark of nonprofit service agencies for many years was full-time employment, often with substantial benefits. This staff pattern was especially characteristic of the larger agencies and was supported by the initial wave of contract funding. But over time, agencies adapted their employment patterns as an adaptation to the more competitive contracting environment by relying to a greater extent on part-time employees or contract employees who work on an ‘‘as needed’’ basis. Typically these workers do not have the same salary and benefit package as full-time employees. This shift to a more professionalized management style may have potentially very important implications for clients. As noted, nonprofit organizations emerge to serve a particular community such as a geographic area or a group of individuals with similar concerns or problems (such as the developmentally disabled). This focus tends to encourage nonprofit agencies to be responsive to the
presenting problems of these individuals even if means serving these individuals at substantial expense. Government contracting makes it much more difficult to sustain this focus on responsiveness to client interests due to government regulations and reimbursement policies. For example, many government contracts are structured as performance contracts so an agency will only get paid when they meet certain performance targets. Further, they will only get paid a specific amount regardless of the amount of resources employed by the agency. Performance contracting in competitive environments may also offer incentives to ‘‘cream’’ the clients who have the greatest possibility of successful outcomes. For example, performance based job training contracts may encourage nonprofit service providers to work with clients who can succeed, especially since an agency will not be reimbursed unless clients are successful. In a competitive contract culture, agencies want a positive reputation in order to obtain new contracts or retain existing contracts. This incentive can promote the creaming of clients, even if it is counter to the overall objectives of the contract (see Considine, 2003). The government-nonprofit agency relationship may be different if the contract is short-term. In particular, some government contracts to nonprofit social welfare agencies are awards for program innovation with no expectation of a continuing contract. However, even in these circumstances, government increasingly requires extensive documentation of program services and finances. Also, the competition for contract funds means that even if a contract is short-term, the agency may hope to replace a contract with another contract. Nonprofit organizations may try to overcome some of the limitations imposed by government contracts by using private funds to cross-subsidize the cost of service (Smith & Lipsky, 1993; Gronbjerg, 1993). Or workers may essentially volunteer their own time to help particular clients in ways that go beyond the expectations of the government contracts. Yet, the more recent shift in government contracting in many countries including the increased importance of performance contracting, restricts the management discretion of agencies. Low vendor rates and greater competition push agencies to be more bottom-line oriented and reduce the ‘‘slack’’ in agency operations. Thus, nonprofit staff are likely to interact with clients differently and focus even more directly on the specific expectations of the government funder and less likely or capable of providing services tailored to individual needs and concerns; the service, in other words, becomes more standardized. Somewhat unexpectedly though, this change in management due to contracting may encourage more
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community connections by nonprofit agencies. Many nonprofit agencies, especially organizations founded in the last 20 years, were started by individuals who were very passionate about addressing a specific problem such as substance abuse, low-income housing, or mental health. The boards of these agencies tended to be small and government contracts tended to make these boards passive in terms of their governance responsibilities since many board members were not familiar with the intricacies of government contracts and joined the board for their passion for the agency’s programs rather than their funding expertise and connections. Further, since funding was initially adequate to support operations, agency boards had little incentive to seek broad-based community support. But the new pressure to be efficient and compete encourages nonprofit service organizations to restructure their board and their community relations in order to improve their competitive position for government contracts, and raise private donative or earned income to supplement their contracts since contracts frequently do not cover the full cost of service. Thus, government expectations for effective practice directly affect nonprofit management. Government contract administrators place great priority on principles of sound management: good financial management (including annual audits); attention to outcome evaluation including the use of current program evaluation models such as logic models; up-to-date tracking of clients and services; and a good reputation in the local community. In order to meet government expectations on these important priorities, human service agencies need to invest in expertise in financial management, program evaluation, and information technology. This investment in capacity and infrastructure in turns tends to promote greater professionalization of the agency. Overall, then, the impact of contracting is consistent with the predictions of institutional theorists including Powell and DiMaggio (1991) who suggested that organizations in a particular field (such as child welfare) are subject to powerful isomorphic tendencies that push organizations to become more similar. Nonprofit agencies in the same field may adopt similar internal practices in order to compete effectively for government contracts. Indeed, they are in many cases required by the stipulations of the contract to abide by specific financial and programmatic regulations (Considine, 2003). Isomorphic tendencies fit with contracting regimes whereupon government and nonprofit agencies develop norms and practices that guide their behavior. Shared professional standards are often part of this contracting regime. However, organizations with certain cultures or histories may
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resist these isomorphic tendencies, especially if government contracts are relatively small part of their overall revenue or if they provide low-intensity or low priority services where government regulations are less intrusive and extensive. Another trend affecting nonprofit organizational development is a form of ‘‘co-production’’ whereupon two or more nonprofit service providers agree to jointly provide a service (usually a social or health service) with public contract funds. For example, government might award a contract to a community nonprofit agency to help at-risk youth. But the nonprofit would jointly produce this program through a collaboration with the local school district to provide the program on school property after regular school hours. Many new low-income housing projects are joint efforts of a nonprofit housing developer and a social service agency which provides supportive services to the poor, disabled, and/or elderly clients who reside in the housing projects. This type of co-production reflects the keen interest of public and private funders in collaboration and services integration, especially given the growth of nonprofit service agencies in many countries. Co-production can realize important efficiencies but it complicates governance and accountability. It is also difficult to successfully achieve if the various parties to the collaboration do not have a high level of trust. Prior to extensive contracting, nonprofit agencies tended to focus on their own private set of concerns that were regarded as quite separate from government. Government regulation of nonprofit agencies tended to be quite minimal with few regulatory standards even in highly sensitive services such as child protective services. With scant government regulations and funding, nonprofit service providers possessed little incentive to actively lobby government (especially since government was unlikely to respond with any substantial changes in policy). Contracting though profoundly changed the incentives faced by nonprofit agencies regarding political activity and their interest in influencing government policy. The availability of contract dollars meant that nonprofit organizations could obtain funds for their programs. And, nonprofit agencies receiving government contracts are directly affected by government policy regarding contract rates, regulations, and programmatic standards, referral policies, and the overall government budgetary climate. Nonetheless, nonprofit agencies can face significant obstacles to political activity. Many nonprofit agencies are quite small and lack the staff resources to actively participate in the political process. The boards of directors of nonprofit
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service organizations tend to be attracted to board service due to their commitment to the agency’s mission and services such as child welfare or homelessness; consequently, most board members possess little experience with government policy. The board and staff of the agency may be concerned that political activity might jeopardize their relationship with government and affect their existing or future contracts (Berry, 2003; Bass et al., 2007). Indeed, government has many sometimes subtle ways to alter contract terms and expectations even if the full amount of the contract remains in force. For instance, government may slow the level of referrals, creating financial and programmatic problems for the agency. Or government can refuse or ignore requests for more funding. Government can award new contracts to other agencies. And government can order an audit of an agency’s books, requiring extensive agency staff time and resources (Smith & Lipsky, 1993; Berry, 2003; Bass et al., 2007). In short, nonprofit agencies face sometimes contradictory pressures regarding political activity (Chaves et al., 2004). Agencies may cope with these pressures by increasing their political activity in some areas especially collective activity, while remaining very cautious or selective in their individual agency activity. Regarding collective activity, nonprofit organizations may band together to create coalitions and associations of service providers to lobby government and advocate for key agency priorities. These coalitions can be formally incorporated tax-exempt organizations with paid staff or more loosely organized associations with no formal legal status. In general, these coalitions and associations focus on the funding and regulatory of interest to their members. Associations might lobby the legislature or advocate before government contract administrators for more funding or favorable regulations. Association staff or board members might undertake their lobbying directly or rely upon their member agencies to contact government officials.
Future Directions Government contracting with human service agencies is in the midst of an important transition phase that is likely to continue, although local forces and circumstances will certainly affect the character and pace of this transition. First, human service agencies will continue to grapple with the twin pressures for more collaboration with other agencies while at the same time coping with a more competitive contracting environment. Collaboration will be encouraged by pressure to reduce costs, the need to be more influential politically, and the continuing demands by public and private funders for agencies to share costs and programmatic expertise in service of the clients.
This pressure for collaboration is complicated by the increasingly competitive environment for government contracts, reflecting the intense interest of government in accountability, efficiency, and results. Greater competition does not necessarily mean that dramatic changes will occur in local human service delivery. Many agencies will retain their contracts and even grow due to increased demand and funding. Government will continue to face political obstacles to contract termination or drastic restructuring of contracts. But the more competitive environment can affect nonprofit service agencies quite profoundly even if contracts are retained: The number of clients can be reduced; rates can fail to increase significantly because government has many available providers; client referrals from government can change abruptly; and new programmatic demands may be placed upon the agency. The worldwide financial crisis has already put pressure on funding levels for government contracts. Given these trends, the challenge for nonprofit agencies is to adapt their management and organizational structure to emphasize flexibility, nimbleness, and efficiency while retaining a commitment to their mission. Agencies will have to be innovative in their organizational structure and willing to invest resources in complying with government regulations and outcome expectations. More broadly, agencies will need to think about new ways to engage citizens and service users in agency governance. In sum, government contracting with nonprofit agencies is an increasingly important strategy to provide publicly supported services to the citizenry. As such, contracting transforms nonprofit service agencies from a relatively narrow niche within social and health policy to the front-lines of policy implementation. Nonprofit social welfare and health agencies are now central to social citizenship since these agencies are the effective gatekeepers for the access of the citizenry to an array of social service benefits – from home care to community living to job training and child care. Access to these benefits in this era of contracts and competition requires sustained public investment in adequate funding for nonprofit agencies and ongoing government monitoring, technical assistance and support. Without this investment, nonprofit agencies receiving government contracts will be unable to provide effective and quality services to citizens in need.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Effectiveness and Efficiency
Cooperatives and Employee Ownership
▶ Faith-Based Organizations ▶ Government-Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Nonprofit Management ▶ Organizational Forms and Development ▶ Performance and Impact ▶ Results and Performance ▶ Third-Party Government ▶ Work and Employment in the Nonprofit Sector
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Smith, S. R., & Lipsky, M. (1993). Nonprofits for hire: The welfare state in the age of contracting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, S. R., & Smyth, J. (1996). Contracting for services in a decentralized system. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 6, 277–296. Van Slyke, D. M. (2007). Agents or stewards: Using theory to understand the government-nonprofit contracting relationship. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 17(2) (April), 157–188. Wilson, J. Q. (1967). The Bureaucracy Problem. The Public Interest, 6, pp. 3–9.
References/Further Readings Alchian, A. A., & Demsetz, H. (1972). Production, information costs, and economic organization. American Economic Review, 62(5) (December), 777–795. Bass, G. D., Arons, D. F., Guinane, K., & Carter, M. F. (2007). Seen but not heard: Strengthening nonprofit advocacy. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute. Berry, J. M. (2003). A voice for nonprofits. Washington, DC: Brookings. Chaves, M., Stephens, L., & Galaskiewicz, J. (2004). Does government funding suppress nonprofit political activity? American Sociological Review, 69(2) (April), 292–316. Considine, M. (2003). Governance and competition: The role of nonprofit organisations in the delivery of public services. Australian Journal of Political Science, 38(1), 63–77. Considine, M., & Lewis, J. M. (2003). Bureaucracy, network, or enterprise? Comparing models of governance in Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Public Administration Review, 63(2) (March/April), 131–140. Coughlin, B. J. (1965). Church and state in social welfare. New York: Columbia University Press. Deakin, S., & Michie, J. (1997). Contracts and competition: An introduction. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 21, 121–125. Donahue, J. D. (1989). The privatization decision. New York: Basic Books. Glazer, N. (1988). The limits of social policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gronbjerg, K. (1993). Understanding nonprofit funding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Hartogs, N., & Weber, J. (1978). Impact of government funding on the management of voluntary agencies. New York: Greater New York Fund/United Way. Kramer, R. M. (1982). Voluntary agencies in the welfare state. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kramer, R. M. (1987). Voluntary agencies and the personal social services. In W. W. Powell (Ed.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (pp. 240–257). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Meyer, J. A. (Ed.) (1983). Meeting human needs: Toward a new public philosophy. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. Perlmutter, F. (1969). The effect of public funds on voluntary sectarian agencies. Journal of Jewish Communal Service, 45(4) (Summer), 312–321. Powell, W. W., & DiMaggio, P. J. (Eds.) (1991). The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pratt, J. W., & Zeckhauser, R. J. (Eds.) (1985). Principals and agents: The structure of business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Ring, P. S., & Van De Ven, A. H. (1992). Structuring cooperative relationships between organizations. Strategic Management Journal, 13(7) (October), 483–498. Salamon, L. M. (1987). Partners in public service: The scope and theory of government-nonprofit relations. The nonprofit sector: The research handbook. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. 99–117.
Cooperatives and Employee Ownership DEREK C. JONES1, PANU KALMI2 1 Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA 2 Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
Introduction The main focus of this article is to provide a brief introduction to economics research on cooperatives and employee-owned firms. We start by providing definitions and then review issues surrounding historical background and incidence. Concerning research, we note that the theoretical literature on employee-owned firms and particularly worker cooperatives have been well developed following the early contributions of Ward (1958) and Vanek (1970), although often theory was insufficiently informed by empirical regularities observed in actually existing worker cooperatives. For other types of cooperatives, there has not been a unifying theoretical framework, and most of these cooperatives have not received a treatment in the literature one would expect on the basis of their economic significance. However, much of this literature has been empirically and institutionally oriented. In the final section we discuss potential future directions for research and emphasize that the availability of new data sets may contain significant promise for research on cooperatives.
Definitions and Examples For our purposes the essential features of cooperatives are given by enterprises that have the following characteristics: (1) Ownership is not determined solely by investment in shares, but the owners have another transaction relationship with the enterprise (as employees, suppliers, or customers); (2) Voting rights are not divided in relation to capital but equally between members. As such this definition de-emphasizes other Rochdale principles including open membership, limited interest on capital,
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religious neutrality, cash trading and the promotion of education (Bonner, 1961). As already indicated a wide variety of firms can be listed under the cooperative umbrella, including agricultural, credit, and consumer cooperatives. One form that has proved to be of particular interest to many is the producer or worker cooperative. In such firms the position of the worker is crucial so that membership is restricted to worker-members in the business who effectively own and control the firm. One of the best known examples today of worker cooperatives are the Mondragon cooperatives (see http://www.mcc.es/ing/) though there are other prominent examples in Italy and France. Employee ownership also encompasses a wide variety of types, notably employee stock ownership plans, employee stock purchase plans and stock options. For some employee ownership is seen as part of ‘‘shared capitalism’’ – where employees participate in the rewards of the business, similar to other alternative methods of compensation including profit sharing and gain sharing (Kruse et al., 2008). In the vast majority of instances of employee ownership, and unlike in cooperatives, voting rights reflect ownership of capital which are not equal either amongst employees or between employee and non-employee owners. In firms with employee ownership, capital owners sometimes do introduce arrangements that enable employees to have enhanced involvement in decision making. While this often happens, it is also rarely to such a degree that firms with employee ownership and worker cooperatives are aligned in this respect. Instances in which this has happened, such as the Eroski retail chain in Spain or in some British consumer cooperatives where employee directors are present (Jones, 1987) are the exception rather than the rule.
Historical Background and International Perspectives The first cooperatives appear to have been established in the eighteenth century. Early utopian writers, notably Owen, who saw cooperative communities as alternatives to competitive and individualistic capitalism, were a major stimulus to the establishment of these first cooperatives. Equally, practical necessities, such as the need to obtain unadulterated foods, played major roles in the formation of early coops such as the flour mills at Woolwich in the 1760s and the famous Rochdale store in 1844. Subsequently while the development of the coop movement continued to be inspired by the writings and actions of individuals such as Fourier, Blanc, and Buchez, pragmatic considerations have always played prominent roles in the evolution of cooperatives.
Diverse forms of cooperatives exist. Hansmann (1996) and Birchall (1997) amongst others provide good descriptions of cooperatives around the globe. Empirically, the most important forms of primary cooperatives, both in the US and elsewhere, appear to be cooperatives in the agricultural sector (mainly in food production), in banking and finance (in the form of credit unions and cooperative banks), in insurance (either mutual or cooperative form), and in retailing, where cooperatives are either retailer- or consumer-owned (the latter is fairly uncommon in the United States but is very popular in some European countries). Cooperatives are economically significant actors all around the globe, and the combined membership in cooperatives, according to the International Cooperative Alliance, is more than 800 million people (see www.ica.coop). Moreover some cooperative forms, including cooperative banks, have been found to be of growing importance in their sectors (Fonteyne, 2007). However, the importance of cooperatives does not derive solely from their economic significance, but also because of their democratic governance and their perceived ability to address market failures (see, e.g., Kalmi, 2007). In part reflecting their social objectives, associations of cooperatives are a prominent feature of the cooperative landscape. Compared to cooperatives, interest in and examples of employee ownership are much more recent phenomena. The oldest forms of employee ownership are stock purchase and stock option plans and have existed only for about 100 years. But even 50 years or so ago such schemes were often quite extensive – for example, they are believed to have covered at least one million employees in several countries including Germany and the United States. However interest in those schemes has often been limited since stock tended to be owned by highly compensated employees. By contrast the growth of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) has stimulated a reawakening of interest in employee ownership. By the mid 1980s it was estimated that the number of plans existing in the United States was approaching 10,000 and that 10 million employees were covered (Rosen et al., 1986.). Also employee ownership has grown rapidly elsewhere. Thus in Japan, in little more than a decade ESOPs (mochikabukai) grew to cover more than 90% of top listed companies (Jones & Kato, 1995). And in Europe the Pepper reports (e.g., Lowitzsch, 2006) document the rapid dissemination of diverse forms of employee ownership especially in the last 20 years. The reasons for the recent growth of employee ownership appear to be quite different from those forces behind the fluctuating fortunes of cooperatives. For many years it is believed that most actors were not
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enthusiastic about employee ownership – for example, employees stressed problems flowing from income variability in firms in which they had an ownership stake. The attitude of governments around the world mirrored this lack of enthusiasm and few promoted ownership by employees. However in recent years this stance has changed and various fiscal incentives for companies and individuals often exist as governments seek to encourage productivity growth, stimulate capital formation, anchor jobs and ameliorate income differences. This has led to a parallel growth in institutions dedicated to promoting the spread of employee ownership, such as the National Centre for Employee Ownership in the United States or the European Federation of Employee Share Ownership. Also the collapse of the command economies and the move away from state ownership led to many ‘‘privatization surprises’’ (Uvalic & Vaughan-Whitehead, 1997) and the emergence of considerable employee ownership. However, in the main, employee ownership has not proved to be stable during economic transition (see, e.g., Jones & Mygind, 1999).
Key Issues While cooperatives and firms with employee ownership are often quite different animals, research by economists on these organizations often concentrates on similar issues. This is especially the case for the overlap between worker cooperatives and firms with employee ownership and in this section we first discuss the economics literature on worker cooperatives and employee ownership. Second, we discuss literature on other types of cooperatives. Much of this literature has been theoretically focused, and empirical literature has followed with a considerable lag. However, this has not been the case in the study of cooperatives within development economics. In that field, empirical observations have motivated theoretical models, but a unifying theoretical framework has been lacking. Issues Concerning Employee-Owned Enterprises and Worker Cooperatives
Much of the economics literature on employee-owned enterprises and worker cooperatives has followed the pioneering work of Ward (1958) and Vanek (1970). In this literature, worker cooperatives (or employee-owned firms more generally) are positioned within a standard microeconomic (comparative static) framework, where it is argued they maximize income per member. Much of the subsequent theoretical literature either has extended directly from these assumptions or has examined the consequences of deviations from these standard
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assumptions. Most empirical literature has tested predictions arising from that theoretical framework and Bonin et al. (1993) and Dow (2003) provide useful surveys of that literature. One set of issues concerns the comparative scarcity of worker cooperatives or firms with employee ownership. Why, apparently, are such firms rare (compared to conventional investor-owned firms)? In turn this leads to examination of issues relating to formation, survival, and life cycle. One might also classify the many studies that examine issues of the incidence of cooperatives and firms with employee ownership under this broad heading. In investigating such matters, work on both producer cooperatives and firms with employee ownership has tended to have a mainly micro focus and to proceed by examining a set of such firms within one country. See for example studies of the entry and exit of French worker coops (Perotin, 2006) or the investigation by Blair et al. (2000) of the stability of employee-owned firms. This is also the case for studies of firm survival. Such studies tend to refute the prediction that firms with employee ownership, including producer coops, will have lower survival rates (e.g., Perotin, 2006). At the same time, beginning with the work of the Webbs and continuing with formal economic modeling by, amongst others, Ben-Ner (1984) researchers have analyzed the tendency of particular types of cooperatives (notably producer cooperatives) to transform themselves into organizations within which control rights are vested in a small number of worker-members. There is also a growing literature that investigates the determinants of the incidence of firms with some degree of employee ownership. For representative studies see, for example Poutsma et al. (2005) for listed firms in European countries. A second area of inquiry revolves around issues of employment and output. For worker cooperatives a vast body of theoretical work was triggered by a seminal paper by Ward (1958) in which a worker cooperative was believed to maximize per capita income of worker-members rather than total profits, as in a capitalist firm. A key finding emerging from this early model is that, relative to a capitalist twin, the producer cooperative will tend to have smaller employment, a negatively sloped supply curve and that labor will be inefficiently allocated within an economy of producer cooperatives. Most subsequent theoretical work overturned the pessimistic conclusions that resulted from this simple Ward model and little or no empirical support was found for these key propositions. Indeed the better empirical inquires, including Craig and Pencavel (1992) find that producer cooperatives have more stable employment. No evidence has been found
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either of short run inefficiencies or of perverse supply curves. And work for firms with employee ownership also finds evidence of more stable employment (e.g., Blair et al., 2000). A third area of investigation is investment and finance. The way in which capital requirements are financed and the resulting structure of ownership of the firm’s assets are matters that have attracted the interest of many researchers, especially students of cooperatives. In cooperatives the issues are particularly interesting since assets may be owned by members individually or collectively as well as by non-member financiers. The non-transferability of ownership rights in many cooperatives has led some theorists to argue that some cooperatives, notably worker cooperatives, will face persistent underinvestment. However empirical support for such predictions is weak (e.g., Jones & Backus, 1977), a finding that many find unsurprising since many real world cooperatives have implemented specific institutional design to ameliorate potential problems that pure theorists have identified. A fourth and final area is the matter of the role of incentives and performance in firms that are cooperatives or within which there is some degree of employee ownership. One issue of especial interest to theorists is whether employee ownership and/or co-operation will lead to employees supplying efficient effort. For example, will democratic firms suffer from shirking by employees? For both types of organization a vast empirical literature has emerged to examine not only the links between employee ownership and firm performance but also the roles of employee involvement in decision making. To date the bulk of the evidence rejects the hypothesis that employees in firms with employee ownership supply lower levels of effort. Following Jones and Backus (1977) a commonly favored approach to test this and similar hypotheses has been to augment a standard production function by a vector of ownership and participation variables. The key result is that the null hypothesis that the various forms of participation taken together do not affect productivity is rejected. Other Types of Cooperatives
Among the various types of cooperatives, worker cooperatives have received most of the attention in the economics literature, disproportionately so compared to the size of this sector. However, this was the case already in the economics literature of cooperatives in the early twentieth century (Kalmi, 2007). Financial cooperatives have been studied to some degree and there are attempts to model their specific characteristics such as whether members may have diverging preferences depending on whether
they are net savers or net borrowers. Also the composition of the membership is likely to influence the setting of interest rates, as demonstrated in theoretical models by (e.g., Smith et al. (1981). More recently, Emmons and Schmid (2002) have extended this framework into a situation where cooperative banks can also distribute dividends. However, very little empirical work has been undertaken to date in this field. There is also a large empirical literature that uses data from cooperative banks, with much of this literature testing more general propositions using samples of cooperative banks. Fonteyne (2007) is an excellent guide to much of the literature. Studies of interest that focus on issues of more specific cooperative issues include Angelini et al. (1998), who find that cooperative banks provide better access to credit for small firms, and Hesse and Cihak (2007), who find that cooperative banks are more stable than commercial banks. There is also literature analyzing the determinants of membership rates in financial cooperatives including Emmons and Schmid (1999) and Kalmi et al. (2008), the latter attempting to explore the role of various motivations (in particular monetary versus social) in the membership decision. There is a surprising dearth of research concerning consumer cooperatives, with. Ireland and Law (1983) constituting a notable exception. In contrast, research on farmer producer cooperatives has proven to be an enduring topic of interest in the field of agricultural economics in journals such as American Journal of Agricultural Economics (see, e.g., Sexton, 1986; Torgerson et al., 1998). Perhaps the most lively area within the field of cooperatives might is that of development economics. Much of this research is motivated by the rise of microfinance and other grass-roots economic initiatives. In recent years, the research on cooperatives that has found its way into major economics journals has often come from development economics (e.g., Banerjee et al. 1994; Pitt & Khandker, 1998.) Finally, there is literature that attempts to provide more general approaches to cooperatives. Hansmann (1996) presents an elaborate theory on optimal ownership structures, building especially upon the argument that different ownership structures have different implications on collective decision-making costs. Jones and Kalmi (2009) use the recent ICA Global 300 (see www.global300.coop) dataset on the largest cooperatives in the world and find that cooperative incidence is very strongly and positively related to the level of interpersonal trust in a society. They determine that trust is a much more robust predictor of cooperatives than is the case in large listed firms, although there is some evidence that the presence of large listed firms is also higher in the presence of higher trust.
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Future Directions Commenting on the literature on worker cooperatives up to the early 1990s, Bonin et al. (1993) noted that the literature had been theory-led and that empirical literature had lagged significantly behind. At the same time, it was apparent that theory building had often ignored many well-known stylized facts. Also, most of that early literature on labor-managed firms (worker coops) used a comparative static framework that appears somewhat dated by current standards (e.g., Vanek, 1970). By contrast some of the leading figures in contract theory have developed models that are based on more modern approaches (e.g., Rey & Tirole, 2007). While such models are still in their infancy and have not been subject to empirical testing potentially large dividends will accompany better modeling that is grounded in stylized facts. Early empirical studies often contained results that contradicted the most basic propositions of the early theory. Reflecting the general rise in the of esteem of applied work in economics, in part because of improved access to data and the broader availability of more powerful statistical software, empirical research on cooperatives and firms with employee ownership has made great strides in the last 30 years or so. However, it is also clear that much remains to be done. Before many research questions can be addressed it is also clear that much more and better data are needed. And while much progress in assembling improved data sets continues to be made, it is also apparent that empirical research in particular will continue to suffer because of the demanding requirements imposed by the challenges posed by robust empirical design. These points can perhaps be best illustrated by considering work on questions at the macro level – for example, work which aims to understand the reasons for the varying importance of cooperatives or employee ownership across time and space as well as the impact of these phenomena on macro variables such as employment adjustment. In this respect most useful beginnings have been made by the ICA and its recent efforts to provide systematic data on the top 300 coops around the world. Equally the nature and quality of data on employee ownership has been much helped by the continuing efforts of those institutions that act to assist firms with employee ownership, such as the NCEO. One example of the potential that such macro data have to offer is the paper by Jones and Kalmi (2009) that was discussed earlier. Equally such work is necessarily still in its infancy since the available data are typically restricted in important ways, including the span of years or the less-than-comprehensive way in which the universe of coops or employee-owned firms is covered. In turn these deficiencies often reflect the historical ways that
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data have been collected by national authorities (such as census data), with a continuing failure to, for example, distinguish alternative organizational forms such as coops from conventional firms. It is also the case that better micro data is needed. Again the traditional ways that government agencies collect data is often quite limited – there is a tendency to give only cursory attention to what goes on inside the ‘‘black-box’’ that is the firm. Consequently there is little on-going and systematic data collection on phenomena such as the presence and extent of employee ownership. In this context it is unsurprising that many firm-level studies have suffered from several important shortcomings. For example, many studies operate with samples of convenience rather than samples that are representative of the underlying populations. Often the range of key variables that are able to be measured is limited – thus studies of firms with employee ownership may omit measures of other potentially important variables, such as the extent of employee involvement. And when key variables are measured sometimes this is done so in an oversimplified way – for example a dummy variable for a producer cooperative, which ignores differences among producer cooperatives in critical respects such as the extent of worker membership. However, we are also seeing research on cooperatives that uses empirical approaches and new data that are close to the frontier of current applied work. For example, Pencavel et al. (2006) creatively combines and matches organization-level with individual-level data, while Arando et al. (2009) undertake the first econometric case study of a Mondragon cooperative. Apart from these empirical issues, there are also theoretical issues that are underdeveloped in current economics research. One glaring example is the role of cooperative networks in the growth and survival cooperatives. All types of cooperatives are often organized into federations. Among the services these federations provide are collaboration in marketing, raising public awareness of cooperatives, often economic cross-insurance, training, liquidity management in the case of financial cooperatives, wholesale operations in the case of cooperative stores, and so on. Often these networks have a regional character (e.g., Mondragon cooperatives, Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia, Maharashtra cooperatives in India, Emilia-Romagna cooperatives in Italy). Despite the fact that the importance of such networks has been recognized in the cooperative literature from its early dawn, economists, in contrast to sociologists (e.g., Halary, 2006), have not paid much attention to it. Moves in that direction include Joshi and Smith (2008.) A second promising research field is the relationship between cooperatives and social capital. While much of the literature emphasizes how cooperatives can contribute
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to the building of social capital (e.g., Borgen, 2001), there is much less literature that looks into social capital as a prerequisite of meaningful cooperatives or as a motivator to participate in cooperatives (e.g., Jones & Kalmi, 2008; Heikkila¨ et al., 2008). This research can potentially give important insights into whether it is the narrower, ‘‘bonding’’ type of social capital that is associated with the rise and sustainability of cooperatives, or the more general, inter-group ‘‘bridging’’ social capital that matters. It is also possible that the determinants of local cooperative formation and successful operations of large cooperative networks require different types of social capital. The importance of social capital can also give indications for general development plans for cooperatives in developing countries; for instance, it suggests that centralized attempts to promote cooperative either by large donor aid infusions or government decrees may not be appropriate.
Cross-References
▶ CIRIEC ▶ Cooperatives, History and Theory of ▶ Credit Unions ▶ Fourier, Charles ▶ Gide, Charles ▶ International Cooperative Alliance ▶ Raiffeisen Banks ▶ Raiffeisen, Friedrich ▶ Schulze-Delitzsch, Franz Hermann
References/Further Readings Angelini, P., Di Salvo, R., & Ferri, G. (1998). Availability and cost of credit for small businesses: Customer relationships and credit cooperatives. Journal of Banking and Finance, 25(6–8), 925–954. Arando, S., Gago, M., Jones, D. C. and Kato, T. (2009). Productive Efficiency in the Mondragon Cooperatives: Evidence from an Econometric case Study. Mimeo, Hamilton College. Banerjee, A. V., Besley, T., & Guinnane, T. (1994). The neighbor’s keeper: The design of credit cooperatives with a theory and a test. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109(2), 491–515. Ben-Ner, A. (1984). On the stability of cooperative type of organization. Journal of Comparative Economics, 8(3), 247–260. Birchall, J. (1997). The international cooperative movement. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blair, M., Kruse, D., & Blasi, J. (2000). Employee ownership: An unstable form or a stabilizing force? In M. Blair & T. Kochan (Eds.), The new relationship: Human capital in the American corporation. Washington, DC: Brookings. Bonin, J. P., Jones, D. C., & Putterman, L. (1993). Theoretical and empirical studies of producer cooperatives: Will ever the Twain meet? Journal of Economic Literature, 31(3), 1290–1320. Bonner, A. (1961). British co-operation. Manchester: Cooperative Union. Borgen, S. O. (2001). Identification as a trust generating mechanism in cooperatives. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 72(2), 209–228.
Craig, B., & Pencavel, J. (1992). The behavior of worker cooperatives: The plywood companies of the Pacific North West. American Economic Review, 82(5), 1083–1105. Dow, G. K. (2003). Governing the firm: Workers control in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emmons, W. R., & Schmid, F. A. (1999). Credit unions and the common bond. Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, September/October, 41–64. Emmons, W. R., & Schmid, F. A. (2002). Pricing and dividend policies in open credit cooperatives. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 158(2), 234–255. Fonteyne, W. (2007). Cooperative banks in Europe: Policy issues, IMF Working Paper 159/07. Halary, I. (2006). Cooperatives in globalization: The advantages of networking. In P. Kalmi & M. Klinedinst (Eds.), Participation in the age of globalization and information (Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms, Vol. 9). Hansmann, H. (1996). The ownership of enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Hesse, H., & Cihak, M. (2007). Cooperative banks and financial stability. IMF Working Paper, WP/07/02. Heikkila¨, A., Kalmi, P., & Ruuskanen, O -P. (2008). Social capital and financial access: Evidence from Uganda, manuscript, Helsinki School of Economics. Ireland, N. J., & Law, P. J. (1983). A Cournot-Nash model of the consumer cooperative. Southern Economic Journal, 49(3), 706–716. Jones, D. C. (1987). The productivity effects of worker directors and worker financial participation in the firm: The case of British retail cooperatives. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 41(1), 79–92. Jones, D. C., & Backus, D. (1977). British producer cooperatives in the footwear industry: An empirical examination of the theory of financing. Economic Journal, 87, 488–510. Jones, D. C., & Kalmi, P. (2009). Trust, inequality and the size of cooperative sector: cross-country evidence. Working Paper 2008–02, Department of Economics, Hamilton College, from http://academics. hamilton.edu/economics/home/workpap/08_01.pdf Jones, D. C., & Kato, T. (1995). The productivity effects of bonuses and employee ownership: Evidence using Japanese panel data. The American Economic Review, 85(3), 391–414. Jones, D. C., & Mygind, N. (1999). The nature and determinants of ownership changes after privatization: Evidence from Estonia. Journal of Comparative Economics, 27, 422–441. Joshi, S., & Smith, S. C. (2008). Endogenous formation of coops and cooperative leagues. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 68(1), 217–233. Kalmi, P. (2007). The disappearance of cooperatives from economics textbooks. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 31(4), 625–647. Kalmi, P., Jones, D., & Jussila, I. (2008). What determines membership in cooperatives?: Evidence from Finnish banks on the role of ownership, manuscript, Helsinki School of Economics. Kruse, D., Blasi, J., & Park, R. (2008). Shared capitalism in the U.S. economy: Prevalence, characteristics, and employee views of financial participation in enterprises, NBER working paper # 14225. Lowitzsch, J. (2006). The pepper III Report: Promotion of Employee Participation in Profits and Enterprise Results in the New Member and Candidate Countries of the European Union, Rome/Berlin. Pencavel, J., Pistaferri, L., & Schivardi, F. (2006). Wages, employment and capital in worker-owned and capitalist firms. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 60(1), 23–44. Perotin, V. (2006). Entry, exit and the business cycle: Are cooperatives different? Journal of Comparative Economics, 34(2), 295–316.
Cooperatives, History and Theories of Pitt, M., & Khandker, S. (1998). The impact of group-based credit programs on poor households in Bangladesh: Does the gender of participants matter? Journal of Political Economy, 106(5), 958–996. Poutsma, E., Kalmi, P., & Pendleton, A. (2005). The relationship between financial participation and other forms of participation: New survey evidence from Europe. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 27(4), 637–667. Rey, P., & Tirole, J. (2007). Financing and access in cooperatives. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 25(5), 1061–1088. Rosen, C., Klein, K. J., & Young, K. (1986). Employee ownership in America: The equity solution. Lexington, MA: Heath. Sexton, R. J. (1986). The formation of cooperatives: A game theoretic approach with implications for cooperative finance, decision making and stability. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 68(2), 214–225. Smith, D. J., Cargill, T. F., & Meyer, R. E. (1981). An economic theory of a credit union. Journal of Finance, 36(2), 519–528. Torgerson, R. E., Reynols, B. J., & Gray, T. W. (1998). Evolution of cooperative thought, theory, and purpose. Journal of Cooperatives, 13, 1–20. Vanek, J. (1970). The general theory of labor-managed market economies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Uvalic, M., & Vaughan-Whitehead, D. (Eds.) (1997). Privatization surprises in transition economies: Employee-ownership in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Elgar. Ward, B. (1958). The firm in Illyria: Market syndicalism. The American Economic Review, 48(4), 566–589.
Cooperatives, History and Theories of MORRIS ALTMAN Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Introduction Cooperatives have evolved significantly over the last 200 years and are of increasing importance to economies and societies throughout the world irrespective of their level of socioeconomic development. Yet, cooperatives, generally speaking, are peripheral to contemporary scholarly analyses. Moreover, they are treated as inefficient and relatively ineffective organizational types whose presence is typically transient and of some importance in times of crises and to marginal socioeconomic participants. Even those with a sympathetic eye consider cooperatives to be of marginal importance. It is therefore of some consequence to discuss the significance of cooperatives over historical time and the extent to which they are actually both efficient and effective economically and socially. Contemporary economic theory has played an effective role in the cooperative (Hill, 2000; Kalmi, 2007). Nevertheless, alternative theoretical lenses provide insight
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into the cooperative advantage in different economic sectors and why this advantage is not always realized or exploited. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that cooperatives can be potentially much more economically efficient than their noncooperative counterparts and can represent important dynamic components of contemporary competitive market economies (Altman, 2006; Bonin et al., 1993; Dow, 2003; Doucouliagos, 1995).
Definition In general, a cooperative comprises a voluntary network of individuals who own or control a business that distributes benefits on the basis of use or ownership where ownership is largely weighted equally across individual members. Benefits are generated by, for example, a share of surplus or profits, improved working conditions and benefits, lower prices, higher quality of product, product type and variety that better serve members’ preferences, and better access to credit. Members control the cooperative on the basis of one member, one vote, with a guaranteed platform to exercise voice. Members invest in the cooperative and thus have a financial stake in the organization. Unlike the typical private business, in the cooperative financial risk is more narrowly distributed amongst users or workers, whereas in the private business, ownership and financial risk need not fall on the shoulders of users or workers. In some jurisdictions, the risks to cooperative owners are restricted by limited liability protection afforded by the law. There are various types of cooperatives which dominate, least important of which, quantitatively at least, is the workers’ cooperative (see Cropp, 2005; Emelianoff, 1948). It is only in the workers’ cooperative, however, that the overall position of the worker is definitively different from what exists in the traditional private sector firm. However, in the emerging multi-stakeholder cooperative it is possible for the nonworkers’ cooperative to incorporate significant components of the substance of the workers’ cooperatives into their corpus (see below). Workers’ cooperative
Such a cooperative is owned and controlled by the workers through the standard one member, one vote platform. Many such cooperatives are run, on a day-to-day basis, by managers and a board of directors. But worker-owners have the ultimate say as to how the firm is managed over the long term and are characterized by a much less hierarchical system of management than the standard narrowly owned firm. Workers’ cooperatives are configured to meet the interest of workers first, as opposed to maximizing profits or share values in the short run. Maintaining and growing employment is often a binding constraint
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of a workers’ cooperative. Profits or surplus can be disbursed across members, based on memberships or hours worked, or invested in to grow the firm or to make it more competitive. Like traditional firms, workers’ cooperatives must be concerned with their production costs if they are to survive and flourish in the marketplace. Workers’ cooperatives are found largely in the processing and service sectors, albeit manufacturing is not unimportant. Consumer cooperative
This is the most important type of cooperative in terms of membership. Consumer cooperatives are sometimes referred to as retail cooperatives. Such cooperatives are quite important in the retailing of food and clothing. Members own the cooperatives and control them through the one member, one vote platform. However, day–day management can and often does take place as it would in traditional firms, and management can be quite hierarchical in structure, especially when the cooperative is large. In addition, management–labor relations are often similar to those in the traditional firm. In theory, a key distinguishing feature of consumer cooperatives is that they should be configured to best meet the preferences of their member-owners in terms of product type, quality, and price. Moreover, the objective of the cooperative is not to maximize the difference between unit cost and price, but rather to charge the lowest price possible, given quality and the investment requirements of the cooperative. But consumer cooperatives typically charge the market price for their product. However, any surplus accrued is supposed to be directed toward investment purposes, disbursed amongst members, or invested in socially beneficial projects as decided upon by members (typically by management). It is important to reiterate that a key difference between a traditional retailer and the cooperative is the overriding importance of the member-owner and the fact that in a cooperative ownership is weighted on the basis of the individual. Thus, no one individual can have a greater ownership or membership share than another. Additionally, consumer cooperatives, especially the smaller ones, have been established in localities and product lines where private retailers have deemed it too risky and unprofitable. When consumer cooperatives have better information on preferences and markets, given asymmetric information, they can survive and even prosper in domains where the traditional retailer cannot. Credit union
A credit union is a type of consumer cooperative that specializes in the money market and it is, along with the food and clothing retail cooperative, among the largest in terms of membership. A credit union is owned and
controlled on the base of one person, one vote, and is typically locally owned. But the credit union is managed on a day-to-day basis by an elected board and professional managers. In additional, management–labor relation can and often maps that of the traditional financial institution. Credit unions initially developed to provide financial resources to individuals and firms that found it difficult to secure these in the traditional financial sector. Credit unions have evolved into financial institutions that cater the needs of individuals across all income levels and firms of different sizes. This allows credit unions to spread the risk of their financial portfolios. In addition, contemporary local credit unions are often part of regional and national credit unions networks, allowing them and their members to take advantage of economies of scale and scope as can traditional financial institutions. A key distinguishing feature of a credit union is the capacity of members to determine the direction of its local credit union. Profits or surplus income can be disbursed to members, invested in the firm, or in social projects. Moreover, the credit union has the capacity to exploit local knowledge (asymmetric information) so as to serve individuals and firms and their particular needs which traditional financial institutions find too risky. But just like traditional financial institutions, credit unions must be carefully managed otherwise a sufficient number of bad loans can force a credit union into bankruptcy. Supply and purchasing cooperative
This type of cooperative is quite important in agriculture where farmers establish a cooperative to obtain goods and services required for their business or for personal use at lower prices than would be possible if they were to go it alone. Thus farmers can take advantage of economies of scale and scope that are afforded to larger corporate farms. But the management of such a cooperative can mimic that of the traditional firm. Marketing cooperative
This type of cooperative aligns the interests of producers with regard to marketing output to retailers or wholesalers. A marketing cooperative can also store, process, and package output prior sale. This allows farmers, for example, to take advantage of economies of scale and scope in storage and production, increasing their net income over what it might otherwise be. It also serves to increase the bargaining and marketing power of farmers. In addition, a marketing cooperative can help stabilize farmers’ income through its inventory capacity, providing farmers with a relatively stable income as marketing prices fluctuate. As with other cooperatives, a marketing cooperative must pay attention
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to efficiency considerations as well as maintaining the flexibility to vary the prices paid and surplus (and loses) disbursed to member farmers as markets restructure over time. Otherwise, it risks bankruptcy.
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training. It provides services that private sector firms will not or cannot provide. Such cooperatives often survive on the basis of subsidies, donations, and voluntary labor. But very often, noncooperative providers of these services survive on the basis of government support as well.
New generation cooperative
This type of cooperative is also referred to as a value-added or new wave cooperative, although cooperatives of old typically added value to their output. The express purpose of this cooperative is to transform raw material inputs into processed output, such as cranberries into juice or wheat into flour. Typically found in agriculture, farmers are owner-members who supply the raw material for processing, hoping to reap additional net income from valueadded activities. Like traditional cooperatives, the new generation cooperative, is owner-member-controlled. But unlike most traditional cooperatives, the new wave cooperative’s membership is restricted to those with the means and the willingness to provide substantial equity capital. This provides the cooperative with the necessary finances to build a competitive value-added enterprise and provide those with an equity stake in the cooperative with shares (typically) in proportion to the equity supplied. The farmer is obliged and has the right to supply the cooperative on the basis of share value. And shares can be sold at market value, which can be greater or less than the purchase or equity price, when the farmer or other supplier wishes to dissociate himself or herself from the cooperative. Multi-stakeholder cooperative
This cooperative has two or more groups of members that may include workers, consumers, producers, investors, community, and/or government. Such a cooperative has the potential of aggregating the interests of different individuals and groups of individuals within one cooperative thereby making them all stakeholders of a particular cooperative. For example, a consumer cooperative, by provided a membership and ownership stake to workers, transforms a traditional consumer cooperative to one where workers’ interests gain significant representation. The consumer cooperative develops characteristics of a workers’ cooperative. This can have significant efficiency benefits to the cooperative. Any cooperative that brings in government, community, or private sector representation strengthens the stakeholder and knowledge base of the cooperative as well as spreading risks without the core cooperative members losing control. Social cooperative
This is a particular type of multi-stakeholder cooperative that brings together providers and users of social services such as day care, health services, housing, and job
Historical Background The Rochdale Principles
The cooperative movement is strictly defined and relates very closely to democratic forms of governance with regard to members. The cooperative is not simply a group of individuals who cooperate in particular economic activities. For cooperation of this type can take place under coercive forms of governance, ranging from serfdom to slavery to the state-sponsored collectives of Communist China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. Wage labor in a democratic society also requires cooperation amongst the economic actors. But a cooperative requires much more than mere cooperation, even when the latter is relatively freely undertaken. The modern cooperative movement aspires to a set of principles first clearly and coherently articulated by members of the Rochdale consumer cooperative, founded by 28 weavers in Rochdale, England, at a time when worker and consumer rights were relatively limited. Consumer cooperatives received legal sanction in England only in 1852. The original Rochdale Principles defining cooperative organizations are (Birchall, 1997; International Co-operative Alliance, 2008; MacPherson, 1996: Thompson, 1994): 1. 2. 3. 4.
Democratic control (one member, one vote) Open membership Limited interest on capital Distribution of surplus in proportion to a member’s contribution to the society 5. Cash trading only (no use of credit) 6. Providing for the education of members in cooperative principles 7. Political and religious neutrality For the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), the official governing body of cooperatives, the following four of the Rochdale principles are central to the governance of member organizations: 1. Open membership 2. Democratic control (one member, one vote) 3. Distribution of the surplus to the members in proportion to their transactions 4. Limited interest on capital
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The following three principles are deemed important and necessary to membership in the ICA: 1. Political and religious neutrality 2. Cash trading only 3. Promotion of education The fact of the matter is that many cooperatives have very clear political and religious agendas. Most use credit as a means of sale. The latter is critical in contemporary market economies and is often the preferred means of payment. Also, a plethora of cooperatives invest little in the domain of education. Kibbutzim and Mondragon Cooperatives
Two important examples of national cooperative movements are the Kibbutzim of Israel (first established in 1910) and the Mondragon Cooperative Association founded in the Basque country of Spain in the 1950s. The Kibbutz Movement of Israel is the largest cooperative grouping in the world. By the end of the twentieth century there were 270 of these collective settlements with a population of 120,000. These settlements are community owned and run and represent a me´lange of worker, consumer, producer, and financial cooperatives. Initially, largely agricultural in orientation, manufacturing, and tourism now plays a significant role in the Kibbutz economy as Kibbutzim adjust to increasing competitive pressures. Most cooperative settlements are small (they vary from about 50 to over 2,000), but there is significant cooperation amongst these (Communal Studies Association, 2008; Avrahami, 2002). The Modragon Cooperative Association of Spain is comprised of over 160 companies operating in manufacturing, distribution, and finance. Member companies employed almost 80,000 people and the Modragon group of companies was the seventh largest in Spain in 2006. But at least 20% of Modragon’s employees are nonmembers (Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa, 2006; Whyte, 1991). The Kibbutz movement also now employs a large number of nonmembers. For the Kibbutzim, this has been to a large extent fueled by severe labor shortages – the inability to attract an adequate supply of labor to meet ongoing demand. Both of these long-standing cooperative movements thus employ many individuals to whom the principles of the cooperative movement do not necessarily apply. Both these movements have had to adjust to ever-changing and increasing market pressure, meeting with much success.
Key Issues Economics and Cooperatives
Contemporary economic theory pays little heed to the cooperative, especially worker and consumer cooperatives. Whereas, supply and marketing cooperatives are treated as contributors to monopolistic pricing, therefore contributing to economic inefficiency (allocative inefficiency) and the misallocation of resources. At best, cooperatives as an organizational type are looked upon as a possible solution to economic dilemmas faced by the economically marginalized members of society. The cooperative is not regarded as a source of economic efficiency and possible contributor to material welfare (Bonin et al., 1993; Dow, 2003; Hill, 2000; Kalmi, 2007). This is a product of the behavioral assumptions embedded in the theory. Although cooperatives are not dominant, their quantitative importance in most countries in both marginal and mainstream sectors, and their profitability and relatively high levels of productivity compared to their privately owned counterparts suggest that cooperative economic organizations must be doing something right to have maintained a significant presence in an increasingly competitive global economy. On the other hand, it is important to understand why cooperatives are not dominant if they are economically efficient. Theory and Workers’ Cooperatives
How does one explain the economic success of workers’ cooperatives? Conventional theory assumes that no such success is possible given that cooperatives are not obliged to invest profits (focusing on employment and workers’ income) and are too egalitarian to generate economically efficient incentives and to engage the employment of superior management. But there exists a cooperative advantage in the workers’ cooperative that lies in its capacity to increase the quantity and quality of effort inputs into the ‘‘production process,’’ thereby producing higher levels of output and a superior quality of output (Altman, 2002, 2006; McCain, 2008). This can also be referred to as the x-efficiency effect (Altman, 2001; Leibenstein, 1966) of cooperative organization. In the cooperative, worker-owners and owner managers have the incentive to work harder and smarter – a possibility assumed in the traditional modeling of the firm. Conventional theory assumes that the manner in which a firm is organized does not impact the extent of x-efficiency. Moreover, where workers’ cooperatives focus on improving benefits and working conditions whilst maintaining and even growing employment they are incentivized into
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adopting and developing technologies that make them competitive. Workers’ cooperatives can, therefore, be more costly to operate than traditional firms, especially low-wage traditional firms, but they can also be much more productive, such that their unit costs and profits can be the same as that of the traditional firm. The cooperative productivity advantage countervails the increased costs of operating the cooperative. Thus in the worker’s cooperatives workers would be much better of without their benefits causing their firm to become uncompetitive. Workers’ cooperatives can yield competitive outcomes without driving out of the market noncooperative traditional firms. Such workers’ cooperative can function and prosper in mainstream economic sectors, even in highly competitive environments. Moreover, when workers are also owners, there is much less incentive for workers to quit. Reducing quit rates and thus turnover rates increases labor productivity and reduces production costs by maintaining the most productive workers and reducing average training costs. Overall, workers’ cooperatives can generate higher levels of material welfare than the traditional firm. This argument is illustrated in Fig. 1 (based on Altman, 2001, 2002, 2006). As traditional analysis would have it, workers’ cooperatives incur higher costs (such as higher levels of labor benefits) and this yields higher unit or average production costs. This is given by line segment am which relates increasing cooperative-
Cooperatives, History and Theories of. Fig. 1 Unit production costs and x-efficiency.
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related costs to average production costs. In the traditional model, increasing labor benefits, for example, has no impact on labor productivity. More realistically, in a more democratic firm wherein labor benefits also increase, labor productivity increases, illustrated by ahi. Therefore, in the cooperative firm, the level of x-efficiency increases as incentives improve. The cooperative firm induces firm members into becoming more productive. To the extent that such productivity increases offsets the increased cooperative-associated costs, average or unit production costs need not change as labor costs increase, illustrated by line segment ag. Eventually, the level of x-efficiency cannot be sufficiently increased to offset increasing labor costs, at points b and h, yielding increased average costs. This induces technological change, illustrated by a shift in the cost curve from agc to agd, which serves to further offset cooperative-related costs when x-efficiency is at a maximum. Lower wage and higher turnover traditional firms need not be more competitive than cooperative firms and the more productive cooperative firms need not have the capacity to drive out the less productive traditional firms. Given the superior incentive system of the workers’ cooperative there is no good theoretical reason to presume that workers’ cooperatives cannot be both competitive on the margin and prosperous. On the other hand, this does not imply that workers’ cooperatives can be expected to dominate the economy. The workers’ cooperative represents only one ‘‘extreme’’ alternative to hierarchical organizational types. Privately owned participatory firms (which allows for some workers’ ownership of firm assets and effective voice) represent another alternative; one where workers need not risk their capital nor bear the risks entailed in ownership (Altman, 2002; Gordon, 1998). Also, they need not invest the time and effort that might be required at the management and corporate decision-making levels in a workers’ cooperative. This firm type overlaps with the multi-stakeholder cooperative. Given the possibility and option of a privately owned participatory firm, many workers might choose the latter. Moreover, workers might choose traditional hierarchical firms given the risks and effort required to establish and maintain a workers’ cooperative. Also, establishing workers’ cooperatives can be problematic if financing is difficult to come by given that financiers have limited say on corporate governance in traditional cooperatives. This constraint can be obviated in multi-stakeholder cooperatives. In addition, establishing workers’ cooperatives suffers from coordination problems – it is difficult and costly to coordinate the
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efforts of individuals to establish a cooperative. This issue is somewhat mitigated by regional and national cooperative federations. Finally, misinformation about the design and operation of workers’ cooperatives can negatively affect preferences for cooperatives. For these reasons, workers’ cooperatives are often established in the wake of crises wherein the traditional firm is on the verge of closure. In the absence of a workers’ cooperative unemployment, the breakdown of social networks and less preferred jobs becomes the default. Such cooperatives can succeed if the new incentive environment increases productivity and encourages technological change wherein the traditional firm was economically inefficient and resistant to improved technology. Cooperatives can also survive on the basis of low wages, where worker-owners willingly sacrifice material benefits so as to remain competitive and thereby secure their employment. Competing on this basis in the short run provides such a cooperative with the capacity to search for efficiencies in production that will allow it to compete on the basis of higher wages and improved working conditions in the longer term. Such a capacity does not typically exist in the traditional hierarchical firm given mistrust, asymmetric information, and different preferences between workers, owners, and managers. Consumer Cooperatives
Establishing consumer cooperatives and other types of nonworkers’ cooperatives face some of the same constraints as do workers’ cooperatives, but not those related to the risks and time that workers must absorb to establish and operate a workers’ cooperative. However, consumer cooperatives have met with considerable success. But they need not be organized in terms of nonhierarchical forms of management and can remain competitive on the basis of low wages and poor working conditions, matching the immediate labor costs of their noncooperative counterparts. In this case consumer cooperatives need not generate superior material welfare outcomes for its workforce, although they should generate material welfare gains to coop members in terms of price and quality and product type. However, through multi-stakeholder organizational setups, consumer cooperatives can overlap with more democratic and less hierarchical working environments, yielding both pecuniary and nonpecuniary benefits to their workforce. The cooperative advantage of consumer cooperatives lies in its capacity to better meet the preferences of their members than privately owned concerns, thus enhancing members’ welfare. For example, the cooperative might be better able to supply member consumers with the right product mix and quality and, in relatively noncompetitive markets where consumers have little bargaining power;
provide preferred bundles of goods and services at lower prices; it might be able to overcome information asymmetries in the credit market providing loans to individuals unable secure such loans from private banks; and it might be able to secure higher prices for members of marketing cooperatives by improving their bargaining power relative to purchasing conglomerates with well-established bargaining power. Even when consumer cooperatives can do no better than privately owned concerns in terms of commodity supply and price, they can enhance members’ welfare if the cooperative generates a sense of belonging or community (social cohesion) amongst members (Fairbairn, 2003). However, such social cohesion and sense of identity with the coop provides the cooperative with the ‘‘protection’’ from market forces allowing it to charge higher prices and supply lower quality products. Member-owners might be willing to pay higher prices, up to a point, simply because a product is sold by their cooperative. But such behavior would undermine the economic and social viability of the cooperative. Nevertheless, there is nothing intrinsic in the cooperative organizational type that implies that this must be the case. Cooperatives can produce and supply quality goods and services at competitive prices. Also, the extent of social cohesion can diminish when consumer cooperatives increase in membership. Each member has less power and voice and more difficulty in having an affect on the decision-making process and outcomes. Less social cohesion and related sense of belonging can undermine the membership base of the cooperative. And the cooperatives success then becomes a function of its capacity to compete with traditional producers and suppliers.
International Perspectives There exist no precise estimates on the importance of cooperatives in the new millennium (International Cooperative Alliance, 2008; Kalmi, 2007; Global300.coop, 2007; United Nations 2005, 2008a, b). But the United Nations guesstimates that the ‘‘cooperative movement’’ had over 800 million members at the beginning of the new millennium and provided for about 100 million jobs. In addition, over the last 150 years cooperatives have spread to over 100 countries. Cooperatives are of importance in both developed and less developed economies. Moreover, cooperatives are of significance in both the more free market-oriented economies, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and the more statist market economies of Continental Europe. About half of the world’s agricultural output is marketed by cooperatives, which speaks to the significance of marketing cooperatives. Overall, it is in the agricultural
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sector that cooperatives of various types remain dominant. In the financial sector, credit unions encompass about 120 million members in 87 countries. Especially in poor countries, cooperatives provide important microcredit services. Consumer cooperatives continue to play an important role worldwide, with its importance varying across countries. Health care cooperatives service about 100 million people in over 50 countries. Electricity provisioning cooperatives have become important. For example, in the United States, such cooperatives service over 30 million people. Least important in terms of quantitative significance are workers’ cooperatives. Only a small percentage of the 100 million individuals employed by cooperatives are controlled by the workers themselves. Thus, consumer, producer, or financial cooperatives need not be managed in a manner that benefits employees where the latter’s (nonmembers’) interest conflicts with that of cooperative member-owners. The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), the formal governing body of cooperatives, referring to the United Nations, also maintains that cooperatives made secure the livelihood of approximately three billion people across the globe or about half of the world’s population. But this reference is quite nebulous in meaning, but suggests indirect economic importance of cooperatives through its multiple linkages. Survey evidence strongly supports the view that cooperatives serve to reduce poverty amongst cooperative members as well as amongst nonmembers and the same can be said with regard to reducing gender inequality. The evidence also suggests that cooperatives can provide a means of generating income and wealth well above any particular measures of poverty.
networks, credit unions, multi-stakeholder cooperatives, and facilitating legal environments. Market forces, no matter how powerful, do not require and cannot force noncooperative solutions to socioeconomic problems. Competitive markets and cooperative organizational forms are all quite compatible. Ceteris paribus, the case can be made that a world without cooperatives is, at a minimum, one that is poorer. Cooperatives have been forced to engage in dramatic changes in terms of organization, production, and markets over historical time. Much success has been achieved as is exemplified by the overall global importance of this democratic organizational type. New forms of cooperatives have been developed where the core value is democratic governance by member-owners; where ownership still adheres to the one person, one vote protocol. But cooperative values as articulated in the Rochdale Principles can become less salient as the cooperative grows and the voice of each individual member becomes less effective. Local control becomes critical to maintaining effective voice and social cohesion within the cooperative. Also, democratic governance excludes employees in most cooperatives. A significant iteration of the cooperative is the democratic privately owned firm. Another is the multi-stakeholder cooperative, which strengthens any particular type of cooperative by providing effective voice to individuals and groups who contribute or who can potentially contribute substantively to the cooperative viability and prosperity. One vital lesson gleaned from the history of cooperatives is that democratic governance within the firm can contribute significantly to socioeconomic well-being.
Future Directions
Cross-References
Overall, the cooperative solution can produce higher socioeconomic welfare levels to members whilst also overcoming significant market failures. In other words, cooperatives and cooperative type organizations can have large positive effects on the economy while at the same time generating significant improvements to the social and spiritual well-being of members. The nonmaterial and economic benefits are dialectically and positively related. This reality is marginalized in much of the conventional literature. To some extent, whether cooperative solutions are adopted depends upon the preferences of individuals given that cooperatives can be competitive even in extremely competitive environments. Not all workers prefer pure cooperatives. Not all consumers choose consumer cooperatives. Nevertheless, preferences for cooperatives need not be met as a consequence of the dearth of financial resources and organizational capacity. These constraints can be overcome through cooperative
▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Civic Agency ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil society, Definitions of and Approaches ▶ Community Development ▶ Cooperatives and Employee Ownership ▶ Credit Unions ▶ Freedom of Association ▶ Governance, Organizational ▶ Grameen Bank ▶ International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) ▶ Proudhon, Pierre ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers ▶ Social Accounting for Social Economy Organizations ▶ Social Cohesion
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▶ Social Economy ▶ Social Entrepreneurship ▶ Social Investment ▶ Theories of Nonprofit Organization, Economic
References/Further Readings Altman, M. (2001). Worker satisfaction and economic performance. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Altman, M. (2002). Economic theory, public policy and the challenge of innovative work practices. Economic & Industrial Democracy: An International Journal, 23, 271–290. Altman, M. (2005). Reconciling altruistic, moralistic, and ethical behavior with the rational economic agent and competitive markets. Journal of Economic Psychology, 26, 732–757. Altman, M. (2006). Workers cooperatives as an alternative competitive organizational form. Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms, 9, 213–235. Avrahami, E. (2002). The changing kibbutz, from http://www.kibbutz.org. il/eng/; 08/05/2008. Birchall, J. (1997). The international co-operative movement. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Ben-Nur, A., & Jones, D. (1995). Employee participation, ownership, and productivity: A theoretical framework. Industrial Relations, 34, 532–554. Bonin, J. P., Jones, D. C., & Putterman, L. (1993). Theoretical and empirical studies of producer cooperatives: Will ever the twain meet? Journal of Economic Literature, 31, 1290–1320. Communal Studies Association (2008). The kibbutz movement, From http://www.ic.org/icsa/kibbutz.html; 08/05/2008. Cropp, R. (2005). A glossary for cooperatives. Bulletin no. 10. University of Wisconsin, Centre for the Study of Cooperatives, from www.wisc. edu/uwcc; 08/05/2008. Doucouliagos, C. (1995). Worker participation and productivity in labormanaged and participatory capitalist firms: A meta-analysis. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 49, 58–77. Dow, G. (2003). Governing the firm: Workers’ control in theory and practice. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Ellerman, D. (2005). Helping people help themselves: From the world bank to an alternative philosophy of development assistance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Emelianoff, I. V. (1948). Economic theory of cooperation: Economic structure of cooperative organizations. Reprinted by the Center for Cooperatives, University of California, 1995, from http://www.cooperatives.ucdavis.edu/reports/index.htm; 08/05/2008. Fairbairn, B. (2003). Three strategic concepts for the guidance of co-operatives linkage, transparency, and cognition. Saskatoon, Canada: Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan. Freeman, R. B., & Rogers, J. (1999). What workers want. Ithaca, NY/ London: Cornell University Press/ILR Press. Global300.coop (2007). International co-operative alliance, global 300 list, from http://www.global300.coop/en. Gordon, D. M. (1998). Conflict and cooperation: An empirical glimpse of the imperatives of efficiency and redistribution. In E. O. Wright (Ed.), Recasting egalitarianism: New rules for communities, states and markets (pp. 181–207). London/New York: Verso. Gulati, G. M., Isaac, T. M., & Klein, W. A. (2002). When a workers’ cooperative works: The case of Kerala Dinesh Beedi. UCLA Law Review, 49, 1417–1454.
Hill, R. (2000). The case of missing organizations: Co-operatives and the textbooks. Journal of Economic Education, 31, 281–295. International Co-operative Alliance (2008). What is a co-operative? from http://www.ica.coop/coop/index.html#difference; 08/05/2008. Kalmi, P. (2007). The disappearance of cooperatives from economics textbooks. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 31, 625–647. Leibenstein, H. (1966). Allocative efficiency vs. ‘‘x-efficiency.’’ American Economic Review, 56, 392–415. MacPherson, I. (1996). Co-operative principles for the 21st century. Geneva: International Cooperative Alliance. McCain, R. A. (2008). Cooperative games and cooperative organizations. Journal of Socio-Economics, doi:10.1016/j.socec.2008.02.010. Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa (2006). The history of an experience, from http://www.mcc.es/ing/quienessomos/historia.html; 08/05 /2008. Prychitko, D. L., & Vanek, J. (Eds.) (1996). Producer cooperatives and labor-managed systems (Vols. 1 & 2). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Rural Cooperatives Center, University of California, Davis (2008). What is a co-op?, from http://www.cooperatives.ucdavis.edu/whatis/index. htm; 08/05/2008. Spear, R. (2000). The co-operative advantage. Annals of Co-operative & Public Economics, 71, 501–523. Thompson, D. (1994). Co-operative principles then and now. Co-operative Grocer, 53, from http://www.cooperativegrocer.coop/ articles/index.php?id = 158; 08/05/2008. Tomer, J. F. (2001). Understanding high-performance work systems: The joint contribution of economics and human resource management. Journal of Socio-Economics, 30, 63–73. United Nations (2005). Cooperatives in social development: Report of the Secretary-General, from http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/social/ cooperatives/coop_docs.html; 08/05/2008. United Nations (2008a). Cooperatives and social development, from http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/social/cooperatives/; 08/05/2008. United Nations (2008b). Cooperatives at work, from http://www.un.org/ esa/socdev/social/cooperatives/coop_docs.html; 08/05/2008. Ward, B. (1958). The firm in Illyria: Market syndicalism. American Economic Review, 48, 566–589. Whyte, W. (1991). Making mondragon: The growth and dynamics of the worker cooperative complex. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zeuli, K. (2004). The evolution of the cooperative model. In C. D. Merritt & N. Walzer (Eds.), Cooperatives and local development: Theory and applications for the 21st century (pp. 52–69). Armonk, NY/London/England: M. E. Sharpe.
Corporate Giving STEFAN NA¨HRLICH Aktive Bu¨rgerschaft, Berlin, Germany
Introduction Businesses are producers of goods and services; as lobbyists they represent their own economic interests or the interests of their branch in politics. Increasingly, firms also contribute directly to the common welfare of society. In some companies there has been a long tradition of
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philanthropic involvement, especially in the form of corporate donations. Yet over the last 2–3 decades, corporate giving has increased considerably in scope in many countries. Although valid data regarding the extent of corporate giving is often lacking, current information which partially stems from regular surveys reveals that businesses play an important role in supporting nonprofit organizations. Corporate giving is implemented in differentiated forms with various instruments. Given the globalized economy, these instruments are used in numerous countries. Businesses are becoming increasingly more involved in corporate giving in order to achieve their firm’s goals. This development goes hand in hand with the changing relationship between the market, state, and civil society.
Definition Corporate giving is when businesses voluntarily contribute money or donate in-kind contributions to nonprofit organizations or for a charitable purpose without receiving any services in return. The classic instrument of corporate giving is corporate donations. Employee and customer donations are also considered part of corporate giving if they are related to the company’s donation programs. Corporate giving can be differentiated from donations by private individuals who are associated with a company and become active with their income or assets (individual giving), as exemplified by the patronage or philanthropic involvement of well-known personalities such as Rockefeller, Rothschild, or Krupp. In the narrow sense, corporate giving can also be differentiated from the concrete services received in return, especially in terms of tax laws. Yet many authors as well as practitioners consider instruments such as sponsorship and cause related marketing to be part of corporate giving. In contrast to business donations, sponsorship is connected to concrete services that are contractually agreed upon and usually take the form of publicity (Bruhn, 2003). It is similar for cause related marketing where the business’s financial donation to a nonprofit organization depends on selling a product or service (Fuljahn, 2008). In these cases the firm is acting voluntarily, but not altruistically as is required by the tax laws for it to be considered a charitable donation. In practice, however, the boundaries are not so strict and it depends in individual cases on the respective national tax laws and their interpretation through the current jurisprudence. Regardless, the classic donation activity within businesses is not free from following long-term interests or achieving firm-specific advantages (Na¨hrlich, 2008). Approaches such as strategic corporate philanthropy and above all corporate citizenship
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emphasize this and provide legitimacy for distributing the firm’s resources to benefit the company (business case) rather than to predominantly contribute to the common good (social case). Conceptually corporate giving is often viewed as one of the three pillars of corporate citizenship alongside corporate foundation and corporate volunteering. Yet corporate volunteering activities are also understood as being an instrument of corporate giving. ‘‘Corporate giving is the making of charitable donations by companies engaged in business activity. These donations can be cash, products, in-kind services, or employee voluntarism’’ (Council on Foundations, 2009). Similarly some authors view the establishment of corporate foundations or donating through corporate foundations as a type of corporate giving (Mecking, 2008). The boundaries amongst the three pillars are in flux, especially due to the individual classifications and ways of organizing in business praxis. Corporate giving on the whole as well as sponsorship in particular are linked with the corporate social responsibility approach in different ways.
Key Issues Instruments
Corporate giving can be implemented through different instruments. The classic instrument is the corporate donation. Yet special giving programs that are managed through employees or the department of a company or an intermediary firm or nonprofit organization also belong to such instruments. Quite often the donation activities are supplemented through the involvement of the business’s foundation. It is common to have a mix of corporate giving instruments. The costs of corporate giving programs are often included in the annual budgets of various business departments (marketing, public relations, human resources, etc.). The amount of the expenditures is influenced by the company’s performance. As a general rule, there is no obligation to report on corporate giving, but there are exceptions in certain countries with regards to their foundation activities. Cash Contributions
Cash contributions are direct contributions to, for example, nonprofit social services organizations, schools, educational institutions, universities, and research institutes both domestically as well as abroad. They are in the form of scholarships or emergency aid for catastrophes or disasters and are provided both directly and indirectly to individuals. Cash contributions are given both on request as well as part of programs or special events such as
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company anniversaries. To some extent they are given as prizes or award grants in order to specifically support certain developments, depending in part on whether the NPO is successful in gaining additional funding (challenge grant). They are also given to NPOs in which the employees of the company are involved as volunteers (volunteer grant). Giving Programs
In large companies there is a special principle of giving that is composed of various factors and provides the basis for the allocation of donations: general allocation guidelines which describe the goals and values of the company’s involvement, decision making powers and modes of communication; certain times for applications and the allocation of funds as well as the usual or maximum contribution for certain groups; and different instruments and additional nonmonetary forms of support for nonprofit organizations or projects. Matching and payroll giving (Philanthropy New Zealand, 2007) are well-known instruments. Many companies support, for example, employee donations in that they match each donation of the employee by a similar or different amount. Employee matched giving entails that the regular donation of an employee to a nonprofit organization is supplemented by the company by a certain amount. Matching can also be related to other target groups. In Germany, matching funds have been specifically used by businesses, mostly cooperative banking associations, over the past years to build up the assets of community foundations. With regards to payroll giving, the company receives the employee’s consent to retain a certain amount of the employee’s salary (e.g., the extra cents) and donate this money to a nonprofit organization or for a certain charitable purpose. For the companies, payroll giving is a means of supporting the involvement of employees with very low costs and administrative effort. For the employees, the special tax benefits of this type of giving are often advantageous. An additional special giving program is the so-called ‘‘savings from winnings’’ (Gewinnsparen). Banks that are subject to public law (savings banks) and private cooperative banking associations are licensed by the state to hold a lottery, for example, in Germany. A portion of the earnings from the sale of lottery tickets is given to the nonprofit organizations and is donated to local nonprofit organizations or for charitable purposes by the banks that sold the lottery tickets to their customers. To put it more precisely, ‘‘savings from winnings’’ refers to donations by the customers of a company. There are laws that regulate the allocation of these donations (Na¨hrlich & Biedermann, 2008).
Cause-Related Marketing
In addition, in the narrow sense cause related marketing (Fuljahn, 2008) is also concerned with donations by the customers of a company. Advertising for a brand and product merchandizing are connected to a charitable purpose for a certain period of time, for example, to save the rainforest or to promote children’s education in Africa. A certain percentage of the price of the product or a set amount is donated to a nonprofit organization. The donation occurs only through the sale of the product. After cause related marketing was introduced in the United States in 1983 through the large campaign of a credit card company, this instrument of corporate giving has remained disputed given competition laws in Germany. It is being discussed if and to what extent the willingness to help on behalf of the customers is being systematically exploited for economic advantages and to what extent the customer must be informed about the type and scale of assistance for ‘‘doing good.’’ Given the concrete return of services that is connected with cause related marketing and sponsorship, these instruments are not unanimously endorsed in the literature as being a part of corporate giving. Sponsorship
Just like cause-related marketing, sponsorship (Bruhn, 2003) places a central emphasis on following a firmspecific publicity goal. An essential feature of sponsorship is that the service is accompanied by a return of services that is relevant and supports the company’s own marketing goals. In contrast to cause related marketing, the service yielded is not dependent upon the sale of a product. By sponsoring a sports team, a cultural event or an educational program, the company’s image profits and the company comes in contact with its target audience. The sponsored institution which is not restricted to the nonprofit sector participates in achieving this goal, for example, by having the company’s logo of the sponsor on a team’s jersey or presenting it on various media, making the sponsoring company’s name a part of the club’s or team’s name or naming a sports facility after the company. The type and scope of the services of the sponsor and recipient are normally contractually agreed upon. The services related to sponsorship are subject to different tax laws than charitable contributions are, both for the company as well as the nonprofit organization. Venture Philanthropy
Despite being conceptually close to a market economy investment, venture philanthropy is not concerned with repayable capital investments that yield interest. John (2006) referred to venture philanthropy as ‘‘an
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approach to charitable giving that applies venture capital principles – such as long-term investment and hands-on support to the social economy.’’ The basic characteristics of venture philanthropy include allocating financial resources for developing organizational infrastructure (capacity building), providing further personal, ideational, or various support by the donors, as well as measuring results according to the defined goals. Companies and corporate foundations have recently shown increasing interest in performance and results-oriented giving approaches. Venture philanthropy is connected to the discussion about social entrepreneurship (Achleitner, 2006). Corporate Foundations
Nonprofit corporate foundations (Mecking, 2008) are a further form of corporate giving which are usually understood as a separate pillar of corporate citizenship given their complexity and importance. Corporate foundations are private foundations which have received their assets through the financial contributions of the company. Foundations are often established by businesses to secure their financial involvement in an enduring and sustainable way. Corporate foundations can support other projects or carry out their own projects. They have their own legal personality and are usually tied closely to the company through the foundation’s board members and the regulations in the foundation’s bylaws. Given that the company’s name is often part of the corporate foundation’s name, this form of involvement is also appropriate for supporting the company’s public relations. In-Kind Donations and the Allocation of Noncash Services
In addition to financial support, noncash contributions play a large role in corporate giving (Ciconte & Jacob, 2009). They are in-kind donations, such as free or discounted use of, for example, office computers or software from the manufacturer, as well as the company’s used hardware, software, or office equipment. In certain branches such as the pharmaceutical branch or the food industry, donations of products are of central importance. Another form is when the company provides free services such as telecommunication, financial, or transport services as well as the opportunity to use the company’s property for meetings and events. Typical examples include waiving fees for certain telephone numbers, bank accounts or the use of company cars. Further measures are related to the area of corporate volunteering such as designing or providing layout services for a nonprofit organization’s publications. The extent to which these measures lead to
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a reduction in taxes for the company is dependent upon the individual case as well as the country’s tax laws. Corporate Volunteering
Corporate volunteering is concerned with the degree to which the free provision of services, for example, marketing, legal, or management support for nonprofit organizations, is connected with the activities, special capabilities or competences of the company’s employees. Corporate volunteering is one of the pillars of corporate citizenship. It encompasses a variety of instruments and special programs ranging from supporting company employees who become privately involved, to releasing employees from their duties for social days or days of caring, to long-term partnerships with nonprofit organizations or special volunteer programs for managers or trainees. Dimensions of Corporate Giving
There is a lack of valid and differentiated data on corporate giving. While the data available in the United States is comparatively good, this area remains in the dark in countries such as Germany despite the long tradition of corporate giving and the significant size of corporate donations. The different classifications of the various corporate giving instruments and the different tax laws regarding assessments make comparison even more difficult. The United States of America
Whereas the amount of corporate donations was only $38 million in 1940, it reached $462 million in 1960 and $3 billion in 1982 (Useem & Kuttner, 1984). According to Giving USA (2007) the amount of donations by corporations and corporate foundations reached $12.7 billion in 2006. Adjusting for inflation, the amount of donations was 10% less than in the previous year, which can be traced back to the exceedingly high level of donations given the different natural disasters in 2005. Excluding these donations, corporate giving rose by 1.7% after adjusting for inflation. According to a survey conducted by the Chronicle of Philanthropy (2008) in 2007, the 150 largest US companies donated 1.4% of their profits for charitable purposes, as compared to 0.9% in the previous year. In a study conducted by the Conference Board (2008), the 189 surveyed companies gave a total of $7.9 billion, thereby representing ‘‘62% of the overall estimated $12.7 billion in corporate charitable giving in the United States in 2006.’’ The individual donations ranged from $72,200 to over $916 million in 2006. The median was $10.7 million as compared to $8.7 million in the previous year. The main areas that benefit from corporate giving are health and social services, which still received 53.4% of all
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support in 2006 despite a 7.6% decrease in comparison to the previous year. In 2006, the donations towards education increased for the first time since 1999 and rose by 7.1%–17.8%. The importance of the field of education is also shown in the survey conducted by the Business Civic Leadership Center (2008) of the US Chamber of Commerce in which 468 managers from various sized companies in the 100 largest cities of the United States took part. 54.9% of the surveyed companies donated to education, 44.9% donated to the field of youth and family and 44.2% donated to nonprofit organizations such as United Way or Catholic Charities. In-kind donations were predominantly given to the field of education (24.9%). The yearly rankings of top donors as compiled in Forbes magazine or the Chronicle of Philanthropy reveal the extent of in-kind contributions in the individual branches. In 2007, the first three companies gave a total $2.8 billion in product giving. All three of the companies belong to the pharmaceutical industry. The top three companies for cash donations gave a total of $658 million in 2007. These companies are from the retailing, financial, and petroleum industries (Forbes, 2008). The survey of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (2008), which 155 US companies including 69 of the top 100 largest US companies (Fortune 100 List) participated in, reported the amount of cash and product giving at $11.6 billion in 2007. The Fortune 100 companies donated mainly to the fields of health and social services and education, spending twice as much as the median amount of all surveyed companies ($23.53 million) with an average of $46.31 million. The costs for human resources and administration of the giving programs amounted to an average 6.1% of the volume of donations. Great Britain
The daily newspaper The Guardian has published data and facts about corporate giving in British companies since 2002. The Giving List provides information about cash donations and in-kind donations and their relation to the profits of the top 100 largest firms registered with the London stock exchange (FTSE 100). According to The Guardian (2006), these British firms gave an average of 0.79% of their pretax profits to charitable, social, or ecological purposes in 2005, as compared to 0.87% in the previous year. The absolute total of donations reached £986 million in 2005. Individual donations ranged from £30,000–61,000 million. For further information on the involvement of British firms, see Campbell et al. (2002). According to a study by the Business in the Community (2003) network, 101 British corporate foundations donated a total of £82 million in 2000–2001. The
corporate foundations thereby contributed 10.8% of the entire amount of corporate giving which totaled £755 million in 2000–2001. Ten years before in 1990–1991, corporate giving amounted to 445 million and in 1996– 1997 it totaled £490 million. In 2000–2001, corporate giving contributed to financing roughly 5% of the British voluntary sector, with the total financing amounting to ca. £15.6 billion. Australia
According to the most recent study of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2002), the Australian economy spent a total of AU$1.447 billion to support nonprofit organizations during the period of time in which the study was conducted. Of this total, $921 million were cash contributions. Whereas small businesses predominantly donated to charitable purposes, the large corporations were mainly active in sports sponsorship. The performing arts received $21.5 million in corporate sponsorship in 2002, as compared to $25.8 million in 2006. In 2006, corporate sponsorship made up 63% of the total sponsorship and donation revenue (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008). For further information on the involvement of the Australian economy, see Noble et al. (2008). Germany
At this point it is not possible to make any reliable statements about the size and importance of forms of corporate giving. There are no central statistics regarding donation revenues. Nonprofit organizations are not obliged to report their financial data (Mecking, 2008). Extrapolating from the results of a representative study (Forsa, 2005), the amount of cash donations of all owner-managed companies with yearly sales starting at €100,000 was ca. €1.5 billion in 2004. There is an additional monetary value of €1.9 billion in services for the free provision of services, the free allocation of products or goods and the use of the company’s facilities and equipment free of charge. Prominent donors in Germany are companies from the credit services sector. Over €700 million were allocated to nonprofit organizations in 2007 in the form of donations, sponsorships, and returns from the respective corporate foundations of the Deutsche Bank (€82 million), Commerzbank (€39 million), Dresdner Bank (€8 million), the group of the cooperative financial services network (€112 million) and the savings banks group that is governed by public law (€465 million) (Na¨hrlich & Biedermann, 2008).
Future Directions In many countries corporate giving has a long tradition and makes an important contribution to supporting
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nonprofit organizations and central social functions such as financing education, health care and social services. Despite country-specific differences and contexts, there are three current challenges that can be identified: Implications of the Financial Crisis
The implications of the current financial crisis for corporate giving are difficult to foresee at present. The worsening economic situation and decreasing firm profits have an impact on the direct financial involvement of many companies. Given the losses in assets, corporate foundations are also impacted more or less depending on the type of their assets investment. Overall, various surveys indicate that the amount of corporate giving will decrease in 2009. Yet, there still are signs of hope (Chronicle of Philanthropy, 2008). Some individual firms are increasing their donation activities, while other companies who have decreasing financial resources for corporate giving are trying to compensate for this by increasing the use of different instruments, such as transferring knowledge and competences through cooperating with nonprofit organizations. Even the effective and efficient use of resources in managing donations with regards to the company as well as the recipient can be understood as a reaction to the decreasing availability of resources (LBG Research Institute, 2009). In this respect, the financial crisis could also have positive consequences for corporate giving or corporate citizenship in the medium-term. For several years there has been an intense discussion about linking social involvement and firm strategy on the one hand and achieving a greater impact in solving social problems. Management of Corporate Giving and Corporate Citizenship
From an in-house perspective, a central topic is how to strategically anchor corporate giving in a better way. Foohey (2004) comes to the conclusion that social involvement is being employed strategically in many companies and aids in achieving the company’s goals, but this occurs at a rather low level. Googins and Rochlin (2008) also view a better strategic alignment between involvement and the company’s goals, as well as further training in and professionalizing the management of corporate citizenship programs and measures as the most important challenges in the future. In German-speaking countries corporative giving has only been paid little attention. Even in the more comprehensive publications, articles or keywords about corporate giving are scarce; whereas, the more general aspects of corporate involvement and other instruments such as corporate volunteering are given broader attention. In
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business praxis there is an increasing need for efficient donation management, as the number of donation requests has risen. In particular, opportunities, and instruments for measuring success in terms of social impact as well as in relation to achieving company goals are viewed as necessary (Na¨hrlich, 2008: 189). Businesses and Society
Protecting the environment, financing social welfare systems, as well as promoting democracy and education are central global challenges. The part that companies can play in solving such problems goes beyond a pure financial contribution in the narrow sense of corporate giving (Schwab, 2008; Scherer & Palazzo, 2008). The role of companies in society is changing and with it their relationship to the state and civil society and the types of cooperation with public agencies and nonprofit organizations as well. At the same time it does not only concern the positive social contribution that companies can make, but also the question of how negative economic consequences can be avoided or reduced. Not only does the current financial crisis require action, but previous cases of, for example, bribery and corruption in applying for contracts, falsifying financial statements, child labor and pollution of the environment also point to a lack in responsibility towards customers, owners, employees, and the environment.
Cross-References
▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Corporate ▶ Fundraising ▶ Marketing ▶ Raiffeisen Banks ▶ Social Entrepreneurship ▶ Venture philanthropy
References/Further Readings Achleitner, A. (2006). Social Entrepreneurship und Venture Philanthropie – Erste Ansa¨tze in Deutschland. Erschienen in: Iris Hausladen (Hrsg.): Management am Puls der Zeit – Strategien, Konzepte und Methoden. Mu¨nchen: TCW-Verlag 2007, S. 57–70. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2002). Generosity of Australian businesses, from http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/3568 44094DDD6666CA256BE50004530F/$File/81570_2000–01.pdf Australian Bureau of Statistics (2008). Arts and culture in Australia: A statistical overview, from http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber. nsf/0/0FDB6275792354A2CA2574520010AD6F/$File/41720_2008% 20(first%20edition).pdf Bennett, R. (1998). Corporate philanthropy in France, Germany, and the UK: International comparisons of commercial orientation towards giving in European Nations. In: International Marketing Review 15, S. 458–475.
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Bruhn, M. (2003). Sponsoring. Systematische Planung und integrativer Einsatz. Wiesbaden: Gabler Verlag. Business Civic Leadership Center (2008). Report on the state of corporate community investment. Washington, DC. Business in the Community (2003). Corporate foundations – building a sustainable foundation for corporate giving. A research report. London Campbell, D., Moore, G., & Metzger, M. (2002). Corporate philanthropy in the U.K. 1985–2000 some empirical findings. Journal of Business Ethics, 39(1–2/August 2002), S. 29–41. Chronicle of Philanthropy (2008). A gloomy giving outlook. Washington, DC. Ciconte, B. L., & Jacob, J. (2009). Chap. 10 Corporate fundraising. In Fundraising basics: A complete guide. Sudbury: Jones and Bartlett. Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (2008). Giving in numbers, 2008 edition. New York. Council on Foundations (2009). What is corporate giving?, from http://www.cof.org/members/content.cfm?itemnumber = 1247& navItemNumber = 2417 Foohey, P. (2004). Theory and evidence. Corporate philanthropy: Strategic in nature, poor in execution. New York: New York University. Forbes (2008). America’s most generous corporations. New York. Forsa – Gesellschaft fu¨r Sozialforschung und statistische Analysen (2005). Corporate Social Responsibilty in Deutschland. Untersuchung im Auftrag der Initiative neue soziale Marktwirtschaft. Berlin. Fuljahn, A. (2008). Cause-related marketing in Deutschland: Theoretische und empirische Analyse der Konsumentenreaktionen. Saarbru¨cken: Vdm Verlag Dr. Mu¨ller. Giving USA (2007). A publication of Giving USA foundation, researched and written by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Googins, B. K., & Rochlin, S. A. (2008). Corporate citizenship in the United States. In H. Backhaus-Maul, C. Biedermann, S. Na¨hrlich, J. Polterauer (Hrsg.), Corporate Citizenship in Deutschland. Bilanz und Perspektiven (pp. 454–480). Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag. Hall, P. D. (1989). Business giving and social investment in the United States. In R. Magat (Hrsg.), Philanthropic giving. Studies in varieties and goals (pp. 221–245). New York: Oxford University Press. John, R. (2006). Venture philanthropy. The evolution of high engagement philanthropy in Europe. Skoll Centre Working Paper, Ma¨rz 2006. Kamens, D. H. (1985). A theory of corporate civic giving. Sociological Perspectives, 28(1), S29–50. LBG Research Institute (2008). Doing more with less: How the economic downturn will impact corporate giving in 2009. Stamford, CT. Mecking, C. (2008). Corporate giving. Unternehmensspende, sponsoring und insbesondere Unternehmensstiftung. In H. Backhaus-Maul, C. Biedermann, S. Na¨hrlich, & J. Polterauer (Hrsg.), Corporate citizenship in Deutschland. Bilanz und Perspektiven (pp. 307–322). Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag. Na¨hrlich, S. (2008). Tue Gutes und profitiere davon. Zum Nutzen von Corporate Citizenship Aktivita¨ten. In H. Backhaus-Maul, C. Biedermann, S. Na¨hrlich, & J. Polterauer (Hrsg.), Corporate citizenship in Deutschland. Bilanz und Perspektiven (pp. 183–200). Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag. Na¨hrlich, S., & Biedermann, C. (2008). Spenden-und Stiftungsengagements deutscher Banken. Paper. Noble, G., Cantrell, J., Kyriazis, E., & Algie, J. (2008). Motivations and forms of corporate giving behaviour: Insights from Australia. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 13(4), S315–325. Philanthropy New Zealand. (2007). Payroll giving: An overview, from http://giving.org.nz/files/Payroll%20Giving%20Reflective%20Paper_ 0.pdf
Scherer, A. G., & Palazzo, G. (2008). Handbook of research on global corporate citizenship. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Schwab, K. (2008). Global Corporate Citizenship. Working With Governments and Civil Society. Foreign Affairs, 87(1), S107–118. The Conference Board (2008). The 2007 corporate contributions report. New York. The Guardian (2006). FTSE 100 giving list 2005. London, from http:// image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Society/documents/2006/11/08/ftse100. pdf Useem, M., & Kuttner, S. I. (1984). Corporate contributions to the nonprofit sector. Working Paper No. 94, New Haven, CT: Ponpo.
Corporate Social Responsibility ANTHONY J. FILIPOVITCH Minnesota State University-Mankato, Mankato, MN, USA
Introduction During his first term as president of the United States in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan embarked on an ambitious plan to privatize much of the federal domestic program (Frederick, 2006). His domestic funding cuts were to be made up in local communities through private sector provision of services and private sector support of community agencies. Since the private sector is more efficient than the public sector (it was argued), better services would be offered at less expense; since the provision of services would be decentralized, more focused services could be provided more responsively. His program was not unique in expecting that the vast, untapped resources of the corporate sector could be enlisted to solve all manner of problems. Community development agencies also have their hands out for ‘‘public–private partnerships.’’ Local government officials look to private foundations to fund unpopular projects for which they dare not spend tax revenues. Often, these ‘‘partners’’ expect to set the agenda for the private sector to fund, although they come to the table empty-handed. Corporations, for their part, have found business opportunities in meeting community needs. But in some cases, those opportunities have turned out to be an exercise in marketing or public relations more than meeting a community need. Other community needs have gone ‘‘unsponsored’’ when no corporation found a business opportunity in them. Gifts of corporate products can also be a way to unload unwanted goods.
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There is a corporate interest in the public good, but that interest is often more subtle than the community imagines, and failure to master those subtleties risks poisoning the well for further public–private partnerships. Should that happen, the corporation will suffer along with the community because, as the proverb has it, ‘‘[w]hether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it’s going to be hard on the pitcher.’’
Definition Most of the writing about corporate social responsibility is quick to point out that the term has no single, commonly accepted definition (e.g., Smith & Ward, 2007). Every definition has at its core some sense of corporate duty or responsibility that goes beyond or is other than simple profit maximization. In other words, just as there is more to life than ‘‘making a living,’’ so too there is more to a corporation’s existence than just making a profit. A business corporation has a duty to be ‘‘socially responsible’’ in addition to being profitable. The differences arise, as will be seen below, in the meaning assigned to ‘‘social responsibility.’’
Key Issues Private business corporations are machines for using the market to generate capital. Managing the traditional factors of land, labor, and capital, corporations attempt to minimize the costs of inputs and maximize the value of outputs; in other words, they attempt to make a profit. Milton Friedman (1962) argued that, once the (minimized) inputs of land and labor are satisfied, the surplus value of outputs should go to the capital – to the shareholders in the firm. Others (Bowen, 1953; Committee for Economic Development, 1971; O’Toole, 1985; Tuleja, 1985) argued that the shareholders are only one of several stakeholders in a firm, and the role of management is to maximize the satisfaction of customers, employees, and the community as well. For them, performance is evaluated not only by financial return (the ‘‘bottom line’’) and intangible value (the difference between book and market value of stock), but also by social performance. From this perspective, profit is the reward for serving society well and business thrives in a community that is prosperous. From the perspective of a socially responsible firm, there are at least four stakeholders in the firm: employees, suppliers, stockholders, and customers (and consumers more generally) (Committee for Economic Development, 1971). While different authors identify these groups differently (Laszlo [2003] expands this list to ten categories,
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including others like government, the local community, and unions), all share the emphasis on a broader understanding of the constituencies to whom a corporation is responsible and a broadened time frame in which the success of corporate action is judged. Although the concept of a socially responsible corporation is not new (John Deere in the United States, for example, was an early practitioner in the late nineteenth century), the confluence of three forces pushed it to the forefront in the 1980s in the United States: The shift from founder-controlled to publicly held corporations placed greater emphasis on long-term profitable growth. Since corporations are enduring institutions which intend to continue long after the death of the founders, they have a greater interest in trading long-range sustainability for short-term gains (Committee for Economic Development, 1971). Second, the displacement of family leadership by professional managers shifted the emphasis of corporate management. Not so much an ‘‘owner,’’ the modern manager was more of a ‘‘trustee’’ who must balance the interests of multiple constituencies (Committee for Economic Development, 1971). And third, welfare economists described ways in which the market alone fails to provide an optimal allocation of goods and services. Garrett Hardin (1968) and Thomas Schelling (1978) demonstrated that individually rational decisions can add up to irrational group decisions (a situation which violates Adam Smith’s assumption of an ‘‘Invisible Hand’’ which guides the market). Economists of both the left (Bish, 1971) and the right (Savas, 1982) developed a formal understanding of ‘‘public goods’’ – goods and services which cannot be served by the market but which are necessary for the orderly progress of society (including the market). In practice, corporate social responsibility has expressed itself in three ways: ● Smaller, privately held firms frequently engage in a form of charity. The emphasis here is on a duty to respond to community need, with no direct tie to the corporation’s interest. In larger corporations, this approach can lead to professionally managed corporate giving programs which follow the patterns of pure philanthropy. The strength of this approach is the diversity of issues that it can address; its weakness is the potential lack of discipline (Ylvisaker, 1984). ● Many firms pursue the public good as an expression of enlightened self-interest. A number of arguments have been offered for tying business self-interest to community interest. Some argue that business does well in a community that is doing well (this was Henry Ford’s
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defense for paying his workers the outlandish wage of $5 a day – he needed to pay them well so they could afford to buy his cars). Others point out that corporations depend on the goodwill and good order of society. If contracts are not honored, if property is not secure, if qualified labor is not available, a business cannot thrive. Further, by behaving in a constructive, efficient, and adaptive manner corporations can avoid the risk of governmental or societal interference which might be more restrictive, costly, and ungainly than what corporations themselves might provide (Committee for Economic Development, 1971). ● A third approach to corporate action in service to public good is to capitalize on what business does best, which is business. A corporation can organize itself to exploit societal needs as business opportunities, developing profit-making, entrepreneurial line operations. This approach combines an awareness of the corporation’s responsibility to meet society’s needs with a conviction that, given the opportunity, the market is the best way to meet those needs. Although the corporation uses the market to meet those needs and prepares a business plan that anticipates at least recovering direct costs (but perhaps shows a profit only in the long run), the corporation is also prepared to bear substantial risk and to forego higher rates of return on investment in order to respond to a societal need (Gilmore, 1986). Corporations have balanced these three approaches in different ways over time. Drawing mostly on the North American experience, Frederick (2006) divides the development of the concept of corporate social responsibility into four historical eras: ● The earliest stage focused on the role of a good ‘‘corporate citizen,’’ and corporate involvement in charity and community improvement programs. There was little agreement on what was to be done or how it was to be done; the emphasis was on exhorting corporations to realize a duty to do anything at all. In this phase, corporate social responsibility and corporate giving were often considered to be synonymous. ● By the 1980s, the discussion shifted to corporate reputation and stakeholder responsiveness. Corporations began to target their social responsibility efforts to stakeholder demands, creating public affairs departments, managing stakeholder involvement and, in the United States, forming political action committees (PACs) to influence legislation. On the heels of wellpublicized scandals like the tobacco industry’s
handling of lung cancer research, Hooker Chemical’s handling of pollution at Love Canal, AH Robins handling of medical complications from its Dalkon Shield device, Dow Corning’s issues with leaky silicone breast implants, and the Ford Pinto’s exploding gas tanks, corporate social responsibility was seen as good public relations and as a response to various advocacy groups who were targeting corporations for the (sometimes unintended) negative impacts of their business. Not only did socially responsible activities counter negative publicity, it was argued, but it could even have a positive effect on corporate profits. Even though empirical research has been unable to demonstrate a clear link between profitability or growth and social responsibility (Kolstad, 2007), corporations seemed to find a link between doing good and looking good (Himmelstein, 1997). ● By the 1990s, the emphasis shifted from general reputation to corporate social performance, accountability, and compliance. Corporations voluntarily adopted codes of ethical conduct and, in 1998, Royal Dutch/ Shell published the first corporate social responsibility report. This approach, focused on external measures and reporting a relative position on various scales, turned what had been a normative focus on ethical behavior into a morally neutral report card. Since such reports are self-generated, they ran the risk of becoming more an exercise in marketing than a hardnosed auditing of social accounts. After all, the nowdefunct Enron Corporation had regularly published its corporate social performance report right up until the scandals brought it down. Nonetheless, as Bowen (1953) had pointed out long before, voluntary self-regulation and reporting can forestall or even prevent government regulation. ● In the twenty-first century, the focus of corporate social responsibility has broadened to include the role of corporations in addressing environmental sustainability as well as social crises (Laszlo, 2003). Many corporations now report a ‘‘triple bottom line,’’ addressing profitability, social impact, and environmental impact and there has been a growth of social accountability oversight organizations such as Social Accountability International and the Ethos Institute. Social Accountability International works around the globe, the Ethos Institute works primarily in Brazil, both of them focusing on training and certifying corporations in ‘‘socially responsible’’ business practices, including health and safety standards and fair labor practices such as adequate pay, reasonable working hours, not using child labor or forced labor. In return,
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companies may use their certification to assure buyers, whether supply-chain partners or consumers, that their products are manufactured in a socially responsible manner. A number of the tensions in using the term ‘‘corporate social responsibility’’ run through this chronological narrative (see also Geva, 2008). For some, the term implies a normative command that corporations act in a certain way; for others, it is a neutral yardstick for placing a corporation’s actions along a continuum of possible behaviors. For some, a responsible corporation is one which meets the requirements of the law and behaves ethically; for others, it implies going beyond avoiding what is illegal and unethical in order to respond positively to a duty to do good. For some, social responsibility is a brake on untrammeled corporate greed for profits; for others it is a goal to be achieved through all of a corporation’s actions. For some, social responsibility is an objective in tension with other corporate objectives; for others all of the objectives of a corporation are mutually entailed in a symbiotic interdependence. For some, corporate social responsibility is an exercise in corporate self-interest; for others, it is an exercise of virtue and altruism.
International Perspectives Internationally, the conceptual discussion of corporate social responsibility is very similar to the North American discussion. The differences come from its application in business practice in various parts of the world. A recent book on Global Corporate Citizenship (Dayal-Gulati & Finn, 2007) covers the same categories of issues developed by Frederick (2006): economic empowerment (community improvement phase), corporate transparency (legal and ethical responsiveness phase), social issues such as workforce development and health care in the AIDS crisis (social performance phase), and green management and green business, such as flex-fuel technology (environmental responsibility phase). A recent review of the experience in the European Union (Schutter, 2008) found that corporate social responsibility there began with an emphasis on environmental responsibility, but is now shifting to corporate performance and reporting. As was the case earlier in the United States, he raises the question of whether the ‘‘business case’’ (corporate self-interest) is strong enough to ensure responsibility or whether EU regulation would eventually be required to ensure social and environmental responsibility. A study of corporate social responsibility in Bulgaria, recently emerging from what is described as a ‘‘corporate paternalism’’ socialist model (Iankova, 2008) and another study of corporate
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social responsibility in Ghana (Ofori & Hinson, 2007) both find a local corporate culture that subscribes to normative and duty-based models more than the utilitarian and performance-based models currently dominant in the rest of Europe and North America.
Future Directions The absence of a precise and commonly accepted definition of corporate social responsibility is not necessarily a problem – terms like ‘‘patriotism,’’ ‘‘public good,’’ and (recently) ‘‘terrorism,’’ have proven quite serviceable despite their myriad meanings. Several recent works are attempting to reframe the different meanings as differences in discourse (Jonker & Marberg, 2007) or differences in sense making (Basu & Palazzo, 2008), but they have not (yet) led to a serviceable application. On the other hand, Aviva Geva (2008) has developed a conceptual model which finds support in a more process-oriented paper by Porter and Kramer (2006). Geva (2008) describes a ‘‘concentric circle’’ model of corporate social responsibility by which the economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities of a firm are integrated, all sharing a common core. The graphic image of this is a set of concentric circles, like a bull’s-eye, with economics as the smallest, inner circle and philanthropy as the largest, outer circle. Such a model implies a commitment by the corporation to operate in a way that promotes the good of society. Profit is not separate from social good and economic calculations cannot ignore the social (and environmental) costs in those calculations. Further, this commitment should be central to the way the corporation acts, whether or not such action is required by law or custom. Porter and Kramer (2006) describe in some detail a direct linkage between corporate competitive advantage and social responsibility – not in the utilitarian sense that social responsibility is good for the bottom line, but in the ontological sense that socially responsible business is the bottom line. Social responsibility can itself be the source of a corporation’s competitive advantage, its unique value in the market. In Porter and Kramer’s sense, a corporation earns its profits by applying its resources (human, organizational, and capital) to activities that benefit society. They refer to this as ‘‘shared value,’’ and insist that every business decision should seek the opportunity for shared value. From their perspective, corporate strategy is not about best practices or scoring highly on a checklist of performance standards; it is about focusing a corporation’s resources in a unique way to benefit society (‘‘good citizenship’’) and improve the market context (‘‘mitigating harm’’ from the procedures by which a firm creates value) as part of its business strategy.
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One area that is particularly underdeveloped in the literature on corporate social responsibility is a positive exploration of a socially responsible relationship between the corporate and the governmental sector. Most of the literature focuses on the tension between the two sectors. It treats the government as a constraint on the corporation (the regulatory function) or as a controlling of the corporation (the policing function). In practice, the government and corporations often work together to achieve common goals; but the literature has not developed such collaborations as a significant element of the theory of corporate social responsibility. Describing and analyzing such positive relationships between corporations and their governments could be fertile ground for future research. While discussion in the literature over the last 30 years has done much to clarify and sharpen the differences between the various connotations of the term ‘‘corporate social responsibility,’’ it has not been able to resolve those differences. For the foreseeable future, the language of social responsibility will continue to embrace many dialects, some of which are barely intelligible to each other even though they have all sprung from a common source.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Ford, Henry ▶ Goods and Services, Types of ▶ Instituto Ethos de Empresas e Responsabilidade Social ▶ Marketing ▶ Performance and impact measures, outcomes ▶ Public Benefit and Public Good ▶ Social Accountability International ▶ Stakeholders ▶ Sustainability
Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Geva, A. (2008). Three models of corporate social responsibility: Interrelationships between theory, research, and practice. Business & Society Review, 113(1), 1–41. Gilmore, J. T. (1986). A framework for responsible business behavior. Business & Society Review, 58(1), 31–34. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248. Himmelstein, J. L. (1997). Looking good and doing good. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Iankova, E. A. (2008). From corporate paternalism to corporate social responsibility in post-communist Europe. The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 29(Spring), 75–90. Jonker, J., & Marberg, A. (2007). Corporate social responsibility: Quo vadis? Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 27, 107–118. Kolstad, I. (2007). Why firms should not always maximize profit. Journal of Business Ethics, 76(2), 137–146. Laszlo, C. (2003). The sustainable company. Washington, DC: Island Press. Ofori, D. F., & Hinson, R. E. (2007). Corporate social responsibility (CSR) perspectives of leading firms in Ghana. Corporate Governance, 7(2), 178–193. O’Toole, J. (1985). Vanguard management. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Porter, M., & Kramer, M. (2006). Strategy & society. Harvard Business Review, 84(12), 78–92. Savas, E. S. (1982). Privatizing the public sector. Chatham, NY: Chatham House. Schelling, T. (1978). Micromotives and macrobehavior. New York: W.W. Norton. Schutter, O. de (2008) Corporate social responsibility European style. European Law Journal, 14(2), 203. Smith, N. C., & Ward, H. (2007). Corporate social responsibility at a crossroads? Business Strategy Review, 18(1), 16–21. Tuleja, T. (1985). Beyond the bottom line. New York: Facts on File. Ylvisaker, P. (1984). Philanthropy in a favorable climate. In V. Esposito (Ed.), Conscience and community. New York: Peter Lang.
Corporation for National and Community Service JESSICA MOORE
References/Further Readings
Address of Organization
Basu, K., & Palazzo, G. (2008). Corporate social responsibility: A process model of sensemaking. Academy of Management Review, 33(1), 122–136. Bish, R. (1971). The public economy of metropolitan areas. Chicago, IL: Markham. Bowen, H. R. (1953). Social responsibilities of the businessman. New York: Harper & Row. Committee for Economic Development (1971). Social responsibilities of business corporations. Washington, DC: CED. Dayal-Gulati, A., & Finn, M. W. (Eds.) (2007). Global corporate citizenship. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Frederick, W. C. (2006). Corporation, be good! The story of corporate social responsibility. Indianopolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing.
1201 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20525 USA www.cns.gov
Introduction The Corporation for National and Community Service is an independent federal organization of the United States of America that acts as a service catalyst by providing strategic critical support to volunteer organizations that deliver much-needed services to communities throughout the US.
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Brief History The CNCS was created by the National and Community Service Trust Act in 1993 in order to connect Americans of all ages and backgrounds with opportunities to give back to their communities and their nation. The legislation, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, officially established the CNCS programs it would oversee: SeniorCorps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America. The CNCS prides itself as being evidence of the United States’ history of commitment to building a culture of citizenship, service, and responsibility.
Mission The mission of the CNCS is to improve lives, strengthen communities, and foster civic engagement through US service and volunteering initiatives.
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also provide vital assistance to national and local nonprofits, schools, faith-based and community organizations, and various public agencies.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and the Elderly ▶ Volunteer Management ▶ Volunteers
References/Further Readings Ashby, C. N. (2003). Corporation for National and Community Service: Preliminary observations on the National Service Trust and AmeriCorps. Washington, DC: General Accounting Office. Metz, A. (1997). National Service and AmeriCorps: An annotated bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Activities The CNCS provides grants, training, and technical assistance to developing and expanding volunteer and service organizations. The CNCS also explores, develops, and models effective approaches for using volunteers to meet the US’s human needs. Research is also conducted and disseminated by the CNCS in order to help develop and cultivate knowledge that will enhance the overall effectiveness of national and community service programs.
Structure and Governance The CNCS is governed by a Chief Executive Officer and a Board of Directors, all of whom are appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate. The Chief Executive Officer oversees the agency, which includes about 600 employees operating throughout the United States and its territories. The Board of Directors sets policies and direction for the CNCS and is accountable for all actions carried out by the Chief Executive Officer with respect to standards, policies, procedures, programs and initiatives as are necessary to carry out the organization’s mission.
Funding The fiscal budget for the CNCS is provided by the United States Government. The 2009 budget appropriation provided to the CNCS totaled $888,462,000.
Major Accomplishments Since the organization’s inception, over 400,000 individuals have served in AmeriCorps, in excess of 1 billion service hours have been generated by Senior Corps volunteers, and more than 1 million high school students participate annually in service-learning initiatives funded by Learn and Serve America. CNCS members and volunteers
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Corporatism MAX STEPHENSON JR. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
Introduction Recent years have witnessed growing interest in crosssectoral collaborations and partnerships among leaders of for-profit, nonprofit, and public institutions at both the national and international scales. These cooperative networks typically join civil society organization representatives, envoys of governmental organizations and business people to address a common concern. Such collaborations have become increasingly important, as leaders in the various sectors have grappled with complex social challenges whose contours appear to require common engagement and cooperation. Examples include efforts to address national and international environmental degradation, provide humanitarian relief following conflicts and disaster events, assure effective medical care for the most poor, oversee alternative energy research and development and secure social services for the needy. These cases suggest that the search to create inter-sectoral collaboration to address large-scale social concerns has now become commonplace. In addition to the increased complexity of public problems now confronting nations around the globe, at least two additional long-lived trends have fueled creation of these collaborative networks. First, for several decades, proponents of neoliberalism have persistently called into question the legitimacy and efficacy of the state in
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addressing many social needs. These thinkers and policy advocates have argued either for state withdrawal from such responsibilities or for third sector or for-profit entities to address them on behalf of the state. This stance has been justified with arguments that these organizations were either more representative or efficient or effective or all of these, than state bureaucracies could be in providing such services. In practice, however, the state role has not been devolved as often as advocates have urged and a complex structure of government-overseen contracts and collaborations has developed which have required the creation of new networked and interorganizational structures. Many of these, though not all, are de facto led by public representatives ultimately responsible for creating sufficient cooperation among those participating to secure desired governmental results. A second trend fueling the development of intersectoral collaboratives aimed at addressing complex social problems is a broad belief among many Western world leaders that past public efforts often had overreached and not achieved their stated aspirations. These perceived failures, themselves sometimes still debated, led many national leaders to a new modesty of public action that sought to draw on the perceived strengths of other sectoral organizations to assist the state in addressing public needs. Those who follow this line of thought have suggested it is better to bring the assumed efficiency of market institutions and the supposed democratic character of nonprofit entities to bear to serve the commonweal when possible in order to overcome the perceived wastefulness and bureaucratic clumsiness and worse, of state institutions. Irrespective of their wellsprings, each of these arguments places collaborative networks in an essentially positive light. As framed by their advocates in recent decades, these entities are necessary to address difficult challenges and overcome the inappropriateness, inadequacies, or ineptitude of state action. One particular form of crosssectoral collaboration now receiving sustained attention at the international scale and which has been adopted from national experience in Europe and Latin America is corporatism. The remainder of this article examines the phenomenon of inter-sectoral collaborative networks through the lens of corporatism, whose dynamics have not always been as welcome as those of collaborative networks more broadly framed. The article evaluates the current trend in the United Nations (UN) system and among other international institutions, including the World Bank, toward the creation of such arrangements involving transnational civil society organizations, international governmental organizations (IGOs) and multinational businesses. The article examines their legitimacy, representativeness,
and transparency/accountability. While the analysis emphasizes the role(s) of civil society organizations in these networks, the reader should keep in mind that these collaboratives also always involve multinational businesses and international governmental organizations. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporatism may usefully help to describe an increasingly employed form of NGO engagement with international governmental (and business) entities, such patterns of interaction will demand ongoing attention and public scrutiny if they are to meet acceptable standards of democratic accountability and legitimacy.
Definition As originally conceived, corporatism sought to provide a variety of functional interest groups – prototypically business groups and labor unions – formal and formalized opportunities to press their claims in national political systems perhaps most notably in Germany and Austria. The groups so engaged were normally peak associations and usually participated in tripartite councils that functioned separately from traditional parliamentary institutions. Government, business, and union representatives met and worked in these councils to attain consensus concerning possible policy choices, and their efforts were then introduced into public choice-making (and often quickly legitimated) as representative of the political will of large shares of society. The councils explicitly sought consensus and all concerned assumed the legitimacy of their role in shaping public decision-making processes. Schmitter (1979: 8) has defined this original conception of corporatism succinctly: Corporatism can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, "
compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly with in their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and support.
A variation of this form of governance involving civil society organizations has been applied in the international arena since at least 1999 when then Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan called for creation of a new sort of ‘‘global compact’’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As part of an ongoing package of institutional reforms, the Secretary General sought development of a collaborative among relevant representatives of UN entities, civil society organizations
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and businesses. Annan initially envisioned these groupings working together in corporatist-like networks to address hotly contested international environmental protection and human- and worker-rights issues. While originally commissioned by the Secretary General to advance his reform agenda, the Report of the Cardoso Panel on United Nations–Civil Society Relations, released in 2004, We the Peoples: Civil Society, the United Nations and Global Governance, was not well received by Annan or many other UN officials (Willetts, 2006: 308). Nonetheless, and perhaps paradoxically, the Panel reinforced the trend toward increased United Nations and other international organization–civil society interaction by calling for still greater engagement by these organizations with civil society institutions around the world (UN Doc.A/58/817 June 11, 2004, Willetts, 2006). In general, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had an incentive to participate actively in conferences or in other forums when called upon by the United Nations, at least in those areas of internationalization of policies and action that would permit them to enlist the international entities to assist them to obtain leverage for change in the policies of lagging individual nation-states. Linkages with IGOs provided NGOs and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) potential opportunities to influence norm-violating states (sometimes their own home states). This ‘‘boomerang model’’ gained particular currency in linking social movements to larger scale change opportunities in specific policy domains, including, perhaps most notably, human rights (Risse & Sikkink, 1999). These efforts included the integration of civil society organizations into UN operations in humanitarian relief via the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response and the Economic and Social Council and in broader governance and policymaking via the NGO Working Group on the Security Council. These and similar initiatives institutionalized collaborative inter-sectoral consultative institutional arrangements in the late 1990s and early in the present decade (Martens, 2006). While NGOS do not enjoy a formal status in the UN General Assembly, they have now been integrated into formal consultation roles. Taken as a whole, the trend has been toward involving NGOs and INGOs in mediating specific interests in collaborative arrangements with UN and other international entities and for-profit institutions.
Key Issues The chief challenges confronting these evolving international UN-NGO-business corporatist networks ultimately are democratic in character and concern whether and how their individual organizational members can be said legitimately to represent and be accountable to either the
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broader sectors from which they are drawn or the populations/stakeholders of the nations or international organizations they serve. These concerns are treated in turn next. The Challenge of Legitimacy
However conceived, these corporatist networks of institutions must confront the challenge of legitimacy. That is, these organizations whose members are unelected, whose gatherings, agendas, and roles are not subject to direct popular control and yet whose existence is aimed at securing consensus to proceed with policy on behalf of that populace or set of stakeholders must operate in ways that secure broad popular awareness and consent. Domestic corporatist network decision-makers are indirectly accountable for their choices to the population they purportedly represent via the state’s policymakers whom they at least implicitly serve. Policymakers can, at least in theory, reject the claims of the corporatist councils advising them. But this indirect link is weaker in international networks in which corporatist decisions serve international institutions, which themselves possess few direct connections to the populations of the states they represent. This situation suggests an ongoing paradox. Corporatist organizational forms are at least partly justified on the basis of their supposed advantages in permitting the stakeholders involved, who are viewed as aggregating the popular will for large shares of relevant populations, to come to consensus on difficult topics confronting governance. Yet, in truth, these organizations do not directly represent those populations and therefore may not claim legitimacy for their recommendations. When these recommendations are simply accepted by relevant authoritative actors, they may reasonably be challenged as illegitimate because they were never subject to all but the most indirect form of democratic accountability. They emerge as contested, contestable, or illegitimate. The Challenge of Representation
Whether operative in nations or at the international scale, corporatist networks are open to the challenge that they do not represent the diversity of the interests of the sectors they purport to represent. They are comprised of peak associations and the representational capacity of trade unions or NGOs, for example, is often contested although these entities are joined not only by shared economic, but often fraternal or normative bonds. To be truly representative of sectors, these groupings would need to embrace the full diversity of those represented and do so in a nearly holistic fashion or be subject to popular accountability in some form. For UN-affiliated international groupings established further to Annan’s agenda for institutional change, both of these conditions have been difficult to attain.
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While a number of well-known and well-established international nongovernmental organizations based in developed nations (e.g., Project Hope International, Doctors without Borders, Oxfam International) have been called upon for counsel by the United Nation and other international organizations, their Southern counterparts have complained vigorously that their views neither represent nor legitimate any perspective other than their own. Instead, representatives of these organizations suggest that Northern NGOs are in fact too often arrogant and unwilling to share capacity or wherewithal that would allow their Southern cousins to participate effectively as well. Moreover, Northern NGOs are not, their critics complain, close enough to conditions on the ground in the developing world to represent them as important international policies and concerns are considered. In short, Northern INGOs although often invited to participate in corporatist international networks, because they are perceived to ‘‘represent’’ an important sector of the political economy, arguably often do not attain in practice the standing they are accorded in the abstract. There is another and perhaps more significant challenge linked to the representativeness of corporatist forms in international governance and politics that concerns whether the notion underpinning the strategy – the direct representation of social interests in international governance decision-making – can ever be sanctioned as democratic, however framed. In the abstract, it appears that if left open to any civil society organization (or for-profit) willing to ask to join, this form of inter-sectoral collaboration might be representative. In practice, however, the ability to engage in such advocacy depends both on capacity to monitor and become aware of such opportunities and on the fiscal and human resources to address them once identified. Many civil society organizations possess neither and may not feel comfortable relying on other institutions to represent their interests. This has certainly been so for the many Southern NGOs that have complained bitterly that their Northern counterparts do not represent their perceived interests in UN-related collaborative advisory or advocacy networks. Notably, this slippage occurs before the corporatist network even meets to develop consensus and offer its guidance to authoritative decision-makers. Another challenge to the representativeness of networks is still more basic: Whether most NGOs were established in the first instance to represent the broader populations from which they spring. Concerned citizens typically create NGOs to provide a service or address a perceived need. They are not created further to popular election or plebiscite, and they may, indeed often do, provide services to otherwise unpopular constituencies –
the homeless, drug addicted or alcoholic, for example. NGOs do not represent relevant political constituencies. Electorates at the ballot box do not periodically popularly sanction their work or claims. Indeed, for those seeking to assist troubled clients, it is not always clear that those individuals would agree that the NGOs working on their behalf are doing so in ways with which they would concur. This reality highlights another concern, whether and how IGO corporatist networks and their organizational participants may be made to function in democratically accountable ways. NGOs are not democratic in the sense of serving general community interests or the popular will, as understood electorally. Nonetheless, they are eminently democratic in arising from the felt concerns of at least a segment of a population who take direct action in concert to address an issue. If this is true for NGOs, it is still more significant for INGOs that operate transnationally and may count no single populace their authoritative overseer in a democratic (electoral) sense. The Twin Challenges of Transparency and Accountability
The capacity of corporatist networks to produce consensus positions to secure paths forward for policymakers is accompanied by less public transparency and accountability among the institutions engaged than might otherwise be desirable to ensure democratic accountability. These networks risk compromising the multiple stakeholder interests involved by eliciting undue pressures to cooperate and compromise that may badly serve those in whose name the stands are taken. More than this, civil society organizations participating in these networks may lose some share of the identity with their donors that allow them to retain a degree of public salience and thereby to raise funds. More precisely, INGOs need to be able to demonstrate to their stakeholders that they are providing vital services and achieving their goals and objectives in doing so. To the extent that engagement in networks make it more difficult for donors to understand the independent roles of the NGOs participating in them or otherwise makes their operations less transparent or open to public scrutiny, it may be more difficult for them to attain enough trust and salience to raise necessary funds, let alone to assure accountability for choices made. More generally, international corporatist networks may not be readily salient to the populations they serve and affect most directly. To the extent that network choices are not clear and open to the public and their potential impacts widely discussed, it will be difficult for their members to claim even a modicum of democratic accountability for their actions. Since neither the
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participating NGOs nor the participating international or business organizations possess direct democratic accountability in the first instance, this situation represents an especially difficult dilemma. Overall, this reality suggests that NGOs particularly, will want to be especially careful to make their roles in these networks transparent so as to secure and maintain a modicum of accountability to the constituencies that support them – if only for the purpose of assuring continued support for their operations.
Future Directions The last 2 decades have witnessed the rapid growth of corporatist networks in the international governance system. Despite the skepticism of many governments and ongoing concerns among participating NGOs that the interests of their sector not be lost in the process of such engagement or lost altogether, these forms of organization, often dubbed ‘‘partnerships’’ to connote their positive potentials, have proven quite durable and even popular. But they bring with them enduring concerns about whether and how their deliberations and recommendations may be rendered legitimate, representative, accountable, and transparent. As it happens, none of these attributes or states is readily attained given the realities of the international system and the fact that the outputs of the great bulk of these networks are mediated by IGOs; themselves relatively insulated from the populations their efforts serve. As with the broad-scale adoption of intersectoral organizational arrangements at the national scale, international decision-makers may expect that corporatist collaboratives of the sort described in this article will continue to raise these concerns. To address them effectively will require the development of mechanisms that assure relevant network stakeholders that ‘‘their’’ organizational representatives are able to behave with relative autonomy as well as with their best interests at heart. These are not static criteria and neither will be easy to attain or maintain. Rather, they will require both shared norms and management systems that ensure the legitimacy, representation, transparency, and accountability claims highlighted as critical in this analysis.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Legitimacy ▶ Partnerships ▶ Social Movements ▶ Transparency
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▶ Transnational Forums and Summits ▶ UN Global Compact
References/Further Readings Brown, L. D. (2008). Creating credibility: Legitimacy and accountability for transnational civil society. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Brown, L. D., & Timmer, V. (2006). Transnational civil society and social learning. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 17(1), 1–16. Crouch, C., & Streeck, W. (Eds.) (2006). The diversity of democracy: Corporatism, social order and political conflict. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Fox, J. A., & Brown, L. D. (1998). The struggle for accountability: NGOs, social movements and the world bank. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martens, K. (2001). Non-governmental organizations as corporatist mediator? An analysis of NGOs in the UNESCO system. Global Society, 15(4), 387–404. Martens, K. (2006). NGOs in the United Nations system: Evaluating theoretical approaches. Journal of International Development, 18(5), 691–700. Ottoway, M. (2001). Corporatism goes Global: International organizations, nongovernmental organization networks and transnational business. Global Governance, 7(3), 265–292. Reinicke, W., & Deng, E. (2000). Critical choices: The United Nations, networks and the future of global governance. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Risse, T., & Sikkink, K. (1999). The socialization of human right norms into domestic practices: Introduction. In T. Rise, S. C. Ropp, & K. Sikkink (Eds.), The power of human rights, international norms and domestic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruggie, J. G. (2002). The theory and practice of learning networks: Corporate social responsibility and the global compact. The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 27(10), 27–36, Spring 2002. Schmitter, P. (1979). Still the century of corporatism? In P. Schmitter & G. Lehmbruch (Eds.), Trends towards corporatist intermediation (pp. 7–52). London: Sage. UN. Doc. A/58/817. (2004). We the peoples: Civil society, the United Nations and global governance. New York: United Nations. Vogel, D. (2005). The market for virtue: The potential and limits of corporate social responsibility. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Willetts, P. (2006). The cardoso report on the UN and civil society: Functionalism, corporatism, or global democracy. Global Governance, 12(3), 305–324.
Cosmopolitanism MARIANO CROCE ‘‘Sapienza’’ Universita` di Roma, Rome, Italy
Introduction The term ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ derives from the Greek word ‘‘kosmopolites,’’ which means, approximately, ‘‘citizen of
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the universe.’’ It refers to two key notions in the conceptual horizon of ancient Greek culture: the kosmos (kόsmος, i.e., the universe or world, in a broad and comprehensive sense) and the polis (pόliς, i.e., the city, as the basic political unity). The former is intended to signify a physical entity which, at the same time, reveals epistemic and ethical features. Actually, the kosmos is a complex order, characterized by an intrinsic harmony and governed by natural laws. The latter circumscribes the space of political action, in which the parties organize themselves. But, in contrast to the restricted notion of polis – namely the bordered space in which the political community (koinonı`a politike` or, in its Latin translation, societas civilis) constitutes itself as an ensemble of citizens who share a political and cultural tradition – in the kosmopolis there are neither foreigners nor strangers, and therefore no political enemy. Modern and contemporary forms of cosmopolitanism embody many features of Greek understanding, in that, by and large, they all claim that human beings belong to the same human community by virtue of their equal nature and their common rationality.
Definition Two factors make it hard to define cosmopolitanism: historical contingencies and conceptual vagueness. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism can be represented as a theoretical, ethical, and political stance, in light of which human beings may become aware of their common nature and their joint human condition. Every form of cosmopolitanism reveals a universalistic tendency insofar as its advocates believe that humans’ equal nature transcends political boundaries and ethnical allegiances. But, if it is true that all the various articulations of cosmopolitanism defend such a tenet, the theoretical structures within which cosmopolitan ideals take form alter significantly the meaning itself of the term ‘‘cosmopolitanism.’’ On the other hand, the general and intuitive meaning of cosmopolitanism is rather vague also because it may correspond both to the class consciousness of frequent travelers (uninterested in any political or social engagement) and to the political projects for a democratic reform of global governance. Hence, in order that the meaning of cosmopolitanism be clarified, it is necessary both to trace it back to its historical origin and developments and to analyze the different meaning that it assumes within the different theoretical frameworks. A common feature of the several forms of cosmopolitanism is the conviction (which sometimes remains a conviction and sometimes is corroborated by theoretical argumentations) that human differences are, at least to
some degree, the result of a social construction. The different symbolic universes – composed of norms, values, beliefs, and principles – which characterize the various cultures are the outcome of a human activity, intended to create a stable order within the natural environment. In light of this comprehension of social reality, cosmopolitans maintain that any culture leaves more or less room for revision and change. What differentiates the various forms of cosmopolitanism addressed below is the way in which this process of revision should be pursued, the scope of it, and the subjects who are required to act.
Historical Background Cosmopolitanism is deeply rooted in Greek culture, where it was a cosmological, physical, social, epistemic, and ethical perspective: It invited human beings to understand the natural world, physical nature, human forms of organization, human knowledge, and human persons as arising from, and implanted in, the same seedbed, i.e., the relation with the universe governed by the logos. This logos is the logical and ontological structure of the world and produces the discrete logoi of human beings. On this reading, any particular tie with a delimited community risks narrowing and harming humans’ comprehension of their real nature and their compliance with the prescriptions of the universal logos. According to Diogenes Laertius, the term kosmou politeˆs was first used by the cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, who wanted to stress his aversion to the traditional and conventional political-territorial bonds. But cosmopolitan way of thinking had penetrated into the Greek reflection since the crisis of the polis. Actually, Plato had already offered a description of sophists as overt enemies of patriotisms and keen advocates of the sociopolitical and biophysical similarity of human beings. Still, their cosmopolitanism was noticeably individualistic and relativistic, for sophists set it out as a critical stance against the conventionality and arbitrariness of political bonds. Famously, stoics were the very first cosmopolitan thinkers. Ancient stoicism was a multifaceted philosophical school stretching over many centuries and countries. Its core tenet was the unity and the orderliness of the kosmos, which was conceived as a complete and comprehensive good. Since they thought of every sphere of reality as ruled by the same logos, stoics held that all human beings (just because they are bestowed with reason) may reach such a logos, regardless of political, cultural, or social distinctions. Hence, according to stoics, inasmuch as universal logos transcends parochial allegiances and national boundaries, by referring to it all human beings may be reckoned to be citizens of the world. Human
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perfection consists properly in the ability to grasp the orderliness and the unity of the world in light of the logos. Within this general framework, Zeno of Citium, the founder of stoicism, and Chrysippus of Soli painted the ideal polis as the homeland of humanity. Nevertheless, Greek cosmopolitanism never acquired the status of a political theory. It was above all a moral and social viewpoint, with several individualistic and apolitical implications. Stoicism was introduced in Rome by Panaetius of Rhodes, and then elaborated by Cicero (who is better classifiable as an eclectic), Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. In addition to the aspects mentioned above, Roman philosophical elaboration conferred on cosmopolitanism philanthropic and legal traits. On the one hand, cosmopolitan thinking impinged on the Roman way to understand social relationships and human common nature, as depicted by the sentence of Terence: ‘‘Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto’’ (‘‘I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.’’). On the other hand, and more importantly, cosmopolitanism turned out to merge with a universalistic conception of the Roman law of peoples (ius gentium), which Roman jurists considered to be somehow based on a broader (and rather vague) natural law (lex naturalis). As a matter of fact, a cosmopolitan standpoint seems to be embodied in the renowned Cicero’s definition of the natural law as the highest reason, rooted in nature, which commands things that must be done and prohibits the opposite. Obviously, Cicero’s understanding is quite far from that of Greek stoics. By defending such a conception of natural law he did not want to embrace a cosmopolitan conception of politics, but to pursue a twofold aim: He tried both to advocate and exalt the Roman republican tradition, and, at the same time, to illuminate a universal moral code which would be able to mitigate Roman imperialism and prevent it from becoming a despotism. This is evidence that not even in Rome cosmopolitanism succeeded in acquiring the status of a political theory and that it served mainly as a moral benchmark. Cosmopolitanism was linked to political action only in that the stoic conception of kosmopolis ended up being an intellectual cover for Roman imperialism. But if the imperial policies actually managed to establish an almost universal commonwealth, many stoic philosophers (Seneca, for instance) were not at ease with the most despotic features of it. The ecumenism of Christian announce rendered cosmopolitanism into a broader universalism, in light of the common relationship with the bearer of the announce, i.e., Christ, the God become man. This was the conceptual basis of the rising Respublica Christiana. But the Middle Ages was crossed by contradictory tendencies of
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universality (under the image of a human common destiny, which prevails over the transient differences among human beings) and particularity (in the form of a vast array of discrete and autonomous territorial entities, freed from close ties with a political center). The dialectic between the common law, as a series of mandatory principles generally valid for every country, and customary laws, as the outcome of the free interpretation and application of the same common law in the different territories, confirms the presence of this underlying ambiguity. In addition, the ongoing conflicts between European and non-European cultures limited drastically the cosmopolitan scope of medieval politics: Only Christians had the privilege to be citizens of the universal Republic. Cosmopolitanism reemerged in the modern era, within the context of the prevailing system of States. The formation of political units, arisen as autonomous and unitary actors in a sort of global ‘‘state of nature,’’ along with the increasing growth of colonialism, apparently determined a reviviscence of cosmopolitan consciousness. But it would be highly misleading to speak of a genuine connection between the ancient cosmopolitanism and the jusnaturalist theories of ius gentium. While the original ius gentium had risen as a legal arrangement aimed at regulating the relationships between Romans and nonRomans (so that it put the legal subjects, be they persons, groups, or peoples, at the center of the legal order), the modern ius gentium was thought of as a series of norms designed to regulate the relations among States. In fact, modern jusnaturalism took shape in a political, legal, and social framework dominated by the two newborn realities mentioned above, i.e., the State (the only legitimate political actor) and the race for colonies. It could even be said that modern jusnaturalism may be better understood as an intellectual complement of the State-building process, at both the international and the domestic level. Actually, not only did modern jusnaturalists defend a concept of international law in which the sole protagonists were the States, but – especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – they favored de facto the process of political renovation promoted by the new central governments to the detriment of the traditional sub-territorial mediators of the Ancient Regime. Hence, also in virtue of the intellectual contributions of jusnaturalist thinkers, the medieval vision of a vertical Respublica Christiana was progressively replaced by the vision of a horizontal ensemble of independent and sovereign respublicae, that is, the emerging Leviathans. A careful reading of the legal theory of F. de Vitoria shows that he gave the ius gentium a quite formal and softly binding role, closer to a moral admonishment than to a compulsory legal standard for the States’
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action. Furthermore, this soft role was even weakened by authors such as A. Gentili, H. Grotius, and S. Pufendorf, whose reflections contributed to reinforce the political state of things that C. Schmitt named ius publicum europaeum. On this interpretation, one may not speak of a modern cosmopolitanism at least since that wave of theoreticians (such as W. Penn, Saint-Pierre, I. Kant, J. Bentham) who committed themselves to elaborate workable strategies for reaching a durable peace among States. In particular, Kant’s Perpetual Peace may be considered as the main modern contribution to cosmopolitan theory, up to the work of H. Kelsen. In this writing, Kant singles out three types of law: constitutional, international, and cosmopolitan. It is worth noting that, for the first time in modern political thought, the third type was presented as independent of those stemming from State sovereignty. Cosmopolitan law consisted in a legal (therefore, neither moral nor philanthropic) right of the stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he or she arrives in the land of another. Yet, notwithstanding such a fundamental step toward a positive acknowledgement of a kind of law independent of the State, cosmopolitan approaches continued to depict the world political scenario as the arena of sovereign and autonomous States, called upon to respect (by way of a self-obligation) certain individual rights. Only in the twentieth century did cosmopolitanism become a sound political and legal project. Kelsen, one of the most influential scholars in the history of jurisprudence, gave sophisticated theoretical reasons for eroding the modern notion of autonomous State sovereignty. According to him, the international legal system embraces and is superior to all other normative systems, including the national ones, to such an extent that international law rules out the notion itself of national sovereignty. In accordance with its pure theory of law, which had already overturned the relationship between State and sovereignty (the State does not produce the legal system, but is the legal system itself and thus depends on the logic functioning of law), Kelsen dismantled the argument that international law rested on the conventional self-obligation of States and that international norms were valid only insofar as the governments or parliaments of the discrete countries recognized them. Kelsen argued that national legal systems were but ‘‘partial systems’’ operating within a superior international legal system that conferred validity on the national ones. Hence, any domestic norm incompliant with international norms was to be considered null. The attempt to rethink the international order starting from the collapse of the modern concept of the absolute State sovereignty, at least by and large, characterizes
all the forms of contemporary cosmopolitanism, which will be sketched below.
Key Issues Today, many theories present cosmopolitan nuances and many cosmopolitan features are present in noncosmopolitan paradigms. Hence, it is worth looking for an interpretative scheme which allows outlining genuinely cosmopolitan theories. In addition to the well-known distinction between moral and political cosmopolitanism, it is possible to identify a further variable, i.e., the focus of the theory either on subjects (be they individuals, groups, or cultures) or on institutions (i.e., States, governments, national, and international public authorities). By intersecting these two variables, it is possible to single out four general forms of cosmopolitanism: moral theories focused on subjects, moral theories focused on institutions, political theories focused on subjects, and political theories focused on institutions. Of course, such forms are not mutually exclusive or fully independent of each other. They are significantly interlinked, in that, for instance, individualistic moral theories often give indications to political institutions as well as political theories focused on institutional reforms often endorse moral principles. Nonetheless, an interpretative scheme, meant to illuminate the basis and the core of the various theories, is necessary in order to capture the different meanings that the term ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ comes to assume in the different theoretical frameworks. Moral theories focused on subjects
There are theories which attribute a greater importance to the questions concerning moral life of individuals and groups than to the political processes which are at the basis of societal organization. It is possible to divide such theories into two main paradigms: the cosmopolitanism of self and the cosmopolitanism of cultures. The first looks at the self as the basic unit of moral experience and thus as the chief target of cosmopolitan reflections. It is well-represented by some writings of M. Nussbaum (see 1997), who openly recalls the Greek and Roman tradition, from Diogenes to stoics. In Nussbaum’s view, human beings ought to conceive of themselves as having common goals and projects and thus to realize that they all belong to a sort of Kantian kingdom of free rational beings, equal in humanity, each one to be treated not as a means but as an end. Such a cosmopolitanism constitutes a sort of educational process, a set of practices aimed at shaping the cultural and moral personality of individuals, so as to make them aware of their sharing a common nature. According to some critics, not only does this
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stance represent a purely moral position, but, furthermore, it has apolitical outcomes (just like the tradition which Nussbaum recalls), in that it tends to transform political philosophy into a generic philanthropic moralism (see Dallmayr, 2003). The second paradigm, i.e., the cosmopolitanism of cultures, concentrates less on individual moral experience and more on social constructivism. It is a reply to communitarianism and strong multiculturalism, and, more in general, to all those theories which assert that for individuals to shape an integral and coherent identity they need to enjoy an integral and coherent culture. This type of cosmopolitanism claims that not only integral and coherent cultures are a product of imagination – a human artifact often promoted by political interests – but also that cultural isolation is an unfit and dangerous solution for facing today’s global challenges. As an example, J. Waldron (1992) maintains that cultures do count in individuals’ development, but, at the same time, individuals cross many cultural contexts and have a multiplicity and perhaps disparate communal allegiances. Such a position, Waldron adds, does not lead cosmopolitans to support the liberal ethereal conception of self. Instead, cosmopolitans uphold a concept of self as a set of commitments and involvements which can be balanced better by assuming a cosmopolitan perspective. The cosmopolitan gamble is that human diversity, cultural pluralism, and social fuzziness are not something to be prevented and cured, but an opportunity for creating new and wider contexts of sociality in which individuals may jointly find better way to fulfill their needs. Moral theories focused on institutions
This kind of moral theories is composed of those positions which move from a specific ideal of social justice; they focus on institutions insofar as justice is advanced as a normative ideal meant to shape the basic structure of society. In this light, the tradition opened by J. Rawls offers a paradigmatic example. Rawls (1999) may be hardly classified as a cosmopolitan thinker, as his intention to pick up the thread of Kant’s reflection on international law still rests on an image of world society as divided into sealed-off national societies. A far more promising approach is that of C. Beitz (1979) and T. Pogge (2002). They continue the contractarian approach of Rawls, but apply it to the whole global society: Their main goal is to face inequalities in basic life chances by implementing a system of global redistribution, for which they provide a philosophical justification. Yet, ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ here tends to shade off into ‘‘universalism.’’ And in fact, Pogge himself stresses that its conception of moral justice can be said to be
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universalistic, since he wants his proposal to be valid for all persons, to assign the same fundamental moral benefits and burdens to all, and to formulate these fundamental moral benefits and burdens so as to privilege or disadvantage no person or group. Political theories focused on subjects
A theory is (primarily) political so long as it does not privilege a moral or ethical foundation and tries to encompass the entire spectrum of the positive ethics embodied in the international Charters of rights. It does not imply that political theoreticians are uninterested in moral thinking. But their political approach is expected to avert ethical conflicts and to privilege political conciliation by strengthening democratic procedures. It is possible to define as focused on political subjects (in particular, noninstitutional actors belonging to the so-called civil society) those cosmopolitan models which understand transnational politics as mainly based on the commitment of these subjects, who are deemed to be the main source of democratic transformation. This is the case, for example, of M. Kaldor and J. Dryzek. According to Kaldor (1999), cosmopolitan politics is mainly associated with the activities of civil society, in particular, nongovernmental organizations and independent media. Such a politics should enhance a transnational cooperation between local actors and those engaged in a variety of transnational activities committed to a cosmopolitan approach. This approach must counter the traditional and narrow politics of particularistic identities with a cosmopolitanism based on inclusive and universalistic values. Only this cosmopolitan engagement, Kaldor points out, can prevent what she calls ‘‘new wars,’’ i.e., those wars brought about by the lack of authority of the State, the weakness of representation, and the deficiency of state economic and legal arrangements. Dryzek (2006) also gives an increasing importance to nongovernmental organizations and to transnational public spheres constituted primarily by network of association and communication. In fact, the suitable context of cosmopolitan practices, as a series of righteous constraints on institutional policies, is the more informal realm of international public sphere. In doing so, such cosmopolitanism endorses a sort of institutional minimalism, which confers on nonpublic transnational actors an ever bigger role. Political theories focused on institutions
Differently from the first political cosmopolitanism, some authors claim that the commitment from below can meet with success only while promoting a parallel reform of domestic and international institutions. They move from
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the assumption that, although the territorial State played (and perhaps will continue to play) a significant role in establishing the rule of law, it is not the only possible context for democracy to develop and thrive. Therefore, they envisage a broader process of democratization of international political structure; an extensive and cooperative global governance through which the intertwined communities of fate would be able to face the growing crisis of their discrete political systems. This kind of cosmopolitanism (also known as ‘‘cosmopolitan democracy’’) is an articulated project for promoting democracy within and among States by means of a multilayered form of global governance, to be founded on a robust and proceduralized global constitutional framework. Two paradigmatic examples are the proposals of D. Archibugi and D. Held. In continuing Kant’s and Kelsen’s approach, Archibugi (2008) argues that the notion of sovereign authority is to be replaced with that of overlapping authorities, operating under the supervision of a supranational judicial body, which should assure compliance with a set of general rules. This theory pursues two primary objectives, as it is aimed both at reducing the occurrence of conflicts between political actors and at minimizing forms of violence and exclusion. That would be achieved by implementing two kinds of reforms. On the one hand, although States would continue to hold many of their current powers, they should accept the normative solutions issued by arbitral bodies and international courts. On the other hand, the international constitutional machinery would secure some political and legal tools for every individual, in the form of a world citizenship. Such a citizenship would not substitute the national one; it would provide a restricted but welldefined series of civil and political rights, which only supranational institutions may guarantee. Held also emphasizes the necessity for a multilevel and polycentric governance, able to guarantee the symmetry and the congruence between political decisions and affected people’s requirements. In his view, cosmopolitan democratic law should guarantee that all those significantly affected by decisions may have a say during decision-making processes and may always contest the outcomes of them. On this reading, national politics would be only one site of political activity among many; and all of the sites would be governed by an overlapping cosmopolitan regulation, as the sole adequate response to global challenges.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society History I: Ancient ▶ Civil Society Theory: Kant ▶ Communitarianism
▶ Community, Types of ▶ Global civil society ▶ Human rights ▶ Schmitt, Carl ▶ Social Justice ▶ Transnational Forums and Summits ▶ Values
References/Further Readings Archibugi, D. (Ed.) (2003). Debating cosmopolitics. London: Verso. Archibugi, D. (2008). The global commonwealth of citizens: Towards cosmopolitan democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beitz, C. (1979). Political theory and international relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brock, G., & Brighouse, H. (Eds.) (2005). The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dallmayr, F. (2003). Cosmopolitanism: Moral and political. Political Theory, 31(1), 421–442. Dryzek, J. (2006). Deliberative global politics: Discourse and democracy in a divided world. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fine, R. (2007). Cosmopolitanism. London/New York: Routledge. Heater, D. (1996). World citizenship and government: Cosmopolitan ideas in the history of Western political thought. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Held, D. (2004). Global covenant: The social democratic alternative to the Washington consensus. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kaldor, M. (1999). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1997). Cultivating humanity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pogge, T. (2002). World poverty and human rights: Cosmopolitan responsibilities and reforms. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rawls, J. (1999). The aw of peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vertovec, S., & Cohen, R. (Eds.) (2002). Conceiving cosmopolitanism: Theory, context and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waldron, J. (1992). Minority cultures and the cosmopolitan alternative. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 25, 751–793.
Council on Foundations ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization 2121 Crystal Drive, Suite 700 Arlington, VA 22202 USA www.cof.org
Introduction The Council on Foundations is a Washington, DC, areabased nonprofit membership association of more than
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2,100 foundations and corporations. The Council provides a wide variety of services primarily for endowed, grantmaking organizations throughout the United States, but also in foreign countries. Within the past 4 years, the Council has emphasized its role in increasing collaboration among affinity groups, regional associations, and university-based, nonprofit-research, and education programs and in making them a part of the Council’s growing resource network.
Brief History In 1949, the National Committee on Foundations and Trusts for Community Welfare was organized under the leadership of Edward L. Ryerson, a leading steel executive in Chicago. With the new name of National Council on Community Foundations, the organization was officially incorporated as a non-profit organization in New York City in 1957. The next year, full-time operations began with a challenge grant of $45,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Council permitted private and company foundations to become affiliated with it. In 1964, the Council amended its by-laws to admit family and corporate foundations as full, voting members and the name of the organization adopted its current name. In 2006, the Council focused on transitioning its leadership role from effective programming to philanthropic leadership. Communication and government relations took on new importance as the Council sought to communicate the definition and role of philanthropy to the general public, the media and national policy makers. Through discussions about charitable reform at the first annual Foundations on the Hill event, government relations became more visible and active at the national and state levels.
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In addition to the Council’s ongoing research (e.g., the Annual Grantmaker Salary and Benefits Report), the Council also conducts various studies that relate to modern issues in philanthropy. The Council’s most recent studies include Foundations Support Families Hit by Economic Downturn: Results of a Survey (May 1, 2008), and Donor Advised Funds Provide the Majority of Grant Funds Awarded by Community Foundations: Results of a Survey (January 13, 2009). Through its Public Policy Department, the Council produces the annual Foundations on the Hill event, which serves as an opportunity for grantmakers to meet with their federal lawmakers in Washington, DC. Through this convening, the Council informs United States congresspeople, senators, and their staffs about philanthropy, and it advocates on issues affecting foundations. In addition, this series of meetings encourages members of Congress to view foundations as resources on key public policy issues. The Council’s Conferences and Meetings Department generally organizes three separate large scale conferences annually: the Family Foundation Conference, the Community Foundation Conference, and the Annual Conference. In addition, the Council offers to its members guidance from expert staff in areas including research and benchmarking, guidance on legal issues, governance, and leadership. For nonmembers, the Council offers several useful resources including the online Career Center (on which job descriptions and resumes can be posted from the general public), the Major Meetings Calendar (on which submitted meetings and events can be publicized), and Courses, Online Learning, and Webinars (through which conversations on topics including Investment Policy Design and Legal Basics can be downloaded).
Mission/Objective/Focus Areas The purposes of the Council are to promote, encourage, and enhance the public good through private giving. The mission of the Council on Foundations is to provide the opportunity, leadership, and tools needed by philanthropic organizations to expand, enhance, and sustain their ability to advance the common good.
Activities The Council’s activities to support its member organizations fall into several areas including publishing and disseminating research, increasing visibility around public policy and advocacy to support effective charitable giving, and organizing educational programs (e.g., webinars, seminars, roundtables), and annual conferences.
Structure and Governance The Council’s governing body at present consists of 32 board members, including four board officers. In addition to elected board members, five individuals serve on the board ex-officio with full voting rights. They include the president & CEO, the chair of the Committee on Family Philanthropy, the chair of the Committee on Corporate Grantmaking, the chair of the Community Foundations Leadership Team and one representative from the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers.
Funding Council revenues are primarily derived from membership dues, conference fees and publications.
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Accomplishments Through research, advocacy, and convening, the Council seeks to promote influential exchanges among practitioners and thought leaders in philanthropy, and one of the most highly regarded topics that the Council has recently addressed involves diversity in institutional philanthropy. The Council made significant advances by establishing its first ever Director of Diversity and Inclusive Practices in 2007. In February 2008, the Council published Diversity and Inclusion in Philanthropy: Position and Action Steps Response to California Assembly Bill A.B. 624, which echoed the Council’s call ‘‘for an active and ongoing process that affirms human diversity in its many forms, encompassing but not limited to ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, economic circumstance, disability, and philosophy.’’
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Civic Action ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ Philanthropy in North America
References/Further Readings Boney, R. (2008). U.S. funders face the downturn: Part 1. Philanthropy Journal. From http://www.philanthropyjournal.org/news/ us-funders-face-downturn-part-1;1/28/2009 Chao, J. et al. (2008). Philanthropy in a changing society: Achieving effectiveness through diversity. New York: Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. O’Connell, J. et al. (2008). Local charities may profit from Council on Foundations’ summit. Washington Business Journal. From http:// www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2008/04/21/story4.html; 1/29/2009
Credit Unions IAN MACPHERSON University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
During the middle of the nineteenth century many people in several European countries turned to the organized cooperative movement (i.e., associations made up of cooperative organizations owned by their members and legally registered with governments) as a way to meet a variety of social and economic needs. They were
particularly interested in cooperative banking because of the ‘‘enigma of credit’’: the challenges the middle and lower classes commonly were encountering during a time of general economic growth in accessing secure savings and borrowing institutions that paid reasonable interest rates on deposits and charged fair rates on loans. They were forced to meet their personal financial needs by using such savings as they possessed or by relying on mutual associations, ‘‘friendly societies,’’ other community organizations or, most commonly, family members. In response to these situations, cooperative movements developed two kinds of banking organizations in the last half of the nineteenth century. One consisted of cooperative banks operated as subsidiaries of large and growing cooperative organizations, such as the Cooperative Bank owned and operated by the Co-operative Wholesale Society in England. This model was employed by consumer movements in several other European countries, followed by agricultural and fisheries cooperative organizations in Europe and overseas in Asia and Latin America. In addition to serving the needs of cooperative members, such cooperative banks were a common way for different kinds of cooperatives to raise the capital they needed for necessary for local, regional, and national development. The second kind of cooperative bank consisted of community-based banking organizations owned directly by their member-users and varying somewhat in their structure and powers in different countries. The banking counterparts of the Rochdale system of consumer cooperatives, they were based on direct member ownership, democratic governance, and the distribution of surplus (or profit) based on participation – in their case through limited interest return on deposits. This kind of cooperative bank spread throughout the world from the later nineteenth century onward, typically as part of the cultural baggage of immigrants, or, as in the case of India and many African countries, the result of assertive imperial policies, most commonly those directed at developing rural communities. The name most commonly used for these organizations in the global South was thrift and credit cooperatives, but in the twentieth century the term ‘‘credit unions’’ became increasingly common. Community-based banking first emerged vigorously in the German states in the 1850s, associated largely with the efforts of Hermann Schulze from Saxony and Friederich Raiffeisen from Heddesdorf in the Rhineland. Both men were deeply concerned about the economic hardships, social unrest, and political turmoil of the 1840s, and experimented with a number of social and economic institutions to respond to them. Both
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ultimately decided that developing community-based banking could help meet many needs, and they devoted most of their lives to that approach from the late 1850s onward. Schulze was elected to the Saxony legislature in 1848. Shortly thereafter he added Delitzsch to his name to distinguish himself from other Schulzes in the assembly. This political connection was important for his banking work. He used it to help popularize his community banks and, most importantly, to secure legislation under which they could be effectively developed. He was especially interested in the challenges confronting small business people and craftsmen in the towns of Saxony, people who had limited access to savings and lending institutions and who faced serous obstacles amid the depression and uncertain economic times of the 1840s and 1850s. Philosophically, he was essentially a liberal who sought ways to provide the financial support individuals needed to better their economic situation. Raiffeissen concentrated largely on the needs of rural people caught between traditional, largely self sufficient farming and the emergence of profitable marketing opportunities in the growing cities made more accessible and reliable by rapid developments in agricultural science, technological innovations, and transportation improvements. He was a profoundly religious man, and he emphasized the importance of ‘‘character’’ or reputation in making loans, unlimited liability for depositors, community bonds, and the inculcation of habits of thrift among members. His approach reflected a deeper concern for general community well-being and social improvement than did that of Schulze-Delitzsch. Community banking movements soon emerged in other European countries as well, notably in Italy and France during the 1870s and 1880s and in Central and Eastern Europe during the following 2 decades. Luigi Luzzatti, who would become President of Italy (1910– 1911), became particularly well known through his efforts to help workers in the northern, industrializing parts of the country form community banks. He became an ‘‘expert’’ on cooperative credit, rivalling SchulzeDelitzsch and Raiffeisen for his knowledge and impact. An even more prominent and completely informed expert was Henry J. Woolf, in the early years of the twentieth century a President of the International Co-operative Alliance, the international organization for the global cooperative movement formed in 1895. Woolf was the author of a book on cooperative banking that went through five printings, and he was at the centre of an informal international network of cooperative banking enthusiasts.
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In 1897, Alphonse Desjardins, a Parliamentary recorder in the Canadian House of Commons, was shocked to learn, while listening to a debate on lending practices and interest rates for loans to low-income Canadians, about the exorbitant charges being levied by lenders. He heard about a Montre´al case, for example, where a man had paid $5,000 on a $150 loan – an astounding interest rate of over 3,000% – because he could never pay off the principle and the interest at stipulated due dates. He heard about other examples almost as bad, all because borrowers had difficulty in paying off their loans on time, given the interest rates they had to pay. Desjardins had already shown interest in the problems of credit for lower income people, and he was engaged in reading about the ‘‘enigma of credit’’ in the European cooperative literature, including community-based banking. He intensified his reading after the debate, and he corresponded with many of the movement’s European leaders, but particularly Luzzatti and Woolf. In December 2000, with the help of his wife, Dorime`ne, the local priest, and a dozen neighbors, he opened the first caisse populaire, as he called his version of a community bank, in the town of Le´vis, across the St. Lawrence River from the city of Que´bec. At first, the mouvement Desjardins grew slowly, in part because Dejardins and his associates had difficulty in securing appropriate legislation under which caisses could be established. They unsuccessfully tried six times to have national legislation passed in the Canadian Parliament but each attempt failed because of the opposition of merchants wanting to impede the development of any kind of cooperative and because of uncertainties over whether the federal of provincial governments should have jurisdiction. The result in Canada was that credit unions had to develop within provincial jurisdictions, creating important differences among them and impeding the development of a strong national organizational framework. From the beginning, therefore, it can be said that governments, through their regulatory regimes, have significantly affected whether and how credit unions could develop; a pattern that had already been demonstrated in reverse in the German experience. News about Desjardins’ work soon spread to the United States, particularly to areas in New England where emigrants from Que´bec had settled. Father Pierre Hevey, with the assistance of Desjardins, organized the first credit union (the caisse populaire Sainte-Marie) in November 1908, even before there was state legislation for it, in the community of Manchester, Massachusetts. At about the same time, a group of civic leaders in Boston were increasingly concerned about the economic
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challenges confronting the urban working class in their city. They learned with interest about the formation of the Manchester caisse and invited Desjardins to Boston to explain his work to them. As it turned out, the most important person in the Boston group was Edward A. Feline, a member of a wealthy family that had pioneered in the development of a clothing department store catering to the needs of lower income people. Filene believed that the problems of production had been solved by technology and the genius of the Ford assembly line, and he thought that the greatest impediment to the development of a stable, sustainable economy was the lack of purchasing power among the masses of the population. He also believed that work place relationships created bonds of understanding and knowledge about peers that could form the basis of sound economic development. He became a convinced proponent of credit unions, a name he suggested for the new kind of cooperative bank envisioned by legislation passed in the Massachusetts legislature in 1909. At the end of World War I Filene started to contribute funds (ultimately a million dollars, a large amount in the first half of the twentieth century) from his considerable fortune to make possible the formation of the Credit Union National Extension Bureau to promote the development of credit unions in the United States. The first director of the Bureau was Roy Bergengren, a lawyer and World War I veteran from Lynn, Massachusetts. From the time of his appointment in 1920 until his retirement in 1945, Bergengren travelled tirelessly around the United States and into Canada promoting the development of credit unions and lobbying state, provincial, and federal governments for effective legislation. He and the American movement generally were convinced that the effective development of sound credit union movements relied upon effective and appropriate legislative and regulatory regimes. The American experience and subsequent experiences in other countries have validated the correctness of that assumption. In the 1930s, the federal government in Washington embraced credit unions as a way to help the working classes meet their needs for personal loans. In 1934 it passed an enabling federal act that complemented the credit union legislation that had had, by that time, been passed in some 30 states. The development of this new legislative framework contributed to a restructuring of the American movement. The Credit Union Bureau became the Credit Union National Association, and the movement organized a cooperative, CUNA Supply Cooperative, to provide credit unions with necessary services and supplies. More importantly, it also organized CUNA
Mutual Insurance Company, an associated insurance company to insure the deposits and loans of credit union members. Although envisioned at first as a small auxiliary organization, CUNA Mutual prospered (it often provided the only life insurance working class people had), and it became very influential within the movement, rivalling CUNA for influence and quickly surpassing it in economic strength. This unequal and separate division of influence and power became a source of considerable division within the American and, by extension, within the English-Canadian movement as well. It also became a focus for disagreement when the Canadian cooperative/ credit union movements organized their own insurance companies during the 1940s and 1950s. Ancillary services are always important within credit unions as outlets for the entrepreneurial instincts they invariably stimulate, as providers of member services that become increasingly important, and as producers of important income. The English–Canadian movement grew steadily, in some years rapidly in the years after World War II. It did so by providing personal loans, much like the American movement, but it also differed from that movement in three key respects: many of the Canadian credit unions were closely tied to other kinds of cooperatives, especially consumer co-ops, thereby having strong community as opposed to workplace, religious, and ethnic associations; they began to offer, often shortly after their development, household mortgages, meaning that they had different managerial and capital needs; and they were often prominent in rural areas – as opposed to the more common urban locations and orientations of the American movement. As in the United States, the Canadian movement largely expanded as part of the growing consumerism of the post-War period, associated with urban growth, increased travel, more frequent family relocations, the ‘‘love affair’’ with the automobile, suburban lifestyles, and rising education costs. Credit unions played significant roles in this changing pattern of life for many North Americans, still serving lower income members but increasingly becoming important providers of financial services for the middle class. The resultant changes were symbolized by the construction of new premises, many of them (in the case of employee or religiously-based credit unions) moving away from their host organizations and locating on business thoroughfares, even Main Street. Many credit unions, too, began to open branch offices, thereby reducing the sense of specific ‘‘place’’ that had characterized their early development. Credit unions largely became bankers to a growing segment of the
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amorphous middle class that expanded so rapidly in the two countries between 1945 and 1995. As the movement in the two countries grew, people from other parts of the world began to take an interest in it. Several networks, such as trade union, political connections, and family associations, contributed to the popularization of credit unions overseas, as did visits by people from other countries to the CUNA offices, located since 1935 in Madison, Wisconsin. Many also visited the campus of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, where a group within the Extension Department, under the leadership of Monsignor Moses Coady had developed an effective approach to community development that typically used credit unions as the base for a wide range of social and economic activities, but particularly the expanded use of many types of cooperatives. This increasing interest, and the remarkable growth of the Canadian movement led CUNA to create a new organization, CUNA International, in 1954, as a framework for the international movement. Since the vast majority of credit unions, for many years, would be located in the United States, however, CUNA International would remain heavily influenced by the American movement, which essentially funded it and dominated its outlook. The international movement grew steadily, in some years rapidly, in the later 1950s and 1960s. A main reason for this growth was the strong interest among many Roman Catholics, especially those concerned about social justice issues. They included people within religious orders (e.g., the Jesuits and the Scarborough fathers) as well as local priests and lay leaders. They began to foster the development of credit unions in Ireland, in Central and South America, in Africa, and in some Asian countries, notably Korea. While these movements emulated the experiences of the United States and Canada to varying degrees, each of them also reflected the cultures and economic life of their communities, an important dimension of the international movement that can easily be underestimated by observers from outside, most of whom tend to search out the similarities with the credit unions in their own lands. In Latin America, many Roman Catholics influenced by Liberation Theology were particularly conspicuous in the development of the movement, though others reflecting more conservative theological positions could readily be found. The result was that credit unions in countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru´ were divided between competing political groups and were adversely affected by the fierce political struggles of the period.
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In Africa and parts of Asia, as the former colonies of European empires struggled in the postindependence periods, the credit unions were often buffeted by the intense politics of the times; governments with scarce resources searching for ways to shape the new nations often eyed covetously their social and economic power or wanted to use them to deliver financial service for which they were ill-prepared. In such situations, credit union movements had to forcefully insist, with different degrees of success, on maintaining the kind of independence needed for their successful development. At the same time, credit unions that had started primarily within Roman Catholic or other faith groups tended to expand beyond their original networks to become genuinely nondenominational. By 1970, the international credit union movement had grown to the point that there was strong resistance among non-American credit union leaders to the domination of the American movement within CUNA International. Pressures from Canadian, Australian and some American leaders led to a restructuring of CUNA International into the World Council of Credit Unions, which extended more influence to Canadian and other movements through a modified board system and budgetary practices that allowed for increased international influence. This shift also coincided with the strengthening of international development assistance programmes for credit unions, encouraged by the United Nations and funded by significant grants from national government organizations, such as United States Agency for International Development and the Canadian International Development Agency. As those programmes developed, in many instances at least partly within attempts to limit the expansion of the Soviet bloc, they augmented very significantly the funds raised within the Canadian and American national credit union/ cooperative movements for the expansion of credit union movements overseas. From the 1970s onward the movements in the two North American countries were engaged in several development projects overseas, for many credit unionists activities in which they took great interest and from which they derived much pride. During the 1970s and 1980s, the movement expanded in many countries, with movements in the United States, Canada, Australia, Korea, and Ireland experiencing the most rapid development. In Latin America, the rest of Asia, and Africa, growth was slower, economic conditions in many countries fluctuated more, and there were in many countries difficulties in establishing stable, significant masses of credit unions upon which to build national and regional organizations. In some instances, most commonly in Africa, the state was too much involved and the local bases of credit unions were too fragile to allow for
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the emergence of strong leadership cadres and structures regionally or even within national movements. Finding the right mixture of local activism and national or regional coordination has always been a challenge for the credit union movement, as it is typically for all kinds of cooperative organizations. The common pattern of continuous growth during the 1980s and 1990s was affected to varying degrees by general economic conditions. During the 1980s the movement in North America, but particularly in the more diversified Canadian movement, financial uncertainties associated with rapidly fluctuating interest rates and increased pressures from regulators significantly increased the levels of reserves required. These encouraged governments to try and regulate credit unions much like banks, potentially (and sometimes in reality) a threat to the distinctive qualities of credit unions, notably in more stringent reporting regulations, levels of reserves, and regulations regarding the start of new credit unions. The rapid change within credit unions led to the employment of a growing number of professional managers, some trained within the movement but many of them attracted from other financial institutions. The pressures of technological change, along with the ambitions of elected and employed leaders, encouraged the merger of many local credit unions into larger units. Larger credit unions, so it was argued, could offer members a wider range of services and more professional advisors. Larger credit unions, however, also raised the danger that, if their leaders did not think imaginatively about how to retain their local connections and how to adjust their democratic processes, then they could easily lose the distinctive features and competitive advantages they had enjoyed in their formative and development stages. Growth and financial success create their own quandaries; people and organizations are often challenged in unanticipated ways by how best to deal with wealth. Today, the credit union movement is an important grouping within the international financial industries and the international cooperative movement. Statistically, it includes 49,000 credit unions in some 96 countries with over 177,000,000 members and more than $1,181,000,000,000 (US) in assets (World Council of Credit Union’s website, accessed: Dec. 27, 2008). Its importance, though, exceeds what even these relatively large numbers suggest. Since the mid-1990s, the movement has gained remarkable new strength in the Eastern European countries, notably Poland and Ukraine, and it has made steady progress in many countries in the global South. Though it has tended to moved upward from its lower income roots in the United States and
Canada, it has retained even expanded its services to some lower income groups in both countries. The record of ‘‘Community Credit Unions’’ in the United States in serving African Americans and Hispanics is particularly notable, as is the record of some credit unions (such as VanCity and Assiniboine) in Canada, many others in Ireland, and Kenya. They have sought innovative ways to reach out to lower income groups and to stimulate community economic development in places where local economies have declined. Much more importantly, the role played by credit unions in the southern part of the world among people with low incomes is remarkable. In countries like Sri Lanka they emphasize how important is the mobilization of savings for people wanting to gain and retain reliable control over their economic destiny. It is a subtle but important difference from the more commonly celebrated microlending approaches that seek to foster economic development through loans drawn from funds raised elsewhere. When considered from these perspectives, both for what they can do to ease financial pressures among those most in need and for what they do in creating economic possibilities for communities in difficulty, credit unions play far greater roles than the mere tabulation of assets suggests. The more conventional successes in meeting the needs of the middle class should not overwhelm this statistically less easily tabulated but crucially important dimension. It is an example of a set of peoples’ organizations developing around the world, a frequently unnoticed phenomenon in the modern era of globalization.
Cross-References
▶ Coady, Moses Michael ▶ Cooperatives, History and Theories of ▶ International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) ▶ Mutual Organizations/Mutual Societies ▶ Raiffeisen, Friedrich ▶ Schulze-Delitzsch, Franz Hermann
References/Further Readings Berthoud, R., & Hinton, T. (1989). Credit unions in the United Kingdom. London: Policy Studies Institute. Davies, I. (2005). Issues in International Commercial Law. Farnham: Ashgate. Ferguson, C., & McKillop, D. G. (1997). The strategic development of credit unions. Chichester: Wiley. MacPherson, I. (1999). Hands around the globe. Victoria, BC/Madison, WI: World Council of Credit Unions. MacPherson, I. (2007). One path to co-operative studies: Papers and presentations. Victoria, BC: British Columbia Institute for Cooperative Studies. Moody, J. C., & Fite, G. C. (1984). The Credit Union Movement: Origins and development 1850 to 1980. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
Cyber-Communities
Cyber-Communities LORI A. BRAINARD The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
Introduction From Community to Cyber-Community
In order to understand cyber-communities, one must first understand the concept of community more generally. While scholars in different disciplines at different points in time have defined and redefined community, the German sociologist, Ferdinand To¨nnies (2001 [1887]), provided a famous, and brief, definition. Tonnies drew a distinction between a society, or a loose association (Gesellschaft, in German) based primarily on self-interest, individualism, and weak social ties on the one hand, and community (or Gemeinschaft, in German), based on stronger ties, including those associated with family, belief, place or location, or need. The reader would do well to avoid binary thinking when it comes to the concept of community. In fact, it is better to think of the notion of community as lying on a continuum with Tonnies’ understanding of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft denoting the extremes. On one end of the community continuum would be a completely individualistic society based exclusively on self-interest. On the other end would be a strong community with thick ties based on people living in close familial and geographical proximity to each other. In between these two extremes, there might be different variations of community. This provides an opportunity to understand community in a more nuanced – though admittedly more messy – way. This more nuanced thinking about community and its variants is particularly necessary in light of the emergence of the Internet as a major force in contemporary life. As the Internet has become more pervasive, scholars and practitioners from different disciplines (sociology, political science, public administration, public policy, economics, and so on) have offered their perspectives on the key issues involved in understanding cyber-communities. These differing perspectives and key issues are reflected, in part, in different objects of study and different definitional understandings of cyber-community.
Definition/Historical Background What are cyber-communities? The answer depends on who is answering that question. Howard Rheingold
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(1993), for example, looks at ‘‘virtual communities’’ and defines them as ‘‘social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on [those] public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace’’ (p. 5). Rheingold notes that the term, cyberspace, was coined originally in William Gibson’s 1984 science-fiction novel Neuromancer as ‘‘the name some people use for the conceptual space where words, human relationships, data, wealth, and power are manifested by people using CMC [computer-mediated communication] technology.’’ Rheingold thus emphasizes social discourse and affect over time in cyber-space as the key factors in cyber-communities. Barry Wellman originally focused on social networks (1996), as opposed to communities. The Internet, itself a vast network, of course, facilitates and enhances the development and scope of social networks more generally. Wellman later (1999) came to understand social networks as communities and, thus, Internet-based or Internet-enhanced social networks as virtual communities. Wellman’s important contribution is that he equates social networks with community and argues and provides evidence that communities do not need to be geographically based. In the meantime, Hill and Hughes (1998) focused on ‘‘cyber-groups,’’ and Brainard (2004) identified and studied ‘‘cyber-organizations’’ (see also Brainard & Brinkerhoff, 2004). Both cyber-groups and cyber-organizations are forms of cyber-communities.
Key Issues Are Cyber-Communities ‘‘Real’’?
Though each of these (and other) scholars has identified and studied a different kind, dimension, aspect, or component of communities, they all are getting at a common, central question: Is a cyber-community a ‘‘real’’ community? This question intersects with the larger issue of social capital. Social capital (Loury, 1977, 1987; see also Bourdieu, 1986) denotes community and collective resources that stem from social relationships and that promote cooperation and allow people to take action. So another way of phrasing the question is to ask whether cyber-communities build, foster, or are repositories of, social capital? Rheingold (1993: 13) answers this question affirmatively. He notes that a key function of communities and cyber-communities is to provide collective goods and argues that cyber-communities are especially good at generating such collective goods as social network capital (a group of social contacts), knowledge capital (informational resources of all kinds), and communion (or fellowship). Following their study of Usenet news groups Hill
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and Hughes (1998) state: ‘‘We found that Usenet newsgroups fit the three criteria necessary for describing a group. They engage in leadership activities designed to establish a group norm, they police those who violate that norm, and they recruit others to their cause and they do so strategically – they seek out those most likely to agree with them’’ (p. 72). Wellman (1999), too, argues that virtual communities are indeed real communities. In fact, he points out that it is erroneous even to draw a distinction between cyber-communities and ‘‘real’’ communities because the cyber realm and the ‘‘real’’ world are not separate and distinct realms. Rather, cyber-communities connect to, link with, support, and are supported by traditional types of community, including those that are place-based. He notes, cyber-groups ‘‘are a technologically-supported continuation of a long term shift to communities organized by shared interests rather than by shared place (neighborhood or village) or shared ancestry’’ (p. 172). Wellman further notes that his studies demonstrate that the long-standing norm of reciprocity, as well as both the weak and strong social ties necessary for community (Granovetter, 1973), exist in cyber-communities. Robert Putnam (2000) provided an important and compelling retort to those who argue that cybercommunities were real communities. In his wildly popular book, Bowling Alone, Putnam argued that community and social capital have been declining in the United States over the past few decades. Acknowledging the growing understanding of cyber-communities as real communities, Putnam devoted a section of a chapter to the cybercommunity phenomenon. In general, Putnam argued that cyber-communities could not serve as real communities and could not build the kind of social capital that could effectively compensate for the loss of, and decline in, social capital more generally. Specifically, Putnam made several points. First, he argued that the Internet has resulted in cyber-balkanization, a phenomenon in which people seek out only like-minded others and thereby close themselves off from ideological opposition, alternative understandings, and uncomfortable discussions. Second, he argued that online communities generally either fell into anarchy or, as a way to ameliorate anarchy, resulted in dictatorship. In other words, he argued that the norms – frequently generated and perpetuated by nonverbal communication in a face-to-face environment – so important to ‘‘real’’ community were not in play in cyber-communities. Third, he argued that there is too much expression on the Internet to facilitate cyber-communities. Here he was getting at the importance of communication and discourse in fostering community, arguing that if
everyone was able to speak (or, more accurately, type) on the internet, then no one was listening and effective communication, discourse, and deliberation could not take place. Galston (2002), like Putnam, agrees that cybercommunities are not ‘‘real’’ communities, yet his argument is somewhat different. Galston, in addition to echoing Putnam’s point about cyber-balkanization, stresses the ease with which a person may leave an online community compared with the great uprooting involved in exiting a traditional place-based community. Galston writes: ‘‘We should not organize our lives around the fantasy that entrance and exit can always be cost free or that we can wall ourselves off from those who are different without paying a long-term social price’’ (p. 56). Brainard (2004; see also Brainard & Brinkerhoff, 2005) responds to the arguments of Putnam, and others, that cyber-communities are not ‘‘real’’ communities. Identifying a collection of ‘‘cyber-organizations,’’ Brainard argues that cyber-organizations do establish norms, although they are transitory and emergent – with norms changing the people/participants change. Cyber-communities also do not necessarily engage in too much expression. This is true in a number of senses. First, while there is a great deal of expression in cyber-organizations (indeed, because they only exist on-line, they only exist to the extent that people post and write in), there is also discussion, conversation, and discourse. In other words, people do listen and respond, rather than simply expressing themselves. Second, they do not necessarily engage in mere talk (versus action). Rather, they do take action in the external world, whether that action is in the form of lobbying, advertising, or letter writing. Finally, Brainard found that members do not simply ‘‘exit’’ a cyber-community at the first sign of not getting their way. Rather, she found that members of cyber-communities do stay and engage in discourse, arguments, deliberation, mediation, and reconciliation rather than simply leave the community. Role in Governance
Galston (2002) a critic of cyber-communities and their several variants writes: ‘‘Online groups can fulfill important emotional and utilitarian needs, but they must not be taken as solutions for our current civic ills, let alone as comprehensive models of a better future’’ (p. 56). While scholars who study cyber-communities usually do not propose those communities as a panacea for civic ills, they do argue that cyber-communities can and do contribute to civic life. Brainard (2004), for example, describes instances in which members of cyber-communities learn the valuable skills involved in building strong social relationships,
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leading/following others in pursuit of shared goals, and lobbying Congress and other political institutions. Indeed, Stanley, Weare, and Musso (2004) investigate electronic rulemaking and identify participation among a broader, more representative group of people than in traditional government rulemaking. Interestingly, they found that the full benefit of electronic rulemaking was not achieved, in part, because the participants were individuals, rather than cyber-communities! Also, Davis, Elin, and Reeher (2002) provide a first in-depth account of the role of Internet in a US presidential election. They argue that ordinary citizens, using the Internet to form themselves into cyber-communities, made better use of cyberspace than did existing formal institutions, such as parties and candidates. They note: ‘‘The Principal political institutions used the Internet as a new version of the older, one-to-many TV, radio and print media and were in fact able to achieve some notable innovations inn political communication. However, they failed to change political life in the dramatic ways many Internet and political observers had hoped to see. Instead, the greatest and most positive political impact was the way informal groups and individuals used the Internet to create and enhance political communities’’ (pp. 5–6; emphasis in original).
International Perspectives As a global network, the Internet has implications for the international arena. The Internet is becoming a key aspect of closed, authoritarian regimes as much as it is a key aspect in open, democratic regimes. Thus, one question is whether the pervasiveness of the Internet, and the increased flow of information and ideas and the enhanced formation of cyber-communities that it facilitates, will force authoritarian regimes to develop and democratize. One early attempt to analyze this question was made by Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor Boas (2003). They find mixed results. While some authoritarian regimes have not had to censor the Internet – primarily because Internet penetration is so low in developing countries – others have engaged in censorship and even the imprisoning of those who post commentaries critical of the government. A second international issue is the political and civic role played by cyber-communities that span several countries but target their political activities at their home country. Thus, for example, emerging work on ‘‘digital diasporas,’’ diaspora groups that use the Internet to engage in information sharing, bonding, and identity negotiation among their members, demonstrates that such cybercommunities, and the political activities they undertake, have implications for security and development in both their home and host societies (Brinkerhoff, forthcoming).
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Future Directions In addition to more work on international perspectives, there are other key issues for future consideration. For example, the digital divide is rapidly shrinking, and one must continue to ask whether cyber-communities will become more diverse and representative of the public at large. Related to this, one must ask if the shrinking of the digital divide will make governance more diverse, representative of the public at large, and respond to a different set of demands. Also, the last two presidential elections in the United States – 2004 and 2008 – have been affected by cybercommunities specifically and Internet-based politics generally, as Howard Dean received significant cyber-grassroots support for his failed bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004, and Barack Obama benefited from the intensive use of cyber-community tools and techniques in 2008.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Community, Types of ▶ Digital Divide ▶ Dotcauses ▶ Grassroots Associations ▶ Information Technology/Internet ▶ Putnam, Robert ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ To¨nnies, Ferdinand
References/Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1986). Forms of social capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–260). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Brinkerhoff, J. (Forthcoming). Digital diasporas: Identity and transnational engagement. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brainard, L. (2004). Citizen organizing in cyberspace: Lessons from health care and implications for public administration. American Review of Public Administration, 33(4), 384–406. Brainard, L., & Brinkerhoff, J. (2005). Lost in cyberspace: Shedding light on the dark matter of grassroots organizations. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 33(3), 32S–53S. Davis, S., Elin, L., & Reeher, G. (2002). Click on democracy: The Internet’s power to change political apathy into civic action. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Galston, W. (2002). The impact of the Internet of civic life: An early assessment. In E. Kamarck & J. Nye (Eds.), Governance.com: Democracy in the information age (pp. 40–58). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Penquin. Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360. Hill, K., & Hughes, J. (1998). Cyberpolitics: Citizen activism in the age of the Internet. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Kalathil, S., & Boas, T. (2003). Open networks, closed regimes: The impact of the Internet on authoritarian rule. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Loury, G. (1977). A dynamic theory of racial income differences. In P. Wallace & Le Mund (Eds.), Women, minorities and employment discrimination. Lexington, MA: Lexington, Books. Loury, G. (1987). Why should we care about group inequality? Social Philosophy & Policy, 5, 249–271. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Stanley, W., Weare, C., & Musso, M. (2004). Participation, deliberative democracy, and the Internet: Lessons from A national forum on
commercial vehicle safety. In P. Shane (Ed.), Democracy online: The prospects for political renewal through the Internet. New York: Routledge. Tonnies, F. (2001 [1887]). Community and civil society (Jose Harris, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999). Virtual communities as communities: Net surfers don’t ride alone. In A. M. Smith & P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in cyberspace (pp. 167–194). London/New York: Routledge. Wellman, B., lman, B., Salaff, J., Dimitrova, D., Garton, L., Gulia, M., & Haythornthwaite, C. (1996). Computer networks as social networks: Collaborative work, telework, and virtual community. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 213–238.
D Dalai Lama PRADEEP KUMAR
Basic Biographical Information His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama – Tenzin Gyatso (Bstan-dzin-rgya-mtsho) – is both the spiritual and political leader of Tibet (Dalai is a Mongolian word meaning profound knowledge, and Lama, a Tibetan term meaning religious teacher). He was born on July 6, 1935 into a Tibetan family living in a small hamlet of Taktser (Amdo) which is located in north-eastern Tibet (Qinghai province of China). At the age of two, he was recognized as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso (1875–1933). On February 22, 1940 he was formally enthroned and assigned the position of the 14th Dalai Lama as the 74th manifestation of Avalokiteshwara tracing from Sakyamuni. Early socialization and education were imparted in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic system following an order known as the Gulpa or Yellow Hat sect. By the age of 23, he completed the ‘‘Geshe Lharampa degree,’’ the highest-level degree equivalent to a doctorate of Buddhist philosophy. In 1959, he left Tibet and moved to India because of the Chinese repression, and since then is continuously struggling for freedom of Tibet and establishment of peace in the region. For this peaceful struggle he has been honored across the world: The Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award in 1987 and the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989 in recognition of his non-violent philosophy and as a messenger of peace.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions The contemporary debate of civil society has large variations with time and place, but there is agreement that the nonprofit and non-state agencies between family and state are based on collective conscience. The present Dalai Lama is a most ardent advocate of this collective conscience. He comes from a simple farming family and was assigned to spiritual leadership in early childhood through the reincarnation philosophy of Tibet, but he is
also a staunch believer of modern democracy based on ethics. According to him, the system of governance must include freedom, equality, tolerance, and compassion. As he says, ‘‘new world order’’ cannot truly emerge unless it is matched by ‘‘new world freedom’’. Order without freedom is repression and freedom without order is anarchy; hence, we need both. Perhaps these are the basic principles of any civil society where the role of the state is minimal. In 1959, due to repression by the Chinese military in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama, with 100,000 followers, crossed the border of Tibet and took refuge at Dharamsala (India). Thereafter he set up a Tibetan government-in-exile with a non-military philosophy and zone of peace. Further, he also categorically declared that if Tibet is freed, he will give up even his status of Dalai Lama. Tibet, the land of monks and mysteries, has very few empirical studies of its civil society, particularly the third sector. A recent study reveals that during 1999 there were only 74 social organizations which increased to 266 in 2003. According to Qiusha Ma (2006) even this size is larger than Guangdong or Sichuang province of China in terms of per capita density of NGOs. However, changes in the number of social organizations from 1999 to 2003 also indicate the peoples’ increasing assertion for a free Tibet. While the Dalai Lama is putting his efforts in liberating Tibet from colonization and subjugation, he is equally dedicated to the idea of peaceful means to accomplish this. Despite several violent attacks on their own people by the state of China (PRC), he always follows and propagates the message of peace and nonviolence. He believes that oppression has never succeeded anywhere in supporting the eternal desire of people to live in freedom.
Cross-References ▶ Compassion ▶ Good Governance
References/Further Readings Bstan-dzin-rgya-mtsho (1962). 14th Dalai Lama: ‘‘My land and my people: The autobiography of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.’’ Bombay: Asia Publication (His first account, translated from Tibetan and edited by David Howarth).
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Bstan-dzin-rgya-mtsho (1990). 14th Dalai Lama: ‘‘Freedom in exile: The autobiography of the Dalai Lama.’’ New York: Harper Collins. Qiusha Ma (2006). NGOs in Contemporary China. London: Routledge. Shiromani, A. A. (1998). The political philosophy of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama. Tibetan Parliamentary and Policy Research, New Delhi.
and resource building though its Organizational Effectiveness program. The Foundation has also supported leadership programs and scholarships for emerging leaders from black and tribal colleges focused on public health and math and science. The Foundation also focuses on conservation, population, and children’s issues particularly centered around their focus on diversity.
Structure and Governance
David and Lucile Packard Foundation PATSY KRAEGER
Address of Organization 300 Second Street Los Altos, CA 94022 USA www.packard.org
Introduction The Packard Foundation is a family foundation which is focused on supporting nonprofit organizations with their management and administrative capacity.
Brief History The David and Lucile Packard Foundation was created in 1964 by David Packard (1912–1996), the cofounder of the Hewlett-Packard Company, and Lucile Salter Packard (1914–1987). The Packards believed that America was unique in that organizations depended upon private funding and volunteer efforts. Throughout their lifetime, the Packards engaged in a variety of philanthropic and volunteering activities. When David Packard died in 1996, a significant portion of his estate went to the Packard Foundation.
Mission The Board of Trustees is responsible for setting the mission and the strategic direction of the Foundation. Thinking big is a core value of the Packard Foundation. The Packards passed on a set of four core values to the foundation as follows: integrity, respect for all people, belief in individual leadership and a commitment to effectiveness.
The Packard Foundation is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation and holds 501(c) (3) status from the Internal Revenue Service. Only Packard family members are members of the corporation. The Packard Foundation is governed by a board of directors which consists of three classes of Trustees: Family Trustees, General Trustees, and an Ex Officio Trustee.
Funding As of December 31, 2007, total assets of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation were $6.6 billion. The Foundation has a grant making budget of $300 million for 2008.
Major Accomplishments Among its significant and diverse grant making since 1964, the Foundation funded the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in 1986 which operates in conjunction with Stanford Medical School in California. In 2005, the hospital was named one of the ten best pediatric hospitals in the nation by US News and World Report, making it the highest-ranking pediatric hospital on the West Coast. In 1987, the Packards created the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and its expeditions have led to the discovery and published descriptions of at least 17 new species of marine animals.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Family ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Packard, David
References/Further Readings Ellsworth, F. L., & Lumarda, J. (2002). Foundation management: Innovation and responsibility at home and abroad. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Activities In 2007, the Packard Foundation awarded worldwide grants totaling nearly $304 million to nonprofit organizations working to conserve and enhance resources and improve the quality of life. The Packard Foundation is particularly interested in supporting nonprofit capacity
DECA, Equipo Pueblo ▶ Equipo Pueblo
Diakonisches Werk der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland
Desroche, Henri ANAEL LABIGNE
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1914 in Roanne, France into a working class family, Henri Desroche was a strong influence on the study of cooperatives and associations in post-World War II France. After attending seminary and living in the abbey of Chambe´ry, Desroche was mobilized for war in the years 1939 and 1940 before continuing his studies in 1942. At that time he became acquainted with the group around the priest Louis-Joseph Lebret and his research centre E´conomie et humanisme (Economy and Humanism). However, Desroche was more interested in the grand utopianists of the nineteenth century and studied the link between religious messianic ideas and utopian theories, particularly as it pertains to the phenomena of associations and cooperatives. His disagreement with the dogmas of the Catholic Church was expressed for the first time in Signification du marxisme (1949) (The Significance of Marxism). But Desroche was not, like often said, excluded from the Church. Rather, he decided to leave the priesthood and distance himself from the Church in order to start a career as a sociologist. Desroche died in 1994, two months before his 80th birthday.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Attracted by ideas of collectivism Henri Desroche strongly influenced the study of cooperatives and associations in France after the Second World War. In 1951, Desroche entered the famous French scientific research center Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS – National Centre for Scientific Research), where he explored the praxis of community life, the prehistory of cooperatives and forms of associations, and international cooperation, in particular the relationship between the rich North and the poor South. In 1953 Desroche founded the Bureau d’E´tudes Coope´ratif et Communautaires (BECC – Department of Cooperative and Community Studies) and in 1957 the International Archive for the Sociology of Cooperation and Development. One year later, upon the recommendation of Franc¸ois Perroux, the French critic of orthodox economic theory, Desroche was appointed the first chair holder for the newly created research area on cooperatives at the E´cole Pratique des Hautes E´tudes (Practical School for Advanced Studies).
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Desroche also founded the Colle`ge Coope´ratif and the Universite´ Coope´ratif Internationale (International Cooperative University), which for several decades brought together activists from Africa, Latin America, the United States and Europe four times a year. In contrast to most of the researchers of cooperatives and associations of that time, Desroche focused not only on consumer cooperatives but also on production cooperatives. Having been a teacher for cooperatives during his entire career, Desroche believed in adding value through a process of exchange and convening, not only regarding community development but also knowledge creation. What he called ‘‘autobiographie raisonne´e’’ was intended to highlight the expertise already held by his students, who where often militants, activists or professionals of the cooperative sector.
Cross-References
▶ Cooperatives, History and Theory of ▶ Mutual Organizations, Mutual Societies
References/Further Readings Desroche, H. (1977). Economie et sociologie coope´ratives. Textes et recherches pour une anthologie provisoire. In Archives de sciences sociales de la coope´ration et du de´veloppement, Nr.: 41/42, pp. 1–410. Editor: B.E.C.C, Paris. Poulat, E´. (1996). Henri Desroche, un passeur de frontie`res. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Diakonie ▶ Diakonisches Werk der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland
Diakonisches Werk der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland CHRISTOPH GOLBECK
Address of Organization Stafflenbergstraße 76 70184 Stuttgart Germany www.diakonie.de
Introduction The ‘‘Diakonische Werk der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland e. V.’’ (Diakonisches Werk, known
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commonly as Diakonie) is the social service agency of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD). With more than 800,000 full-time and voluntary employees, Diakonie is one of the largest non-statutory welfare organizations in Germany.
Brief History In 1848 the first Protestant umbrella organization was established as ‘‘Centralausschuß fu¨r die Innere Mission’’ (Central Committee for the Inner Mission). Its founding father was Johann Hinrich Wichern, a Protestant priest, who in 1833 started the ‘‘Rauhe Haus’’ (Rough House) as reaction to deplorable and pitiful living conditions of many children in the city of Hamburg. Another Protestant welfare organization, the ‘‘Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirche’’ (founded 1945), and the Inner Mission merged in 1957 to form Diakonie which is based in Stuttgart.
Mission In the biblical tradition Diaconia (Grecian: service), means working for reconciliation, especially bringing help where it is needed, demanding justice in situations of exclusion, and advocating for those whose voice is not heard. The mission of Diakonie has to be seen in line with this tradition. It is deeply rooted in the Christian faith within the heritage of Reformation, aimed at supporting the poor and underprivileged.
that of a registered association (eingetragener Verein, e.V.). Diakonie has a multitude of institutional members, among them the 22 dioceses of the EKD, nine free churches, and 81 professional associations. It is overseen by an executive board, consisting of 18 members from the dioceses and other individuals.
Funding Because of its status as a non-statutory welfare organization Diakonie’s work is financed primarily through state funding (about 90%; mainly through contributions to the nursing care insurance) but also through individual donations, voluntary work and the German church tax.
Accomplishments Diakonie is one of the most important social service agencies in Germany. Its outstanding record covers nearly all areas of human personal service not only in Germany but also in international projects.
Cross-References
▶ Wichern, Johann Hinrich
References/Further Readings Boeßenecker, K.-H. (2005). Spitzenverba¨nde der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege. Eine Einfu¨hrung in Organisationsstrukturen und Handlungsfelder der deutschen Wohlfahrtsverba¨nde. Weinheim, Germany: Juventa. Schwarzer, U., Schmitz-Elsen, J. (2003). Non-statutory welfare – people to people. Berlin, Germany: Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege e. V.
Activities Diakonie is engaged in most fields of social service production among them elderly care and nursing. But it also runs hospitals and works in the field of international development aid. As of 2005, its member organizations comprised about 27,500 autonomous bodies which provide more than 1,000,000 nursing and care places; they employ about 435,000 full-time staff members. Most importantly, the work of Diakonie is supported by about 400,000 voluntary members who are organized in about 3,600 voluntary and self-help associations also belonging under Diakonie’s umbrella. In 1959, the Protestant churches in Germany initiated the development aid program Brøt fu¨r die welt (www.brot-fuer-die-welt.de), which has since been the responsibility of Diakonie.
Structure and Governance As an important part of the so-called ‘‘Spitzenverba¨nde der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege’’ (Umbrella Societies of Non-Statutory Welfare Organisations) Diakonie has to be seen among others as an integral component of Germany’s corporatist welfare legacy. Its legal status is
Digital Divide DALIA YUSUF European Muslims Project International, Giza, Egypt
Introduction Although the digital divide has been a globally recognized phenomenon since the mid-1990s, it reveals a vast array of controversial interpretations and approaches. Contrary to the technocratic perception of the digital divide as inequality in providing access to technology, information sociologists see it as a manifestation of many social, economic, geographical, and educational divides. The first study of the digital divide was made by the US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in July
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1995 – a survey entitled Falling Through the Net. The survey introduced the haves and the have nots of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Since 1995, the NTIA has published a series of reports exploring the digital divide from various conceptual and practical perspectives including distribution policies, models of usage, and describing the ICTs’ access as an issue involving civil rights. Nowadays, integrating ICTs into different societies is inevitable as a means to empower people and enhance their social development. However, marginalized disadvantaged groups should be enabled to conduct their own policies in accessing, utilizing, and creating knowledge.
Definition The digital divide represents the gap between people who do have and those who do not have access to digital technology. Typically this means Internet access, but the term has broadened to include other information and communication technologies (ICTs). ICTs in this sense include the use of fax machines, telephones, computers, media, CDs, and the Internet among others to facilitate the flow of information (http://www.virtualactivism. org/articles/04/usingICTS.htm, July 7, 2008). Although approaching the digital divide with binary classifications of who is on-line looks natural at the beginning of the diffusion process, some scholars have argued that digital divides can be better understood by suggesting other varying levels at which divides exist (DiMaggio & Hargittai, 2001). From the time the National Telecommunications and Information Administration published its first report Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the Have Nots in Rural and Urban America in 1995, researchers have introduced many kinds of digital divides analyzing the inequalities of access to and use of this medium. Many researchers studied the factors of this gap (e.g., socioeconomic, racial, gender, generational, geographical, and residential) and its impact on various segments of society. Seeking a multidimensional interpretation of the digital divides, Kling (1998) made a distinction between technological access (the physical availability of technology) and social access (the professional knowledge and technical skills necessary to benefit from information technologies). Norris (2001) believed that the digital divide is a blend of circumstances which needs to be considered from the perspective of the global divide that encompasses differences between developed and developing countries; the social divide which highlights inequality within one country; and the democratic divide which refers to
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the differences between those who do and do not use digital technologies to participate in democratizing their societies. Another classification suggested five dimensions of digital inequality: technical means, autonomy of use, skill, social support, and use patterns (DiMaggio & Hargittai, 2001). Similarly (DiMaggio & Hargittai, 2001) by focusing on possible interpretations of the digital gap in terms of access, ability to use, and actual use, Fink and Kenny (2003) suggested another interpretation: that the gap is in the impact of use – measured by financial and economic returns. Looking deeply into the digital divide Lisa Servon (2002) argued that it is a symptom of a more complex problematic status of poverty and inequality. Similarly Warschauer (2003) suggested that new technologies require social inclusion and are an ‘‘essential medium that supports other forms of production, participation and social development.’’
Key Issues Alternate Concept: Social Inclusion
The digital divide can deepen the worldwide social divide as disadvantaged social groups who cannot afford access to information and communication technology (ICT) are in danger of being excluded from accessing informational society opportunities. However, mere access to ICT does not reflect the exact nature of the digital gap or its impact. Focusing on the important social issues of technology and inequality helped to deepen public understanding of the ‘‘digital divide’’ DiMaggio and Hargittai (2001), Jarboe (2001), and Warschauer (2003) overcome the simplified notion of the gap by emphasizing the complex interrelationship between technology and society. Integrating ICT into different communities and institutions may contribute to social inclusion. Social inclusion challenges inequalities and responds to a complex system of problems. Technology can help improve economic, cultural, social, and political conditions, but this can only be achieved by observing the sociocultural sensitivities and uniqueness of the different communities. Analyzing the different forms of access to information and technology is inevitable in combating social exclusion and marginalization. The effective integration of ICT requires a list of prerequisites including physical (access to computers and telecommunication connections), digital (on-line digital materials), human (issues such as literacy and education), and social (community and institutional structures that support access to ICT) resources (Warschauer, 2003).
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Any social inclusion strategy to empower targeted disadvantaged groups should address the various dimensions of the digital divide related to income, race, gender, age, residence, and so on. Socioeconomic factors appear very influential as the gap can be described as a cycle whereby low income promotes limited information technology use and low information technology use limits the potential to increase one’s income (Wallsten, 2005). Accordingly, it was recommended that low-income communities should be represented in the policy arena and the marketplace to guarantee that the evolving technologies meet the basic needs of everyone regardless of the ability to pay (Benton Foundation, 1998). Hoffman and Novak (1998) studied the racial gap by supporting the notion that the presence or lack of a computer in the home is the reason behind gaps in Internet use, particularly, between whites and blacks, while other studies measured the gender gap on the Internet (Bimber, 2000). There is some support for the idea that the digital divide is not merely a generational effect (Loges & Jung, 2001). The rural–urban gap may be bridged by accessing and designing web pages to supply services for farmers to develop human resources and promote natural, historical, and cultural values (Strover, 1999). Education
Education can be both a cause and a result of narrowing the digital divide. People with higher levels of education are likely to have better opportunity to gain access to the Internet and possess adequate web-use skills. At the same time, information and communication technologies (ICTs) contribute to the improvement of educational systems throughout different regions and beyond the classroom. The acceleration of information flow provides learners with a wider range of materials and enhances models of sharing knowledge. Various international forums and reports recognized the fact that education is an indicator of the extent to which the digital divide has been overcome (NTIA, 1999). Moreover, some educational experts believe that ICTs can overcome the traditional educational barriers such as geographic location and physical disabilities (Forum Barcelona, 2004). School Internet access becomes crucial in bridging the digital and educational divide. As well-resourced schools were more likely to provide their students with regular computer access, narrowing these divides becomes more of a challenge. Inequality in distributing resources within the education system, between rich and poor schools, negatively impacts disadvantaged learners in terms of their performance. Discussions surrounding the digital
divide in schools, moves from basic access to computers and the Internet, to skills and training. Seeking sustainable educational and developmental models, some scholars have redefined education as a set of social practices more than a number of physical tools. They believe that education is more effective when it meets the social needs (Freire, 1994). In the same context, they criticized methods that mainly focus on individual skills while ignoring broader social systems (Warschauer, 2003). E-democracy
As liberal democracy is determined by the capacity to participate in the new public space, a new democratic divide appears between those who do and do not use Internet resources so as to engage, mobilize, and participate in public life (civic engagement). The key indicators of e-democracy (e.g., e-government, e-vote, e-petition, etc.) could provide an opportunity for improving the ways democracy operates. Disadvantaged social groups with inadequate ICTs access would be underrepresented in these evolving arenas. Widening the democratic and digital gaps contradicts the core concept of democracy. Caldow (2004) stated that ‘‘academics and others are beginning to explore models of e-democracy. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) defines three types of e-democracy interaction – a one-way information provision; a two-way relationship where citizens have the opportunity to give feedback on issues; and, finally, a partnership relationship whereby citizens are actively engaged in policymaking.’’ In addition, he introduced Gartner Dataquest’s four-stage model linking e-democracy and e-development: ‘‘In the first stage (presence) the Internet site provides on-line information in a static format. In the second stage (interaction) citizens search information, download forms, or access links to other relevant sites. The third stage (transaction) alleviates the need to complete a transaction by mail or to make an office visit. The fourth stage is transformational. Some attributes of this stage are wireless access, enabling sites to push government information to citizens and robust customer relationship management (CRM) tools.’’ There are various stances toward integrating ICTs into the workflow of governments and international organizations. For instance, there are recommendations to ‘‘incorporate ICTs into their work to increase public participation and transparency’’ in the United Nations similar to other international organizations, such as the World Bank, the EU, and the WTO (Rik Panganiban, 2005). Others argued in favor of the significance of e-voting
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and its relevance to ‘‘the primary political impact of the Internet on democracy within the European Union’’ (Paper for the Workshop on ‘‘E-voting and the European Parliamentary Elections’’ Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Villa La Fonte, EUI May 10–11, 2002). Despite the digital divides and their impacts on marginalized groups, many human rights activists and social movements agreed on the possibility of e-democratization. The flow of information and the use of the web as an alternative media to publicize different opinions encourage people to participate even in remote regions. Networking as a main characteristic of ICT use becomes an important factor in breaking the silence, political empowerment, and mobilization. To support their work, many social and human rights activists believe that open content and free software are inevitable to achieve on-line equality and overcome democratic divides. Global Digital Divide
As the digital divide refers to differences in technology access within a country, the global divide is apparent between industrialized, developed, and developing countries. Generally the digital divide is attributed to the socioeconomic status of each country (Cullen, 2003). The Internet and PC penetration rates are greatly affected by per capita income (Chinn & Fairlie, 2004). However, this is not the only factor; there are more influential factors such as state regulations of the supply of telecommunication services and providing infrastructures to develop and improve these services. Differences in the diffusion process of Internet access between countries widen the global digital divide. It is noted that in some countries ‘‘granting monopoly to a national operator and charging high license fees for Internet-access services are examples of market barriers’’ that discourage the development of telecommunication sectors (Sehrt, 2003). Another technical obstacle is infrastructure including Internet connection and phone lines. Increasing the speed of access and the number of phone lines helps to reduce the global digital divide. Measuring a complex dynamic phenomenon like the global digital divide is challengeable. One way is to measure the penetration of telephone subscribers and Internet users. However, measurement is not that simple; for example, while the United States remains the largest Internet market in terms of the number of Internet subscribers, China is gaining fast and, if the current growth rates continue, China could overtake the United States in terms of total Internet subscribers.
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The cost of Internet access is much lower in developed countries than in developing countries. Comparisons of Internet costs between Asia, Europe, and the United States, allow one to map the digital divide across the world. Moreover, it is known that the digital divide is most obvious in Africa. The divide widens in Africa’s countryside, where a lack of roads, telephone lines, and electricity separates the rural majority from their urban counterparts (Mutume, 2003). According to the World Information Society (WSIS) Report 2007, the digital divide continues to evolve. This is so, despite the fact that statistics show a general improvement across the globe in both PC and Internet use rates. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go to achieve global digital equality. In 1998, the International Telecommunication Union adopted a resolution to hold a World Summit on the Information Society under the umbrella of the United Nations. The summit was held in two phases; the first from December 10 to 12, 2003, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the second from November 16 to 18, 2005 in Tunis, Tunisia. The digital divide was at the top of the agenda in both phases. In Geneva, world leaders declared: ‘‘We are fully committed to turning this digital divide into a digital opportunity for all; particularly for those who risk being left behind and being further marginalized.’’ In the same context, the WSIS stocktaking was launched in 2004. It is a searchable database of WSIS-related activities and initiatives initiated to become an effective tool for exchanging information and experiences, and encouraging all WSIS stakeholders to contribute in enhancing the database. The least developed countries participate in world information summits looking forward to eliminating regional imbalances in utilizing information and communication technologies (ICTs). These summits have evolved over the last few years in structuring international cooperation aiming at dealing with the global digital divide. However, these summits could be witnessing conflicting interests across the world that might negatively affect reducing the divides. Aiming to raise awareness about the digital divide, the United Nations holds an annual celebration of the World Information Day which takes place on May 17.
Future Directions Many scholars, professionals, and politicians around the world continue to discover ways to solve the digital divide. One approach to combat this problem is the availability of affordable technologies, such as low-cost computers, which are specifically designed for the income levels and
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socioeconomic conditions of developing countries (James, 2003). In reviewing data from Falling through the Net 2001 from the US Department of Commerce, Anthony Wilhelm stated that the concept of the digital divide has been superseded; leading-edge wireless broadband information and communications vehicles, such as thirdgeneration wireless or Ka-band satellite, both of which afford great opportunities as well as pose considerable hurdles to communities that are unable to afford or avail themselves of these new services. In the same context and at the roundtable organized within the framework of the World e-Democracy Forum, October 3, 2007, Marie-Christine said that the switchover of technologies from high-speed (xDSL) to very high-speed (FTTH) could intensify the digital gap because only 50% of the population would at best be covered by 2012. The growth in utilization requires an infrastructure of quality. The World Information Society Report 2007 indicated that the debate over the future of the digital divide is now moving away from ‘‘quantity’’ in basic connectivity and access to ICTs to measures of ‘‘quality’’ and ‘‘capacity,’’ or speed of access. Engagement with the digital divide requires an innovative theoretical framework as well as achievable action plans. New theoretical perspectives are inevitable in providing researchers with useful tools to understand the various impacts of the digital divide. Instead of discussing the demographic differences of access and ownership, scholars should concentrate their future efforts in studying the consequences of these differences (Van Dijk & Hacker, 2003). Moreover, solid theoretical frameworks can help in assessing actual public policy interventions and their effects in bridging the divide (Gordo, 2003). The action plans and initiatives that could overcome the digital divide are undertaken by governmental as well as nongovernmental circles. The digital divide is a common subject in US politics and various government policies. Former US president, Bill Clinton, was enthusiastic to reduce the national divide talking about turning it into a ‘‘digital opportunity.’’ The Clinton administration was specifically concerned with the impact of the digital divide on school systems. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, over 90% of the United States was connected to the Internet, but the extent of the access varied (Education Statistics Quarterly). Tackling the emergence of the new broadband divide, President George W. Bush gave a speech on March 26, 2004, in which he called for highspeed Internet service for all Americans by 2007. In February 2008, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) reported that the aim to afford access to broadband for all has been
achieved ‘‘to a very great extent.’’ Critics argued that the report seems very optimistic, emphasizing that the connection speed off-campus and in households, remains a future challenge. Various nongovernmental organizations have engaged with the digital divide through community-based projects and initiatives on national and international levels. Over the last two decades, most of these projects have focused on Internet connectivity and providing hardware for educational purposes such as ‘‘One Laptop per Child’’ with the objective of affording cheap computers to disadvantaged children across the world. Searching for a better understanding of the lifestyle of disadvantaged groups is a precondition for any sustainable solutions to the digital divide. At the top of future challenges is reexamining the possibility of empowering those who have been marginalized by involving them in decision making, establishing plans, and choice determination to select what suits their status and socioeconomic contexts.
Cross-References
▶ Civic Participation ▶ Cyber-communities ▶ Dotcauses ▶ Information technology, Internet
References/Further Readings Benton Foundation (1998). Losing ground bit by bit: Low-income communities in the information age. Washington DC: Benton Foundation and National Urban League. Bimber, B. (2000). Measuring the gender gap on the Internet. Social Science Quarterly, 81, 868–876. Caldow, J. (2004). e-Democracy: Putting down global roots. January 2004. Institute for Electronic Government/IBM Corporation. Chinn, M., & Fairlie, R. W. (2004). The determinants of the global digital divide: A cross-country analysis of computer and Internet penetration. Yale University Economic Growth Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Cullen, R. (2003). The digital divide: A global and national call to action? The Electronic Library Oxford, 21(3), 247–258. DiMaggio, P., & Hargittai, E. (2001). ‘‘From the ‘digital divide’ to ‘digital inequality’: Studying Internet use as penetration increases,’’ Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, Working Paper Series number 15. Fink, C., & Kenny, C. J. (2003). W(h)ither the digital divide? January. Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: reliving pedagogy of the oppressed, notes by Ana Maria Araujo Freire (trans. Robert R. Barr). New York: Continuum. Gordo, B. (2003). Overcoming digital deprivation. IT & Society, 1, 166–180. Hoffman, D. L., & Novak, T. P. (1998). Bridging the racial divide on the Internet. Science, 289. James, M. J. (2003). Free software and the digital divide: Opportunities and constraints for developing countries. Journal of Information Science, 29(1), 25–33.
Ditchley Foundation Jarboe, K. (2001). Inclusion in the information age: Reframing the debate. Athena Alliance, from http://www.athenaalliance.org/ apapers/inclusion.html Kling, R. (1998). Technological and social access on computing, information and communication technologies. White Paper for Presidential Advisory Committee on High-Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet, from http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/archive/kling/pubs/NGI.htm Lisa, J. S. (2002). Bridging the digital divide: Technology, community, and public policy. Oxford: Blackwell. Loges, W., & Jung, J. (2001). Exploring the digital divide: Internet connectedness and age. Communication Research, 28(4), 536–562. Mutume, G. (2003). ‘‘Africa takes on the digital divide.’’ Africa Recovery, 17(3). NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) (1999). Falling through the net: Defining the digital divide, US Department of Commerce. Norris, P. (2001). Digital divide. Civic engagement, information poverty, and the Internet worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panganiban, R. (2005). E-Democracy and the United Nation. Digital Divide Network, http://rikomatic.objectis.net/work/e-democracy book/ Sehrt, M. (2003). E-Learning in the developing countries: Digital divide into digital opportunities. UN Chronicle, XL(4). Strover, S. (1999). Rural Internet connectivity. Rural Policy Research Institute, from http://www.rupi.org/. Van Dijk, J., & Hacker, K. (2003). The digital divide as complex and dynamic phenomenon. The Information Society, 19, 315–326. Wallsten, S. (2005). Does sequencing matter? Regulation and privatization in telecommunications reforms, development research group, The World Bank. Warschauer, M. (2003). Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://www.digitaldivide.net, June 5, 2008. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/warschauer/, June 5, 2008. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_4/hargittai/#author, June 5, 2008. http://www.virtualactivism.org/articles/04/usingICTS.htm, July 7, 2008.
Ditchley Foundation MARTIN HO¨LZ
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in 1958 by Sir David Wills, it is headquartered in Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, UK.
Brief History The founder of the Ditchley Foundation, Sir David Wills, was a descendant of the family that co-founded Imperial Tobacco. He purchased Ditchley Park in 1953 not for the stately mansion, but for the beautiful park attached to the property. His experience in World War II led him to dedicate the use of the mansion to encourage transatlantic dialog in the hopes of promoting global understanding, peace, and security. The Ditchley Foundation was established with this purpose in 1958. Its sister organizations, the American Ditchley Foundation and the Canadian Ditchley Foundation, were established in 1964 and 1981, respectively, to recruit participants in the dialogs from these countries, to fund the participants’ travel, and to help shape the content of the dialogs.
Mission/Objectives The main aim of the Ditchley Foundation is to foster Anglo-American dialogue and relations, but has expanded to also promote international relations in a broader sense.
Activities The Ditchley Foundation organizes some 12 conferences a year and an annual lecture, mainly taking place at Ditchley Park. The conferences bring together some 40 invited experts from all sectors to reflect on current international policy issues. For the conference held in February 2008 to commemorate the Foundation’s 50th anniversary, the topic focuses on ‘‘The Priorities of US foreign policy after George W. Bush.’’ The diverse topics on the agenda for 2009 include the nature and role of international NGOs, the role of universities in securing the future, the relationship between architecture and society, and the future of US–European Union relations. The Director regularly posts on the Foundation’s website reports on his impressions from each conference.
Address of Organization
Structure and Governance
Ditchley Park Enstone, Chipping Norton Oxon OX7 4ER UK www.ditchley.co.uk
A Council of Management governs the Ditchley Foundation. In 2009, former UK Prime Minister Sir John Major was chairman and Lady Wills remains Honorary Life President. A Programme Committee advises the Director regarding forthcoming conferences.
Introduction
Funding
The Ditchley Foundation is an operating foundation with the aim of advancing international learning and serving as discussion platform for international experts. Established
For its 50th anniversary, the Foundation launched a development campaign with the aim of raising more than four million British pounds; by its close in February 2008,
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it had raised some three million British pounds. Complementary funding is raised by the American and Canadian Ditchleys.
Major Contributions/Accomplishments In its 50 years of history the Ditchley Foundation fostered not only Anglo-American dialogue, but beyond that an international debate on current objectives. Bringing together decision-makers from the worlds of politics, business and industry, the civil service, the armed forces, the media and academic life, international policy issues are addressed and new solutions are sought.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Operating
References/Further Readings http://www.ditchley.co.uk/
Doctors without Borders ▶ Me´decins Sans Frontie`res
Donor/Donor Intent JENNY HARROW Cass Business School City University, London, UK
Introduction The centrality of the donor and donor accomplishments, characteristics, and preferences is a marked feature of nonprofits literatures. Whether as enabler of nonprofits’ independence, sign of citizen activism, or expression of personal values, the donor is the emblem of voluntarism. As such, the donor experiences rewards and risks. Balanced against the rewards of personal satisfaction, prestige, and new social connections are the risks of poor donation choices, minimal influence over donees, even anxiety over meeting donor promises. To minimize risk and maximize reward, the notion of donor control continues to gain ground, with the principle of donor intent as a benchmark for directing donee action. Conditional gifts are, of course, a feature of wider social life, reminding recipients of the donor’s expressed or nascent power. It may be argued that the issue, if not the legal expression, of
donor intent will become increasingly critical in donors’ thinking, as their incomes come under pressure during periods of economic downturn. Equally, the social expression of donor intent will ensure that donors’ values, exemplified in their giving, will come under public scrutiny as never before. Paradoxically, the donor as the emblem of voluntarism is surrounded by increasing professionalism. Fundraisers provide ‘‘donor development’’ and some donors press donees to demonstrate high performance levels. Yet, the image of the information-rich, resource-rich donor, spurring others to donate, is at odds with those social and religious injunctions which emphasize the importance of private, if not secret, donation. This image also challenges donor–citizenship association, if those unable to donate are seen as lesser citizens. The donor will then be both courted and castigated, alongside multiple narratives of donors’natures, from saintly to dangerous. Donor courtship is the task of the resource-seekers, where donor identification with a cause is a critical factor. Donor castigation – from their choice of cause to their desire to influence closely (or conversely, to neglect) a nonprofit’s direction – occurs in sociopolitical spheres. Across this courtship–castigation spectrum, the donor is subject to a variety of governmental regulation, regionally, nationally, and internationally, making the global donor a particularly complex actor.
Definition The individualized nature of ‘‘the donor’’ is stressed in dictionary definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary sees the donor as ‘‘the person who gives’’ (from Middle English, donoure, from Anglo-French, doneur, from Latin, donare). Thus the characteristics of donors reflect human nature writ large – generous or miserly, selfless or selfish, prompted by or avoiding public display. Underpinning this personalization is a sense of devotion or commitment. Thus, a donor may be an individual acting as a biological material source (blood, organs), and as a giver of time, through volunteering, as well as through money or in-kind gifts, to a cause (or person) that is generally understood as worthy. The intermingling of the terms ‘‘donor’’ and ‘‘philanthropist’’ makes for uncertainty, with an apparent implicit understanding in much writing that the latter is an enlarged and more structured version of the former. From the individualist perspective, much literature explores the nature of the donor in terms of who they are (age, gender, race, location, education), where they are (employment sectors, career level, income stability, geographical location), and how they self-identify (family,
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community, locality, religion, interrelationships). Thus, Houston (2006: 67), for example, finds government employees more likely to volunteer for charity and donate blood than for-profit employees, whilst ‘‘no difference is found among public service and private employees in terms of individual philanthropy.’’ Hughes and Luksetich (2008: 278), considering giving variability, find that ‘‘the size and stability of the income flow may be more of a consideration for charitable contributions than is the preference of the individual who earns the income.’’ Describing and understanding donor segmentation, as a precursor to targeting particular donors, is a strong feature in practice and academic literatures. Thus, McClintock (2004: 6) notes of the ‘‘typical Canadian donor’’ that he or she is between 34 and 54, with postsecondary education, a full-time job, and a household income above $60,000, and attends religious services regularly. Yet Shelley and Polonsky, in an Australian context (2002: 19), examining whether motivations of donors vary by age or gender, offer results suggesting that ‘‘there may be limited benefits in segmenting existing donors and that charities may be able to use similar promotional strategies for all existing donors.’’ Still, the emphasis on the person of the donor, or with corporate giving by firms, on the proxy donor who decides the firm’s action, remains. Notwithstanding the extensive literature on corporate donors as motivated by business advantage and stakeholder pressures, the individual responsibility for those decisions is also shown. For Dennis, Buchholtz, and Butts (2007), the most important factor in corporate giving is the degree to which the chief executive declares themselves a philanthropist. Those who lack the capacity as well as the inclination to donate may be disadvantaged in their wider community. Valentine (2005: 113) emphasizes that ‘‘the exclusion of already marginalized people from donating blood presents a risk of further marginalization. If blood donation is understood to be a civic practice . . . it becomes too easy to see those who cannot donate as non-citizens.’’ Levenson and Farrant (2002) raise similar issues, analyzing the limited response in the UK prison service to the ‘‘unlocking potential’’ of prisoners’ active citizenship and volunteering. Modernization, social exchange, and expectancy theories all offer perspectives on donor thinking and practice. For Rehberg, ‘‘modernization theory posits a change from traditional or ‘collective’ forms to modern or ‘reflective’ forms of volunteering’’ (2005: 109), in a study of young Swiss adults’ motivation for international volunteering, where ‘‘for only 11% of them, altruism . . . was the one and only driving force.’’ Social exchange theory assumes
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that relationships involve ‘‘give and take’’among partners, so that the donor weighs up the costs of donation (money or time). Expectancy theory argues that donors have expectations about future events and that their giving behavior reflects these expectations. Weertz and Ronca (2007) examine these theoretical arguments in turn in the context of alumni giving and voluntary support for higher education. In exploring donor rationality, the view of donors engaged in transactions between parties (including other donors as well as donees) is prominent. Handy (2000: 439) presents the charity role as often that of ‘‘an agent that brokers a charitable transaction between the donor and the recipient,’’ with the accompanying issue of the principal/agent problem, and its impact on donor behavior. Where the donor is understood as a nation-state as well as an individual, transactional gain is widely understood as a key motivating factor; where donor decisions concern not only ‘‘how much’’ but positioning relative to other donors (Lebovic, 2005, assesses bilateral aid positioning distributed to 101 countries between 1970 and 1994 by the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the OECD’s five largest bilateral aid donors). The extent to which ‘‘donors’’ are also the voter/taxpayers of donor nations provides further ambiguity, with a study of voter responses to governmental decision making underpinned by the World Values Survey, explored by Chong and Gradstein (2008).
Key Issues The Donor–Fund-Raiser Nexus
The extensive literature exploring the nature and direction of donor spending provides shifting evidence on donor profiles and insights into donor adherence to or flight from particular funding commitments. Some debates in this field seem to have a life of their own – does government funding of some nonprofits deter donors, or shift them to other causes; is the baby boomer generation showing high levels of generosity or have they already spent or committed their money, and so on. Within this literature, knowledge transfer takes place between scholars and fund-raisers, for example, on donors’ attitudes to overhead costs (Bowman, 2006), on nonprofits’ approaches to donors in customer services contexts (Polonsky & Sargeant, 2007), and in exploring links between donor perceptions and donation levels (Sargeant et al., 2006). Here, the challenge is to sustain the level of theoretical debate, whilst recognizing the distinctive learning needs of donors and fund-raisers, in contexts where competition for donors continues to escalate.
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Other debates reflect the tensions inherent when donors take private decisions to address public problems. Donors as public policy brokers or social issue entrepeneurs (following Leat’s 2005 study of foundations and public policy) offer further dimensions of power. The power factor trickles down from the nation-state donor to small-scale or intermittant donors, and also to the informal or semi-formal donor groups, such as giving circles, pooling resources to be given away, where members’ learning and community problem solving may face imbalance (Eikenberry, 2007). Together, these areas point to three key issues for further exploration: those of donor education, donor trust, and donor control. Donor Education
Unsurprisingly, those cultivating donors, rather than donors themselves, argue for the need for ‘‘donor education,’’ although the as yet small-scale organization of ‘‘philanthopy classes’’ for the younger members of major donors’ families, and the development of the donor/philanthropy curriculum in schools and colleges may challenge this. Little is also known about the influence of financial and related advisers in channeling donor effort. This makes Madden’s continuing survey research on attitudes and behaviors of professional advisers (bankers, financial planners, lawyers, accountants) in raising the topic of philanthropy with their clients especially important (Madden & Newton, 2006). Nonprofits’ ability to support donor education will be limited by resources. Siegel and Yancey (2003: 43), examining the state of donor education in the United States, argue that ‘‘there is a tremendous shortage of donor educators . . . in both the hard and soft sides,’’ and acknowledge problematic questions such as who can and should be donor educators. Nonprofits’ overwhelming fear of ‘‘losing donors rather than empowering them’’ is a continuing theme in Siegel and Yancey’s work (ibid.: 44). Donor Control and Donor Intent
In international development fields, where donors may be a blanket term for transnational NGOs but most often for nation-states, donor empowerment is invariably a given; with donors castigated for overcontrol or insufficient control in almost equal measure. Thus Subramaniam (2007: 551) emphasizes, drawing on case study research in rural India, that ‘‘donors pre-determine activities to be pursued and utilize the capacity building initiatives as mechanisms for promoting theoretical ideas and frameworks that conform to knowledge production in the West.’’ Alternatively, McNamara
and Morse (2004), with the collective experience of 54 years of work in a Nigerian nongovernmental development organization, emphasize that whilst injudicious donor interference had had damaging repercussions, their overall experience suggests that ‘‘care and consideration flow throughout the aid chain and actions are not malevolent.’’ In national and domestic settings, it seems possible that donor control is an uncertain attribute among many potential donors, and is often restricted to assertions about the ‘‘oughts’’ and ‘‘ought nots’’ of nonprofit practice, for example that all donations should go ‘‘straight to the cause’’ and that ‘‘high’’payment or even payment at all of a nonprofit’s staff is unacceptable (clear cases both for ‘‘donor education’’; but problematic for fundraisers). Donors in the workplace, as a bounded group with a chosen focus, may provide another control source (Barman, 2007), or at least influence, as in employee behavior to encourage their employers’ donor role, in times of major disaster (Harrow et al., 2006). In situations where donors initiate funding rather than respond to requests, a degree of donor control is often explicit, including those rarer cases where donors give to government bodies, such as local government. Whether most donors are likely to seek growing control over donees, or whether this is primarily a function of the growth in wealthy donors (who model donor and investor roles together) is a moot point. Paradoxically, high levels of donor control may carry a high cost for and adversely affect the efficiency of the donee. Nevertheless, it is difficult to review the work on donor control without acknowledging the consumerist and individualized approach which underpins these developments. The willingness of nonprofits to offer donors opportunities to set tight boundaries on their gifts’ use also represents a fund-raising strategy in its own right. Here, flexibility is traded for resource availability, and, potentially, resource leverage. Ultimately donor choice in this form may become enshrined in nonprofits’ ways of working, whether or not particular circumstances require subsequent flexibility (Barman, 2007). Informal as well as formal means of ensuring that donor intentions are honored not only by the donee but by a donor’s family, is shown in the development of ‘‘legacy charters,’’ extensions of ‘‘donor charters,’’ where donors’ families are offered stakes in funding direction. Their efficacy has yet to be shown. It also remains to be seen whether the ongoing lawsuit of Robertson v. Princeton, in which descendants of donors providing a major gift in 1961 to the university seek to remove their foundation from Princeton’s control, becomes a landmark case in
Donor/Donor Intent
donor–beneficiary relations. Certainly it may already have encouraged donors and nonprofits to approach restricted gifts more cautiously, and be more prepared both to withdraw and decline the offer of that gift. For living donors, the enforcement of their intent may be straightforward or controversial. In the latter case, Kehoe (2004: 503) describes the difficulties when, between 1929 and 1939, the donor of a new gallery at the British Museum to house the Parthenon (Elgin) marbles held a vision at odds with that of the Museum establishment, ‘‘one that generated controversy, including the unauthorized cleaning of the marbles.’’ Recourse to law where donor intent appears violated or neglected will be dependent upon the extent to which national jurisdictions give prominence to donors’ rights. In the United States, donor intent is understood, fluidly, as a donor’s expected outcome in making a contribution. Where written documents set out donor requirements or conditions, these documents are subject to the jurisdiction of state-level courts (Brody, 2005). Brody comments that as illustrated by controversy over the American Red Cross’s handling of contributions for victims of the September 11 attacks, the legal rights of donors generally depend on state attorneys general for vindication. More problematic may be situations where donor intent cannot be realized, because of donor fund collapse or bankruptcy (op cit). Ostrander’s seminal paper on developments in the United States (2006) contrasts her development of a social relations theory underpinning for donor–donee relations to the formalization of donor-control mechanisms, as a concomitant of the growth of wealthy donors and the shared agenda of many such donors and nonprofit advocates to enable high levels of control in return for resources. Whilst Ostrander is clear that donors ‘‘do not always or inevitably donate the specific terms of their gift’’ (ibid.: 357), the option to decline gifts will be open to very few. Increased control is thus delivered through the creation of new relationships, through ‘‘donor exclusivity (donor networks, giving circles), donor intermediaries and . . . donor oversight between ‘‘social investors’’ and their nonprofit ‘‘partners’’ in high-engagement philanthropy’’ (ibid.: 356). Urging scholars and researchers to pay attention to the means whereby donor and recipient can, alternatively, engage collaboratively in nonprofit development and directions, Ostrander presents a perspective that not all practitioners and scholars would share. This is that a donor collaborative rather than control approach would ‘‘be more likely to increase and stabilize philanthropic support’’ than offers to donors to specify the use their gifts (ibid.: 370). This may be the kind of challenge which
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community foundations, especially where they offer formal donor education programs, may be well-placed to test. However, it may also be argued that the controlinvestment style of donor–donee relations is already too well-embedded to return to a more developmental, collegial approach (see, e.g., Barman’s examination of United Way’s approach to ‘‘donor choice’’, 2008). This may then have to wait until disenchantment with the restrictions and demands of investment-style donors sets in. In the meantime, it would be ironic if the widely cited (but mostly unresearched) phenomenon of ‘‘donor fatigue’’ set in among wealthy donors, because the donor control which they have imposed is wearisome, as well as failing to deliver evidence of the ‘‘high impact’’ they have been promised, in the forms and over the periods which they would like.
International Perspectives The international reach of donor actions shows borders of states becoming less relevant in understanding donor behavior and achievements. The opportunities provided by technology for E-philanthropy also emphasize the fluidity of donors, making them a less catchable group of socioeconomic actors. Donation activity for major international disasters offers insights into donors’ ‘‘moral geography’’ (Silk, 2004) whilst international media reporting may both encourage new donors and increase donor wariness of giving. In such circumstances, traditional regulatory systems seem to have little impact, and it is unclear whether the inevitable donor detachment from donees is compensated for by high flows of information or made more likely by it. Expectations by donors of high performance by nonprofits working locally in affected regions also emphasizes the importance of the donor conduit in engaging donor sympathy and in demonstrating the effectiveness of contributions. Thus the major issue of donor trust, not only of intermediary NGOs to deliver services and host nonprofits to draw in funds, but also of states to legitimate and not hinder donor actions becomes important. Leadership in donor practice may appear to be, but may not necessarily be, best exemplified by previously well-known international organizations and philanthropists; and the competitive climate in which giving occurs seems easily sustained. Global companies’ global donation record – notably in regions where they work or seek to work – is a case in point. Donor practice on a cause-by-cause basis suggests continuing patterns of responsiveness that do not evidence the kind of donor fatigue, discussed above, arguably because the recipients’ lists of needs will be relatively clear and
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purchasable by or on behalf of the humanitarian consumerdonor. The trend in the international community’s setting of general development aims – for example the Millenium Goals – may encourage some donors’ continuing support. Yet such wide goal-setting also seems out of favor with other donors, who still seek the specific as a focus for their giving. Comparative research on donor motivation at the nationstate level is both growing and judgmental. For example, Berthe´lemy (2006), comparing donors’ degrees of altruism, finds donors in Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, and most Nordic countries among the most altruistic; and Australia, France, Italy, and to some extent Japan and the United States among the most egoistic. Although nation-state donors may be upbraided for lessening or even not delivering on donor promises, other donors may not. The phenomenon of donor withdrawal from particular fields, which may appear perverse and damaging to many, whilst entirely consistent with private decision making to others, will be magnified on the international stage. For the most wealthy donors in this field, the choice of apparently clear targets – for example the worldwide eradication of particular diseases – makes for the kinds of specificity which other donors may admire, and creates an independent context in which their work occurs, and can be measured. Comparative data on donor choices and levels are also suggesting a continuing personalization of the donor function. Pharoah, for example, (2008) tracks comparative family foundation growth in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe for the first time, analyzing the relative burden of giving carried by these particular forms of donor action. Whilst overall family foundation giving remains highest in the United States, the largest 100 UK family foundations’ giving is worth 0.07% of GDP, surpassing 0.04% for the United States and 0.02% for the rest of Europe. The rationales for, and outcomes of, the international global reach of donors will be interpreted differently by differing ideologies, for example, as evidence of shared humanity or the imposition of a particular hegemony. Just as donor education may seek to encourage donor growth in small communities as expressions of community continuity and values, so it is possible that the ‘‘next big thing’’ in international donor development is not the transnational global donor ‘‘club.’’ Rather, it may be the appearance of donors in regions where formal giving has appeared less evident or was politically problematic, albeit that informal giving of resources, time, and support will have long flourished. (See, e.g., Laliberte´’s account, 2003, of a Taiwanese-founded organization’s 10 years of relief work in China, despite cross-Straits tensions.)
Future Directions Scholarship and practice-led research will continue its overriding interest in donor profiles, demographics, motivations for and propensity to give, locally, nationally, and internationally. Such research enables exploration of non-donor as well as donor activity, predictive work on the elusive question of donor identity, and the development of theoretical understanding on the ways in which donor action and choice drives nonprofit strategy, their rise, or demise. This work continues to raise the question as to the extent to which the donor’s role is essentially private or public. The hybridity that comes from publicity for some donors and anonymity for others makes it uncertain as to where donor communities reside, not least where donors make donations to multiple causes, and have multiple identities, some independently held as individuals, others shared with, for example, families, friends, faith and associational groups, and fellow employees. Further research on donor attachment is thus needed, in line with that exploring altered perceptions of, and purposes of, volunteering, as is the study of the extent to which ‘‘non-wealthy’’ donors are willing and able to claim donor status in citizenship contexts. Donor perceptions and practice in ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ times (see Madden & Scaife, 2008) may also become a further research theme, aligned with the growing focus on donor accountability. Complete anonymity in donor practice seems increasingly less well-regarded, as piecemeal regulatory effort requires greater donor openness (most recently in the United States, with corporate donors required to declare gifts to lawmakers’ favored charities, undercutting donation as a lobbying tactic). Deepening understanding of governmental policy activism in relation to donor proclivity, its effects and impact on recipient nonprofits and on donors alike, is then also important. This relates especially to the development of regulatory frameworks to enhance donor confidence or economic policy shifts to reward donors, for example through tax advantage. It also relates to those policies seeking to curb donor support, whether for legitimate or illegitimate civil society organizations, both nationally and transnationally (Crimm, 2004). The inherent competitiveness of donor action which predominates is, of course, dependent on donor visibility, which may prove to be less attractive to a wider public in straitened economic times. Ironically, many of the staples of middle- and lower-income donor practice – regular income deductions, payroll giving – are invisible or less visible actions, so that copying by others becomes less easy. Even perceptions of donation as always discretionary may be changing. The British parliamentarian Frank
Donor/Donor Intent
Field’s suggestion for enforcing a culture of giving among the wealthy (increasing tax for the ‘‘super-rich,’’ which is capable of being offset entirely by charitable giving) offers a view of donation as a quasi-mandatory action, perhaps even a lesser form of economic punishment (Field, 2008). Donor trust still remains as a critical aspect, whether giving is or is not voluntary. Thus, the factors and features affecting donor trust (beyond the formal structures of regulation and self-regulation) remain an important, if problematic, research field, often inevitably confined to snapshot studies of the wake of unusual events, such as nonprofit fraud or misconduct. A less-researched area of the donor–donee relationship is the question of recipient or beneficiary trust, arising when donor pledges and promises do not come to fruition, and donor failure is problematic or spectacular. Just as the for-profit literature is beginning to evidence customer forgiveness (and repeat business) with less well-performing firms, so the extent (and feasibility) of mutual donor–recipient forgiveness in the face of nonprofit or donor failure suggests an intriguing research field. To develop this area would be a small contribution to the return to social relations frameworks of understanding donor and recipient roles, for which Ostrander has argued cogently.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Citizenship ▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Family ▶ Fundraising ▶ Gift Relationship ▶ Giving Circles ▶ Philanthropy and Professional Advisors ▶ Volunteers
References/Further Readings Barman, E. (2007). An institutional approach to donor control: From dyadic ties to a field level analysis. American Journal of Sociology, 112(5), 1416–1457. Barman, E. (2008).With strings attached: Nonprofits and the adoption of donor choice. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 37(1), 39–56. Berthe´lemy, J. C. (2006). Bilateral donors’ interest vs. recipients’ development motives in aid allocation: Do all donors behave the same? Review of Development Economics, 10(2), 179–194. Bowman, W. (2006). Should donors care about overhead costs? Do they care? Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 35(2), 288–310. Brody, E. (2001). Enforcement; legal standing and private remedies. New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising, 31, 7–22. Brody, E. (2005). The charity in bankruptcy and ghosts of donors past, present, and future. Seton Hall Legislative Journal, 29(2), 471–530.
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Chong, A., & Gradstein, M. (2008). What determines foreign aid? The donors’ perspective. Journal of Development Economics, 87(1), 1–13. Crimm, N. (2004). High alert: The government’s war on the financing of terrorism and its implications for donors, domestic charitable organizations, and global philanthropy. William & Mary Law Review, 45(4), 1341–1452. Available at SSRN:http://ssrn.com/abstract = 1103239. Dennis, B. S., Buchholtz, A. K., & Butts, M. M. (2007). The nature of giving: A theory of planned behavior examination of corporate philanthropy. Business & Society Online, September, from http:// bas.sagepub.com/cgi/rapidpdf/0007650307305368v1 Eikenberry, A. M. (2007). Philanthropy, voluntary association, and governance beyond the state: giving circles and challenges for democracy. Administration & Society, 39(7), 857–882. Handy, F. (2000). How we beg: The analysis of direct mail appeals. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 29(3), 439–454. Harrow, J., Palmer, P., & Bogdanova, M. (2006). Business giving, the Tsunami and corporates as rock stars: Some implications for arts funding. Cultural Trends, 15(4), 299–323. Houston, D. J. (2006). Walking the walk of public service motivation: Public employees and charitable gifts of time, blood, and money. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 16(1), 67–86. Hughes, P., & Luksetich, W. (2008). Income volatility and wealth: The effect on charitable giving. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 37(2), 264–280. Irvin, R. A. (2007). Endowments: Stable largesse or distortion of the polity? Public Administration Review, 67(3), 445–457. Kehoe, E. (2004). Working hard at giving it away: Lord Duveen, the British Museum and the Elgin marbles. Historical Research, 77(198), 503–519. Laliberte´, A. (2003). Love transcends borders’ or ‘‘blood is thicker than water’’? The charity work of the Compassion Relief Foundation in the People’s Republic of China. European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2(2), 223–261. Leat, D. (2005). Foundations and policy involvement. New York: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Lebovic, J. H. (2005). Donor positioning: Development assistance from the US, Japan, France, Germany, and Britain. Political Research Quarterly, 58(1), 119–126. Levenson, J., & Farrant, F. (2002). Unlocking potential: Active citizenship and volunteering by prisoners. Probation Journal, 49, 195–204. Madden, K. M., & Newton, C. J. (2006). Is the tide turning? Professional advisers’ willingness to advise about philanthropy. Technical Report Working Paper No. CPNS 30. Brisbane, Australia: Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, Queensland University of Technology. Madden, K. M., & Scaife, W. (2008). Good times and philanthropy: Giving by Australia’s affluent. Brisbane, Australia: The Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, Queensland University of Technology. McClintock, N. (2004). Understanding Canadian donors (pp. 1–40). Toronto, Canada: Canadian Centre for Philanthropy. McNamara, N., & Morse, S. (2004). Voices from the aid ‘‘chain’’: the personal dynamics of care. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(2), 253–270. Ostrander, S. (2007). The growth of donor control: Revisiting the social relations of philanthropy. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 36(2), 356–372. Pharoah, C. (2008). Family foundation philanthropy. London: Centre for Charity Effectiveness, Cass Business School, City University.
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Polonsky, M., & Sargeant, A. (2007). Managing the donation service experience. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 17(4), 459–476. Rehberg, W. (2005). Altruistic individualists: Motivations for international volunteering among young adults in Switzerland. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary & Nonprofit Organisations, 16(2), 109–122. Sargeant, A., Ford, J. B., & West, D. C. (2006). Perceptual determinants of nonprofit giving behaviour. Journal of Business Research, 59(2), 155–156. Shelley, L., & Polonsky, M. J. (2002). Do charitable causes need to segment their current donor base on demographic factors? An Australian examination. International Journal of Nonprofit Marketing, 7(1), 19–22. Siegel, D., & Yancey, J. (2003). Philanthropy’s forgotten resource? Engaging the individual donor: The state of donor education today and a leadership agenda for the road ahead. Mill Valley, CA: New Visions Philanthropic Research and Development, from http://www.hewlett.org/nr/ rdonlyres/e2a8f872-c769–4080–9a6d-c71b069e380c/0/deifinalreport. pdf, 14 May 2008. Silk, J. (2004). Caring at a distance: Gift theory, aid chains and social movements. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(2), 229–251. Subramaniam, M. (2007). NGOs and resources in the construction of intellectual realms: Cases from India. Critical Sociology, 3(3), 551–573. Valentine, K. (2005). Citizenship, identity and blood donation. Body & Society, 11(2), 113–128. Van Til, J. (2008). Searching for critical issues in philanthropy. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 19(1), 121–128. Weertz, D. J., & Ronca, J. M. (2007). Profiles of supportive alumni: Donors, volunteers, and those who ‘‘do it all.’’ International Journal of Educational Advancement, 7, 20–34.
Dotcauses NUNO S. THEMUDO University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Introduction New technologies invariably affect the way in which we participate in the world around us and are likely to disrupt existing institutions as groups renegotiate their relative positions (Castells, 1998; Rheingold, 2002). The impact of the invention of the printed press, for example, is hard to overstate, transforming both national and transnational social relations, reducing dependence on the power of the Catholic Church and paving the way for modern nation states. Like the naval innovations in the fourteenth century, the press in the fifteenth century, and the automobile in the twentieth century, the Internet has considerably shrunk the world. By supporting an explosion of transnational information exchange, the Internet is often equated in its revolutionary potential to the invention of the press. A few scholars see the Internet
as the great equalizer, capable of projecting the voice of traditionally excluded groups and resisting domination by existing power structures, thus democratizing state, market, and global public sphere (e.g., Clark, 2003; Norris, 2001). But like other technological revolutions, the rise of the Internet is likely to produce winners and losers. Groups mastering the new technology are likely to increase their power relative to those who don’t. Who are the challengers and how do they organize their onslaught? How do power holders respond to it? These are critical questions in understanding the revolutionary, and potentially emancipatory, potential of the Internet revolution. This piece focuses on a critical dimension of the Internet revolution: the recent rise of Internet-based civil society networks, or ‘‘dotcauses,’’ in world politics. In the following I will define dotcauses, analyze the main opportunities and challenges resulting from organizational virtualization, and conclude with a brief discussion of dotcauses’ main impacts on civil society and world politics.
Definition Dotcauses are ‘‘cause-promoting networks whose organizational realm falls largely within Internet-space’’ (Clark & Themudo, 2006: 50). They are civil society networks, which mobilize support for social causes primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) through the Internet. From a social movement perspective, dotcauses can be seen as ‘‘mobilization structures,’’ that is, ‘‘collective vehicles . . . through which people mobilize and engage in collective action’’ (McAdam et al., 1996: 3). They foster collective action by reducing the costs of participation, providing virtual meeting spaces for communities of interest, and facilitating identity formation and trust building at the global level. Some of the earliest dotcauses were the Free Burma campaign network, starting in 1995, followed by networks waging campaigns against Shell in Ogoniland and against McDonald’s (O’Neill, 1999). The dotcause is the civil society equivalent of the ‘‘dotcom’’ organization in the business world (i.e., a commercial organization, such as Amazon.com, which relies primarily on its Internet presence to undertake its core business). Similarly, dotcauses rely on the Internet to undertake core activities such as resource mobilization and coordination, which are mostly undertaken through ‘‘virtual’’ rather than face-to-face communication: ‘‘Believe it or not, the Indymedia has no central office, and therefore we have no address, phone number or fax’’ (IndyMedia’s website). This high level of virtualization and lack of physical presence is also exemplified by Attac, which held its first truly international ‘‘physical’’ meeting almost 4 years after its birth, after it had already
Dotcauses
relied on the Internet to build a membership of around 80,000 individuals. Klein (2000: 394) found a similar level of virtualization in a third dotcause: "
McLibel’s head office is nothing more than a tiny room at the back of a London flat with graffiti in the stairwells. The office walls are papered with subvertisements and anarchist agitprop. Helen Steel, Dave Morris, Dan Mills and a few dozen volunteers had gone head to head with McDonald’s for seven years with a rickety PC, an old modem, one telephone and a fax machine. Dan Mills apologized to me for the absence of an extra chair.
Without the Internet, dotcauses would not exist or would not exist in anything like their current form. As Diani (2000: 395) points out, the Internet ‘‘improves the effectiveness of communication dramatically, and in doing so it often makes the very existence of these networks possible.’’ Virtualization, that is, the extent to which networks depend on virtual over face-to-face communications between members, is the defining characteristic of dotcauses, conveying both challenges and opportunities for their mobilization capacity and impact.
Key Issues
such as printing and broadcasting, the Internet encourages audience participation in shaping the message and resulting collective action. The physical separation typically involved in virtual networks presents significant obstacles to monitoring and control, and consequently to the development of bureaucracies. Virtualization thus encourages more egalitarian networks over hierarchy and informality over structure (see Handy, 1995; Anheier & Themudo, 2002). Networks emphasizing self-monitoring, collegiality, and shared goals are therefore more appropriate forms in virtual settings. Dotcauses such as Peoples Global Action (PGA) often see themselves as ‘‘coordination mechanisms,’’ not formal organizations; they are not registered anywhere and have no spokespeople, but they do have a manifesto. PGA’s main activities are to coordinate antifree trade and anti-WTO activities around the world and to organize a conference on these themes every 2 years. PGA’s website is its main point of contact with its supporters and the outside world (PGA website). Another dotcause, Subversive Enterprises International, presents an extreme example of informality and lack of hierarchy: "
Opportunities from Virtualization
Virtualization can greatly reduce the costs and the bureaucracy needed to coordinate collective action, especially at the transnational level (see Klein, 2000; Warkentin, 2001), therefore reducing the barriers to entry for new players and enabling the mobilization of less well-resourced groups. Virtualization enables rapid and inexpensive coordination, avoiding the high costs of physical space. This is aptly illustrated by the anecdote that when the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a dotcause, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, it did not even have a bank account to receive the award money (Mekata, 2000). According to Boyd (2003), ‘‘The Internet allowed [United For Peace and Justice] to start serious organizing with only $5,000–$10,000. We pulled off a demo in five weeks that would normally take five or six months.’’ Bypassing traditional mass media, dotcauses also help disseminate alternative opinions and information to a wide audience (see Bennett, 2003; Clark & Themudo, 2006). Dotcauses can disseminate alternative analyses of complex policy making negotiations in ‘‘real time’’ thus informing rapid civil society responses such as during the negotiations for a Multilateral Agreement on Investment or during various intergovernmental meetings aimed at reaching new free trade agreements. By allowing for more interaction than traditional forms of communication,
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Who is in charge of Subversive Enterprises, Int’l.? No one. . . . Each member of Subversive Enterprises, Int’l. is responsible for their own actions, and their own leadership. . . .No one is higher than anyone else. No one is lower than anyone else. We are a network, not a bureaucracy. Feel free to consider yourself a member right now. . . . The only reason this ‘‘organization’’ was formed, was that we hoped that individuals like yourself (-selves) might be more encouraged to take action if you knew that there were others out there like you, with similar interests and goals. You want to start you own chapter/branch/franchise of Subversive Enterprises, Int’l.? Go right ahead. We would prefer that your agendas be somewhat compatible with ours, but anything goes (Subversive Enterprises International’s website).
This is not to say that all dotcauses have no hierarchy. Instead, virtual organizations tend to organize more on collegial and less on hierarchical principles (Handy, 1995). In dotcauses power commonly flows from participation, which encourages further participation. This is especially true in dotcauses which, for ideological reasons or a weak financial base, rely on Internet-connected volunteers for most, if not all of their work. For example, within Attac, "
Membership equals participation, and participation equals decision-making power. There is no elite group of lobbyists supported by passive members, and no
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bureaucracy to deal with. Members of local groups organize whatever events and campaigns they’d like to see happen, as long as the topic is consistent with Attac’s platform (Attac’s website).
Virtualization also helps to protect anonymity, which facilitates more aggressive campaigning at the margin of the law. While Internet regulation is increasing, it is still remarkably difficult to catch and prosecute offenders in cyberspace. In terms of activism this puts more aggressive campaigners beyond the reach of corporate lawyers and state officials. Internet activists can use various technological tools to undertake ‘‘virtual sit ins’’ and disrupt their targets, in what has been called ‘‘hacktivism’’ (Hartigan, 1999). For example, FloodNet, a project of two dotcauses, Digital Zapatista Movement and Electronic Civil Disobedience, bombards targeted servers (such as that of the White House) with requests for information. If enough computers are participating in the protest, the target server may shut down, unable to deal with all the data requests. Another dotcause, Electronic Disturbance Theater, successfully shut down the World Economic Forum’s website in 2002 (Childress, 2004). Even though such activities are illegal (Hartigan, 1999), there have been very few attempts to hold accountable those responsible, partly because the law is unclear and partly because many activists act outside the legal boundaries of their target countries. By using inexpensive and interactive communications technologies, dotcauses offer alternative forms of participation in civil society. They often facilitate the mobilization and coordination of traditionally excluded groups, such as anarchists and Southern indigenous groups, who may be underrepresented in the policy arena and previously unable to participate and organize at the global level because they were too resource poor (Chadwick, 2006). Challenges of Virtualization
The vast mobilizing potential of the Internet is in practice limited by equally sized challenges. The lack of sustained physical contact reduces the virtual organization’s ability to generate the level of trust between members required for sustained commitment to collective action (Handy, 1995; Diani, 1999). The anonymity and informality often involved in virtual relationships create a major obstacle to identifying organizational constituencies and, consequently, defining accountability relationships and building trust between members, especially at the transnational level. The self-selection of dotcause adherents makes it likely that they share a common analysis of the cause in question, and even worldview, but the medium of communication makes it difficult to reach consensus on strategies
and tactics without preexisting trust. Hence dotcauses are powerful tools for raising public concerns about social causes, for attracting whistleblowers and alternative sources of information, for demystifying and making transparent the processes of policy-making and for enhancing accountability of power-holders, but in building up widespread and coherent campaign strategies, problems of trust become evident. According to Jordan and Van Tuijl (2000: 2065), ‘‘the necessary trust to seriously discuss agenda setting, strategies, and risk management cannot be developed by email alone (if it is available).’’ Dotcauses’ ability to generate trust is further hampered by the fact that they tend to be young networks, with incipient reputations. Hence it is more difficult for virtual and young groups such as dotcauses to attract trust and resources from outsiders than for older and more established ‘‘physical’’ CSOs. Since the strength of a network is directly proportional to membership, frequency of exchanges and the trust generated between network members (Keck & Sikkink, 1998), trust building remains one of dotcauses’ greatest organizational challenges. Despite the steep obstacles to building trust through virtual communications, many successful dotcauses demonstrate that it is not impossible. They pursue several strategies to help solve the ‘‘trust challenge,’’ such as hyperlinking to other websites with more trustworthiness, associating with reputable public figures, dissociating themselves from the status quo by providing alternative news and analysis, and encouraging members to create affiliated ‘‘physical franchises’’ (Clark & Themudo, 2006). Such strategies have shown some success, sometimes even in attracting financial donations which require a high level of trust between giver and recipient. For example, during the 2000 Presidential campaign in the United States, MoveOn.org helped Howard Dean to fundraise several million dollars (Chadwick, 2006). Today, the advocacy group has 3.2 million individual members and its strong fundraising capacity was again demonstrated during the recent Obama campaign. Another dotcause, Kiva, has fostered person-to-person microfinance, using the Internet to connect lenders and microentrepreneurs. In less than 3 years after its creation, Kiva had channeled over $50 million to microenterprises in developing countries. And its resource mobilization capacity is increasing. For example, during the first week of December 2008, as stock and credit markets continued to be afflicted by one of the worst financial crises in history, through Kiva 9,472 lenders loaned $0.69 million to 1,953 entrepreneurs, and almost 6,000 new lenders joined the network. These transactions are sustained by virtual communications, with few prospects that a lender will ever
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meet an entrepreneur face-to-face. Therefore, despite their improbable ability to generate sufficient trust to sustain collective action, dotcauses have repeatedly defied expectations, suggesting that trust building in virtual settings is possible. A second key challenge relates to power and exclusion. It is important to not assume that the Internet automatically leads to inclusion, dialogue, and democracy (Coleman, 1999; Norris, 2001; Surman & Reilly, 2003). Virtualization raises important issues of access and participation. Through their websites, dotcauses are able to catapult local issues into the global arena. On the other hand, only those with Internet access and who can work in a major international language (preferably English) can participate fully. This leaves many people out, especially due to different rates of Internet access and technological expertise between rich and poor, old and young, educated and uneducated, and South and North. Dotcauses have made important efforts in translating their content into multiple languages and making their websites friendly to low bandwidth access, but aside from problems of technological reach, large cultural and standpoint obstacles remain. Because of the Internet’s ease in crossing national boundaries, dotcauses are often transnational and transcultural networks. But generally there are important differences between Northern and Southern activists’ perspectives on different issues, so dotcauses are still critically influenced by the physical location of the members of the network. Despite their ‘‘virtual’’ presence in ‘‘cyberspace’’ the location of dotcauses’ staff and supporters is still relevant. The emergence of the Internet and dotcauses has helped to reduce the distance between North and South but, clearly, the distance remains significant. A New Force in Civil Society
Traditional ‘‘physical’’ CSOs such as Nature Conservancy, Save the Children or GreenPeace also rely increasingly on the Internet to promote their missions. But they rely on virtual communications as a complement to physical presence, which dominates in terms of resources, staff time, and contribution to mission. They are therefore much more likely to have formal bureaucratic procedures and clear lines of authority in place due to internal and external accountability pressures, offering less opportunity for member participation. According to Tarrow (2004: 31): "
The Internet as a form of movement communication has had a more transformative effect on new movement organizations than on established ones, which continue to rely more on face-to-face communications and on conventional organizational channels of communication.
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Dotcauses’ distinctiveness is driven by technology and enhanced by the fact that they are part of a newer generation of CSOs. The average dotcause is much younger than the average traditional CSO, since by definition dotcauses have only emerged since the Internet became an important mass communications medium in the 1990s, and most of them have been created much more recently. Through ‘‘organizational imprinting,’’ we expect organizations – and their missions and processes – to be strongly influenced by conditions of the period in which they were formed (Stichcombe, 1965). Emerging at a time of rapidly growing Internet-based communications, globalization, and mistrust toward representative democracy and hierarchies, it is not surprising that many new civil society networks adopt a dotcause form, using the Internet as their primary medium of communication to create participatory, and often transnational, structures. These differences combine to suggest dotcauses are a new type of CSO requiring a separate analysis. Alongside the traditional family, school, church, and local network mobilization structures, the development of the Internet has brought about the dotcause as a new type of mobilization structure which is transforming civil society.
Future Directions The impact of Internet on civil society and world politics is likely to intensify as traditionally excluded groups improve their access to technology. The emergence of dotcauses is an important dimension of this impact. Given the lack of research in this area, however, this concluding section can only suggest tentative hypotheses about dotcauses’ impact, in the hope of generating future empirical exploration. Dotcauses have a complex impact on civil society. On one hand, dotcauses can empower the social movements in which they participate. As organizational networks and mobilizing structures, dotcauses play important roles in furthering their causes such as attracting new support, coordinating collective action, disseminating information and new ideological framings, and facilitating the inclusion of groups traditionally excluded from civil society participation. By undertaking these tasks in new and cheaper ways they offer an alternative to traditional mobilization structures, potentially attracting new support for new and old causes. Dotcauses can therefore strengthen civil society by increasing resource availability, coordination, and inclusiveness. By giving voice to traditionally excluded groups, dotcauses also contribute to civil society’s democratization, especially at the global level. On the other hand, dotcauses may potentially undermine traditional CSOs’ strength by increasing
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competition for attention, resources, and legitimacy. Campaigning activity relating to globalization and the institutions of global governance have always included large CSOs such as Oxfam, Sierra Club, Environment Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth and Amnesty International as well as small activist groups – with varying efforts to coordinate across sector and to work transnationally. Up till the early 1990s the larger groups tended to be most prominent in the public eye and most influential with decision-makers, because they had wider followings and could command greater coverage in the mainstream media. Size, and often age, was a fundamental advantage. However, a decade later the comparative advantage has partly shifted. In the Internet age, the transaction costs of communicating to large audiences, of networking and of working transnationally have diminished, while the advantages of nimbleness – of being able to respond swiftly to events as they unfold – have grown. More established CSOs are hobbled by elaborate management and board processes that must approve major policy statements; dotcauses are free of such constraints. Hence, today there are strong advantages to being small, flexible, and dependent primarily on virtual communications. It isn’t that dotcauses are inherently stronger because they are virtual groups – rather that established CSOs are restrained by difficult trade-offs between their traditional and their new webbased support-bases, and between high visibility tactics and cultivating respect amongst policy makers and the mainstream media. By offering an alternative form of participation in civil society, dotcauses may therefore contribute to an erosion of traditional CSOs’ support base. The overall impact upon civil society strength will depend on the extent to which dotcauses contribute to civil society’s resource base and efficiency, possibly compensating for the potential predatory impact on traditional CSOs. By providing new opportunities for citizen participation in international affairs, dotcauses are changing world politics. For example, despite their weak resource base and ‘‘trust challenge,’’ dotcauses have visibly helped to coordinate transnational campaigns, demystify complex multilateral agreements, provide an alternative to the corporate media, and support indigenous movements. A less visible, but potentially more consequential, impact derives from dotcauses’ demonstration that alternative transnational organizational forms are possible and effective. Could they help put a check on the current growth drive of international bureaucracies such as the United Nations (see Barnett & Finnemore, 2004), helping to democratize them? Many members of international organizations cherish democratic values but regularly set them aside while solving global coordination challenges. As ‘‘experiments’’ in a natural ‘‘institutional lab,’’ dotcauses
represent potential solutions to global coordination problems in the context of complex political relations and very scarce resources, revealing the many opportunities as well as challenges of the Internet in helping to solve global governance problems. Indeed, organizational theory suggests that technologies which facilitate information processing and diffusion reduce the need for hierarchical forms of organization, privileging network structures. It is possible, therefore, that while the Internet may offer the means, dotcauses may show the way to alternative, more participatory, institutional arrangements in world politics.
Cross-References
▶ Amnesty International ▶ Attac ▶ Collective Action ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Cyber-communities ▶ Friends of the Earth ▶ Greenpeace ▶ International Campaign to Ban Landmines ▶ Internet, technology ▶ Nature Conservancy ▶ Oxfam International ▶ Participation ▶ Save the Children ▶ Sierra Club ▶ Social Movements ▶ World Economic Forum
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. K., & Themudo, N. (2002). Organizational forms of global civil society: Implications of going global. In H. K. Anheier, M. Glasius, & M. Kaldor (Eds.), Global civil society 2002 (pp. 191– 216). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ATTAC: http://attac.org.uk/attac/html/about.vm (accessed on March 21, 2006). Barnett, M., & Finnemore, M. (2004). Rules for the world: International organizations in global politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bennett, W. L. (2003). Communicating global activism: Strengths and vulnerabilities of networked politics. Information, Communication and Society, 6(2), from http://depts.washington.edu/gcp/pdf/bennettnmpower.pdf Boyd, A. (2003, August 4). The web rewires the movement. The Nation, 13–18. Castells, M. (1998). End of millennium – The information age: Economy, society and culture (Vol. III). Oxford: Blackwell. Chadwick, A. (2006). Internet politics: States, citizens, and new communications technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Childress, S. (2004, August 30). ‘Hacktivists’ log on: Police are on guard against threats of electronic chaos. Newsweek. Clark, J. D. (Ed.) (2003). Globalizing civic engagement. London: Earthscan. Clark, J. D., & Themudo, N. S. (2006). Linking the web and the street: Internet-based ‘Dotcauses’ and the anti-globalization movement. World Development, 34(1), 50–74.
Drucker, Peter Ferdinand Coleman, S. (1999). Cutting out the middle man: From virtual representation to direct deliberation. In B. Hague & B. Loader (Eds.), Digital democracy: Discourse and decision making in the information age. London: Routledge. Diani, M. (1999, September). Social movement networks virtual and real paper for the conference ‘‘A New Politics?,’’ 16–17, CCSS, University of Birmingham, from http://www.nd.edu/dmyers/cbsm/ vol2/bgham99.pdf Diani, M. (2000). Social movement networks virtual and real. Information, Communication & Society, 3(3), 386–401. Hulme, D., & Edwards, M. (Eds.) (1997). Too close for comfort? NGOs, states and donors. London: Macmillan. Handy, C. (1995). Trust and the virtual organization. Harvard Business Review, 73(3), 40–50. Hartigan, P. (1999, January 24). They call it ‘Hacktivism.’ Boston Globe, F01. IndyMedia: http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/FrequentlyAsked QuestionEn (accessed on March 21, 2006). Jordan, L., & Van Tuijl, P. (2000). Political responsibility in transnational NGO advocacy. World Development, 28(12), 2051–2065. Keck, M., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Klein, N. (2000). No logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies. New York: Picador USA. McAdam, D., McCarthy, J., & Zald, M. (1996). Introduction: Opportunities mobilizing structures and framing processes. In D. McAdam, J. McCarthy, & M. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings (pp. 1–20). New York: Cambridge University Press. Mekata, M. (2000). Building partnerships toward a common goal: Experiences of the international campaign to Ban Landmines. In A. Florini (Ed.), The third force: The rise of transnational civil society (pp. 143–176). Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Brookings Institution Press. Norris, P. (2001). Digital divide. Civic engagement, information poverty, and the internet worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Brien, R., Goetz, A. M., Scholte, J. A., & Williams, M. (2000). Contesting global governance: Multilateral economic institutions and global social movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, K. (1999). Internetworking for social change: Keeping the spotlight on corporate responsibility (Discussion Article no. 111). Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. People’s Global Action: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/en/ (accessed on March 21, 2006). Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. Stichcombe, A. L. (1965). Social structure and organizations. In J. G. March (Ed.), Handbook of organizations (pp. 142–193). Chicago: Rand McNally. Subversive Enterprises International: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2484/intro.htm (accessed on May 2002; has been taken from the web since the writing of this article). Surman, M., & Reilly, K. (2003, November). Appropriating the Internet for social change: Towards the strategic use of networked technologies by Transnational civil society organizations. Information Technology and International Cooperation program, Social Science Research Council, from http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/ Tarrow, S. (2004). Beyond globalization: Why creating transnational social movements is so hard and when is it most likely to happen, from http://www.antenna.nl/waterman/tarrow.html (accessed February 2004). Warkentin, C. (2001). Reshaping world politics: NGOs, the internet, and global civil society. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Drucker, Peter Ferdinand CAMILLO VON MUELLER, TIMO MEYNHARDT
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria Peter Ferdinand Drucker attended the Universities of Hamburg and Frankfurt, receiving his LL.D at the latter in 1931. After the rise of the National Socialists, Drucker moved to London in 1933 where he worked in insurance and banking. After the marriage with German born Doris Schmitz, Drucker and his wife emigrated to the United States in 1937. Drucker taught at Bennington College in Vermont as professor of philosophy and politics from 1942 to 1949. In 1942, Drucker conducted a two-year analysis of the social and structural relationships of General Motors under Alfred P. Sloan, laying the groundwork of modern management research and consultancy. Drucker was a professor of management at New York University from 1950–1971 and a professor of social science and management at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California from 1971–2002. Since the 1940s, Drucker advised various institutions such as Coca Cola, Google, IBM, the American Red Cross, and the Salvation Army. Drucker held 25 honorary doctorates from American, Belgian, Czech, English, and Swiss universities as well as orders from the governments of Japan and Austria. In 2002 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’s highest civilian honor. Drucker died in 2005 at his home in Claremont, California.
Major Contributions Drucker is generally known as one of the fathers of modern management. Writing almost on every topic of management, he developed a number of concepts (e.g., ‘‘knowledge work,’’ ‘‘management by objectives’’) and identified major trends in society. Drucker’s work includes early comprehensive studies on the functioning of fascism (1939), predictions concerning the role of pension funds in corporate America (1976) and forecasts on the role of nonprofit organizations in society (1990). In 1990, Frances Hesselbein, the former director of Girls Scouts United States, established the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management (now Leader to Leader Institute) to honor Drucker’s achievements in providing managerial and educational expertise to nonprofits. Peter Drucker called himself a ‘‘social ecologist’’ who was primarily interested in societal issues rather than in management. In his seminal work ‘‘Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices’’ (New York: Harper & Row,
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1973) he described management as a ‘‘societal function’’ and as a ‘‘liberal art and not a science.’’ Drucker built his impressive work on the intellectual heritage of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ferdinand To¨nnies, and Alexis de Toqueville including also observations from scholars such as Othmar Spann and Julius Stahl. During his seven decades of teaching, consultancy, and research Drucker published 36 books that have been translated into more than 30 languages as well a several hundreds of scientific articles and papers. In 1987, the Claremont Graduate University named its School of Management after him. The Peter F. Drucker Research Library and Archive (1993) and the Drucker Institute (2006) have also been instituted at Claremont Graduate University. Affiliated to the Drucker Institute, Drucker Societies exist around the globe connecting institutions such as Bejing Normal University, China, and the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: de Tocqueville ▶ International Red Cross and Crescent Movement ▶ Nonprofit Management ▶ Salvation Army ▶ Sloan, Alfred P. ▶ Toennies, Ferdinand
References/Further Readings Drucker, P. F. (1945). Concept of the corporation. New York: John Day. Drucker, P. F. (1939). The end of economic man: A study of the new Totaliarianism. London: William Heinemann. Drucker, P. F. (1976). The unseen revolution: How pension found socialism came to America. New York: Harper & Row. Drucker, P. F. (1990). Managing the non-profit organization. New York: HarperCollins.
Dunant, Jean-Henri (Henry) GEORG VON SCHNURBEIN
Basic Biographical Information Born 1828 in Geneva (Switzerland) into a well-situated family, Henry Dunant became an unsuccessful businessman and – led by his affection for the situation of the needy – the founder of several organizations, amongst the most important is the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Dunant started working at a bank in 1849.
After working for a Swiss mill company in Se´tif/Algeria, he founded his own mill company in Algeria in 1858 (Socie´te´ financie`re et industrielle des Moulins des Mons-Dje´mila). In 1867, the liquidation of his company ends in a scandal and he is forced to leave the ICRC. Impoverished, he lived in Heiden (Switzerland) until a journalist rediscovered him in 1895. Afterwards he received several awards and in 1901 the first ever Nobel Peace Prize together with Fre´de´ric Passey. He died in 1910 in Heiden.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Although Dunant was raised in a strong Calvinist family closely connected to revivalism, it was the experience of a battle that changed his life. In his book A Memory of Solferino he recorded his memories of the aftermath of the battle of Solferino, where 40,000 soldiers were left on the battlefield, injured or dying. Dunant organized first aid, convinced the population to help the wounded regardless of their nation and convinced the victorious French army to release the captured Austrian doctors. Back in Geneva, he developed ideas and principles of a neutral organization to provide care to the wounded soldiers. In 1863, the ‘‘Comite´e International de Secours aux Militaries Blesses’’ was founded, which later became the ICRC. In 1864, 12 European states signed the first Geneva Convention that was based on Dunant’s ideas. After his bankruptcy in 1867 he was expelled from the ICRC and was shunned by his former colleagues. Despite his own situation he traveled through Europe to promote his humanitarian ideas. He argued for a supranational court to mediate international conflicts and promoted the idea of a world library. He wrote about women’s rights and corresponded with Bertha von Suttner. Besides the ICRC, Dunant was founder and initiator of several other organizations. He was one of the founders of YMCA Geneva in 1852 and among the founding fathers of the World Alliance of YMCA in Paris in 1855. In 1866 the former Swiss Red Cross is founded with his support. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), he founded the Common Relief Society (Allgemeine Fu¨rsorgegesellschaft) and soon after the Common Alliance for Order and Civilization (Allgemeine Allianz fu¨r Ordnung und Zivilisation).
Cross-References
▶ Human Rights ▶ International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement ▶ NGOs and Humanitarian Assistance ▶ YMCA
Durkheim, E´mile
References/Further Readings Boissier, P. (1985). History of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Volume I: From Solferino to Tsushima. Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute. Dunant, H. (1986). A memory of Solferino. Geneva: ICRC. Moorehead, C. (1998). Dunant’s dream: War, Switzerland and the history of the Red Cross. London: HarperCollins.
Durkheim, E´mile ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Basic Biographical Information
Born into a rabbinical family in 1858 in E´pinal, France, E´mile Durkheim is considered one of the founders of sociology. Studying at the E´cole Normale Supe´rieure under Auguste Comte, among others, he developed an early interest in a scientific approach for understanding society modeled after the natural sciences. After graduating in philosophy in 1882 and spending a year studying in Germany, he taught pedagogy and social science at the teacher’s training center in Bordeaux. From here, Durkheim proceeded to help develop the theoretical and methodological foundations of sociology through a series of major publications (The Division of Labor in Society, 1893; Rules of the Sociological Method, 1895; and Suicide, 1897). He also established the journal L’Anne´e Sociologique, and founded the first Department of Sociology in France, at the University of Bordeaux. By 1902, Durkheim had finally obtained a prominent academic position as Chair of Education – later renamed Chair of Education and Sociology – at the Sorbonne in Paris, from where he continued to pursue the goal of establishing sociology as a scientific discipline. Durkheim died in Paris in 1917. His last years were full of personal tragedy, having lost his son as well as many of the young sociologists he had trained to World War I.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions One of his main arguments was that individuals, while ultimately creating the societies they live in, experience society as something external, as a ‘‘social substratum’’ with its own underlying logic and force. He examined this tension between the individual and society in a number of fields such as religion, deviant behavior, and social integration. By doing so, he made significant contributions to the field of sociology more broadly, and laid the
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groundwork for many key concepts in the study of civil society, social capital and philanthropy, including solidarity and social cohesion. For example, in The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim explores issues that are closely related to notions of bonding and bridging capital today, but also to aspects of civil society and social self-organization. Indeed, the central questions are very contemporary: what holds societies together, and what binds individuals to the societies they live in? In addressing these questions, Durkheim differentiates two large systems equilibrating social order: mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. Under mechanical solidarity, social order is maintained primarily through shared beliefs and sentiments, along with repressive laws, that tie the individual to the society as a whole. Mechanical solidarity would be typical of preindustrial or tribal societies, in which ties within societal units, e.g., family, church, or neighborhood, are strong, but those between units tend to be weaker. The second large system is characterized by organic solidarity, typical of industrial societies, in which higher levels of differentiation and complexity translate into greater ties of interdependency. Under organic solidarity, shared practices and loyalties ensure a more stable, flexible social order and different beliefs and values can be accommodated (through law). At the same time, Durkheim felt that the centrifugal economic and social forces of modern societies towards selfishness and individualization may be too strong for the cohesive power of organic solidarity. He suggested that business and professional associations in particular, but other forms of intermediate organizations generally, could offer stability to modern society by looking after the common good. An example would be the professional codes of conduct developed and enforced by businesses, professions, etc. While these could contribute significantly to compensate for the lack of moral regulations in modern societies, the state is seen as essential for offering a moral compass and as an instrument for subordinating individual to collective interests when needed.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Business and Employers’ Associations ▶ Civil Society, Definitions and Approaches ▶ Comte, Auguste ▶ Mutual Societies, Organizations, Mutual Societies ▶ Professional Associations ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Cohesion ▶ Solidarity
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References/Further Readings Alexander, J. C. (1988). Durkheimian sociology. Cultural studies. England, New York: Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, E´. (1938). The rules of sociological method (8th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Durkheim, E´. (1965). The division of labor in society (G. Simpson, Trans.). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E´. (2002). Suicide. A study in sociology. London: Routledge.
E EAPG ▶ European Association for Planned Giving (EAPG)
Ebadi, Shirin JEANETTE ROHR
Basic Biographical Information Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who in 2003 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her outstanding commitment to democracy and human rights. Ebadi was born into a religious middle-class family in Hamadan, Iran, where her father was a professor of commercial law. The family moved to Tehran in 1948. Ebadi graduated from the law department of Tehran University in 1969 and started to work as a judge. She received her master’s degree in law in 1971. In 1975, she became the first woman to preside over an Iranian legislative court. During the same year, she married Javad Tavassolian with whom she has two daughters. Having initially supported the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ebadi was forced to step down from her position as a judge due to conservative clerics insisting on women being prohibited to officiate as judges. She applied for a lawyer’s concession which was given to her only in 1993. In the meantime, she wrote a number of books and newspaper articles dealing with human rights issues. She lectures law at Tehran University.
Based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Ebadi supports the concept of a pluralistic and democratic society and opposes fundamentalism. She demands a reform of Iran’s legal system in order to establish independent judges and lawyers. Adherent to the principle of gender equality, Ebadi has shown herself as a strong campaigner for strengthening the legal status of women and children. In 1994, she founded the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child (SPRC) in Iran which campaigns for increasing the age of criminal responsibility. She is currently president of Iran’s most important human rights organization, the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC) in Tehran. In 1996, she was given the Human Rights Watch Defender Award. In October 2003, Ebadi became the first Iranian as well as the first Muslim woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As the leading figure of Iran’s human rights movement, she has since taught and lectured at a number of universities all over the world. In spite of threats to her life and her family, she has been proceeding to defend Iranians accused of political crimes.
Cross-References
▶ Human Rights ▶ Human Rights Watch
References/Further Readings Ebadi, S. (2006). Iran awakening: A memoir of revolution and hope. New York: Random House. Hubbard-Brown, J. (2007). Shirin Ebadi: Champion for human rights in Iran. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.
Major Contributions As a lawyer, Ebadi has taken up numerous cases of dissident intellectuals. Prominent examples are Darioush Forouhar and Parvaneh Eskandari, a married couple which fell victim to a series of murders committed by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence during the late 1990s. Ebadi also represented the families of both Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad who was killed in the Iranian student protests of 1999 and Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi who died in Iranian custody in 2003.
Ebert, Friedrich ▶ Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
ECF ▶ European Cultural Foundation (ECF)
H. Anheier, S. Toepler (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-93996-4, # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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EFC ▶ European Foundation Centre (EFC)
Effectiveness and Efficiency BRAM VERSCHUERE University College Ghent and Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Introduction Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly under pressure to prove to their constituencies that they are achieving their missions and goals in an efficient and effective way (Murray, 2005: 345). This environmental pressure on the NPOs by their funders, clients, regulators, and other stakeholders is one of the primary causes of the growing interest in organizational performance. NPOs are forced to show their stakeholders that they have an impact on complex social problems, in order not to lose their legitimacy. Murray (2005: 347) argues that this general tendency to stress organizational effectiveness and efficiency is linked to the so-called accountability movement, which also increasingly affects the public sector. According to the accountability movement, NPOs and the people that run them should be accountable to those they are created to serve and those who provide the money to operate them. Besides these external pressures for more accountability and effectiveness, managers and board members also increasingly demand better information on how the organization is performing. More and more, managerial tools such as outcome measurement, benchmarking, client satisfaction surveys, and quality systems are adopted to increase the managerial capacity of NPOs (and public agencies), which in turn is assumed to increase efficiency and effectiveness (Sowa et al., 2004; Light, 2000). This kind of pressure the NPOs are confronted with, inducing them to be effective, makes (measuring) their performance increasingly important, both from a practitioner’s and from an academic point of view.
Definition Organizational effectiveness and efficiency is a concept that has many synonyms (Baruch & Ramalho, 2006). Many terms are used in the literature to designate organizational outcomes and results: effectiveness, efficiency, performance, productivity, quality, success, health, etc.
The most straightforward definition of organizational performance that puts many of these terms in relation with one another is the production of the welfare framework (POW) by Kendall and Knapp (2000, in Anheier [2005: 194]). A similar model is the input/output model by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2000: 13). According to both models, efficiency can be defined as the ratio between the organizational inputs (resources of the organization) and the organizational outputs (measurable products and services delivered by the organization). For example, the number of graduates per annum in a public school, in relation to the resources of that school (subsidies, grants, personnel), can convey something about the efficiency of the school. Considering two public schools with a comparable amount of resources and pupils, school A with 100 graduates per annum can be considered as being more efficient than school B with 50 graduates per annum. Effectiveness can be defined as the ratio between the objectives set by the organization (e.g., increasing the general education level in the neighborhood) and the outcomes that are the result of the organization’s efforts (results, e.g., the number of a school’s graduates that obtain a university degree; and impact, positive effects for the neighborhood of the fact that many people with high education levels live there). This approach to organizational performance is, however, very rational and instrumental. It puts a large emphasis on the linear relationship between inputs (resources) of the organization, outputs (measurable results) that are the result of the organization’s functioning, and outcomes or societal effects that are the result of the organization’s efforts. This basic approach to organizational effectiveness comes close to the goal model of organizational effectiveness (Herman & Renz, 2004; Rojas, 2000; Forbes, 1998). According to the goal model, organizations have goals, and the extent to which the goals are met by the organization determines the organizational success. The model departs from the assumption that organizational goals are identifiable and unambiguous. This assumption makes the goal model prone to critique, as one can argue that only real people (and not organizations) have goals, that in real life goals are often ill-specified, and that organizations often do not include unofficial but still important goals. Hence, the goal model offers a rather narrow and instrumental approach to organizational effectiveness and efficiency. A second approach to organizational effectiveness is the system resource model of effectiveness, which considers organizations that are able to exploit the environment to acquire scarce resources as being effective. In other words, organizational effectiveness can be measured as the
Effectiveness and Efficiency
viability or survival of the organization in its environment. In sum, effective organizations are able to maintain their functioning by their ability to exploit environmental resources. The main critique to this approach is that the ability to collect valuable and scarce resource may be an important criterion of effectiveness for some organizational stakeholders (e.g., the board or the management), though not for all stakeholders (e.g., clients that are mainly interested in the quality and cost of the services delivered). Thirdly, the multiple constituency model claims that the many stakeholders of NPOs all have different conceptualizations of organizational effectiveness in mind, or at least have different criteria to assess the NPO’s effectiveness. According to this model, organizational effectiveness is not a single reality, but a more complicated matter of differing interests and expectations among different organizational stakeholders. This model is ontologically rooted in social constructivism theory, assuming that realities are constructed by people’s beliefs, values, and knowledge. Hence, according to the multiple constituency model, organizational effectiveness and efficiency is whatever the stakeholders judge it to be. The result is that no single organizational effectiveness exists, but that in reality, stakeholders of the NPO (board, management, employees, volunteers, clients, funders, etc.) may all have different opinions on what effectiveness means, and on how effective the organization is.
Key Issues Effectiveness and Efficiency as a Heterogeneous Concept
As the overview of definitions of organizational effectiveness shows, NPO effectiveness and efficiency is not a neutral or homogeneous concept. Firstly, organizational effectiveness is always a matter of comparison (Herman & Renz, 1999). The effectiveness and efficiency of an organization, be it an objective reality or as a social construct, can only be assessed in a meaningful way when compared to the effectiveness and efficiency of other organizations, to an ideal type organization of its kind, or to the organization itself at another moment in time. Secondly, organizational effectiveness and efficiency is a multidimensional concept that cannot be reduced to one single measure. The multidimensional integrated model of nonprofit organizational effectiveness (MIMNOE) (Sowa et al., 2004) is exemplary for this. MIMNOE captures two levels of effectiveness, management effectiveness and program effectiveness, on two sublevels, organizational capacity and organizational outcomes. Other examples
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include the balanced scorecard, or the competing values framework. The implication is that an organization most unlikely will be able to maximize effectiveness and efficiency on all dimensions or criteria simultaneously. Thirdly, the assessment of organizational effectiveness and efficiency will depend on who is evaluating (Murray, 2005). NPOs often have multiple stakeholders, who all might have other opinions on what the effective NPO should be like and on what criteria to use for assessing effectiveness and efficiency. Clients will stress the quality of services delivered, the management might be interested in the quality of internal management processes, while board members might assess organizational effectiveness on resource acquisition and economy in using these resources. Problems in Measuring Effectiveness and Efficiency in the Nonprofit Sector Generic Problems in Measuring Effectiveness
There are two broad and generic reasons why measuring or evaluating organizational results can be problematic (Murray, 2005). Firstly, there are technical problems in evaluating organizational performance. Some goals or objectives of an NPO are hard to measure because of their vagueness and ambiguity. How does one measure the goal of the community organization that is ‘‘making our neighborhood a better place to live’’? It is very challenging, from a technical point of view, to develop valid and quantifiable measures to assess the extent to which such vaguely described goals are met by the organization. Next to that, one can measure organizational performance but also the performance of organizational subunits. This raises the question about how results obtained for the effectiveness of part of the organization can be aggregated to the organization as a whole. A similar problem arises when NPOs manage different programs. One program can be more effective than another, but how is that observation related to the organizational overall effectiveness? Finally, even when every stakeholder agrees on the desirable output and outcome of the organization, there still are technical problems on how to measure these outputs and outcomes. This is the question to what extent the measures used really capture the goals they are intended to measure? For example: Does an employment agency that is able to direct 90% of its unemployed clients to the labor market, but is very selective in the type of client they help (e.g., only highly educated unemployed), really meets its goal of ‘‘reducing unemployment in the region’’? A second problem in assessing effectiveness and efficiency of NPOs is related to the nature of human beings (the people that assess and interpret organizational results).
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If the assessment shows good organizational effectiveness, people tend to take full credit for the good results, thereby neglecting the fact that good performance is the result of a combination of factors, and that personal contribution to the good result is only one factor. Ceteris paribus, in the case of poor results, people tend to avoid blame, and will want to explain poor performance as being beyond their own personal control. Murray (2005) has labeled this mind-set as ‘‘look good and avoid blame.’’ Next to that, the results of the evaluation of effectiveness may also be interpreted subjectively (‘‘subjective interpretation of reality’’). This is often the case when evaluation results need to be explained and interpreted, and occurs because there are many variables that cannot be controlled but still influence or moderate the presumed link between organizational (or personal) behavior and eventual organizational performance. The Specific Context of the NPO
The observation that organizational effectiveness is a multifaceted and heterogeneous concept also invokes some (potential) problems when one wants to measure NPOs’ effectiveness and efficiency. Studying and measuring organizational effectiveness and efficiency in the context of NPOs is problematic for several reasons (Forbes, 1998). The distinctive nature of NPOs, characterized by the absence of a profit-motive and the aim of creating social added value, prevents the use of measures of effectiveness that are commonly deployed for business (for-profit) organizations such as profitability or stock-market performance. Next to that, the fact that NPOs often have amorphous and heterogeneous goals, and often offer intangible services, makes quantitative measures of performance difficult. One can measure the number of clients that have consulted the social worker in the organization during 1 week, but it is much harder to measure the quality of the conversation between social worker and client, and the effect of that consultation (whether they eventually come up with a solution for the client’s problem). Thirdly, the work of NPOs is often based on societal values about which consensus is often hard to find, implying that also consensus about the criteria to evaluate the organization and its performance is often difficult to reach. When Is the NPO the Most Effective Organizational Form?
In an environment that is characterized more and more by competition for delivering services between nonprofit organizations and for-profit organizations, for example in the delivery of welfare services, the question which organizational form is the most effective one is extremely important. That said, this kind of assessment is also
extremely difficult, given the variety of possible criteria organizational effectiveness can be measured upon (cf. supra). It can be assumed that NPOs and for-profit organizations (and also government agencies) behave differently because they have different functions, distribution criteria, goals, motivations, etc. (Anheier, 2005). Notwithstanding these differences, organizations of different types (NPO, for-profit) often deliver services in the same field (e.g., nursing homes, child care, and health care). A central question is then whether organizational form matters in delivering these services. One could argue that the non-distribution constraint that applies to NPOs (preventing NPOs to redistribute profits or savings to owners of the organization) may lead to better quality of services delivered because the organization is not driven by the profit-motive. In other words, nonprofit supply services to those in need (altruistic), while for-profits supply to the highest bidder. On the other hand, one can argue that the profit-motive will be an incentive to behave cost-efficient, and that in this case the for-profit organization may have the comparative advantage. Krashinsky (1998) found that Canadian nonprofit daycare centers do appear to offer better quality than forprofit day-care centers, but he added the important conclusion that some nonprofits offer low quality, while some for-profits offer high quality. He thus concludes that the non-distribution constraint does not induce all NPOs to offer good quality in any case. Especially when organizations are small, the non-distribution constraint is difficult to enforce, and managers may engage in disguised profit distribution such as increasing salaries, engaging in shirking (avoiding duties and work), or downgrading quality of one service to support another (preferred) service. Variables Affecting Effectiveness and Efficiency
There is a large literature that addresses the question: Under which circumstances are NPOs effective and efficient? At least three sets of variables can be identified that are supposed to have an effect on the effectiveness and efficiency of NPOs (Herman & Renz, 2004; Schmid, 2002; Forbes, 1998): the practice and the efficiency of the board of the organization, the management practice, and organizational characteristics. More recent research supports the hypothesis that effective board practice (e.g., the use of prescribed board practice such as involvement in strategic planning, using meeting management techniques, and low internal conflict) is related to organizational effectiveness. In addition to that, there is a considerable amount of evidence that relates effective management practice (e.g., planning, measuring results, independent audit) to organizational effectiveness.
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Considering the relationship between board and management practice on the one hand, and organizational effectiveness on the other hand, however, the research evidence must be nuanced. Firstly, most research is based on assessment of perceptions of organizational members about the effectiveness of the organization. Secondly, most research is not longitudinal, so that claims about causality are difficult to make (e.g., effective board practice leads to organizational effectiveness). Thirdly, it is unlikely that the causal relationship between managerial best practices and organizational effectiveness is absolute. Some particular innovative managerial tools or practices may work well in some contexts or settings, but not necessarily in others. The practical implication is that every organization should discover its own best practice, as practices are only effective because of their value in the context of the organization (Herman & Renz, 2004: 701–702). Also, organizational characteristics such as the level of centralization, formalization, the amount of worker autonomy, coordination and control, and staff empowerment seem to be related to organizational effectiveness (Schmid, 2002). For example, decentralized authority within the organization seems to contribute positively to effectiveness in organizations where flexible and informal structures and patterns of management prevail, and where professionalism among staff is high. To the contrary, in organizations that require a high level of supervision and control over the quality of services (provided by non-professional staff whose level of functional maturity is low), centralized authority may be more effective. As a second example, organizations with a large number of professional staff (e.g., medical staff in hospitals) may benefit from large levels of worker autonomy, because in such organizations the workers typically face challenges, risks, and opportunities as conditions for effectiveness. Also, organizations with a highly skilled professional staff may benefit from relatively loose control and high worker empowerment, because in such organizations workers need to be able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and need to have the power and autonomy to deal with different people and situations (Schmid, 2002: 390–391).
Future Directions Comparative research into effectiveness and efficiency between public, nonprofit (voluntary), and for-profit sectors and their organizations can be developed further. Relatively straightforward and rather unidimensional criteria like efficiency, productivity, market share, and quality of services can be measured and compared between organizations belonging to different sectors
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(Baruch & Ramalho, 2006). Comparing effectiveness and efficiency between sectors becomes all the more important giving the increasing presence of the market sector in areas that were previously the monopoly of public and voluntary sectors (e.g., social care and health care). On the other hand, multidimensional analysis may provide much richer assessments of effectiveness and efficiency of NPOs (Sowa et al., 2004). Especially in a nonprofit context, effectiveness is a complex concept that can be assessed at varying levels (individual, program, organization, sector), and varying dimensions (outputs and goals, structures and processes, capacity, etc.). In addition, under the assumption that NPOs are different (compared to business and public sector organizations), conceptions and indicators that are appropriate for measuring effectiveness and efficiency of NPOs should be developed further. In this respect, Herman and Renz (1999: 123) advocate the further development of a measure of responsiveness as an indicator of effectiveness. This responsiveness goes further than being attentive to needs and demands of organizational stakeholders, and considers the role of NPOs as also being responsive to the interest of the least advantaged in the community or society. This is, according to Herman and Renz, a more challenging conception of responsiveness that deserves attention, because ‘‘if NPOs are not for social justice, who will be ?’’ (Herman & Renz, 1999: 123). Furthermore, both objective and perceptual measurements of organizational effectiveness can be compared and combined in future research. From a social constructivist point of view, measuring organizational effectiveness via assessing the perceptions of the many organizational stakeholders may yield interesting conceptual and theoretical conclusions (see, e.g., Tassie et al., 1998). Finally, as to research strategy, both large-N survey research, as well as small-N case study research might be used and combined, depending on the research purpose (typology development, hypothesis testing, etc.).
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Governance, Good ▶ Legitimacy ▶ Performance and Impact Measures, Outcomes ▶ Results and Performance ▶ Stakeholders ▶ Sustainability (Financial)
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. (2005). Nonprofit organizations. Theory, management, policy. London/New York: Routledge.
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Baruch, Y., & Ramalho, N. (2006). Communalities and distinctions in the measurement of organizational performance and effectiveness across for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 35(1), 39–65. Forbes, D. (1998). Measuring the unmeasurable: Empirical studies of nonprofit organization effectiveness from 1977 to 1997. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 27(2), 183–202. Herman, R., & Renz, D. (1999). Theses on nonprofit organizational effectiveness. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28(2), 107–126. Herman, R., & Renz, D. (2004). Doing things right: Effectiveness in local nonprofit organizations, a panel study. Public Administration Review, 64(6), 694–704. Kendall, J., & Knapp, M. (2000). Measuring the performance of voluntary organizations. Public Management, 2(1), 105–132. Krashinsky, M. (1998). Does auspice matter? The case of day-care for children in Canada. In W. Powell & E. Clemens (Eds.), Private action and the public good (pp. 114–123). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Light, P. (2000). Making nonprofits work. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. Murray, V. (2005). Evaluating the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. In R. Herman et al. (Eds.), The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management (2nd ed., San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.pp. 345–370.) Pollitt, C., & Bouckaert, G. (2000). Public management reform – A comparative analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rojas, R. (2000). A review of models for measuring organizational effectiveness among for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit management & leadership, 11(1), 97–104. Schmid, H. (2002). Relationships between organizational properties and organizational effectiveness in three types of nonprofit human service organizations. Public Personnel Management, 31(3), 377–395. Sowa, J., Coleman Selden, S., & Sandfort, J. (2004). No longer unmeasurable? A multidimensional integrated model of nonprofit organizational effectiveness. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 33(4), 711–728. Tassie, B., Murray, V., & Cutt, J. (1998). Evaluating social service agencies: Fuzzy pictures of organizational effectiveness. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary & Nonprofit Organizations, 9(1), 59–79.
Eigen, Peter ALEXIA DUTEN
Basic Bibliographical Information Born in 1938 in Augsburg, Germany, Peter Eigen studied law and political economy in Erlangen and Frankfurt, before completing a doctoral degree in law. Eigen founded Transparency International in 1993. At the age of 29, Eigen was already working for the law division at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation, he became legal adviser for the governments of Botswana and Namibia. Shortly after, he was appointed Director of the Regional Mission for
Eastern Africa of the World Bank. He left the institution in 1993 for an early ‘‘retirement.’’ Retirement turned out to be very busy for Peter Eigen. On the basis of his 25 years’ know-how in economic development, Eigen engaged in an academic career. After lecturing law and international relations at his home university in Frankfurt, Germany, as well as at Georgetown and at John Hopkins University in the United States, he became a faculty member of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was appointed honorary professor at the Freie Universita¨t, Berlin. In 2000, Eigen received an honorary doctoral degree of the Open University in the United Kingdom and in 2004, the Readers Digest Award ‘‘European of the Year 2004’’. After the loss of his first wife, Peter Eigen remarried to Gesine Schwan, social democrat candidate to the German presidency in 2004 and 2009.
Major Contributions Through his own experience but also connected to his first wife’s activities as a doctor in poverty-stricken countries, Eigen was confronted with the magnitude of corruption. He measured the damages corruption was afflicting to politics, the economy and the society in developing countries. These experiences triggered the launch in 1993 of Transparency International (TI), ‘‘the global coalition against corruption.’’ Eigen chaired the NGO for twelve years. In 2006, he also chaired the International Advisory Group of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The identification of corruption as the enemy of development was an important step for global governance. TI became the leading organization in terms of fight against corruption and engaged in political consultancy. Eigen’s bestseller ‘‘Das Netz der Korruption’’ (2003) is a work of reference. Eigen himself is often characterized as being a ‘‘global player’’ since his work of a lifetime not only enriched international and development politics but also shaped global governance. Peter Eigen also founded the Berlin Civil Society Center, that ‘‘works for a stronger civil society and a better global governance’’ by means of seminars and workshops customtailored for the needs of civil society organisations.
Cross-References
▶ Good Governance ▶ Transparency ▶ Transparency International ▶ World Bank
EMES – European Research Network
References/Further Readings Eigen, P. (2003). Das Netz der Korruption: Wie eine weltweite Bewegung gegen Bestechung ka¨mpft. Campus Verla, Frankfurt am Main. Transparency International. (2008). Global corruption report 2008: Corruption in the water sector. Cambridge University Press.
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pacified places as a specific type of security. Compared to premodern societies, in which the individual lives in an insecure environment, the modern society creates pacified places, in which the individual is not any longer exposed to extreme situations.
Cross-References
Elias, Norbert BENEDIKT KROLLPFEIFER
Basic Biographical Information Norbert Elias, a German sociologist of Jewish descent (later became British citizen), was born on June 22, 1897 in Breslau (Wrocław). In 1915, he volunteered for the German army in World War I. The war events shook Elias to the core. In 1918, he started the studies of philosophy, psychology, and medicine at the University of Breslau. After passing the preliminary examination in 1919 he quit medicine. During his studies he had two exchange semesters, one at the University of Heidelberg, where he met Karl Jaspers, and one at the University of Freiburg. He graduated with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy in 1924 at the University of Breslau. After the seizure of power by the Nazis, Elias fled to Paris in 1933. In 1935, he moved on to Great Britain, where he wrote his main work The Civilizing Process. After several lectureships in Leicester, Accra, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt, he settled down in Amsterdam, where he died at his home on August 1, 1990.
Major Contributions With regards to civil society, Elias’s concept of civility is of crucial importance. Civility means politeness, tolerance, and confidence. Therefore, for Elias, the major feature of civil society is respect of individual autonomy, which is based upon security and trust. The civilizing process is a process of individualization in which external control is of secondary importance. Rather, self-monitoring and self-control of the individual come to the fore. Driving forces of the civilizing process are the formation of the monopoly of force and the growing stability of the major societal institutions. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of human relationships has positive effects on the civilizing process. The monopoly of force and the growing stability of the societal institutions facilitate the realization of
▶ Citizenship ▶ Civility
References/Further Readings Elias, N. (1988). Violence and civilization: The state monopoly of physical violence and its infringements. Translation from German of ‘‘Zivilisa¨ ber das Staatsmonopol der ko¨rperlichen Gewalt tion und Gewalt. U und seine Durchbrechungen’’ (1981). In J. Keane (Ed.), Civil society and the state. New European perspectives. London: Verso. Elias, N. (2000). The civilizing process. Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations (Rev. ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
EMES – European Research Network ALEX MURDOCK
Address of Organization c/o University of Lie`ge Bd du Rectorat, B33 Box 4 4000 Lie`ge (Sart-Tilman) Belgium www.emes.net
Introduction The EMES is a research network of established university research centres and individual researchers whose goal is to gradually build up an European corpus of theoretical and empirical knowledge, pluralistic in disciplines and methodology, around ‘‘Third Sector’’ issues.
Brief History EMES arose in 1996 when a group of European academics obtained European Union funding to create the network. It is named after its first research program, on ‘‘the emergence of social enterprises in Europe.’’ However EMES regards itself as having a broader interest than simply social enterprise. It sees the Third sector as broadly defined.
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Mission
Funding
The mission of EMES is primarily a scholastic one to encourage and disseminate research and learning in the broader third sector. The prime area of interest is Europe (including Eastern Europe) but it has developed a more international focus.
The initial funding of EMES was from the European Union. Ongoing funding has been derived from a range of sources.
Activities EMES has undertaken six major research projects in the following areas: ● Social Enterprise – The Emergence of Social Enterprise in Europe (1996–1999) – Promoting the role of Social Enterprise in CEE and CIS (2006) ● Third Sector – The Third Sector and Employment ● Personal and Social Services – Child Care Project (2001–2006) ● Work Integration – Social Integration Services in Europe – ELEXIES project (2001–2004) – Socioeconomic performance of Social Enterprises in work integration – PERSE Project (2001–2004) EMES has run and also has been associated with various conferences and other collegial research activities over the period of its operation. In 2008 it combined with the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) to organize a major European Conference. In July 2009 EMES plans to hold its second international conference on social enterprise in Trento, Italy. EMES has more recently created a Ph.D. student network which includes a research summer school. It has also developed links to develop Ph.D. education. The links have now reached across to Canada and the Canadian Social Economy Student Network.
Structure and Governance EMES has a legal form as a nonprofit association established under Belgian law. It is a membership based organization and, perhaps unusually, admits members on both an institutional and on an individual basis. It is to a large extent an open academic community which welcomes all who share its aims to develop scholarship in social enterprise and the third sector, defined broadly.
Major Accomplishments EMES has succeeded in generating a great deal of well rated published research much of which can be downloaded from its website. It also has been associated with the development of a European community of scholars and the strengthening of an emerging academic field. The links it has developed with other bodes as indicated above have also represented a very positive development.
Cross-References ▶ Social Enterprise ▶ Third Sector
References/Further Readings www.emes.net/
Endowment, Definition and Management of RENE´E A. IRVIN University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
Introduction Endowment, in the vernacular, can refer to any asset of substance that allows a person, organization, or country to excel in their pursuits of business or leisure. For example, economists specializing in international trade describe a country as having an ‘‘endowment’’ of abundant land for agricultural crops. A man or woman can be described as ‘‘well-endowed,’’ but this implies a topic more risque´ than a generous trust fund or accumulated retirement savings. Nonprofit sector ‘‘endowment’’ is analogous to a savings account. Organizations may have endowments of other types of assets (a beautiful campus, historic facilities, etc.), but their financial endowment is the primary focus of this discussion.
Definition Nonprofit (nongovernmental) organizations and foundations – especially foundations – use endowment earnings as a source of income for their operations. Endowment is
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more than just savings, however. Nonprofit and for-profit firms alike use reserves, a form of savings, to survive temporary increases in cash needs when income receipts are insufficient to cover the shortfall. Another type of savings is capital project accounts, which accumulate funds over multiple years in order to finance larger purchases of equipment or buildings. Each of these can be spent down to zero as the situation dictates – to relieve a shortage of cash or to purchase a building. Endowment, however, is often restricted, whether by protocol, donor intention, or a binding legal contract, so that the original corpus of funds is never spent. Note the very sharp difference with this type of savings. For-profit firms do not speak of endowment, nor do they face binding legal restrictions on how their savings must be spent. If a for-profit firm accumulated a significant amount of funds in savings, it would be a target for a takeover. Accumulation of cash reserves is a signal to others that the firm is not investing in itself properly. Accumulation of endowment for a nonprofit, on the other hand, is a sign of organizational maturity and acceptance by the donating public that the mission should endure over time. The legal definition and practice of endowment establishment and spending differ by country, but elemental to the degree to which a nonprofit endowment fund is restricted is the donor intention of the original gift. Centuries upon centuries of gifts to the church or state illustrate the historical significance of donations establishing churches, universities, and parks. If the donor intended that his or her gift fund a specific purpose into perpetuity, future caretakers of the endowment must direct funds toward that purpose only, and must steward and preserve the corpus of the endowment so that its growth allows perpetual payout for that purpose. This is often referred to as a ‘‘true’’ endowment. Nonprofit organizations also have the option of establishing a ‘‘quasi’’- endowment. That is, a variety of income sources – donations, fees, and bequests, for example – may be directed into a fund that is not a true and legally binding endowment. The funds may be spent down to zero if needed because the organization itself decided to put them aside as savings (they were not directed to do so by a donor, specifically). The organization calls this fund an endowment and pledges to pay out only a portion of the annual growth of the fund so that the fund may grow over time. Unless the donations going into this fund were specifically restricted for a certain purpose, the quasi-endowment’s earnings over time can be used to fund any organizational need. Unlike true endowment, quasi-endowment can be considered
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simply as savings with unusually conscientious practices governing withdrawals. The reason why many nonprofit organizations place their savings in quasi-endowment instead of a true endowment account is to signal to all organizational stakeholders that these funds are not merely reserves, but assets set aside to preserve the organizational mission over time. The ‘‘endowment’’ label promotes prudence in future expenditure of the funds’ earnings. On the other hand, the quasi-endowment arrangement allows the organization some flexibility to spend the principal, not just annual earnings or capital gains, when the organization is facing a large operational deficit. Throughout the rest of this article, ‘‘nonprofit organizations’’ are considered to include both foundations and (non-granting) organizations, unless otherwise noted. Acquisition of endowment funds is similar between public foundations (where donations come from many individuals) and nonprofit organizations. Public foundations include community foundations, established to receive funds from community members to disburse in the form of grants to organizations within a geographically defined area. Germany, for example (and to a lesser extent England), has shown the most rapid growth in community foundations over the past decade, as cities and even neighborhoods within cities establish and grow their foundations to promote local quality of life initiatives. Private foundations, on the other hand, are established from a gift or group of gifts from one person or family. Although private foundations face the same stewardship and payout considerations that nonprofits and public foundations must contend with, the private foundations do not have the perpetual task of appealing to the public or membership to build the endowment.
Key Issues Endowment Management
Earnings and capital gains of endowment assets over time provide an attractive source of revenue for a nonprofit organization. Once the initial gift arrives, the stream of revenue from endowment assets arrives without virtually any labor expended, as would be necessary with commercial fees, annual donations, and grants. With a larger endowment, the organization can devote more of its time to program implementation and less time on fund raising activities. Furthermore, unrestricted endowments provide a revenue stream that can be used for whatever the nonprofit needs, such as ongoing program costs, a much needed roof repair, or updated accounting software. In contrast, revenues from other sources such as grants are
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difficult to obtain for these more prosaic needs. Will a foundation provide funds for the new accounting software, or for a program that extends service to a previously unmet segment of the population? The grant makers will gravitate toward the direct programmatic support, while the hidden operational support of the organization goes unfunded. Thus, revenue from unrestricted endowment can fulfill a critical need for the less newsworthy but vital supporting services in an organization. Restricted Endowments
Major donors often designate their largest gifts to fund a specific purpose (for example, a university might receive a gift for scholarships for students from a certain area of the country). The nonprofit or foundation must comply with these restrictions forever, unless the court agrees that the purpose for which the funds were intended no longer exists. In that case, the funds would be directed to a purpose that is close to the donor’s original intent. It should be noted that a nonprofit may have a large endowment or total endowments, but if the funds are restricted to selected purposes, the organization has less managerial flexibility than an organization holding unrestricted endowment funds. Statistics listing total endowments held by nonprofit organizations rarely describe the extent to which these funds are restricted or unrestricted, and thus do not provide a complete picture of comparative fiscal health. Building the Endowment
Building a strong endowment is a high priority for most nonprofit organizations and many foundations (not private foundations, but those receiving donations from the broad public). How is this achieved? If the organization builds a quasi-endowment, it may gather revenue and follow its own managerial guidelines to pay into the endowment. For example, a nonprofit may put all bequest gifts or a certain percentage of annual giving revenue toward endowment. For a more formal emphasis on building endowment, especially true endowment, nonprofits and public foundations concentrate their efforts on obtaining gifts from major donors. Universities in particular are adept at staging multi-year endowment campaigns with very large campaign goals of a billion dollars or more. Thus, endowment funds overwhelmingly originate from high-wealth individuals, not from the small gifts received in broad-based campaigns (such as direct mail). Nonprofits concentrate their endowment efforts on fund raising from major donors because it usually takes less managerial effort to obtain one $1,000,000 gift than
ten thousand $100 gifts. Also, a large gift to endowment is a gesture that suggests a deep dedication to the mission. ‘‘Endowment’’ is difficult to explain to a neophyte donor (after all, it isn’t all immediately spent on the cause), but begins to make sense to a donor who is nearing his or her life’s end and hoping to bestow a lasting gift to a beloved organization. Nonprofits with planned (estate) giving programs, therefore, usually direct those gifts toward the permanency of an endowed fund. An optimal size of endowment is an elusive concept. Some human service organizations are reluctant to build a large endowment, for fear of losing grant contracts or even annual gifts from donors. Grant makers may view a large endowment as an indication that the organization is not devoting enough expenditure directly to the mission. Not only appearances, but also compelling current needs – such as hunger, or the need to save an animal species before it goes extinct – motivate agencies to limit their endowmentbuilding efforts. In the end, the optimally sized endowment from a societal perspective depends on the organization’s mission and the existence of its alternative revenue streams now and in the future. Stewardship
In the course of an endowment campaign, a nonprofit may establish an endowment advisory committee to set policy and supervise investment and payout policies. This committee reassures potential donors that the nonprofit will steward the assets properly with prudent investment choices, and select a payout strategy that is neither too generous, resulting in loss or inadequate growth of the endowment, nor too miserly, resulting in a suboptimal level of program services produced. Prudent endowment investment choices are difficult to define, but more evident in contrast to imprudent investment choices, where the endowment’s corpus is threatened by losses from risky investments. In the 2001–02 recession, one US foundation lost over forty percent of its fund balance because the assets were held in just one stock. The decision to hold the assets in one company’s stock was specified by the original donor, so no imprudence is implied, but for other foundations or nonprofits, diversification of asset holdings is one of many important ways to reduce portfolio risk. Some nonprofits and foundations may choose to limit their investment holdings to stock in those companies whose activities do not conflict with the nonprofits’ missions. Payout Practices
Payout strategies can differ widely. In the United States, nonprofit organizations are not required to pay out any of
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their endowment in any given year. This allows organizations to undergo an endowment-building phase. Private foundations, on the other hand, are required to pay out at least 5% of their asset base annually. Growing the foundation’s endowment is easily done if the investment returns are robust, but the 5% payout requirement for private foundations leaves little room for growth during lean years. To reduce the variation in their annual payout, nonprofits and foundations may adopt a rolling average model whereby they pay out a set percentage of a multi-year average of their assets. Payout also depends, of course, on the original donor stipulations. If the donor preferred a true endowment into perpetuity, the payout policy will seek to protect the corpus of the endowment over time. If the fund is a quasi-endowment, the organization may draw down the endowment substantially in times of extreme financial distress. Other Endowment Issues
From the nonprofit or foundation’s point of view, more endowment is always better, unless the gift is unduly restricted to a purpose that is difficult to carry out. A broader societal benefit is also evident. Endowment serves a role in smoothing out public service expenditures over time. Through recessions or even depressions, when commercial revenues, donations and grants may fall, endowment assets can provide the steady revenue stream that allows society’s favored cultural artifacts and services to survive (Irvin, 2007). Generational Welfare
From a societal point of view, however, endowment growth at both foundations and nonprofit organizations is not entirely beneficial. Taking assets away from the freeflowing market economy and restricting them – permanently – to a specified function could, in theory, introduce drag on a macroeconomy. Generational equity is also a concern. If one allows an endowment to be kept untouched or carefully stewarded over the ages, it shifts consumption patterns (‘‘consumption’’ referring to any benefit the nonprofit sector produces) from the current generation to future generations. This is a positive development if future generations are indeed going to be worse off than the current generation. Are they going to be worse off? The evidence is mixed. Every generation seems to have its version of the ‘‘in my day, we had it much worse than you’’ admonishment, as well as a fond remembrance of ‘‘the good old days.’’ Rising consumption rates of modern conveniences and advances in health care over time support the argument that each generation is a little better off
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than the previous. Considering this apparently advancing quality of life, the intergenerational shift of endowment from current to future generations is unwise. Depending on the sector, opposing arguments can be crafted regarding the need for savings over time. Environmental protection organizations may benefit from either a sharp infusion of assets now, in a last-ditch effort to forestall climate change or preserve wild spaces and species. Similarly, an immediate investment in vaccines and other health-related innovations can eradicate diseases. . .forever, we hope. History and Relevance Over Time
Between 1480 and 1660, over 80% of charitable contributions in England went to endowments (quoted in Brody, 875). The recent growth of endowments in the United States and Europe, therefore, is a recent and comparatively insubstantial phenomenon. Across the ages, whenever wealth has concentrated sharply in a small tier at the top of the population, contributions to endowment have grown more quickly. Often, donors specify that their gift endow a specific service. Though well-intentioned, these restricted endowments pose awkward dilemmas for future generations. The need for the service may no longer exist, the selected beneficiaries may no longer exist, or the service which it funds may no longer be perceived as beneficial to current society. Rich (1961: 86) remarked, ‘‘Perpetuity, like eternity, is a very long time and offers abundant opportunities for bad guesses regarding the charitable needs of future generations.’’ Almost a century prior to Rich’s lament, Kenny expressed similar disapproval of perpetual charities; ‘‘[W]hilst charity tends to do good, perpetual Charities tend to do evil. Too often. . .they bless neither him that gives nor him that takes. . .[I]t is utterly expedient to narrow (endowed charities’) resources during their youth, for the purpose of augmenting their superfluities in their decrepitude’’ (quoted in Brody, 1997: 919). In these cases, the courts are sometimes asked to intervene to release the endowment funds for a purpose which has a similar mission to which the original donor preferred. Exchange of Tax Advantages for Public Benefits
Different countries have a range of tax advantages provided in exchange for charitable donations, including matching funds for donations, tax deductions, and credits. Usually, a gift for endowment is treated like any other donation provided to a nonprofit organization. For example, a donation may reduce the amount that the taxpayer must report as income. Assume the income tax rate is 40%. The taxpayer saves 40% of the cost of the donation
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via a reduction in his or her tax bill. In exchange for forgoing the taxes, the government receives the public benefits that the nonprofit organization produces (and indirectly, via the nonprofits that a foundation funds). If the endowment gift went directly to a nonprofit, the organization may wait several years before spending any of its endowment proceeds. If the endowment gift went to a private foundation, the government may see an immediate return, because the foundation is required to pay out a certain percentage of the endowment, in the form of expenditures on public benefit goods and services. That annual expenditure may be small; less than five percent of the endowment’s balance. Therefore, the government may have to wait an awfully long time for its tax exemptions to show up in the form of public benefits. Decision Making Control of the Assets
The individual donor, when restricting an endowment to fund a specific purpose, retains the most decision making control over the assets, even after the donor is deceased. Even if the endowment is not specified for a specific purpose, control of the assets rests with a small group of decision makers. Although the assets in endowment have been ostensibly earmarked for the benefit of the public, the decision making regarding the investment and payout of endowment funds is made by the respected community members who serve as foundation or nonprofit stakeholders (board members and trustees). These stakeholders are, as a rule, high-income or high-wealth, welleducated community elders (Abzug & Galaskiewicz, 2001). This point is not to imply that community elite are directing resources to self-serving interests, but to reveal an inherently paternalistic decision making structure. Community elites determine what community needs are, and use endowment resources to pay for those identified needs. Nonprofit sector decision making differs with respect to endowment expenditure radically from the use of government funds collected with taxes. Government decision making depends at least partially on the voting public to select the decision makers (politicians and the judiciary) to carry out voters’ broad preferences. Thus, while an individual community member can be highly involved in the nonprofit sector, the broad public is uninvolved with the big decisions directing the use of nonprofit and foundation funds. Is this a concern? Perhaps to an academic audience only, at this point, and it is probably not a concern if the decision makers in place have good ideas that yield benefits for society. Yet, as the accumulation of society’s assets in endowment rapidly accelerates, public
scrutiny of endowment and accountability of stakeholders involved in its stewardship will surely increase.
Future Directions For many nonprofit organizations, just now establishing their first endowment fund and planning an endowment campaign, the concerns about endowment center on how to attract donors, how to steward the investments wisely, and what payout strategy to use. Nascent nonprofit sectors in many countries may take a decade or more to progress to a point where building endowment is possible. Research that is most beneficial for these developing nonprofit organizations will invariably focus on innovations and best practices in building endowment. In other countries with long-established nonprofit and nongovernmental sectors, endowed charities may have a long history – in some cases, centuries – of existence. Here, more theoretical issues of societal control come to fore, allowing a rich tableau of scholarly inquiry. How does accumulated endowment affect the government/nongovernment power balance, as more and more assets are housed in the nonprofit sector? Is government getting its proper ‘‘return’’ in exchange for granting tax benefits to the donor? Is it truly beneficial to allow an individual to direct a flow of assets toward a certain purpose. . .forever?
Cross-References
▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Family ▶ Planned Giving ▶ Tax Exemption, Justifications for
References/Further Readings Abzug, R., & Galaskiewicz, J. (2001). Nonprofit boards: Crucibles of expertise or symbols of local identities? Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 30(1), 51–73. Brody, E. (1997). Charitable endowments and the democratization of dynasty. Arizona Law Review, 39(3), 873–948. Hansmann, H. (1990). Why do universities have endowments? Journal of Legal Studies, 19(1), 3–42. Irvin, R. (2007). Endowments: Stable largesse or distortion of the polity? Public Administration Review, 67(3), 445–457. Klausner, M. (2003). When time isn’t money: Foundation payouts and the time value of money. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 1(1), 51–59. Rich, W. (1961). Community foundations in the United States and Canada, 1914 – 1961: A guide to their organization, Development and Operation (2nd ed.). New York: National Council on Community Foundations.
Equipo Pueblo
Equipo Pueblo MARTIN HO¨LZ, CHARLOTTE ANHEIER
Address of Organization Francisco Field Jurado N˚ 51 Col. Independencia Deleg. Benito Jua´rez Me´xico D.F., CP.- 03630 www.equipopueblo.org.mx
Introduction The Desarrollo, Educacio´n y Cultura Autogestionarios (DECA) Equipo Pueblo, a Mexican civil association, better known as Equipo Pueblo (the People’s Team), was founded on November 15, 1977. Equipo Pueblo aims to enable civic participation among all actors within Mexico’s society, allowing them to acquire roles as active citizens, in order to improve public policies.
Brief History The founders of Equipo Pueblo, Elio Arturo Villasen˜or Go´mez, Alex Morelli and A´ngel Torres, with the guidance of Bishop Sergio Me´ndez Arceo and Jose´ A´lvarez Icaza, all shared the experience with and commitment to the poor and indigenous peoples in Mexico’s rural and urban areas. The initiative arose amid the emergence of the lay movement under the auspices of the Catholic Church to work with and for the poor and unprotected. Equipo Pueblo was founded in 1977 to accompany the social movements underway at the time in Mexico seeking improvement in labor conditions and living standards, and more broadly, democracy. Equipo Pueblo has adapted its mission and approach to the political situation in Mexico. While in the beginning it focused on coordinating and strengthening the social movements already in place, Equipo Pueblo moved on to a strategy of focusing on pilot projects of community self-help and professionalizing the social movements to achieve greater impact. Gradually, it transitioned from its focus on mobilization to shaping and influencing public policies as well.
Mission/Objectives Equipo Pueblo seeks to provide a means for fostering democracy and sustainability in Mexico by focusing specifically on the creation of a just and democratic society including economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights. The organization aims to promote active participation by citizens in public debate, contribute to a
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transparent, just society, endorse human rights, and contribute to social development.
Activities To pursue these aims, Equipo Pueblo engages in investigation, articulation, and intervention. In order to ensure more participatory action, Equipo Pueblo executes projects in communities in the areas of gender, social, economic, and cultural rights as well as sustainable development, while also lobbying especially at the local government level. It also offers technical assistance, particularly in strategic planning, design, and evaluation of projects and programs, and other institutional development services.
Structure and Governance While the member’s assembly consists of nine individuals, three of whom are part of the directory council along with Maria Eugenia Mata Garcia, the president, the Executive Director manages the programs and the areas of interest. Suborganizations in four major regions in Mexico constitute the ‘‘Red Equipo Pueblo’’: the Comite de Defensa Popular de Zaragoza, which runs several health, housing, and agricultural programs and handles the treatment of dirty water; the Frente Democratica Campesino, located in the Chihuahua region, which advocates local sustainable development; the Union de Colonos de San Miguel Teotongo, which manages the regions of Itzapalapa in the Federal District; and Desarollo Integral Autogestionario, which is located in the district of Morelos. Equipo Pueblo maintains further relations to other sectors, civil society organizations and networks in Mexico.
Funding Equipo Pueblo has available several sources of funding. The average budget ranged between $ 25 000 and $ 50 000, 90% of which were contributions from international philanthropic organizations. Additionally, Equipo Pueblo is supported by foreign governments, several Mexican foundations and a state agency.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Promoting development at subnational areas Equipo Pueblo has contributed to increased civic participation and fostered democratic processes in contemporary Mexico. With its research and publications the organization also provides comprehensive knowledge of the effects of globalization.
Cross-References ▶ Advocacy ▶ Civic Participation
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▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Mexico and Central America ▶ Social Movements
References/Further Readings Nun˜ez Garcı´a, S. (2000). Mexico and the United States: Is there a common way to promote social development from below? Available online: http//www.yorku.ca/robarts/archives/institute/2000/ pdf/garcia.pdf
Esmee Fairbairn Foundation NORMAN SPENGLER, JANA BRUNKE
Address of Organization Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9AG UK www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk
Introduction The Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation is one of the largest independent grantmaking foundations in the United Kingdom. Grants are intended for organizations which aim to improve the quality of life for people and communities in the United Kingdom in a sustainable manner. The Foundation is a charity registered in England and Wales, based in Mayfair, London, and has a staff of approximately 20. The foundation commits approximately £30 million annually for activities in United Kingdom leading to a free, stable, and socially cohesive society.
Brief History Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation was established in 1961 by Ian Fairbairn whose company, M&G, was a pioneer of the UK unit trust industry. The Foundation was set up as a memorial to Ian Fairbairn’s wife Esme´e, who had played a prominent role in developing the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service and the Citizens Advice Bureaux. In 1999 the Foundation sold its holding in M&G in a takeover of the company by Prudential Corporation PLC.
Mission The Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation aims to improve the quality of life throughout the United Kingdom. Key areas of interest embrace cultural life, education, the natural environment and integration of disadvantaged
people. Organizations that try to conduct projects within these areas are called for applications which mainly include financial support. The foundation’s grantmaking strategy is especially designed to provide venture capital for risky enterprises within its scope.
Activities Significant grants in recent years have been agreed for the Community Land Trust Development Fund (together with Tudor Trust; £2 million to support the building of permanently affordable homes); Policy Studies Institute and Green Fiscal Commission (£432,810 to develop and disseminate evidence on the large-scale introduction of green taxation, to stimulate new proposals for green taxation in public debate); HEARTS (Higher Education, the Arts and Schools; in cooperation with others; £500,000 aiming to strengthen the position of the arts in initial teacher training); Village Core Program (£1 million over 3 years to the Plunkett Foundation, a leading promoter of rural issues); Primary Review (based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education; condition and future of primary education in the United Kingdom); Rethinking Crime and Punishment (aimed to raise the level of debate about the use of prison and alternative forms of punishment in the United Kingdom); Fear and Fashion (together with five other foundations; to address the problem of young people carrying knives and other weapons; aims at disseminating and sharing best practice). All project efforts are tracked regularly, and the dissemination of project impacts and results through media is also supported by foundation resources.
Structure and Governance The board of trustees meets once a quarter year to make decisions about future strategy, approve planning and budget, as well as accepting applications to be granted. A Charity Commissioners Scheme ensures ethical standards of Trustees and governance. The operative staff is led by Dawn Austwick, the current Chief Executive, and consists of three teams covering grantmaking, financial affairs and internal services. Several committees (on Audits, Finance and Administration, Investment and Nominations) and Program Groups complete the Foundation’s governance and structure.
Funding The Foundation holds assets of around £740 million. Total amount of grants made annually is around £30 million, of which the average grant is worth £50,000 and agreed for a maximum of 3 years; funding objects are mainly project costs and occasionally research. Two
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta
budgets of funding sources can be applied for: a Main Fund that makes up two-thirds of the annual funding asset and focuses on cultural life, education, the natural environment and encouraging people. Furthermore, a Strand Fund offers grants for specific topics that are adopted to identified societal needs on an irregular basis. In 2009, the Strand Fund covers a budget of about £3 million for projects in the realms of Biodiversity (supporting the development of effective conservation approaches), Food (enabling people in the United Kingdom to consume sustainable food), Museum & Heritage Collections (grantmaking for curatorial work, conservation, and collections management) and Learning (promotion of new approaches to teaching and learning for children and youth people against the background of current and future challenges).
Contributions Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation contributes to a modern civil society by distributing venture capital to innovative but risky projects in order to generate and disseminate new stimuli for both societal and policy development.
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Copenhagen and Wisconsin-Madison where he earned his Ph.D. His main research interests are welfare states and equality of opportunity as well as life course dynamics, social stratification and comparative social policy. He has in particular referred to the significance of family policy as the foundation of welfare state development claiming that ‘‘pension politics starts with babies.’’ Dealing with equality of opportunities he has called for a radical reform of the welfare state following the Danish example, focusing on education and its impact on other policy fields. Esping-Andersen presently is professor of Sociology at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain) and has taught at a number of other places before that, among them Harvard University (1978–1985) and the European University in Florence (Italy). As a consultant for international organizations such as the OECD, the EU, the United Nations and the World Bank, he has in addition also contributed to applied policy-relevant work. EspingAndersen is member of the scientific board of a great many scientific institutions, amongst others the Danish Institute for Social Research. He is married and father of two boys, his primary nonprofessional interest being writing and recording music.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Social Investment ▶ Venture Philanthropy
References/Further Readings Bolten, M. (2005). Foundations and social investment. Making money work harder in order to achieve more. London: Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation. Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation. (2007). Annual report & accounts 2007. Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation. London: Esme´e Fairbairn Foundation.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta ANNE SANDER
Basic Biographical Information Gøsta Esping-Andersen, one of the most renowned contemporary social scientists, was born in Denmark in 1947. His mother a Swedish pianist and his father a Danish World Bank employee, he spent his childhood in Denmark, Iran, the United States and Syria. He then studied economics and sociology at the Universities of
Major Contributions Even though Esping-Andersen has written and published numerous books he is still most well-known for his 1990 work Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism which has influenced and shaped the scholarly debate about the welfare state significantly. In his book Esping-Andersen identifies three main types of the modern welfare state in developed nations – liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare states – according to their level of decommodification. Classical examples for the respective typologies are the United States, Germany, and Sweden. This theoretical approach has been applied for analysis and comparative welfare state research ever since and served as a point of reference for the categorization of welfare regimes. Salamon and Anheier (1998) for instance have employed Esping-Andersen’s welfare state analysis for their civil society-based social origins theory. Combining Esping-Andersen’s approach with other theories, they identify four nonprofit regimes, characterized by combinations of nonprofit sector characteristics and a particular position of the nonprofit sector in society, as well as a particular state role and constellation of other institutions and social groupings. While some social scientists still refer to EspingAndersen’s typology, or have tried to amend it, others hold that it is outdated. Opponents of the framework
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claim that empirical studies have proven that the complex mechanisms of welfare states cannot easily be ascribed one of the three categories. Others hold that Esping-Andersen’s methodology and his statistical tools were insufficient. Esping-Andersen’s typology has however been one of the most influential theoretical approaches in recent welfare state research and has been adopted by and referred to by a variety of both scholars and political actors. Currently he is working on his latest book, called How Women Changed the World.
Cross-References
▶ Social Origins Theory ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Niejahr, E. (2003). Politik vom Wickeltisch. Portra¨t. In: DIE ZEIT, 02.10.2003/Nr. 41. Salamon, L. M., & Anheier, H. K. (1998). Social origins of civil society: Explaining the nonprofit sector cross-nationally. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 9(3), 213–247.
Ethos Institute ▶ Instituto Ethos de Empresas e Responsabilidade Social
Etzioni, Amitai ZEYNEP ATALAY
Basic Biographical Information Amitai Etzioni (b. 1929, Cologne, Germany) is an eminent sociologist and public intellectual, best known by his work on communitarianism. Born under the name Werner Falk, Amitai Etzioni emigrated to Palestine in order to escape the Nazi regime where he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958. Between 1958 and 1978, Etzioni served as professor of Sociology at Columbia University: part of the time, as Chairman of the Department. He went on to serve as
a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution (1978), as a Senior Advisor to the Carter White House (1979–1980), as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School (1987–1989), as the founder and the first president of the International Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (1990), as the founder and director of the Communitarian Network (1993), and as the president of the American Sociological Association (1994–1995). Etzioni is the first University Professor of the George Washington University where he currently serves as the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Amitai Etzioni is considered to be the founder of the communitarian movement in the United States. In the early to mid-1980s the communitarianism debate was limited to the disciplines of philosophy and political science, and the language used and expertise involved in these debates were restricted to specialists. Building on these early debates on communitarianism versus libertarianism, Etzioni organized the field, shaped major issues and debates, and most significantly, opened it to a wider audience outside of academe. The political climate in which communitarianism was born was shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the rise of social conservatism and laissez-faire economics. In response to the deterioration of the moral fabric of the society caused by excessive individualism that communitarians believed to be increasing, Amitai Etzioni and William Galston started to organize meetings to develop communitarian approaches to social issues. The group began publishing the quarterly journal ‘‘The Responsive Community’’ in 1991 and formed the ‘‘Communitarian Network’’ in 1993. The Communitarian Network, a nonprofit organization and think tank based in Washington, DC, serves as the widest intellectual platform for the communitarian project. The focus of Etzioni’s communitarianism is the deterioration of the sense of community as a consequence of the transformations that take place in contemporary modern society. The agenda of communitarianism is to build stronger communities that are more responsive to the needs of citizens, as it maintains that in contrast to isolated individuals, individuals who are well-integrated into communities are better able to reason and act in responsible ways. Amitai Etzioni is the author of 22 books, including The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 1997
European Association for Planned Giving (EAPG)
Tolerance Book Award. In addition to his prominence in the academic world, Etzioni is one of the major public intellectuals in the United States. He publishes in the leading news media and appears on network television regularly.
Cross-References
▶ Communitarianism ▶ Community, types of
References/Further Readings Etzioni, A. (1996). The new golden rule. New York: Basic Books. Etzioni, A. (2001). The monochrome society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Etzioni, A. (2003). My brother’s keeper: A memoir and a message. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Etzioni, A. (2004). How patriotic is the Patriot Act? Freedom versus security in the age of terrorism. New York: Routledge.
European Association for Planned Giving (EAPG) PAURIC O’ROURKE
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capabilities and efficiencies within the planned giving sector, both nationally and internationally that will enable a culture and network of philanthropy to thrive. EAPG’s cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary expertise aims to optimize efficiencies and outcomes for the sector as part of a pan-European network. A diverse membership mix enables EAPG to serve as a meeting point for all relevant stakeholders – both charities and professional advisors – towards a deeper understanding of the dynamic of this evolving field.
Activities The diversity of EAPG’s membership shapes the nature of its activities in that it responds to and caters for both for-profit and nonprofit professions and intermediaries by offering a comprehensive, integrated, and accessible program of relevant events. These include online resources, newsletters, roundtables, workshops, training seminars, conferences, and publications addressing critical tax, legal, financial, political, social, and organizational issues impacting the field of philanthropy and planned giving in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, and the world. It has strategic links with its equivalents in North America, namely the International Gift Planning Alliance and the National Committee on Planned Giving.
Structure and Governance Address of Organization 2 Swadlands Close GB Lenham, ME17 2AF UK www.plannedgiving.co.uk
Introduction The European Association for Planned Giving (EAPG) is a network member organization established to advance philanthropy by developing and promoting best policy and practice in the field of planned giving and cross border philanthropy.
History EAPG was founded in 1998 by James Myers, then President of the European American Tax Institute (E-ATI), through the joint collaboration of a group of progressive charities who recognized the need and value of a coordinated and consolidated response to this growing and evolving profession across the United Kingdom and Europe.
Mission The principal espoused aim of the EAPG is to ‘‘blaze a trail for philanthropy’’ by identifying and developing core
EAPG is incorporated as a limited company and a Registered Charity in England and Wales. It is governed by a Board consisting of ten trustees and a Chairperson, all drawn from various stakeholder interests in the nonprofit and charitable giving sector and intermediaries. The work of the Board is supported by an Advisory Council, which has a strong international composition of experts in the relevant fields. Jonathan Gold, of Alliance Berstein Global Wealth Management is the current Chair.
Funding Annual membership fees are the main source of funding, with for-profit and nonprofit member organizations paying different rates. It currently has a diverse membership of approx. 145, representing for-profits such as tax, legal, and financial wealth advisors and third sector consultants as well as nonprofits such as various foundations, higher education institutions and the full range of charities spanning arts, culture, heritage, medical, humanitarian, and NGOs.
Accomplishments It produces a Directory of Professional Advisers and Resources for Cross-Border Philanthropy and Charitable Planned Giving. See www.crossborderdirectory.org
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European Cultural Foundation (ECF)
It has contributed most significantly to the establishment, development, and professionalization of philanthropy and planned giving as a distinct field and profession within the third sector.
Cross-References
▶ National Committee on Planned Giving (NCPG) ▶ Philanthropy and Professional Advisors ▶ Planned Giving
ECF moved to Amsterdam under the presidency of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in order to be hosted by a signatory country of the Rome Treaty. During much of the Cold War the ECF focused on East-West initiatives such as the Concord East-West Orchestra as well as joint programs with Moscow. Subsequently, the ECF has continued the exchange of artistic endeavors while supporting new initiatives such as the development of parliamentarians of transitional democratic states through partnership foundations.
References/Further Readings Alliance Magazine – http://www.alliancemagazine.org/ – An online magazine that addresses current development in the fields of philanthropy, charitable giving and social investment. Ashton, D. (2004). The complete guide to planned giving: Everything you need to know to successfully compete for major gifts. Cambridge, MA: J.L.A. Publications. Barrett, R. D., & Ware, M. E. (2001). Planned giving essentials: A step by step guide to success. New York: Jones & Bartlett. See list of publications and references in the EAPG Cross Border Directory: http://www.plannedgiving.org.uk/eapg/index White, D. E. (1995). The art of planned giving. New York: Wiley.
European Cultural Foundation (ECF) CHRISTOPHER S. BIGGERS
Address of Organization Jan van Goyenkade 5 1075 HN, Amsterdam The Netherlands www.eurocult.org
Introduction The European Cultural Foundation (ECF) is a nonprofit organization primarily supporting intercultural dialogue through its European based network of independent professionals and organizations. Participants of ECF projects and programs are dedicated to cultural exchange and cooperation viewing them as a conduit to promote trust and understanding as well as social change.
Brief History The ECF was founded in 1954 in Geneva by the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont whose main focus was organizing conferences committed to discussing the human element of European integration. By 1960, the
Mission The mission of the ECF is three pronged – a focus on cultural diversity, support of cultural cooperation, and advocacy of cultural policy frameworks throughout the EU and surrounding countries. In support of these three areas, the Foundation’s Board of Governors has established a grants program to further develop its yearly priority themes. In furthering the agenda, the ECF enables organizations and individuals to implement cultural programs within and beyond national borders by establishing networks of independent experts, further enhancing intercultural dialog.
Activities
Successfully awarding €1.5 million on average per year, the ECF’s grants program is one of the primary instruments used to address the pressing issues adopted by the ECF agenda. Other activities of the Foundation include support for a multitude of programs such as StepBeyond or the Cross Mediterranean Placement Programme which focus on mobility as a primary theme to bring artists, researchers, and translators into the wider European context. Through the ECF’s existing network, the Foundation’s activities seek to further the development of a ‘‘more comprehensive European action promoting artistic mobility’’ at the European level and surrounding regions.
Structure and Governance The governing structure of the ECF is led by the director and deputy director as well as a 12 member Board of Governors including treasurer, chair, and deputy chair. Other organs of the Foundation include a President and an Advisory Council with the support of a 25 member staff. The Board is the decision making body responsible for allocating fiscal resources as well as appointing the Advisory Council. Furthermore, the Board meets with the Advisory Council once a year in order to set the agenda and ‘‘overall strategy’’ for the upcoming year.
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Funding The ECF has partnered with individuals and organizations from both the public and private sector to ensure the necessary resources for its functioning. Most notably the ECF receives generous support from the lotteries in the Netherlands, mainly the BankGiro Lottery and the De Lotto, who have continued their ongoing financial contributions through the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation.
Accomplishments Among the ECF’s notable accomplishments include their successful contributions to emblematic programs such as the Central and East European Book Project – assisting in the translation of contemporary works, and ERASMUS – promoting transnational university exchanges. Most recently, the ECF hosted high-level conferences with the aims of promoting culture as a part of EU foreign policy which initiated support for artistic projects in 48 different countries.
Cross-References
▶ Advocacy ▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Civil Society and Cultural Organizations
References/Further Readings Snel, G. (2004). Alter ego: Twenty confronting views on the European experience. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ECF (2004). 50 years of sharing cultures 1954–2004. Amsterdam: ECF.
European Foundation Centre (EFC) RAQUEL CAMPOS FRANCO
Address of Organization 51, rue de la Concorde 1050 Brussels Belgium www.efc.be
Introduction The European Foundation Centre (EFC) describes itself as ‘‘an international association of foundations and corporate funders dedicated to creating an enabling legal and fiscal environment for foundations, documenting the foundation landscape, strengthening the infrastructure of
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the sector, and promoting collaboration, both among foundations and between foundations and other actors, to advance the public good in Europe and beyond.’’ The EFC serves over 230 members and 60 associates, as well as a further 50,000 organizations linked through a network of more than 40 information and support centers worldwide.
Brief History Established in 1989 by seven of Europe’s leading foundations, the EFC is a Brussels-based international nonprofit association of foundations. From the beginning in 1989, passing through several yearly meetings that ‘‘established the EFC’s role of providing the primary meeting point for foundation professionals in Europe,’’ to the 2008 Annual General Assembly in Istanbul with more than 600 attendants, the EFC has grown from a small group of foundations to a set of more than 230 members in 2009. The EFC has been struggling for years for the transformation of the European foundation statute into a law, and the launch of a feasibility study by the European Commission in 2007 was a promising step.
Mission The EFC mission is ‘‘to strengthen the independent funding element of European philanthropy through robust cooperation with an array of partners.’’ With this mission in mind, the EFC aims to contribute to the vision of ‘‘a resilient infrastructure from which European philanthropy – with its unique embrace of innovation, dynamism, and cooperation – can advance the public good in Europe and beyond.’’
Activities The EFC is committed to advance its mission through intervention in four priority areas: creating an enabling legal and fiscal environment for foundations, communicating and documenting European philanthropy, benchmarking, and capacity-building and network-building. EFC is the foundations’ sector main representative body with the European Union institutions, and under the priority of creating an enabling legal and fiscal environment for foundations, the main focus in recent years has been the European foundation statute. The aim is to see the statute become law in order to allow foundations’ cross-border work. Under the priority of communicating and documenting European philanthropy, EFC has recently launched a magazine – Effect. It also produces many other documents and databases, sometimes in collaboration with research institutes. In order to contribute
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to the setting of standards and the building of capacity in the sector, the EFC promotes benchmarking and training events. The Principles of Good Practice are presented by EFC as an example of the commitment to this priority. While engaging itself in network and partnership building, the EFC also acts as an enabler for members and others to engage in mutually beneficial partnerships. An example is the European Forum on Philanthropy and Research Funding, a platform for cooperation of foundations which are active in the research field.
Structure and Governance Ultimate authority of the EFC vests in the Annual General Assembly of Members, with governance entrusted to an elected Governing Council, supported by a Management Committee. The mandate of the Governing Council is to guide the programmatic and strategic work of the EFC. The Management Committee focuses on the day-to-day operational management of the EFC, and it consists of a group of individuals representing members of the Governing Council, including the Chair, the Vice-Chair, and the Treasurer of the Association and additional individuals representing members of the Governing Council. In 2007 four new programmatic and member-led committees were created, having launched a series of new initiatives during that year. There is also a newly established Nomination Committee, with the mandate of monitoring the composition of the Governing Council and Management Committee, and aiming to ensure a balance of gender of representatives, geographic regions as well as the size and type of organizations that are represented in EFC governing bodies. The EFC Audit Committee has as mandate the monitoring and assessment of the financial situation of the EFC. An important governance document is the EFC Principles, which encompass a set of seven Principles of Good Practice based on an identified set of core values that every foundation in Europe should aspire to embrace.
Funding The EFC Activities are financed primarily through projects (39%), general purpose grants (33%) and fees (24%) according to the 2007 Annual Report. EFC held a total income of €4 million in 2007, and 4.4 million as total assets.
Accomplishments In parallel with the efforts of defending the creation of a foundation statute in Europe, included in a more general
effort of creating an enabling legal and fiscal environment for foundations in Europe, the EFC has developed several relevant activities in its elected priority areas of intervention. It gathers and analyzes relevant information concerning the foundation world, it promotes and participates in partnerships and networks created with a thematic or geographic focus, and it opens spaces for dialogue and action in relevant fields.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and the European Union ▶ Codes of Ethics and Codes of Practice ▶ Philanthropy in Europe ▶ Umbrella Organizations
References/Further Readings EFC Annual Reports (http://www.efc.be/ftp/public/Annual%20Reports/ EFC_Annual_Reports/) EFC (2008), Fostering Creativity, EFC 19th Annual Conference Highlights.
European Research Network ▶ EMES – European Research Network
Evaluation and Civil Society LEHN M. BENJAMIN George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Introduction Evaluation is a critical issue for civil society organizations (e.g., nongovernmental, nonprofit, private voluntary organizations). Policy makers, funders, activists, and scholars want to know whether civil society organizations (CSOs) are having an impact on the problems they seek to address. Evaluative demands are only likely to increase as CSOs continue to play a central role in public problem solving. At the same time, larger questions about the broader impact of civil society in democratic development loom large in a policy environment that continues to favor private action to address social problems. But evaluating civil society broadly, and CSOs specifically, is not easy. Many of the outcomes CSOs seek are long term and difficult to measure. At the same time, CSOs make other contributions to society beyond service
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delivery – they advocate for policy change, provide opportunities for civic engagement, organize and mobilize communities – all of which are even less tangible and more difficult to evaluate. Evaluation is even more complex when attempting to understand the impact of civil society more broadly. Despite these challenges, those who study the field are working to develop more applicable and innovative approaches to understanding the contributions of civil society evaluation. After giving a brief introduction to evaluation, this essay looks at some key issues in evaluating civil society organizations and concludes with recent developments.
Definition Patton (1997) defines evaluation as the systematic collection of information to make judgments, improve effectiveness, and/or inform decision making about a program, initiative, or organization. But this definition hides a diverse set of evaluation practices that have developed since the 1960s when evaluation was mandated for War on Poverty programs and took root as a professional field. In those early years, evaluators focused on determining whether these new programs caused observable outcomes with the hope of informing future policy making. Today, evaluation practice is informed by a broader set of theoretical ideas about the nature of reality (ontology) and knowledge (epistemology), as well as practical management and policy concerns. A quick glance at evaluation texts reveals a plethora of approaches: process evaluation is used to document how a program is experienced by various stakeholders; decision-oriented evaluation is used to look at how well a program has been implemented; and critical evaluation is used to examine how a program may be maintaining power and resource inequity. Perhaps more fundamental has been the development of evaluation approaches that draw on epistemological stances that move beyond positivism. At the risk of oversimplification, these stances suggest that measuring an objective reality is not possible because one’s observations are always shaped by one’s perceptions (e.g., critical realism, social constructivism), and that social phenomena cannot be understood outside of a context (e.g., hermeneutics, phenomenology, interpretivism). Regardless of approach, evaluation requires making certain key decisions: What criteria will be used to judge the merit or worth of the program or organization (goal achievement, quality of implementation, satisfaction of beneficiaries, or reputation of program among multiple stakeholders)? What standards will be applied to these criteria (e.g., X percentage of those trained get full-time
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jobs, a majority of the residents believe the organization is effective in addressing blight)? And what evidence will be needed to understand whether these standards have been met (e.g., survey of trainees 1 year after completion of the program)? Of course, many other questions need to be addressed along the way, including: Who determines these criteria, standards, and evidence? Is there agreement among stakeholders over what constitutes success? Can sufficient evidence be gathered to understand the merit or worth of the program? Are the costs of collecting data feasible? What is the purpose of the evaluation or how will the results be used? Are individuals, programs, civil society organizations, or civil society being evaluated more broadly?
Key Issues Early writings on evaluation and civil society focused on identifying the distinguishing characteristics of civil society organizations, as compared to public agencies and for-profit firms, and the implications of these unique organizational characteristics for evaluating CSO performance, including the importance of mission and the fact that CSOs have to attend to the expectations of multiple constituencies (e.g., donors, beneficiaries, volunteers), who often have different expectations of these organizations. Later work examined issues such as the prevalence of evaluation among nonprofit practitioners, measures of organizational effectiveness, and challenges to evaluating the sector as a whole. Taking a broad-brush view of the literature today, three central and related questions organize this work: (1) Are civil society organizations making a difference? (2) How can one best measure the difference civil society organizations are making? (3) How can evaluation be used to improve the difference that civil society organizations are making for those they serve? Before addressing these questions, it is worth distinguishing between evaluation and closely related concepts: accountability, performance measurement, and effectiveness. In brief, accountability is one possible purpose for conducting an evaluation but by no means the only purpose. Other evaluation purposes include improving programs or processes and generating knowledge. Performance measurement involves the ongoing collection of evaluative data to inform organizational decision making and is one approach to evaluation. As noted above, evaluation includes a broad range of approaches. Effectiveness is one important criterion used to evaluate a program or an organization, and is often defined as some level of goal achievement, but other criteria include efficiency, beneficiary satisfaction, responsiveness, and so on.
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Are CSOs Making a Difference?
Countless studies examine whether CSOs are making a difference. Some of these studies focus on CSOs working in particular areas like health, the environment, or international development while other studies examine the civil society sector more broadly. Most of these studies are internal and conducted primarily for the benefit of CSOs themselves and their funders. However, reviews of existing evaluations cited in Edwards and Hulme (1996), Flynn and Hodgkinson (2001), and Riddell (1999) reveal two clear and consistent themes. First, the data and methods of evaluating the impact of civil society organizations are woefully inadequate. Second, the evidence of CSO impact is mixed, making it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about their impact on poverty. These studies challenge inflated expectations about CSOs, i.e., CSOs are more efficient, more effective because they are more innovative, more responsive to local conditions, and closer to the poor. Yet, these studies have also spurred useful conversations about how to capture the impact of CSOs, about the noninstrumental value of CSOs, about the burden evaluation requirements place on organizations, about the need to link performance expectations with capacity building, and about the need to ensure evaluative requirements do not distort nonprofit agendas. Recognizing these limits and the continued need to have some way to evaluate CSOs, researchers, practitioners, funders, and policy makers continue to work on ways to better measure the difference that CSOs are making. How Can the Difference that CSOs are Making be Measured?
Measuring the difference that CSOs are making requires addressing three challenging tasks. First, an agreement needs to be reached on the criteria used to evaluate civil society organizations (i.e., how does one know whether civil society as a whole or individual CSOs are making ‘‘a difference’’?) Second, methods and measures need to be selected that will give some indication of how civil society organizations stack up against these criteria. Finally, empirical research also reveals that evaluation efforts are often intertwined with political issues, power dynamics, and relationship concerns, all of which can affect the usefulness of evaluative efforts. Criteria Using mission related criteria would seem to be a straightforward way to evaluate individual civil society organizations. Because civil society organizations often have very broad mission statements (e.g., end homelessness) that are not really attainable by one organization, using mission-related criteria requires
translating the mission into a set of organizational goals (e.g., the percentage of homeless families served that have moved into decent, permanent, and stable housing). But using goal achievement as the criterion for evaluating CSOs is limited for several reasons. First, goal achievement assumes that one can translate mission into a set of goals that are definable, unambiguous, coherent, consistent, and do not conflict. Yet, many researchers, including Cutt and Murray (2000), Forbes (1998), Kanter and Summers (1987), and Herman and Renz (1999), point out that goals are often multidimensional, hard to operationalize, and plenty of studies have shown how this complexity and ambiguity leads to different perceptions of CSO effectiveness by key stakeholders. Second, goal achievement assumes that change is linear. But as Fowler (1996) points out, for many CSOs, adapting and responding to changing conditions, having programmatic assumptions challenged, and redefining goals is required for success. Third, goal achievement fails to capture other important contributions of civil society organizations, such as providing opportunities for civic engagement, advocating for policies that benefit the marginalized communities CSOs serve, and providing a check on state power. Method and Measures Assuming agreement on the criteria to evaluate CSOs, the next challenge is figuring out how to measure CSOs against these criteria. For example, if one is capturing the percentage of homeless families that have moved into decent, permanent, and stable housing, one needs to answer such questions as what counts as decent, permanent, and stable housing? How long after the CSO has provided services to the families should their housing situation be assessed? How should this information be collected – a written survey, telephone interview, observation? Yet, efforts to measure the difference CSOs are making have raised a number of concerns. These concerns include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) not everything valuable is measurable; (2) CSOs’ work is long term and often addresses deeply entrenched problems, but funders usually want to see immediate evidence of results; and (3) evaluation can lead CSOs to focus on what is measurable, to avoid the hardest cases because they are more time consuming and less likely to result in success, while discouraging experimentation and innovation. People, Politics, and Power Evaluation processes are infused with political interests, power dynamics, and basic human fears about judgment. For example, Cutt and Murray (2000), Murray (2005), and Tassie and colleagues (1996) all report on the misunderstandings and contradictions that can happen in an evaluation. Both funders
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and grantees contribute to these dynamics. On the one side, funders’ judgments about CSOs worth or value are based on formal and informal criteria. The failure to specify or even be clear about the role of implicit criteria is at the heart of many misunderstandings between funders and grantees and often leaves the grantees feeling like the evaluation is simply political. On the other side, CSOs become adept at explaining away their lack of performance on circumstances beyond their control, taking little responsibility for organizational performance. How Can the Difference that CSOs are Making be Improved?
Countless manuals and texts exist to help nonprofit managers collect evaluative data to inform decision making and improve performance (see, e.g., Bozzo, 2000; Cutt & Murray, 2000). This is a change. Early on, evaluation was the purview of expert social scientists who used experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation designs to prove whether a program caused observable results primarily to inform policy. But in the last 20 years or so, less emphasis is placed on using evaluation to prove that a program caused results, and more emphasis is placed on using evaluation to improve practice and inform management. While the latter also relies on some understanding of a causal relationship between the program and observed results, this understanding is based on a detailed analysis of a process and not variance theory (see Maxwell, 2005 for further discussion of causation). Most of these resources focus on helping nonprofits adopt outcome measurement, develop a logic model or logframe, specify a theory of change, or create a balanced scorecard. Civil society organizations working in international development are encouraged to institute a monitoring and evaluation system (M&E) and conduct an impact assessment (IA). All of these tools and approaches emphasize collecting information that provides some indication of whether intended beneficiaries are better off as a result of the civil society organizations’ work. For example, outcome measurement tools often focus on helping nonprofits distinguish between outputs, or the work that they accomplished (e.g., number of workshops conducted) and outcomes or the results of this work (e.g., people are more knowledgeable about the causes of type II diabetes and some of these people will make healthier eating choices as a result of this information). Despite all the effort going into building the capacity of civil society organizations to collect and use evaluative data to improve their performance and demonstrate accountability to key stakeholders, empirical studies, such as
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those by Fine, Thayer, and Coghlan (2000), Cutt and Murray (2000), and Urban Institute (2002), show that organizations largely use this information to report to funders, not to inform internal decision making. Part of this may reflect the fact that early demands for evidence of performance and results were funder driven; part of this may reflect the fact that nonprofits lack the capacity to collect and use data, and that with time this will correct itself; part of this may simply be the difference between the limited usefulness of data that can only partially describe reality; and part of it may reflect the need to find a balance between evaluations that seek to understand impact and results and evaluations that are intended to inform ongoing decision making.
Future Directions Practitioners, researchers, and funders continue to develop better approaches to evaluating civil society. Three recent developments are worth noting here. First, a number of tools and publications have focused on evaluating CSO advocacy (including advocacy for policy change and community organizing). Advocacy work is much less linear and predictable than traditional service delivery and consequently requires that evaluation provide realtime feedback on activities (instead of focusing on evaluation reporting timelines), respond to emerging strategies and changing goals, recognize the value of intermediate outcomes (changes that are short of getting new policies in place), and broaden outcomes to include changes in such things as capacity, social norms, and alliances (for further information see Evaluation Exchange vol. 13(1) 2007; Innonet has an advocacy evaluation project with publicly accessible resources; Alliance for Justice and Blueprint R&D have been working on tools for funders and nonprofits). Second, researchers have proposed multidimensional evaluative models to better capture CSO effectiveness, and the further development of these models is likely. These include some of the tools mentioned earlier like the Balanced Scorecard but also Cutt and Murray (2000) detail a framework developed in Canada that included 12 attributes (e.g., management direction, acceptance as measured by stakeholder satisfaction, working environment, achievement of intended results) while Sowa, Seldon, and Sandfort (2004) offer a framework that also captures programmatic and management effectiveness. Finally, scholars and practitioners have also started to address the complex and expansive task of evaluating the sector as a whole. Two recent volumes in this area include Anheier (2004) and Flynn and Hodgkinson
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(2001). The latter volume takes on the challenge of assessing the sector’s impact by exploring some of the measurement issues, looking at the impact or what is known about impact in different subsectors like health, the arts, and education. In his book Anheier proposes a framework for measuring civil society (its size, composition, revenue); the extent to which civil society is supported by enabling legal, political, and social conditions; the extent to which civil society organizations contribute to overall trust in a society and civil society’s contribution or impact. Undoubtedly, those working and studying civil society will see more developments to better measure and evaluate individual organizations and their collective impact on a society.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Alliance for Justice ▶ Effectiveness and Efficiency ▶ Performance and Impact ▶ Social Accounting ▶ Social Audits
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. (2004). Civil Society: Measurement, evaluation and policy. London: Earthscan. Bozzo, Sandra L. (2000). Evaluation Resources for Nonprofit Organizations: Usefulness and Applicability. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 10(4), 463–469. Connell, J. P. (1995). New approaches to evaluating community initiatives: Concepts, methods and contexts. Washington, DC: Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families, The Aspen Institute. Cutt, J., & Murray, V. (2000). Accountability and effectiveness Evaluation in nonprofit organizations. London: Routledge. Edwards, M., & Hulme, D. (1996). Beyond the magic bullet: NGO performance and accountability in the post-cold war world. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Fine, A. H., Thayer, C. E., & Coghlan, A. T. (2000). Program evaluation practice in the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 10(3), 331–339. Flynn, P., & Hodgkinson, V. (Eds.) (2001). Measuring the impact of the nonprofit sector. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Forbes, Daniel P. (1998). Measuring the Unmeasurable: Emprical Studies of Nonprofit Organization Effectiveness from 1977 to 1997. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 27(2), 183–202. Fowler, Alan F. (1996). Assessing NGO Performance: Difficulties, Dilemmas and a Way Ahead. Chapter Thirteen in Beyond the Magic Built: NGO Performance and Accountability in the Post Cold War World. West Hartfort, CT: Kumarian Press. Herman, R., & Renz, D. (1999). Theses on nonprofit organizational effectiveness. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28(2), 107–126. Hoefer, R. (2000). Accountability in action? Program evaluation in nonprofit human service agencies. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 11(2), 167–177.
Kanter, R., & Summers, D. (1987). Doing well while doing good: Dilemmas of performance measurement in nonprofit organizations and the need for a multiple-constituency approach. The nonprofit sector: A research handbook. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kendall, J., & Knapp, M. (1999). Evaluation and the voluntary (nonprofit) sector: Emerging issues. Chap. 10 in International perspectives on voluntary action: Reshaping the third sector. London: Earthscan. Maxwell, J. A. (2005). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Murray, V. (2005). Evaluating the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. In R. Herman (Ed.), The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management (2nd ed., pp. 345–370). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. O’Connor, A. (1995). Evaluating comprehensive community initiatives: A view from history. In New approaches to evaluating community initiatives: Concepts, methods and contexts. Washington, DC: Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families, The Aspen Institute. Paton, R. (2003). Managing and measuring social enterprises. London: Sage. Patton, Q. M. (1997). Utilization focused evaluation: The new century text (3rd ed.). London: Sage. Plantz, M., Greenway, M., & Hendricks, M. (1997). Outcome measurement: Showing results in the nonprofit sector. In using performance measurement to improve programs. New Directions for Evaluation, 75, 15–30. Riddell, R. (1999). Evaluating NGO development interventions. Chap. 11 in International perspectives on voluntary action: Reshaping the third sector. London: Earthscan. Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Leviton, L. D. (1991). Foundations of program evaluation: theories of practice. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Tassie, Bill et al. (1996). Rationality and Politics: What Really Goes on When Funders Evaluate the Performance of Fundees? Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 25(3): 347–363. Urban Institute (2000). A look at outcome measurement in nonprofit agencies. Elaine Morely, Elisa Vinson, and Harry Hatry. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. Urban Institute (2002). How and why nonprofits use outcome information: Findings from a symposium. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. Wholey, J. S., Hatry, H. P., & Newcomer, K. E. (2004). Handbook of practical program evaluation (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation GORDON SHOCKLEY
Address of Organization 4801 Rockhill Road Kansas City, MO 64110 USA www.kauffman.org
Introduction The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (hereafter, Kauffman Foundation) was incorporated in 1966 by the entrepreneur Ewing Marion Kauffman. Operating in
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Kansas City, Missouri (United States), it promotes entrepreneurship as well as the education of children and youth in the United States.
Brief History Ewing Marion Kauffman ran successful business enterprises in the Kansas City area for many years, most notably the pharmaceutical company Marion Laboratories Inc. and the Kansas City Royals, a professional baseball franchise in the United States. His successes in these businesses endeavors enabled him to establish the Kauffman Foundation in the 1960s. The Kauffman Foundation’s early focus was on healthcare. Its first large-scale program promoted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training. In the 1980s, the Kauffman Foundation refocused its efforts on youth and children development and education. It began to advance entrepreneurship in the early 1990s. One of its first entrepreneurship programs was the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Also in the 1990s the Kauffman Foundation made an important strategic shift from operating programs to giving grants.
Mission The vision of the Kauffman Foundation is ‘‘a society of economically independent individuals who are engaged citizens, contributing to the improvement of their communities,’’ while its mission is ‘‘to help individuals attain economic independence by advancing educational achievement and entrepreneurial success.’’ The key principles supporting the Kauffman Foundation’s dual mission are benefiting society through its programs; supporting practice-based research; utilizing the Kansas City region in which the Kauffman Foundation is based as a ‘‘program incubator;’’ and developing partnerships to leverage its resources and capabilities.
Activities The Kauffman Foundation focuses its efforts mostly in the United States, though its activities have policy implications outside the United States and the Kauffman Foundation is recognized around the world. Dr. Carl Schramm, the current president and chief executive officer of the Kauffman Foundation, summarizes in his book The Entrepreneurial Imperative (2006) the motivation of the foundation’s entrepreneurship activities: ‘‘Entrepreneurship is America’s comparative advantage, and we need to exploit it fully both at home and abroad’’ (p. 3). The Kauffman Foundation’s entrepreneurship activities center on support through grants, networking, and convening through a wide range of partnerships and programs
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to understand the economics of entrepreneurship, train entrepreneurial leaders, enhance entrepreneurial skills and abilities, and encourage new business formation. The Kauffman Foundation’s education activities generally target children and youth populations in Kansas City’s urban core. It works with regional partners to support programs that seek to improve children’s academic achievement in math, science, and technology skills. The Kauffman Foundation is currently engaged in a comprehensive, 10-year initiative to significantly improve math and science education in the Kansas City area.
Structure and Governance The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a ‘‘Missouri Not For Profit Corporation.’’ It was incorporated in the State of Missouri (United States) as a nonprofit corporation in 1966 under The General Not for Profit Corporation Act of Missouri of 1953.
Funding The Kauffman Foundation ended FY 2007 with unrestricted net assets of USD$2,415,510,000. It receives the majority of its income from its investments (USD $435,621,000 in FY 2007). The Kauffman Foundation gave out USD$35,380,000 in grants and payments to partnering organizations alone in FY 2007.
Major Accomplishments One of the Kauffman Foundation’s major, recent accomplishments in entrepreneurship has been the Kauffman Campus Initiatives. Through this initiative, the Kauffman Foundation provided sizeable grants to several colleges and universities in the United States to support entrepreneurship education ‘‘across the campus.’’ Recent initiatives in children and youth education include the Kansas City Math and Science Initiative, which supports primary and secondary education programs focusing on those crucial subjects, and Kauffman Scholars, Inc., a separate but affiliated nonprofit organization that provides financial and other resources to assist disadvantaged, urban youth in attending college.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ Social Entrepreneurship
References/Further Readings Baumol, W. J., Litan, R. E., & Schramm, C. J. (2007). Good capitalism, bad capitalism, and the economics of growth and prosperity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schramm, C. J. (2006). The entrepreneurial imperative: How America’s economic miracle will reshape the world. New York: HarperCollins.
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F Fairbairn, Esmee and Ian ▶ Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
Faith-Based Organizations CAROL J. DE VITA The Urban Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Introduction Faith-based organizations such as Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, Salvation Army, and the YMCA have been an important part of the US social service delivery system for decades, providing child care, nursing home care, food, shelter, job training, and other services for people in need. In the mid-1990s, a new policy agenda emerged in the United States that sought to broaden the pool of faith-based organizations eligible for government funding. These policies, generally known as faith-based initiatives, sparked debate about the appropriate role of religion in the public square and the desirability of direct partnerships between church and state.
Definition One of the difficulties in studying faith-based organizations is that there is no universal definition, or even consensus, on what constitutes a faith-based organization. The term sometimes refers to religious entities such as churches, temples, mosques, and other houses of worship. It also refers to large social service agencies such as Catholic Charities and others that have a current or historical affiliation with a faith tradition. And it can also refer to a spiritual quality, rather than a formal affiliation or faith tradition, which is part of an organization’s mission, structure, programs, and services. The lack of a consistent definition creates difficulty in researching faith-based organizations and in implementing faith-based policies. Simply put, the term faith-based organization can mean different things to different people in different contexts. Many researchers and public administrators ask an
organization to self-identify as faith-based, or they use a series of criteria to classify organizations as faith-based. Sider and Unruh (2004) developed a typology of faithbased organizations that runs along a continuum. At one end are ‘‘faith-infused’’ organizations that connect religious faith to all aspects of the organization’s mission, staffing, governance, and programming. Faith is a central and an inseparable part of the organization’s identity and its programs. At the other end of the spectrum are ‘‘faithbackground’’ organizations. These groups have historic ties to a faith tradition but are organizationally structured like a secular nonprofit and have no explicit religious content in the delivery of their programs. A special case in this typology is ‘‘faith–secular partnerships’’ in which a secular organization joins with a religious congregation or explicitly religious organization to provide a service. Although staff and volunteers in these partnerships are often drawn from the religious community, the partnership is administered without regard to faith, and the content of the service typically has no explicit references to faith. Religious activities, such as attendance at worship services, may be offered as an option to participants, but are not required to receive services. As this typology suggests, faith-based organizations differ in organizational form and extent of religiosity.
Historical Background Recent interest in establishing partnerships between religious groups and government in the United States is not new. Government support for nonprofit health and educational organizations can be traced to the earliest roots of the nation. Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, for example, received public funding in their early years, and in the nineteenth century, states and localities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, provided direct subsidies to religious organizations to run hospitals, orphanages, and schools (Hall, 2006; Salamon, 1995; Smith & Lipsky, 1993). Twentieth-Century Approaches
The rise of the modern welfare state in the twentieth century made government contracting with nonprofit social service providers increasingly common in the United States, but providing public funds directly to faith-based
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groups raised the issue of separation of church and state. This dilemma was bypassed by requiring faith-based providers to deliver their services in a secular manner – that is, without regard to faith and without faith content in the program. Today, many large faith-based providers, such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, receive a sizable share of their revenues from government. Faithbased groups run 70% of the nation’s food pantries and soup kitchens, and many of these programs receive surplus food commodities from the federal government (Poppendieck, 1998). A quarter (27%) of emergency shelters and transitional housing are run by faith-based organizations, with many receiving funding under the federal homeless program (Aron & Sharkey, 2002). By the 1990s, some US policy makers began to call for a reexamination of the social welfare system. They argued that government contracting to secular service providers often resulted in impersonal and ineffective social service programs and that small, locally based providers, particularly faith-based groups, were better able to instill a sense of personal responsibility and personal transformation in service recipients (Olasky, 1992). Passage of Charitable Choice, a provision of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Section 104 of P.L. 104-193) – commonly called welfare reform – opened the door to more contracting with faith-based organizations. Charitable Choice enables religiously affiliated organizations to compete for government contracts and accept government vouchers on an equal basis with secular service providers without giving up the religious character of their programs. The law expressly forbids using government funds to proselytize or conduct worship services or religious instruction and requires the state to provide alternative (secular) services if the service recipient objects to the religious nature of a program. The intent of Charitable Choice is to ‘‘level the playing field’’ and open the government contracting process to small, locally based religious groups, including religious congregations. The Bush Administration’s Faith-Based Initiatives
When President George W. Bush assumed office in January 2001, he made faith-based initiatives a centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda. Within days of taking office, he established the White House Office of Faithbased and Community Initiatives and through Executive Order established department- and agency-level Centers for Faith-based and Community Initiatives (CFBCI). He also ordered a review of procurement procedures to identify barriers that might restrict faith-based groups from applying for government funds. In August 2001, the
White House issued Unlevel Playing Field, which concluded that faith-based and small community-based organizations were at a disadvantage in the federal procurement process. As of June 2008, 11 federal agencies had CFBCIs. These offices provide information, resources, workshops, and conferences to faith-based and community groups on the availability of federal grants and the federal procurement process. Under the faith-based initiatives, all federal programs are to encourage faith-based organizations to apply for government grants and contracts, but the Administration initially targeted three priority areas: mentoring children of prisoners, prisoner reentry programs, and access to recovery – a program directed to the treatment of substance abuse and related recovery support services. Over the years, the priorities have expanded to include disaster preparedness, relief and recovery, as well as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and global malaria initiatives. In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services created the Compassion Capital Fund (CCF) to help small faith-based and community organizations build their organizational capacity. Working through intermediary organizations, which provide technical assistance to the faith-based organizations, the CCF seeks to build local capacity and enable more faith-based and community organizations to identify and respond to government procurement notices. Between FY 2002 and FY 2007, the Compassion Capital Fund received appropriations totaling $289.1 million. According to the White House, faith-based organizations received $2.18 billion in federal competitive funding from 11 federal agencies in FY 2006 – or approximately 11% of competitive funds (Table 1). In the aggregate, the Department of Health and Human Services and the US Agency for International Development made the largest awards to faith-based organizations in FY 2006 ($723.2 million and $552.4 million, respectively) however, the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development awarded the largest percentage of their competitive funds to faith-based groups (30% and 25%, respectively). Although the intent of the faith-based initiatives is to level the playing field for smaller faith-based organizations and increase their participation in the procurement process, a study by Montiel and Wright (2006) found only marginal effects. Based on a review of more than 28,000 grant awards for nine federal agencies over a 3-year period (FY 2002–FY 2004), the researchers found a slight increase in the share of awards going to faith-based organizations
Faith-Based Organizations
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Faith-Based Organizations. Table 1 US Federal competitive funding awarded to faith-based organizations in FY 2006 (White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives. Accessed on June 13, 2008, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/ fbci/final_report_2006.pdf)
US department or agency
Total awarded ($)
Awarded to faith-based ($)
Percentage of total to faith-based
Health & Human Services
9,774,274,710
723,171,246
7.4
USAID
3,884,458,053
552,363,250
14.2
Housing & Urban Development
2,054,962,792
512,014,071
24.9
Agriculture
1,811,016,754
193,038,168
10.7
Justice
645,485,827
73,091,780
11.3
Corporation for National & Community Service
573,020,592
69,892,379
12.2
Commerce
285,534,489
8,552,860
3.0
Education
191,663,976
15,221,243
7.9
Labor
157,088,195
15,536,283
9.9
69,158,052
20,790,952
30.1
Veterans Affairs Small Business Administration Total
12,246,842
989,192
8.1
19,458,910,282
2,184,661,424
11.2
FY 2006 data are based on a review of 134 competitive programs at HHS (65), HUD (11), DOJ (14), DOL (11), ED (5), USDA (20), DOC (6), VA (1), SBA (1), and 35 competitive programs areas at USAID (26) and CNCS (9)
(11.6% of grants in FY 2002 to 12.8% in FY 2004) and almost no change in the share of discretionary dollars awarded to faith-based groups (17.8% in FY 2002, 17.1% in FY 2003, and 17.8% in FY 2004). Furthermore, both the number of awards and total dollars awarded shifted to larger national and international faith-based organizations during this period, while local and regional organizations experienced relative declines. These data suggest that larger organizations with presumably greater capacity retain a competitive edge when seeking government funds.
Key Issues Four key issues have shaped the debates concerning the faith-based initiatives: (1) the separation of church and state, (2) the capacity of faith-based organizations to work with government, (3) hiring practices of faith-based organizations, and (4) the effectiveness of faith-based services. Separation of Church and State
The First Amendment of the US Constitution states: ‘‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion.’’ Over the years, this Amendment (sometimes called the Establishment Clause) has been interpreted as a separation of church and state. In reality, the separation has always been somewhat porous, allowing faith-based organizations to work with government and to receive government financial support. However, the Charitable
Choice provision made the ‘‘separation’’ more permeable by enabling religious social service providers to openly retain the religious character of their programs. Although Charitable Choice explicitly prohibits proselytizing, there are no guidelines to distinguish between a simple religious message and an effort to convert. A related issue is the individual’s right to choose between faith-based and secular providers. Although Charitable Choice states that an alternative is to be provided if the individual objects to the religious nature of a program, formal mechanisms to notify individuals of this right are often lacking (US General Accountability Office, 2006). Even if notification is given, exercising this right may be problematic. In some places, especially rural areas, access to an alternate program may be difficult. Some programs, such as substance abuse treatment programs, have long waiting lists. If treatment is court-ordered, for example, an individual may be reluctant to reject a faith-based program if doing so results in or extends his or her incarceration. Individuals with mental disorders may be unable to make an informed decision. The GAO recommended that government agencies establish better guidelines and monitoring practices to determine compliance with these safeguards among its faith-based grantees. Capacity to Work with Government
Most social service programs (sometimes called social ministries) run by local congregations are small. They
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operate with limited budgets, limited staff, and often rely on volunteers. Like their small secular counterparts, these groups usually lack the capacity to identify governmentfunding opportunities, write proposals, and administer government-funded programs, which can require considerable paperwork. They often lack the technology, financial systems, and management infrastructures needed to comply with public reporting and regulatory requirements. A recent study of congregations in Indiana found that their management infrastructures are primarily geared toward running the church, not the social ministry programs, and adapting these systems to the congregation’s social ministries would not be easy (Clerkin & Gronbjerg, 2007). Especially for smaller congregations in lower-income neighborhoods, capacity issues can be a formidable challenge (De Vita & Palmer, 2003). Hiring Practices
One of the most controversial issues relates to the hiring practices of faith-based organizations that receive government funding. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, expanded in 1972, religious organizations are exempt from laws that forbid the hiring or firing of employees on the basis of religion or adherence to religious practices. In recent years, for example, the employment of gays and lesbians has been an issue. Supporters of the faith-based initiatives believe that to retain their religious character, faith-based groups must consider religious beliefs as part of their employment practices. Opponents argue that faith-based organizations may hire whomever they like with private money, but public funds should not be used to discriminate. The Bush administration regarded the issue as a matter of ‘‘protecting the civil rights and religious liberties of faith-based organizations.’’ Several states, including California and Colorado, introduced legislation exempting religious organizations from discriminatory employment practices, but none of these bills have passed as of 2008. Further, the US Supreme Court has been silent on this matter, declining to hear a case (LeBoon v. Lancaster Jewish Community Center) in April 2008 that focused on the firing of an evangelical Christian worker. A lower court ruling therefore stands, which said the JCC is considered a religious organization under the Civil Rights Act and exempt from discriminatory practices. In US law, ‘‘religion’’ is a term of art, and its definition varies in different statutes, adding to the complexity of defining a ‘‘religious organization’’ or a ‘‘religious employer.’’ Effectiveness of Faith-Based Services
The faith-based initiatives were predicated on the assumption that faith-based programs are more effective
than secular ones in transforming an individual’s behavior. Yet, until recently there was little rigorous evidence to assess the validity of this claim. The high visibility of the faith-based initiatives has spurred many researchers to study the issue. To date, the evidence that has emerged shows no appreciable differences between faith-based and secular providers. For example, a study of job training programs in Indiana found that participants in secular programs were more likely to find full-time jobs and receive health insurance than those in faith-based programs, but the differences were small (Deb & Jones, 2003). A national study of nursing homes found that faith-based homes were less likely than secular ones to receive complaints and inspection deficiencies, but again the differences were small (Ragan, 2004). And, a third study of welfare-to-work programs in Los Angeles found no systematic differences between one type of provider and another (Monsma & Mounts, 2002). From a methodological perspective, rigorous comparative studies are extremely difficult to conduct. It may not be possible to assign participants randomly to service providers and create control groups. Selection bias related to who enters or leaves a program can compromise results. Estimating the cost of volunteer labor and measuring the extent to which faith plays a role in service delivery are other hurdles to overcome. Additional research using rigorous research techniques is needed before conclusions about the effectiveness of faith-based and secular service providers can be drawn.
International Perspectives The faith community has a long history working outside the United States. For decades, groups such as Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, and World Relief have provided humanitarian assistance around the world. After World War II, faith-based groups were instrumental in the resettlement of Eastern Europeans, and in the 1980s, they were key players in resettling millions of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States. More recently as tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters have struck, faith-based organizations have responded to these crises with relief, recovery, and long-term development assistance. While most US faith-based groups that work in the international arena are Christian, humanitarian aid is a core part of all faith traditions. Groups representing a broad spectrum of faiths – such as, the Jewish Federation, Islamic Relief, and the Aga Khan Development Network – are active players in humanitarian aid and development assistance programs that address the needs of people throughout the world.
Faith-Based Organizations
For the most part, the faith-based agenda with its emphasis on government contracting is a product of US policy makers and emanates from the unique culture and historical experiences of the United States. Other countries have very different attitudes toward church–state relations, which permit the development of close ties and partnerships between these sectors. At present, there are no indications that other nations are pursuing a US-style faithbased agenda.
Future Directions Because faith-based initiatives in the United States are closely tied to the policies and administrative directives of the Bush administration, it raises the question of what will happen after President Bush leaves office. The legislative underpinning for the faith-based policies rests in three bills passed by Congress between 1996 and 2000: the original Charitable Choice provision in the 1996 welfare reform legislation, and extensions of Charitable Choice in the Community Service Block Grant program (1998) and in drug treatment and prevention programs (2000). Since 2000, no additional legislation has passed Congress, and all expansions of the faith-based programs have been through Executive Order. This leaves administrative structures such as the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives and the departmental Centers vulnerable to reorganization or even closure under a new administration. Indeed, shortly after taking office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing a new White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which will work with both secular and faith-based organizations to address economic and social needs in local communities. In addition to the federal infrastructure created to advance the faith-based agenda at the national level, the Bush administration encouraged states and localities to create their own faith-based offices or liaisons to work with local groups. By 2008, 35 states and more than 100 cities had done so (White House, 2008). These entities range from a single advisor in the governor’s office to a small staff working with local faith-based groups. The presence of these offices and liaisons suggests that support for faith-based policies has devolved to lower levels of government and interest in sustaining some type of arrangement with the faith community is likely to continue even after Mr. Bush leaves office. What may change is the rationale and political justification for the policies. The Bush administration viewed faith-based policies through the lens of a competitive model. Compared with larger organizations, small groups
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were at a disadvantage and the playing field needed to be leveled. But many faith-based groups and small nonprofits are unable or reluctant to invest in the infrastructure required to work with government, and government procurement is still dominated by larger organizations. In the future, if the faith-based initiatives are to be sustained, they may need to be repositioned away from a competitive model and toward one that emphasizes collaboration. Under this paradigm shift, the overarching question would be: how can different types of organizations contribute to public policy goals, not who wins and who loses. Research on workforce development programs in California offers some insights into how this new paradigm might work (Campbell & Lemp, 2007). For example, faith-based groups are often good at reaching hard-to-serve populations (i.e., ex-offenders, addicts, people with limited English skills, etc.). And because faith-based providers see this work as an expression of their faith, they often engage in the intensive handholding and supportive services needed to help individuals overcome difficult circumstances. But faith-based organizations and small nonprofits also need assistance to partner with government. In California, the state did not rely on intermediaries to provide this assistance but built its own capacity through a newly created special projects division that worked with small providers. This arrangement enabled the state to monitor the programs and progress of the faith-based organizations and to understand directly the challenges that these groups face. Future models for partnerships between government and faith-based organizations may evolve through the development of local networks that come together to address community needs. This will require building trust among community residents, providers, and government, and filling gaps in the service delivery system – roles that the faith-based community has fulfilled in the past. Under this model, large and small organizations, faithbased and secular, may play different roles but are likely to work together toward a shared goal of improving the quality of life of individuals, neighborhoods, and nations.
Cross-References
▶ Aga Khan Foundation ▶ Catholic Charities ▶ Catholic Relief Services ▶ Churches and Congregations ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Islamic Relief ▶ Luthern Social Services ▶ Mosques ▶ Religious Organizations
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▶ Salvation Army ▶ World Vision ▶ YMCA
Fanon, Frantz ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
References/Further Readings Aron, L. Y., & Sharkey, P. T. (2002). The 1996 national survey of homeless assistance providers and clients: A comparison of faith-based and secular nonprofit programs,. Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services, from http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410496_1996_NSHAPC.pdf; 06/13/08. Campbell, D., & Lemp, C. (2007). Government workforce development partners: Final evaluation report on the California community and faith-based initiative. Davis, CA: California Communities Program. Department of Human and Community Development. University of California. Clerkin, R. J., & Gronbjerg, K. A. (2007). The capacity and challenges of faith-based human service organizations. Public Administration Review, 67(1), 115–126. Deb, P., & Jones, D. (2003). Does faith work? A comparison of labor market outcomes of religious and secular training organizations. Paper presented at the Faith-based Social Service Provision under Charitable Choice Conference, Washington, DC. De Vita, C. J., & Palmer, P. (2003). Church–state partnerships: Some reflections from Washington, DC. Charting civil society policy brief no. 14. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Hall, P. D. (2006). A historical overview of philanthropy, voluntary associations, and nonprofits organizations in the United States, 1600– 2000. In W. W. Powell & R. Steinberg (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (pp. 32–65). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Monsma, S. V., & Mounts, C. M. (2002). Working faith: How religious organizations provide welfare-to-work services. Philadelphia, PA: Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. Montiel, L. J., & Wright, D. J. (2006). Getting a piece of the pie: Federal grants to faith-based social service organizations. New York: The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy. Olasky, M. (1992). The tragedy of American compassion. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway. Poppendieck, J. (1998). Sweet charity? Emergency food and the end of entitlement. New York: Viking. Ragan, M. (2004). Faith-based vs. secular: Using administrative data to compare the performance of faith-affiliated and other social service providers.. New York: The Rockefeller Institute of Government. Salamon, L. M. (1995). Partners in public service: Government –nonprofit relations in the modern welfare state. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sider, R. J., & Unruh, H. R. (2004). Typology of religious characteristics of social service and educational organizations and programs. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 33(1), 109–134. Smith, S. R., & Lipsky, M. (1993). Nonprofits for hire: The welfare state in the age of contracting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. The White House (2001). Unlevel playing field: Barriers to participation by faith-based and community organizations in federal social service programs. Washington, DC: The White House. The White House (2008). The quiet revolution. Washington, DC: The White House. US General Accountability Office (2006). Faith-based and community initiative: Improvements in monitoring grantees and measuring performance could enhance accountability. GAO-06–616. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Basic Biographical Information Frantz Fanon, a prominent francophone contributor to postcolonial studies, was born in 1925 to a mixed race, middle-class family living on the Caribbean island of Martinique (Antilles), which was then a French colony. He attended the respected Lyce´e Schoelcher in Fort-deFrance, where he was taught by Aime´ Ce´saire, founder of the concept of Ne´gritude, a movement that specifically rejected Western political, social, and moral domination and influenced Africans as well as Blacks around the world. The abuse of the Martiniquan people by the French soldiers forced to remain on the island during World War II was a major influence on Fanon; it showed him the realities of colonial racism. In 1943, at the age of 18, Fanon fled the island joining the Gaullist forces and became a member of the Free French Forces. After World War II, he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, France. There he began writing political essays and plays and married a French woman, Josie Duble. In the 1950s he moved to Algeria where, while working as a psychiatrist, he joined the National Liberation Front. Expelled in 1957, he returned to France but then moved on to Tunisia. Fanon died 1961 in the United States where he sought treatment for leukemia under the name Ibrahim Fanon. The day of his death was the same day as his literary main-work ‘‘Les damne´s de la terre’’ (1961) (engl.: ‘‘The Wretched of the Earth’’) was published in Paris. This work became the classic manifesto of decolonization.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions No other francophone intellectual has been as influential wherever independence struggles have been fought around the globe and whenever theorists have attempted to understand their existential relationship to racial difference and oppression. Fanon’s political philosophy, ‘‘Fanonism,’’ has influenced many liberation movements. His works have inspired anticolonial liberation movements, including the student revolts of 1968, the South African anti-apartheid struggle headed by Steve Biko, as well as the Black Power Movement in the United States. Before he left France, Fanon had already published his first analysis of the effects of racism and colonization, ‘‘Peau noire, masques blancs’’ (1952) (engl.: ‘‘Black Skin, White Masks’’), which he had submitted as his (ultimately
Fa¯ra¯bi-al, Abu¯ Nas.r Muh.ammad ibn al-Farakh
rejected) doctoral thesis under the title, ‘‘An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks.’’ For him the role of culture was essential. He saw culture in general as a totalizing structure, a system from which individual freedom must be wrested. To understand that system, he chose to analyze all spheres of cultural expression: the radio, the cinema, literature and science itself. Furthermore, Fanon’s psychological training and experience led him to argue that many of the problems he observed were based on psychological oppression. Fanon’s work is still relevant today for critical race theory, cultural politics of identification, and to a certain extent, for understanding the causes and sources of twenty-first century acts of terrorism.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Culture ▶ Identity ▶ Social Movements
References/Further Readings Caute, D. (1970). Frantz Fanon. New York: Viking. Fanon, F. (1965). The wretched of the earth. New York: Reprint of Les damne´s de la terre. Paris, 1961. Lionnet, F. (2005). Frantz Fanon. The Columbia history of twentiethcentury French thought In D. K. Lawrence (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Fa¯ra¯bi-al, Abu¯ Nas.r Muh.ammad ibn al-Farakh THORSTEN HASCHE
Basic Biographical Information Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ was born in AD 870 in Turkestan at Wası¯j in the district of Fa¯ra¯bı¯ on the Jaxartes. His father was a qa¯’id, a Turkish soldier at an Abba¯sid court. Before going to Baghdad, al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ worked in a garden and a vineyard in Damascus, reading books at night by the torch of a guard. In Baghdad he studied logic and got acquainted with the whole range of Greek thought and contemporary philosophical and theological discussions. Although Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ got famous during his lifetime, being called the second master (first master: Aristotle), he maintained his skeptical distance towards actual politics. After settling to the court of Sayf al-Dawla, Amir of Aleppo, and travelling
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to Egypt and Ascalon, he died in 950 in Damascus at the age of 80. He lived during a time of deep theological divisions and philosophical controversies due to the vast expansion of the Islamic ummah under the reign of the Uma¯yya¯ds. Living at the flourishing Abba¯sid courts al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ wrote and thought under the influence of ka¯la¯m (theology), the Greek legacy of fa¯lsa¯fa¯ (Islamic rationalism) and Shi’ism.
Major Contributions Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ was the first systematic philosopher in Islam. His neoplatonic work, based on an emanationist scheme, consists of five major themes: logics, physics and meteorology, metaphysics and methodology, ethics and politics and, finally, music theory. In his major political treatises, namely The Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City and Civil Polity, al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ outlines the concept of a political association (ijtima¯) in the form of large, intermediate, and small communities, identified with the inhabited world (ma’mu¯rah), the nation (ummah) and the city (madı¯nah). The main purpose of a political association is to provide a framework for the people to attain happiness and to help the people in their search for truth. On the top of the perfect city stands the Ima¯m who has reached intellectual perfection and is a recipient of the revelation from God through the intermediary of the active intellect. With his political philosophy al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ provided a scheme to criticize the existing political order, the caliphate, and strengthen the moral responsibility of the political association against pure political power and the mere accumulation of wealth. He also brought together conflicting methods of acquiring knowledge, namely theological and philosophical thinking, in one approach and therefore helped to mediate between the main factions in Islamic culture.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Civil Society and Religion ▶ Civil Society History I: Antiquity ▶ Civil Society History II: Medieval Period
References/Further Readings Fakhry, M. (2002). Al- Fa¯ra¯bı¯, founder of Islamic neoplatonism. Oxford: Oneworld. Fakhry, M. (2004). A history of Islamic philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Netton, I. R. (1992). Al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ and his school. London/New York: Routledge. Walzer, R. (1985). Al-Farabi on the perfect state. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Fe´de´ration Internationale des Ligues des Droits de L’Homme (FIDH)
Fe´de´ration Internationale des Ligues des Droits de L’Homme (FIDH) EVELYNE SCHMID
Address of Organization 17, Passage de la Main d’Or 75011 Paris France www.fidh.org
Introduction The International Federation for Human Rights, known by its French acronym FIDH, is a federation of nongovernmental human rights organizations striking to improve the prevention of human rights abuse and the sanction of perpetrators. Today, 155 organizations in approximately 100 countries are part of the federation.
Brief History French and German national human rights groups initiated the federation in 1922 as the first international human rights organization. Already in 1927, FIDH proposed a Worldwide Declaration of Human Rights and an international criminal tribunal. FIDH established the first fact-finding and observation missions after World War II.
Mission FIDH coordinates and assists the activities of its member organizations, at the local, regional, and international levels. The Federation’s priorities are the defense of victims, the support of local organization’s capacity for action, the mobilization of states and intergovernmental organizations and the dissemination of information and eyewitness accounts. The Federation particularly focuses on the protection of human rights defenders, the protection of women’s rights, an economic globalization founded on the respect for human rights and the eradication of impunity.
Activities The Federation’s main activities include advocacy and litigation, trial observation, fact-finding, and observation missions and specific interventions on behalf of victims or thematic situations. FIDH supports its member organizations and partners in their lobbying efforts and pursues judicial cooperation programs to
strengthen member organizations domestically. The Federation has opened a permanent office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and conducts fact-finding missions and trial observations in over 60 countries.
Structure and Governance Every three years, the FIDH Congress elects the International Board and determines the strategic directions for the organization and decides on membership issues. An Executive Board is tasked to carry out the daily management. The international secretariat is based in Paris. Jointly with the World Organization Against Torture, FIDH runs the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders aimed at the protecting and enhancement the work of human rights defenders.
Funding The work of FIDH is financed primarily through grants, donations, and membership fees. In 2006, the federation received U$57,000 in membership fees and U$4,300,000 in grants and donations. For the same period, FIDH reported total expenditures of U$4,800,000. FIDH accepts funding from governmental and corporate sources.
Accomplishments The establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002 was a realization of one of the oldest demands of FIDH. In 2003, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights defender and head of the Federation’s Action Group for Women’s Rights.
Cross-References
▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Ebadi, Shirin ▶ Federations, Nonprofit ▶ Human Rights ▶ INGOs
References/Further Readings Landman T. (2006). Holding the line: Human rights defenders in the age of terror. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 8(2), 123–147. Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, FIDH and World Organisation Against Torture (2003). Human rights defenders in a ‘‘Security First’’ environment: Annual report 2003. Paris: FIDH. Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, FIDH and World Organisation Against Torture (2007). Steadfast in protest: Annual report 2007. Paris: FIDH.
Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs
Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs ANJA ERBEL
Address of Organization 18, Mahmoud Bassiouni Street Downtown – Cairo Egypt www.efyngo.org (currently under construction)
Introduction The Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs (EFYNGO), is considered the nongovernmental umbrella and hub of Egyptian youth-led NGOs and NGOs working in the area of youth development. It currently represents 14 Egyptian youth organizations from different Egyptian cities and governorates and it aims to eventually incorporate all youth-related NGOs in Egypt.
Brief History The idea to found the Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs was born during a workshop called ‘‘Day of Youth,’’ organized by the German Goethe Institute in Cairo in 2004. This event brought together leaders of 25 Egyptian NGOs working in youth development and youth initiatives and gave them the opportunity to network for the very first time. Until the workshop was repeated the following year, the leaders had brainstormed about establishing an umbrella organization for all youth-led nongovernmental organizations in Egypt working on youth development issues which could represent the different NGOs and facilitate cooperation. The Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs was founded by 11 youth NGOs in 2005 and registered with the Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity in January 2006.
Mission The Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs has three main objectives pursued through their work. First, it aims to build the capacity of its member NGOs; moreover it seeks to coordinate development efforts among its member organizations. Finally the federation is aimed at improving communication and coordination between Egypt’s youth civil society and other sectors such as the donor, private, and governmental sectors in their youth development activities. In addition, Egyptian youth are represented through the Federation in various local, regional, and international events.
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Activities The Federation acts as a facilitating agent to help youth organizations in their activities; support is not limited to member organizations of the Federation. However, member organizations are prioritized in the application process for funding and training. The Federation currently runs four projects, each of them in cooperation with an investment company, a firm or an institution, such as the EFG Hermes Foundation, the Sharkawy and Sarhan law firm, Microsoft, the Goethe-Institute or the British Council. A large project entering its second year in cooperation with Microsoft for instance trains recent graduates and unemployed youth from all regions of the country in IT skills, soft skills, internet security and social entrepreneurship to enhance their employment possibilities. Projects run in collaboration with cultural institutes such as the Goethe-Institute and the British Council focus on youth exchange, education, research and youth advocacy rather than conveying technical knowledge. The ‘‘Youth Social Venture Fund,’’ financed by the EFG Hermes Foundation is a program offering those NGOs without easy access to funding the financial means they need to develop their organization and to train personnel in the skills required for efficient and professional NGO management. The Federation attended various events e.g., the Africa-Europe Youth Summit, Lisbon/Portugal; the Africa Youth Panel, Addis Ababa/Ethiopia; the Arab Youth Forum, Amman/Jordan; the Euro-Arab Coordination Meeting of Youth Organizations, Amman/Jordan; CIJEF (Conseil International des organisations des Jeunes de la Francophonie) Meeting, Quebec – Canada.
Structure and Governance The Federation General Assembly currently consists of 14 youth-led NGOs, 11 of which were also involved in the founding process of the organization. The EFYNGO’s Executive Board initially comprised five members, the number being expanded to seven members in 2008, each of them representing a different NGO out of the currently 14 member organizations. A chair, a vice-chair, a secretary and a treasurer in addition to three regular board members compose the board of the Federation. The Federation’s staff consists of the Director of Program, two Project Assistants and one Project Coordinator, in addition to a small number of volunteers.
Funding The Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs’ work is financed primarily through individual projects. The Federation receives no governmental funding and only
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negligible individual contributions and donations supporting their work. The projects mentioned in the ‘‘activities’’ section are the main source of funding for the Federation rather than yearly contributions which makes it difficult to define an average expenditure or budget due to variation.
United Way or a statewide association of nonprofit organizations. While these various manifestations of multipart, multisite nonprofit organizations are quite diverse, they are all ‘‘federated’’ in the sense of sharing of authority and control between their participating units (affiliates) and a central office.
Accomplishments
Definition
Established only recently, the Federation of Egyptian Youth NGOs is not yet widely known by the Egyptian public. However, the EFYNGO itself does not pursue much publicity since the final projects are run by the youth NGOs themselves and not by the Federation. A major accomplishment of the Federation can be monitored in the project run in cooperation with Microsoft. It has so far managed to educate more than 1,300 young people and expects to increase this number by another 1,000 each in the second and third year of the project. Also through the Youth Social Venture Fund/EFG-Hermes Youth Sustainability and Viability Fund two EFYNGO projects, implemented by youth NGOs, could be financed.
Selsky (1998) defines federations as ‘‘associations in which the affiliates are organizations rather than individuals’’ (p. 286). This article refers to federations in the same way, which is a more inclusive definition than others. For example, O’Flanagan and Taliente (2004) define a federation as ‘‘a network of local affiliates that share a mission, a brand, and a program model but are legally independent of one another and of the national office.’’ This is just one type of nonprofit federation akin to a franchise system. Young (1989) and Oster (1992, 1996) sketched out taxonomies of nonprofit federated organizations. Young divided federations into three categories: corporate organizations in which authority and control are centralized; federal organizations featuring a balance between central authority and local affiliates; and trade associations where sovereignty resides in organizational members. Subsequently, Oster claimed that most nonprofit organizations in the United States were part of overall national systems that could be dichotomized into two categories: corporations with branch offices, and franchises in which rules and incentives ensured substantial autonomy for local affiliates. Franchise systems have been described in the business literature as a hybrid form of organization, between a hierarchy and a market, as Baucus, Baucus, and Human (1996: 374) explain, ‘‘requiring a nationally recognized brand name and efficient back-office operations, with customer service occurring locally.’’ Oster (1996) argued that for various reasons, including access to capital, performance incentives, and mobilizing and motivating volunteers, the franchise form was preferred for the majority of national nonprofit organizations that she examined. These arguments parallel those of authors of for-profit literature on franchising, such as Brickley and Dark (1987), who identify shirking behavior, risk-sharing, and free-rider problems as reasons for companies to franchise out or wholly own their retail units.
Federations, Nonprofit DENNIS R. YOUNG, LEWIS FAULK Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Introduction Nonprofit federations exist in many forms and are described in various terms including federations, franchises, membership associations, systems, leagues, councils, and decentralized corporations. Some are aggregations of organizational units of very similar function and structure and consider themselves to be part of the same overall system or umbrella, such as YMCAs or chapters of the March of Dimes. Others are aggregations of more distinct and varied organizations in the same field of service, such as the Child Welfare League of America and the American Symphony Orchestra League. Still others are aggregations of differentiated organizations in a broad field of service that consider themselves part of the same system, such as a regional Catholic Charities or Jewish Federation. Yet others are aggregations of diverse nonprofit organizations that affiliate with one another for the specific purpose of collaborative fund-raising, policy advocacy, or capacity building, such as a regional
Historical Background As Hall (2006) explains, nonprofit associations in civil society in the United States have roots in the spread of translocal, non-state-related religious congregations,
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political organizations, and professional associations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These associations served as predecessors to secular and religious non-state-related federated organizations, including humanitarian organizations like the US Sanitary Commission that developed during the US Civil War, and the Red Cross in World War I. Hammack (1998) traces some of these developments in his reader through the reprinting of historical documents including de Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century essays on civic and political associations and Sills’ classic 1957 study of the history of the March of Dimes. Similarly, McCarthy (2003) traces the early development of social reform movements and associations, including those focused on abolition of slavery, women’s rights, humanitarian assistance, and civil liberties, from the beginnings of the American republic through the Civil War. The twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of nonprofit organizations of many forms, including nonprofit federations. As Young and Faulk (2010) discuss, the historical development of nonprofit federations followed a variety of patterns including bottom-up and top-down expansion and integration, depending on a number of economic and organizational factors.
Key Issues Leaders of federations make strategic and negotiated choices about their memberships and the degrees to which authority and control are distributed between affiliates and a central authority. Moreover, federations develop according to different growth scenarios, leading to alternative structural patterns. These scenarios are influenced by a variety of economic issues including economies of scale and scope, transactions costs, principal–agent considerations, and interorganizational externalities. Nature of Affiliates
Federations can consist of affiliates which are highly homogeneous, highly heterogeneous, or distinct but complementary in some important way. For example, the affiliated councils of the Girl Scouts of the USA or the Boy Scouts of America are highly homogeneous. While they are separately incorporated, they all take the same form, follow the same rules, use the same symbols and materials, earn revenue in similar fashion, and so on. The same is true of many health charities such as the American Cancer Society and the March of Dimes. In contrast, member organizations of a local United Way are highly diverse. They consist of various health and social service organizations whose common thread is to serve the social and health needs of a local community while receiving some fraction of their support from a
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shared community fund-raising campaign. Similarly, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) consists of a diverse array of social service organizations that address the needs of children in some way, such as day care, foster care, education, or other services. These members have different names and logos and are likely to belong to other federations within their communities or particular fields of service as well. They come together under CWLA for educational resources, conferences, policy advocacy on behalf of children, and other common needs and interests, and they pay for these services largely with membership dues. Another category of federation features organizational affiliates that relate to one another as a ‘‘system’’ and may be institutions within a particular religious or ethnic community, such as Catholic Charities, Jewish Philanthropies, and Lutheran Services. They consist of various types of social service organizations, schools, and health care organizations that are interconnected through systems of referral, resource allocation and fund-raising, shared values, and policy setting by a central (regional) federation body. While affiliate organizations of these federations have highly diverse orientations and purposes, they are complementary to one another so that as a whole they can holistically address the needs of clients or communities with multiple issues and challenges. Central/Affiliate Relations
Relations between a federation’s central office and its affiliates also traverse a wide spectrum of possibilities, ranging from tight control through a corporate governing structure that limits affiliate autonomy, to a balanced system in which central and affiliate units share authority, to highly decentralized arrangements in which affiliates are autonomous and the central office is substantially confined to a support role. Here a distinction is made between control and decentralization. A large federation may delegate administrative authority to its affiliates for efficiency purposes but still retain authority or control through various mechanisms of accountability, such as issuing and revoking charters. In this sense, some nonprofit federations operate like franchises, setting rules and often tight boundaries on affiliates’ discretion, while eschewing direct control. Alternatively, as Oster (1996) explains, some federations operate essentially as unified corporations with their affiliates more tightly held and better characterized as ‘‘branch offices.’’ At the other extreme, in a highly decentralized federation, autonomous members may voluntarily choose to follow guidelines or policies defined by the central body but retain discretion to deviate from those policies. Bradach (2003) reasons that federations whose programs are more highly
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standardized or which do not strongly depend on replicating a particular organizational culture can employ looser, more decentralized structures, while those which are less standardized or more highly dependent on a particular organizational culture must necessarily be tighter and more centralized. He cites STRIVE, a job training organization, as an example of the former, and City Year, an organization that engages young people for a year of urban community service, as an illustration of the latter. Standley (2001) explains that health charities such as the American Cancer Society or March of Dimes tend to be more centralized, corporate type federations. Social service federations such as Volunteers of America or Catholic Charities tend to balance central authority with local autonomy and discretion, setting rules and guidelines for operations but also allowing programmatic choice at the local level. Finally, federations that have coalesced around a common set of issues or interests are likely to be highly decentralized, operating essentially as membership associations. The Southeastern Council of Foundations, the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, Independent Sector, or the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council are examples of such association-type federations whose central offices’ authority derive essentially from the consensus they can develop among their member organizations. Clearly, both the homogeneity of affiliates and the degree of central control are continuous variables that do not conform to strict categories. Moreover, many multipart nonprofits involve a mixture of forms – for example, having both branches and franchised units, as Brickley and Dark (1987) explain are found in for-profit companies as well. The centrality of entrepreneurship and growth in the development of federations mirrors the logic of franchises in the business sector. Baucus, Baucus, and Human (1996) argue that franchises grow in part because entrepreneurs are anxious to exploit the benefits of a franchise system in order to gain a competitive advantage over rivals in starting or expanding local businesses. Similarly, Young (1985) finds that case studies of start-ups as well as program innovations and expansions in the nonprofit sector often reveal entrepreneurial choices to leverage the advantages of federations and the difficulties of undertaking such initiatives independently. In fact, federations come about through a variety of entrepreneurial scenarios such as the following:
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5. 1. An organization could expand as a single entity, establishing internal divisions and branch offices as needed to manage efficiently. Thus, the March of Dimes was established as a single organization and grew through
the establishment of tightly controlled chapters throughout the country. An organization could replicate itself through franchise arrangements that allow it to retain control over the character of its affiliates as they spread and grow. To do so, it would establish a central office geared to overseeing franchised units. Once the system is established, independent local nonprofit entrepreneurs could decide to buy into it, establishing local franchises and agreeing to abide by the rules of the system. Breakthrough Collaborative is one contemporary example (www.breakthroughcollaborative.org). McCarthy (2002) provides several diverse examples from the social movement field – the Anti-Saloon League, the Southern Farmer’s Alliance, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and the Association for Children for Enforcement and Support (ACES). An organization could be imitated by other groups that adapt its concept to new venues. In this imitation process, the original organization could be passive, possibly hostile, or it might actively assist its imitators, perhaps, as Taylor, Dees, and Emerson (2002) explain, by licensing or selling its programs or products. Eventually, the original organization and its imitators may decide to collaborate by establishing an umbrella organization to assist with common challenges and support further growth of the movement, and possibly police the parameters of operation. The United Way of America and Boys and Girls Clubs of America illustrate this mode of development. An organization could expand its concept, diversifying the kinds of goods and services it offers, and the clients and donors it attracts. For example, a social service organization emphasizing treatment may find that it can do a better job by adding preventive or education services to its program portfolio. Young (1985) finds that the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services (JBFCS) in New York grew in this way, partly through mergers with other local social service organizations, and also in the context of a larger umbrella federation that encouraged its diversification and expansion. Project HOPE, a poverty fighting organization in Detroit began with a food distribution program and diversified to job training and education, remaining local in its operation, an approach which Taylor, Dees, and Emerson (2002) call ‘‘scaling deep.’’ An organization could decide to remain narrowly focused but increase its effectiveness by expanding its affiliations with other organizations that provide complementary services. This may lead ultimately to a federated system of diverse, related organizations
Federations, Nonprofit
such as Lutheran Social Services or Jewish Philanthropies. Local nonprofit entrepreneurs, either executives or board members of existing, perhaps fledgling, independent organizations, might choose to negotiate their entre´e into such a federation. 6. Organizations growing (or struggling) through all of the above scenarios may identify areas of common interest with other organizations, leading them to join or form associations of diverse members that pursue goals of mutual interest. The American Association of Museums and the Child Welfare League of America are examples. Taylor, Dees, and Emerson (2002) cite the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a network of member schools and educational centers that share 10 essential principles of school restructuring and redesign. More broadly, as Selsky (1998) explains, even more diverse sets of nonprofit organizations may form federations such as state associations of nonprofit organizations, in order to pursue common interests in policy advocacy, and educational and technical assistance services. Multiple factors are involved in the development of nonprofit federations. These factors include: economies of scale, economies of scope, transactions costs, interorganizational externalities and principal–agent issues. Economies of Scale
A nonprofit organization may find that it can address its mission more efficiently by expanding the scale at which its services, or certain of its activities or functions, are carried out. Expansion strategies include internal growth or merger with another organization. Depending on the nature of the scale economies there are other strategies as well. If the savings from expanding scale are related to common, support functions such as purchasing, marketing, or fund development, such functions can be retained by a central office while smaller-scale field operations may be accomplished through branching or franchising. For franchise-like organizations whose members provide very similar services, O’Flanagan and Taliente (2004) argue that economies of scale in the areas of brand management, back-office services, fund-raising, and performance management constitute the essential justification for federation. Similarly, Bradach (2003) and Taylor, Dees, and Emerson (2002) argue that having a national umbrella allows nonprofits to take advantage of scale economies in quality management, organizational, and programmatic learning, as well as administrative support services. This is consistent with Brown’s (1998: 322) observations that economies of scale in franchise operations in the business
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sector manifest themselves in such functions as ‘‘regional and national advertising, quality control and product standardization.’’ Alternatively, if a nonprofit organization chooses not to expand itself (because of limited scale economies in operations) it may choose to join with imitators or organizations of similar interest in forming umbrella organizations, or join industry associations that perform the support functions at an efficient scale under an appropriate fee structure. Similarly, an organization choosing to join a system of complementary organizations may also take advantage of that system’s scale to achieve support function economies. Taylor, Dees, and Emerson (2002) explain that risk management is another area where economies of scale may apply. A federated system can be viewed as a portfolio of (semi) autonomous enterprises each with its own probabilities of success and failure. By differentiating its organizational ‘‘holdings’’ through federation, a growing nonprofit organization may reduce volatility and maximize its performance within its own parameters of risk tolerance. The effectiveness of this approach in managing risk necessarily grows with scale since expansion itself enables diversification. Moreover, the expansion permits greater organizational learning, helping members of the organization to avoid poor practices and learn about less risky ones. Alternatively, when several autonomous organizations band together into a federation, they can exploit economies of scale in insuring themselves against various kinds of risk. In effect, the federation serves as a safety net for any one of its affiliates. Economies of Scope
Often the mission of a nonprofit organization is more effectively addressed if its services are offered in tandem or combination with other complementary services. For example, the effectiveness of an occupational rehabilitation or work-training organization may be enhanced if convenient child day care services are easily accessible to its clients. A social service organization addressing the needs of children with behavior problems may be able to accomplish its goals more easily if it can coordinate its services with a family counseling program. A nonprofit devoted to improving conditions in a low-income community engages a variety of service providers, in areas such as housing, social services, health care, and youth recreation. Federation structures help nonprofits exploit these economies of scope. Transactions Costs
All structural arrangements involve transactions costs, i.e., the costs of doing business associated with economic
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exchanges among organizational units, including the gathering and assessment of information, and the monitoring and evaluation of processes and results. Ronald Coase (1937) recognized that the growth and size of a firm, and the boundaries between the firm and the open market, were intimately related to the nature of transactions costs. Coase hypothesized that a firm would continue to expand until the cost of the marginal transaction of doing business inside the firm exceeded the cost of performing that same transaction through a contractual arrangement in the marketplace. An application of this idea is developed by Brown (1998) who argued that the costs of motivating employees through an internal system of merit promotion rise as the ratio of subordinates to supervisors increases. At some level, therefore, firms choose to accommodate additional growth through franchises. This substitutes performance-based financial incentives for promotional opportunities and leads to a mixture of internally owned and franchised retail outlets. This basic idea is powerful for understanding how many nonprofit federations develop. A nonprofit may grow through internal expansion until it becomes too costly to conduct all business through a central hierarchy – at which point various alternatives may be considered including the establishment of branches, chapters, or divisions on the one hand, or franchises or affiliates, on the other. This decision may hinge on the relative costs of carrying out transactions under these alternative arrangements. In the former cases, the transaction costs center on internal administrative, budgeting, and control systems, while in the latter cases, transaction costs involve more arm’s-length mechanisms of negotiation, monitoring, and resource exchange through contractual arrangements. Principal–Agent Considerations
Barney and Hesterly (2006) describe principal–agent theory as dealing with the problems associated with carrying out the intent of a decision maker (principal) when the task is delegated to a manager, subordinate, or contractor. Delegation or contracting inevitably involves some loss of control which must be addressed through some combination of incentives and oversight. In forprofit literature, Brown (1998) cites various factors affecting the ability of managers to control their operations, including geographical dispersion of operations, costs, and effectiveness of alternative reward systems, and ability to measure performance. For nonprofit federations, alternative structural arrangements offer differing degrees of oversight, control, and alignment between principal and agent, and may be more or less effective for different variants of nonprofit
service. The measurement of performance in some service areas is more difficult than others, and some services are delivered in more geographically dispersed patterns than others. There are also some special characteristics of nonprofit service that complicate decisions to engage various structural forms. For example, the dearth of unambiguous quantitative measures of performance (such as profit) may enhance the attractiveness of federated arrangements that allow for benchmarking of some units against others, using whatever quantitative and qualitative indicators may be available. The more easily such internal comparative measurements can be made, the more the principal– agent problem can be ameliorated, assuming that the measures themselves are not too costly to collect or too distorting in the incentives they may introduce. The principal–agent problem in the for-profit sector is usually viewed as a ‘‘top-down’’ issue. In the nonprofit sector a more fundamental question is raised by alternative federated arrangements – namely who exactly is the agent and who is the principal? For centralized federations, the implication is clearly that the headquarters organization is the principal and the divisions or branches are the agents. For decentralized federations, sovereignty for the members may be implied and the central organization may be considered an agent of the members. For balanced federations, the central organization and its affiliates may each be both principals and agents, with each level having some degree of autonomy and some degree of accountability to the other. Interorganizational Externalities
Interorganizational externalities are the indirect economic impacts that one organization has on another, outside the realm of direct market transactions. For example, as Baucus, Baucus, and Human (1996) describe in business sector franchises, poor performance by renegade outlets or lack of consensus among franchisees and franchisors on overall goals or means of competition can reduce performance of all franchisees. In the case of nonprofit federations, as in business, such effects are closely bound to issues of reputation. For example, Taylor, Dees, and Emerson (2002) warn against the harm that can be done by ‘‘renegade’’ affiliates: organizations sharing the same or similar names, or to a lesser degree, organizations operating in the same industry or realm of service, affect each other by their actions because consumers, donors, other funders, or the general public may associate such ‘‘related’’ organizations with one another in their own minds, and paint them all with the same brush when it comes to allocating resources, choosing service providers, or advocating for changes in policy. Thus, all United Ways were badly hurt by scandals
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in the central office or in isolated local United Ways in the 1990s. All Catholic parishes were hurt by the pedophile problems of certain highly visible dioceses. And, perhaps to a lesser degree, all foster-care agencies are hurt by stories of abuse in some foster homes, just as all universities are hurt by corruption scandals involving student loan officers in some institutions. The omnipresence of interorganizational externalities is made all the more salient by the role of trust in the nonprofit sector. As Steinberg (2006) explains, trust is one of the theoretical pillars on which the presence of nonprofit organizations in a market economy is understood. In situations where consumers or donors are disadvantaged by asymmetry of information, the nonprofit form serves as a signal of honesty and integrity, based on the incentives and governing arrangements that differentiate nonprofits from for-profit firms. Issues of trust cut both ways for nonprofit federations. Nonprofits that belong to a federation can be hurt by such affiliation if one of its members behaves badly. To the contrary, nonprofit organizations are helped by belonging to federations that enjoy name recognition and trust, and which encourage or enforce appropriate behavior. Bradach (2003) calls this ‘‘ensuring the brand.’’
International Perspectives The development of global associations has been one of the fastest-growing aspects of civil society since the late twentieth century. Most global and transnational nonprofits assume some type of federated form and are subject to the same kinds of growth imperatives considered here. For a review of management and development challenges facing transnational nongovernmental organizations see Young (1991, 1992) and Young et al. (1999).
Future Directions Bradach (2003) criticizes nonprofit organizations for their inability to ‘‘go to scale’’ with their innovative and socially beneficial programs. This is a complex issue given the variety of ways in which nonprofit organizations ‘‘grow’’ by affiliating with one another through federations, and the large presence that federations have in the sector. One important empirical research question is the degree to which nonprofits belong to federations. Given the general definition offered here, it is likely that a very large proportion of nonprofit organizations, perhaps most, belong to a federation of one kind or another. Further, an important issue is the degree to which scale drives nonprofits’ decisions to federate. As discussed here, economies of scale are just one of several factors that
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nonprofit leaders must take into account in determining if, when, and how to grow. The particular nature of scale economies may influence nonprofits to expand as unitary organizations or only to combine certain functions through some form of federation. Clearly too, the absence of scale economies would recommend against a growth strategy based on internal expansion, but a federated strategy might be based on economies of scope, transaction costs, principal/agent issues or interorganizational externalities. Our present understanding of the decision to federate is rudimentary. Hence, nonprofit management practice could benefit from empirical research that clarifies the rationales for federating in different ways or not federating at all. Finally, alternative federation forms present different challenges of management, governance, and organizational strategy. Managing a franchise-like system is unlike managing a loose association of diverse organizational members. Perhaps what is most urgently needed is a sense of how leaders and members of a federation see themselves in relation to one another, in the context of alternative federated forms. Young (2001) argues that a common identity or vision may be a prerequisite to a management plan or strategy. Once these identities are understood, a logical next step is to discover and devise management and governance structures and procedures that best serve the missions of federations and their constituent organizational units.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History of ▶ Boy Scouts ▶ Business and Employers’ Associations ▶ Catholic Charities ▶ Child Welfare League of America ▶ Clubs and Clans ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Girl Scouts ▶ Independent Sector ▶ Intermediary Organizations and Field ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations ▶ Lutheran Social Services ▶ March of Dimes ▶ Membership and Membership Associations ▶ Mothers Against Drunk Drivers ▶ Organizational Forms and Development ▶ Professional Associations ▶ Social Franchising ▶ Subsidiarity ▶ Umbrella Organizations ▶ United Way ▶ YMCA
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References/Further Readings Baucus, D. A., Baucus, M. S., & Human, S. E. (1996). Consensus in franchise organizations: A cooperative arrangement among Entrepreneurs. Journal of Business Venturing, 11, 359–378. Barney, J. B., & Hesterly, W. (2006). Organizational economics: Understanding the relationship between organizations and economic analysis. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational studies (2nd ed., pp. 111–148). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bradach, J. L. (2003). Going to scale. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring, from http://www.ssireview.org/site/printer/going_to_scale/ Brickley, J. A., & Dark, F. H. (1987). The choice of organizational form: The case of franchising. Journal of Financial Economics, 18, 401–420. The Bridgespan Group (2007). Habitat for humanity: Funding growth. February, From http://www.bridgespangroup.org/PDF/ FundingGrowth/HabitatforHumanity.pdf Brilliant, E., & Young, D. R. (2004). The changing identity of federated community service organizations. Administration in Social Work, 28(3/4), 23–46. Brown, W. O. Jr., (1998). Transaction costs, corporate hierarchies, and the theory of franchising. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 36, 319–329. Coase, R. (1937). The nature of the firm. Economica, 4, 386–405. Community Action to Fight Asthma (CAFA) (2005). Asthma and environmental advocacy in California: The role of health coalitions – Lessons learned 2002–2005. Report Foster, W., & Fine, G. (2007). How nonprofits get really big. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring, from http://www.ssireview.org/ site/printer/how_nonprofits_get_really_big/ Glaton, J. D. (2007). Feeling pressure from Harvard on college cost. New York Times (pp. A1, A11). December 29. Hall, P. D. (2006). A historical overview of philanthropy, voluntary associations, and nonprofit organizations in the United States, 1600–2000. In W. W. Powell & R. Steinberg (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed., pp. 32–65). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hammack, D. C. (Ed.) (1998). Making the nonprofit sector in the United States. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press Kerlin, J. (2006). Social enterprise in the United States and abroad: Learning from our differences. In R. Mosher-Williams (Ed.), Research on social entrepreneurship, ARNOVA Occasional Paper Series, 1(3), 105–125. McCarthy, J. D. (2002). Franchising social change: Logics of expansion among national social movement organizations with local chapters. Pennsylvania State University, draft, May 1, presented to the Conference on Social Movements and Organization, University of Michigan, May. McCarthy, K. D. (2003). American creed: Philanthropy and the rise of civil society 1700–1865. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Miller, J. L., Shendell, D. G., & Love, M. B., et al. (2005). Asthma and environmental advocacy in California: The role of health coalitions: Lessons learned from community action to fight asthma: 2002–2005. Oakland/San Francisco, CA: CAFA and TCE, from http://www. calasthma.org/about_cafa/case_studies/ O’Flanagan, M., & Taliente, L. K. (2004). Nonprofits: Ensuring that bigger is better. McKinsey Quarterly, 00475394, Issue 2. Oster, S. M. (1996). Nonprofit organizations and their local affiliates: A study in organizational forms. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organisation, 30, 83–95.
Oster, S. M. (1992). Nonprofit organizations as franchise operations. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 2(3): 223–238. Philanthropy News Digest (2007). Habitat for humanity ousts some affiliates. The Foundation Center, October 18, from http:// foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id = 192200039 Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rodriguez, L. (2007). The Girl Scouts: Uncharted territory. The Nonprofit Quarterly, Fall, 16–22. Rosenfeld, D. (2002). The Cleveland orchestra story. Cleveland, OH: Gray & Company. Selsky, J. W. (1998). Developmental dynamics in nonprofit federations. Voluntas, 9(3): 283–303. Standley, A. (2001). Reinventing a large nonprofit: Lessons from four voluntary health associations. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 11(3): 305–320. Steinberg, R. (2006). Economic theories of nonprofit organizations. In W. W. Powell & R. Steinberg (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed., pp. 117–139). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Strom, S. (2007). Some worry home charity is shedding grass roots. New York Times, July 18, from nytimes.com Taylor, M. A., Dees, J. G., & Emerson, J. (2002). The question of scale: Finding an appropriate strategy for building on your success. In J. G. Dees, J. Emerson, & P. Economy (Eds.), Strategic tools for social entrepreneurs (pp. 235–266). New York: Wiley. Young, D. R. (1983). If not for profit, for what? Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath. Young, D. R. (1985). Casebook of Management for Nonprofit Organizations: Entrepreneurship and Organizational Change in the Human Services. New York: Haworth Press. Young, D. R. (1989). Local autonomy in a franchise age. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 18, 101–117. Young, D. R. (1991). The structural imperatives of international advocacy organizations. Human Relations, 44(9), 921–941. Young, D. R. (1992). Organizing principles for international advocacy associations. Voluntas, 3(1), 1–28. Young, D. R. (2001). Organizational identity and the structure of nonprofit umbrella associations. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 11(3), 289–304. Young, D. R., & Faulk, L. (2010). Franchises and federations: The economics of multi-site nonprofit organizations. In B. Seaman & R. D. Young (Eds.) Nonprofit management and economics. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar (forthcoming). Young, D. R., Koenig, B. L., Najam, A., & Fisher, J. (1999). Strategy and structure in managing global associations. Voluntas, 10(4), 323–343.
Feeney, Charles (Chuck) Francis FREDA DONOGHUE
Basic Biographical Information Charles Francis Feeney was born on 23 April 1931 in Elizabeth, New Jersey into a modest Irish American Catholic family. On graduation from high school at the age of 17 he signed up to the US Air Force. He served in Japan for
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4 years during the Korean War, after which he went in 1952, on a GI Scholarship, to the Hotel School at Cornell, which had a reputation for producing entrepreneurs. From the start Feeney demonstrated his entrepreneurial talents by setting up a sandwich enterprise selling to his fellow students, which helped provide him with extra income. In 1956, after Cornell, he went to France and from there to Spain. Establishing a duty-free business with another graduate of Cornell (and later two others), they started first by selling alcohol to the US naval ships and moved into cars and perfume. With a constant eye to opportunities, the duty-free empire that Feeney established eventually operated across many countries on several continents. As well as his duty-free business, Feeney made several other significant investments, all of which contributed to making him one of the world’s richest men. One of Feeney’s characteristics was his secrecy and when word eventually began to get out about how rich he was he had already transferred his wealth to a charitable foundation. First called the Atlantic Foundation, established in Bermuda in 1982, this was to eventually become known as the Atlantic Philanthropies, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the world.
Major Contributions Feeney had already been involved in individual gift giving before he established the Atlantic Foundation and was influenced in his thinking by Carnegie. Reading widely on the subject of philanthropy, Feeney, through Atlantic, developed a model of strategic giving which was renowned for its efficacy and its anonymity. Not only were recipients sworn to secrecy, on threat of losing their funding should they spill the beans, but Feeney ensured from the start that Atlantic would give ‘meaningfully’. He was interested in giving that provided the impetus for other support, whether in the form of other philanthropic donations or government funding. In this way, Feeney worked to ensure that his giving had impact. Education has been the largest beneficiary of his philanthropy because of his belief in the power of education in personal, social, and economic development. Although Feeney was keen to remain anonymous, his giving eventually became so well known that secrecy was farcical and in 2001 the Atlantic Philanthropies officially discarded its policy of confidentiality and anonymity. Feeney was ‘‘outed’’ in the world press and at around the same time a decision was made, mulled over for the previous few years by Feeney, to ‘‘spend down’’ Atlantic’s endowment by around 2016. In addition, the foundation moved away from its previous interests and into the areas of ageing, human rights, health, and disadvantaged
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children and youth, with a commitment to strengthening civil society. Giving while living is regarded by Feeney as more effective and he has been as entrepreneurial in philanthropy as he was in the corporate world. A personally frugal man, his foundation has donated about $4bn and has contributed significantly to the United States, the island of Ireland, Australia, and Vietnam as well as South Africa, Great Britain, Thailand, Cuba, and Bermuda.
Cross-References
▶ Carnegie, Andrew ▶ Strategic Philanthropy
References/Further Readings O’Clery, C. (2007). The billionaire who wasn’t. New York: Public Affairs.
Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund A. JOSEPH BORRELL
Address of Organization P.O. Box 770001 Cincinnati, OH 45277-0053 USA www.charitablegift.org
Introduction Established in 1991 and opened to the public a year later, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund (FCGF) is the US’s largest and best known donor-advised fund. In June 2008, the FCGF had over $4.7 billion in assets spread across nearly 48,000 named accounts within the overall fund. When measured by assets under management, the FCGF is among the five biggest US public charities.
Brief History FCGF, like other donor-advised funds, has changed the mechanics of giving. It democratized the process of philanthropy by allowing small donors to obtain some of the advantages enjoyed by private foundations or charitable trusts without the administrative responsibilities of these vehicles. In 2009, FCGF allowed individuals to set up named accounts with as little as $5,000 in initial donations.
Mission Accounts at FCGF can be created either through an outright gift or through a pooled income scheme, a type of
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planned giving, which provides lifetime income to a donor or donors and eventually an outright charitable donation. Donors are attracted to FCGF due to the tax advantages that may accrue to the donor from an irrevocable charitable gift of money or other assets to FCGF. Once completed, the funds donated legally belong to FCGF and must be used for charitable purposes. FCGF holds gifts from its various donors in separate accounts and invests the proceeds so that the donation can grow over time. At an appropriate time, a donor can request that the fund’s administrator make grants from the account to other charities of the donor’s choosing. While not legally bound to honor donor choices, virtually all recommendations for grant making are carried out by FCGF. When transmitting funds to other charities, FCGF allows donors to identify the holders of the account and be recognized for the donation or to give the money anonymously. Unlike a typical direct donation to a charity which may result in more fundraising appeals, the easy ability to remain cloaked behind the FCGF’s identity allows donors to freely give to charities while preserving donor privacy.
Activities There is little in the scholarly literature about the Fund. Also, the materials in the popular press (newspapers and magazines) about FCGF often contain now outdated information due to material changes in how the fund operates and tax law changes.
Structure FCGF is governed by an independent board of directors and organized as a public charity, which gives donations to FCGF significant tax advantages compared to donations to a private foundation. The fund’s relationship to the for-profit mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments has been controversial. Despite being able to receive money from the Gift Fund, other charities, including community foundations, have not been impressed by the growth of FCGF. Fundraisers argue that it is difficult for smaller charities to match the name recognition and awareness afforded to Fidelity’s charitable vehicle, given its relationship to Fidelity Investments and their combined large marketing budgets.
Funding The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund employs Fidelity Investments to provide various administrative and investment services. For example, well known Fidelity Investments mutual funds are among the choices available for funds donated to FCGF, but awaiting disbursement to charities.
In addition, amounts held in the FCGF are assessed regular management and other fees.
Major Accomplishments In the first 15 years of operation, donors used the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund to funnel over $6 billion to other nonprofit organizations. Other investment companies have sponsored the creation of similar donor-advised funds, but FCGF remains the biggest and most wellknown of these funds.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Planned Giving ▶ Tax Deductions for Charitable Contributions in the United States
References/Further Readings Cloutier, C. (2005). Donor advised funds in the U.S.: Controversy and Debate. The Philanthropist, 19(2), 85–108. US Government Accountability Office (2006). Tax exempt organization: Collecting more data on donor-advised funds and supporting organizations could help address compliance changes. Washington, DC.
FIDH ▶ Fe´de´ration Internationale des Ligues des Droits de L’Homme (FIDH)
Filer Commission ▶ Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs (The Filer Commission)
Filer, John H. ALICIA SCHORTGEN
Basic Biographical Information John H. Filer was born in 1924 and received a Bachelor of Arts from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 1947. In 1950 Filer earned his Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School. Filer served as a Republican state senator
Flexner, Abraham
from New Haven, Connecticut in 1957 and 1958. John Filer joined Aetna Life and Casualty Company in 1958 as assistant counsel and was named general counsel in 1966. Mr. Filer was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Aetna in 1972 and served as CEO until his retirement in 1984. Aetna’s market share tripled in size during Filer’s tenure and grew to become the nation’s largest shareholderowned insurance company. John Filer died in 1994 in a hospital outside of his hometown of West Hartford, Connecticut.
Major Contributions Often lauded as the ‘‘father of corporate philanthropy’’ because of his introduction of a formal corporate philanthropy program while leading Aetna, John H. Filer dedicated much of his professional life to exploring philanthropic interests. Early in Filer’s executive career, John D. Rockefeller third appointed Filer chairman of the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs. The Filer Commission, as it became known, formed in the summer of 1973 to explore private giving to philanthropic organizations in America. On December 2, 1975 the Filer Commission Report, Giving in America: Toward a Stronger Voluntary Sector, was officially presented. John Filer made two short speeches that day, one to Al Ullman, then chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and one to the Washington Press Club. Filer’s contributions to the commission’s findings were significant, and his leadership paved the way for a report that remains the most thorough study of the third sector to date. John Filer served as Independent Sector’s chairman of the board from 1987 to 1989. Independent Sector is a nonprofit organization that serves as a forum for charities, foundations, and corporate giving groups to advance philanthropy and voluntary participation in the United States. During Filer’s leadership, Independent Sector launched its ‘‘Give Five’’ campaign calling upon Americans to give 5% of their income and five volunteer hours per week.
Cross-References
▶ Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs (The Filer Commission) ▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Independent Sector
References/Further Readings Brilliant, E. L. (2000). Private charity and public inquiry: A history of the Filer and Peterson Commissions. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs (1975). Giving in America: Toward a stronger voluntary sector. Washington, DC.
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Flexner, Abraham DARWIN STAPLETON
Basic Biographical Information Abraham Flexner was born on November 13, 1866 in Louisville, Kentucky (United States) to parents who had emigrated from Germany. Graduating in 1886 from Johns Hopkins University, one of the most advanced American universities of its era, he returned to Louisville to establish an innovative college-preparatory school. In 1905–1906 he pursued graduate studies at Harvard University and the University of Berlin.
Major Accomplishments/Achievements In 1908 Flexner was hired by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to study the status of North American medical schools. His ensuing publication, Medical Education in the United States and Canada (1910), often referred to as ‘‘the Flexner report,’’ was a scathing critique that confirmed and extended existing concerns. Flexner recommended closing four-fifths of the medical schools, and providing more support for the few that emphasized science-based clinical and laboratory instruction. Subsequently (1912–1925) Flexner was employed by the General Education Board, a Rockefeller philanthropy, to help put these reforms into practice, reforms that revolutionized medical education in North America. Flexner continued to promote imaginative, highquality learning at all levels throughout the rest of his career. His argument for modernized grade school education, published as The Modern School (1916), led to the founding of the progressive Lincoln School of Columbia University. From 1930 to 1939 he was the first director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, one of the first think-tanks in the United States. Flexner was a consistent proponent of education for the gifted and capable, believing that it was necessary in the modern age to create a class of well- and broadlyeducated leaders. He also was an advocate for philanthropy on a grand scale, arguing that philanthropy should be directed toward major initiatives rather than to provide sustaining support.
Cross-References
▶ Philanthropy and Professional Advisors ▶ Philanthropy in North America ▶ Rockefeller Sr., John D. ▶ Think Tanks
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References/Further Readings Flexner, A. (1940). I remember: The autobiography of Abraham Flexner. New York: Simon and Schuster. Thomas N. B. (2002). Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a life in learning. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wheatley, S. C. (1988). The politics of philanthropy: Abraham Flexner and Medical Education. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fondation de France ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Address of Organization 40 avenue Hoche 75008 Paris France www.fdf.org
Introduction The Fondation de France is a private nonprofit organization recognized by the French government as a charity working in the public interest. It was created to fill the gap between the public and the market of socially oriented organizations and to help other civil society organizations to undertake philanthropic, cultural, scientific, and general interest projects. It acts as an umbrella organization for other French foundations by receiving donations and legacies and awards scholarships and prizes.
provides grants mainly in the areas of housing and employment and in the area of violence prevention. Within Health and Medical Research, Fondation de France supports information dissemination, training, public health and medical research, with a focus on ethics, children, pain, addictions, psychological disease, palliative care, and health education for young people. As part of the Culture program, the foundation has set up pilot programs in which it carries out its mission as mediator between artists and society. In the area of Environment, Fondation de France promotes community gardens as a basis for social inclusion and the exploration of environmental issues. Finally, it supports the development of some 500 foundations.
Activities To pursue these objectives in the main focus areas, the Fondation de France undertakes a variety of activities. It raises and distributes funds to respond to the needs of society in the areas of health, scientific, and medical research, culture, the environment, and solidarity, in particular the fight against poverty and social deprivation. Acting as a sort of foundation incubator, it enables individuals and companies to create charitable foundations under the aegis of the Fondation de France and to have the benefit of the foundation’s advice on management. In its efforts to support the French civil society sector more broadly, the Fondation de France provides assistance in the creation and development of associations and helps them to achieve their aims. In addition, through Friends of Fondation de France based in New York City, the foundation helps US funders to support projects in France.
Brief History The Fondation de France was established in 1969 on the initiative of Andre´ Malraux, the first Minister of Culture of France, to help individuals and companies carry out philanthropic, cultural, environmental, or scientific projects and social activities.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas Unlike most French foundations, which tend to have narrowly defined and fixed objectives, the Fondation de France is a multipurpose foundation. Its three central objectives are to give grants to associations working in the field of social problems with especially innovative approaches; to encourage philanthropy by both promoting generosity in France and improving the practice of philanthropy globally; and, finally, to house individual and corporate foundations. Fondation de France’s program areas cover a broad range of themes. Under the Social Cohesion program, it
Structure and Governance Fondation de France is governed by a Board of Trustees and an administrative council (‘‘conseil d’administration’’), which decides on general policies. A staff of more than 120 full-time employees is responsible for implementing the decisions of the administrative council. The administrative council and staff are supported by more than 400 volunteers, many of them working in committees of experts, voluntary professionals who are on hand to advise in the foundation’s various areas of activity, including programs and financial management.
Funding The Fondation de France received its first endowment from the Caisse des De´poˆts et Consignation, a public agency that pools the fund of the public savings banks and 17 other public or private banks. With assets in 2006 amounting to more than €900 million, the foundation
Fondazione Cariplo
finances itself through revenue from its endowment, donations, and bequests, and government funding. Two-thirds of Fondation de France grants come from individual foundations or funds, which contribute capital and designate a field to support in the form of prizes, scholarships, and grants. Total expenditures in 2006, including those of all the foundations and funds under Fondation de France’s management, amounted to more than €126 million.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions In its more than 40 years of operations, Fondation de France has financed more than 100,000 projects and 50,000 associations. As of the end of 2007, more than 600 foundations or funds, including 57 created by businesses, were operating under the aegis of Fondation de France. Undoubtedly, it has contributed immensely to the development of the French foundation sector and to its civil society more broadly.
Cross-References
▶ Bloch-Laine´, Francois ▶ Philanthropy in Europe
References/Further Readings Pavillon, E. (1995). La Fondation de France: 1969 – 1994. L’invention d’un me´ce´nat contemporain. Paris: Anthropos.
Fondazione Cariplo ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization Via Manin, 23 20121 Milano Italy www.fondazionecariplo.it
Introduction An Italian foundation of banking origin in Milan, Fondazione Cariplo promotes the social, cultural and economic development of the Lombardy community as well as the communities of the Novara and Verbania provinces. With more than 50 staff members, the foundation is the fourth largest member of the European Foundation Centre, and its assets currently stand at €6.3 billion.
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Brief History Fondazione Cariplo was established in 1991 following the reorganization of Italy’s banking system under the Amato-Carli legislation. The foundation manages the assets of the Cassa di Risparmio delle Provincie Lombarde, a savings bank established in Milan in 1823. After defeating Napoleon in 1816, Imperial Austria had gained vast Italian territories, including Lombardy. In the face of terrible poverty from devastating, long-drawn Napoleonic Wars, the Austrian administration commissioned a group of capable, honest Milanese aristocrats to create and manage a philanthropic organization that would aid the poorest population and finance economic activities. Their efforts led to the creation of an entity named Commissione Centrale di Beneficenza, which exists to this very day as one of the governing bodies of Fondazione Cariplo.
Mission/Objective/Focus Area The mission of Fondazione Cariplo is to be a resource that helps social and civil organizations better serve their own community. The Foundation designs its work around the environment, arts and culture, social services, research and technology transfer. Each of these program areas maintains its own staff.
Activities In addition to offering a competitive grants program, Fondazione Cariplo also carries out independent programmatic initiatives. The foundation promotes, designs, and implements its own projects in partnership with other entities, and these projects are managed directly by the foundation’s staff. The foundation also supports a sizable independent art collection. Continuing the artistic heritage of the Savings Bank of the Lombardy Provinces, Fondazione Cariplo presently owns a collection of significant historicalartistic artwork, which includes 780 paintings, 118 sculptures, 52 objets d’art, and furniture that belong to a period between the first century and the second half of the twentieth century.
Structure and Governance Fondazione Cariplo’s main governing body is the Steering Board (also known as Commissione Centrale di Beneficenza, or CCB), which sets the Foundation’s operational strategies and policies. The 40 members of the CCB serve a 6-year term. The President is appointed by the CCB, and he supervises the implementation of the Foundation’s strategies. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors,
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which is in charge of operational decision-making. The Board of Directors consists of the Chairman, two Deputy Chairmen, and six other members elected by the CCB, and members serve a 3-year term. The Secretary General is responsible for the functional and organizational coordination of the Foundation. The current President of Fondazione Cariplo is Giuseppe Guzzetti, and Dr. Pier Mario Vello serves as Secretary General.
Funding Shortly after 1816, Milan’s Austrian administrators suggested that a savings bank be created in the fashion of Vienna’s Savings Bank. In 1823 Milanese savings bank Cassa di Risparmio di Milano (later renamed Cassa di Risparmio delle Provincie Lombarde) was incorporated, and its aim was to promote household savings in Lombardy. The Amato-Carli legislation of 1991 permitted the privatization of Italy’s banking system. Under the Amato-Carli Act, Italian savings banks demerged their lending businesses into newly formed joint-stock companies. The remaining entities changed their legal status and became foundations. In January 1998, Fondazione Cariplo completed the sale of its shares in Cariplo Spa (the joint-stock company), which led to the formation of Banca Intesa, one of Italy’s leading banking groups. The proceeds from that negotiation enabled Fondazione Cariplo to become one of the world’s largest foundations. For the last fiscal year, the earnings of Fondazione Cariplo were €462,938,703 and expenditures were €21,107,331. Fondazione Cariplo does not receive any government funds and its income is generated from the management of its financial asset base, which currently amounts to €6.3 billion.
Accomplishments Fondazione Cariplo was awarded the ‘‘Committed to Excellence’’ (C2E) recognition by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) for its implementation of the EFQM Model and the way it applied the principles of Knowledge Management to become a Knowledge Creating Foundation. The EFQM Model is used by over 30,000 organizations, and more information about EFQM is available at www.efqm.org The foundation also won the 2008 Annual Report Oscar in its category (Foundations of Banking Origin, Corporate Foundations, Nonprofit Grantmaking Organizations). The Annual Report Oscar is a prestigious award organized by FERPI, the Italian Association of PR Professionals, under the auspices of the President of the
Republic of Italy. In the last 45 years, the Oscar has been given to those organizations that achieved communication excellence in their annual reports. Other information about FERPI is available at www.ferpi.it/ferpi/association.
Cross-References
▶ Charity, History of ▶ Civil Society History V: 19th Century ▶ European Foundation Centre ▶ Nonprofit Mergers ▶ Philanthropy in Europe
References/Further Readings Salole, G. (2007). We have only just begun – A conversation with Giuseppe Guzzetti. Effect Magazine, 1(2), 20. Stru¨bin, M. (2006). Community Foundations in Europe. Mennagio Magazine.
Ford Foundation ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization 320 East 43rd Street New York, NY 10017 USA www.fordfound.org
Introduction With 600 staff members, the independent and nongovernmental grantmaking foundation is headquartered in New York City and makes grants throughout the United States and in more than 50 countries. The second largest foundation in the United States and the third largest member of the European Foundation Centre, the foundation’s assets were reported at $13.7 billion in 2007.
Brief History Founded on January 15, 1936 with an initial gift of $25,000 ‘‘all for the public welfare,’’ the Ford Foundation was created by Edsel Ford, whose father Henry founded the Ford Motor Company. During the first years of the foundation’s work, grants were confined almost entirely to Michigan philanthropies of interest to the Ford family, mainly the Henry Ford Hospital and the Edison Institute. In 1949, the board approved the recommendations created by the seven-member Gaither Study Committee,
Ford Foundation
which proposed that the foundation become an international philanthropy dedicated to solving humankind’s most pressing problems. The committee, headed by California attorney H. Rowan Gaither, recommended that the foundation should commit to promoting peace, freedom, and education throughout the world. The foundation then expanded its grant making to include support for higher education, the arts, economic development, civil rights, and the environment, among other areas. In 1952, the foundation’s first international field office opened in New Delhi.
Mission/Objective/Focus Area The foundation’s mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement is reflected by its work in 13 individual fields, which include Arts and Culture, Community Development, Economic Security, Education, Governance, Human Rights, and Workforce Development.
Activities The foundation’s major activities fall into Programs, Signature Initiatives, and Partnerships. The foundation makes about 2,000 grants throughout the year in the following three program areas: Asset Building and Community Development, Peace and Social Justice, and Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom. The foundation also supports 13 Signature Initiatives, which typically require significant funding over a period of years. Grantcraft, first a signature initiative in 2001, had in 6 years developed into a stand-alone project and currently offers dozens of guides, case studies, and videos designed to prompt discussions among foundation practitioners about strategic and tactical lessons in philanthropy. The foundation’s support for Israel and Eastern Europe, which dates back to the 1950s, has been expanded through its special partnerships with organizations in Jerusalem and Sofia whose work coincides with the foundation’s priorities. The foundation also publishes resources and reports for direct use by grantmakers. Its publications include regional brochures that highlight the foundation’s work organized by its 12 global offices, books and studies that cover a wide range of topics, and an online E-Library that includes archives from 1949–1999.
Structure and Governance The Ford Foundation is governed by a 14-member Board of Trustees – 11 from the United States and three who
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are citizens of other countries. All trustees are nominated by a trustee committee and their responsibilities include serving on one of the board’s three program committees, setting policies (in grant making, geographic focus, spending, investment, management, governance, and professional standards), and overseeing internal and independent audits. Trustees generally serve two 6-year terms and typically have extensive experience in higher education, business, law, government, nonprofit management and the civic sector. Notable past trustees include Kermit Gordon (former President, Brookings Institution), Roy E. Larsen (former President, Time Inc.), and William G. Milliken (former Governor of Michigan), The current Board Chair is Katherine S. Fuller (President and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund), and Luis A. Ubin˜as serves as the Ford Foundation President.
Funding In the 1940s, the bequests of Henry Ford and his son Edsel transformed the organization into what was then the largest foundation in the world. In 1949, the foundation received 1,153,809 shares of class ‘‘A’’ nonvoting stock from the estate of Edsel Ford, and the next year, it received 26,099 shares from the estate of Henry Ford. To date, the foundation has distributed more than $15 billion worldwide. As of the end of its 2007 fiscal year, the foundation’s assets were valued at $13.7 billion. The foundation operates solely on funding generated from its endowment.
Accomplishments The Ford Foundation’s most influential work rests around its long term support of projects that reflect its mission. In the area of public broadcasting, for example, the foundation has made significant impact through its funding and support from 1951–2005. Also, in civil rights and human rights both in the United States and abroad, the foundation’s influence since the late 1960s has resulted in significant social change, and it continues to be a core part of the foundation’s mission and work around the world.
Cross-References
▶ Ford, Henry ▶ Philanthropy in North America ▶ Social Justice
References/Further Readings Berman, E. (1983). The ideology of philanthropy: The influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations on American Foreign Policy. New York: State University of New York Press.
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Edwards, M. (2008). Just another emperor? The myths and realities of Philanthrocapitalism. New York: Demos: A Network for Ideas & Action. Korey, W. (2007). Taking on the world’s repressive regimes: The ford foundation’s international human rights policies and practices. New York: Palgrave McMillian.
Ford, Henry DAVID B. HOWARD
Basic Biographical Information Henry Ford was born in 1863 to Irish immigrant parents on a family farm in what is now Dearborn, Michigan. The first of six children, Henry showed an early interest in mechanics and would later revolutionize manufacturing while building the largest automaker in the world. At the age of 16, Ford left the family farm and went to work as an apprentice machinist in Detroit. Ford spent time operating and servicing steam engines and running a sawmill before becoming an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company in 1891. Within 2 years, Ford was promoted to Chief Engineer, and began experimenting with internal combustion engines. After two unsuccessful attempts to start an automobile company, the Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. By 1908, Ford ushered in a new era of personal transportation with the introduction of the Model T. Ten years later, half the cars in the United States were Model Ts and Ford’s revolutionary assembly line production made the company the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. He died in 1947 in Fair Lane, his Dearborn estate, and he is buried in the Ford Cemetery in Detroit. After his death, Ford Motor Company recovered from its recent losses, and went on to become an American Institution. In 2007, Ford was the seventh-ranked overall American-based company, with global revenues of $172.5 billion.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions With a gift of $25,000 from his son Edsel, Ford and his son created the Ford Foundation in 1936 ‘‘to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare.’’ The Ford Foundation soon became a national and international philanthropy dedicated to reducing poverty, promoting democratic values, striving for peace and building educational capacities and understanding of human conduct. After Ford’s passing in 1947, and in response to a
commissioned study to chart the institutions’ future, the foundation expanded its grantmaking activities to include national and international support for higher education, the arts, economic development, civil rights, and the environment, among other areas. Notable gifts from the foundation include the first grant to support the creation of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 1951 and a $1 million gift to the Children’s Television Workshop in 1969 to help create and launch ‘‘Sesame Street.’’ Although Ford is best known for his wealth and innovative manufacturing technologies, as an employer he helped introduce the concepts of minimum wage and the 40-hour work week. Recognizing that efficiency meant retaining quality employees, he enacted a $5-perday program in 1914 (more than doubling the previous minimum daily pay) and in 1926 he implemented a five eight-hour day work week.
Cross-References
▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Ford Foundation ▶ Grantmaking Foundations
References/Further Readings Bak, R. (2003). Henry and Edsel: The creation of the ford empire. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Brinkley, D. (2003). Wheels for the world: Henry Ford, his company, and a century of progress. New York: Viking. Ford, H. (1922). My life and work [in collaboration with Samuel Crowther]. Garden City: Doubleday. Watts, S. (2005). People’s tycoon: Henry Ford and the American century. New York: A. A. Knopf.
Foundation Center SALVATORE ALAIMO
Address of Organization 79 Fifth Avenue/16th Street New York, NY 10003-3076 USA www.foundationcenter.org
Introduction The Foundation Center (FC) describes itself as ‘‘the nation’s leading authority on philanthropy, connecting nonprofits and the grantmakers supporting them to tools they can use and information they can trust.’’ They
Foundation Center
maintain a comprehensive database on US grantmakers and their grants, conduct research, and provide training for the purpose of advancing philanthropy. They have five regional library/learning centers in New York City, Atlanta, Cleveland, San Francisco and Washington, DC as well as a more than 340 cooperative collections across the country.
Brief History FC was founded in 1956 by the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford, Rockefeller, Kellogg, and Russell Sage foundations for the purpose of providing centralized information about foundations and grantmaking activity. F. Emerson Andrews of the Russell Sage Foundation served as first president of what was then called The Foundation Library Center in New York City. The center’s model of cooperating collections began with its first collection in the Interlibrary Center in Chicago, in 1959 and grew to include a collection in every state by 1978. The Washington DC center opened in 1963, the Cleveland and San Francisco centers opened in 1977, and the Atlanta center opened in 1994. In 1968, the organization changed its name to The Foundation Center to represent their services beyond the libraries that are still active today. The organization continues to utilize technology in its services such as The Foundation Directory Online which debuted in 1999.
Mission FC’s mission is to ‘‘strengthen the nonprofit sector by advancing knowledge about US philanthropy’’ and its values include recognizing philanthropy’s important role in democratic society and that effective philanthropy requires accurate, shared information, accountability, and transparency.
Activities FC utilizes various methods for providing information about foundations and grantmaking in free, subscriptionbased, online, and hard copy formats. Some include Foundation Finder which provides free, basic information about foundations and the subscription-based Foundation Directory Online. Hard copy versions of foundation directories are available at all five locations. The Center also provides free real-time chats with their librarians for people conducting research or seeking information on grantseeking, grantmaking, and nonprofit management. FC conducts research on national, regional, and international grantmaking trends including Foundation Yearbook: Facts and Figures on Private and Community
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Foundations which provides information on the state of foundation giving. They also conduct research on special topics such as More Than Grantmaking: A First Look at Foundations’ Direct Charitable Activities; and provide statistics on grantmakers and grants. Training is provided by FC on various topics, both paid and free in person and online formats, including Proposal Writing Seminar, Proposal Budgeting Workshop, Cultivating Grantmaker Relationships, Proposal Writing Basics and How to Approach a Foundation.
Structure and Governance The Foundation Center is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization with approximately 15 trustees on their board from across the United States. The headquarters in New York City has approximately 14 senior staff, and their president also serves on the board. Each of the five regional offices (libraries) has directors who report to the New York office and have their own staff and advisory boards.
Funding The Center’s total revenue of more than $21.5 million for the year ending December 31, 2007 came from a variety of sources including approximately 12% from foundations and corporations; 44% from publication revenues; 10% from program service and other fees; 6% from return on investments; and 19% from net assets released from restrictions. The organization incurred expenses of approximately $20.5 million resulting in a surplus of about $1 million.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions The Foundation Center’s major contribution to civil society has been connecting grantseekers to grantmakers to enable more efficient and effective grantmaking intended to positively impact nonprofit management and the causes organizations serve. The Center’s inclusive access to accurate and current information has enabled organizations, especially those lacking capacity, to advance their operations through philanthropic fundraising, resulting in diminishing the hindrance of information asymmetry.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Philanthropy in North America
References/Further Readings Andrews, F. E. (1973). Foundation watcher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Foundations, Community
Foundations, Community PETER WALKENHORST Bertelsmann Stiftung, Gu¨tersloh, Germany
Introduction Community foundations are local philanthropic organizations that seek to improve the quality of life in a defined geographic area. They establish and manage permanent endowment and other funds for a wide variety of donors, provide services to those donors, distribute grants, operate programs, and mobilize leadership to address community needs and opportunities. During the last two decades, this originally North American concept has spread around the globe. This worldwide dispersion of community foundations derives from the adaptability of their core ideals across national and cultural borders. The idea of a foundation that enables individuals with charitable impulses to respond to local or regional needs (‘‘connecting people who care with causes that matter,’’ as one foundation describes it) has proven its ability to adjust to various cultural, societal, and legal environments. As a result, the community foundations concept has become truly international and now offers a framework for the development of community-based philanthropy around the world. Notwithstanding the differences among individual countries, community foundations everywhere have similar functions: By building philanthropic and social capital they are strengthening the essential fabric of their given communities. By attracting financial resources from many different donors, they also make an important contribution to the democratization of philanthropy.
Definition The community foundation concept is, at the same time, both simple and complex. It is simple in the sense that a community foundation mobilizes and connects resources to needs in a community. It is complex, however, because this mission can be accomplished in various ways. Feurt (1999: 25) defines a community foundation as ‘‘an independent philanthropic organisation working in a specific geographic area which, over time, builds up a permanent collection of endowed funds contributed from many donors, provides services to those donors, and makes grants and undertakes community leadership activities to address a wide variety of current and long-term needs in its service area.
The foundation is governed by a board of citizens broadly reflective of the community it serves.’’ These functions and characteristics distinguish a community foundation from all other types of foundations. Yet, it is important to note that no two community foundations are exactly alike. While some display most of the attributes listed above, others place greater emphasis on one characteristic over another. Even in countries with a long history of community foundations, significant variations exist in their organizational structure, governance, and role in the community. Consequently, as the concept has spread to different countries, it has adapted and modified itself to relate to different societal and cultural contexts.
Historical Background Community-based philanthropy is not a new phenomenon. Nor is it an invention of Western civilization. The idea of a foundation that pools resources from local donors to address local needs can be found in many cultures around the globe. In the European tradition, for example, local charitable giving in collective forms dates back as far as the Middle Ages. The modern community foundation, however, was first established in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1914 on the initiative of Frederick Harris Goff, a local banker. As the administrator of many large bequests, Goff had observed firsthand how quickly posthumous gifts to charity could become obsolete. He had an idea to consolidate a number of these trusts into a single foundation that would be governed by a board of local citizens. While the banks would continue to manage the trust assets, the citizen board would be responsible for making grants to community organizations and initiatives. This new philanthropic vehicle not only relieved local trust banks of the burden of grant making, but also ensured that the changing needs of the community would be addressed in the future, even if the original purpose of a trust had become obsolete. Goff ’s idea caught on. What started as a local experiment in Cleveland, rapidly spread across the Midwest and Northeast of the United States and across the border to Canada. Between 1914 and 1924, 26 community trusts were set up in the United States alone, most of them in the Midwest. During the ‘‘Great Depression’’ in the 1930s, community foundations experienced a period of decline. The economic crisis also reduced confidence in the banks. As a consequence, when the movement revived after World War II most community foundations were now established under the charitable corporation form; boards had the authority to make their own investment decisions.
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Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s the numbers and assets of community foundations continued to increase steadily. Not until the 1960s, however, did their growth begin to show real vigor. Community foundations now also prospered in the West and the South, which had always lagged behind other regions. This trend was further accelerated by the Tax Reform Act of 1969. As part of the reforms instituted by the new law, community foundations received the favored tax status as ‘‘public charities’’ which gave them considerable advantages over private foundations. In addition, the newly established regulations included a ‘‘public support test’’ that required community foundations to prove that they received at least one third of their financial support from the general public. These changes had the side effect of spurring a new emphasis upon donor development and thus became the impetus for further growth during the late 1970s and 1980s. During the late 1970s and 1980s community foundation assets continued to grow rapidly. The concept spread across the country, often supported by large private foundations, which viewed community foundations as partners for promoting philanthropy or operating specific programs on the local level. This general trend was further enhanced during the 1980s by the massive reductions in government programs for community development and social services. Given these cutbacks in federal funding, individual donors, corporations, and private foundations increasingly looked to community foundations as a way to meet public needs. After the establishment of the Winnipeg Foundation in 1921, Canadian community foundations also experienced a slow but steady growth during the next decades. As in the United States, a more dynamic development began to occur in the late 1970s. During the same period, community foundations began to establish a foothold overseas. The first community foundation outside North America was established in the United Kingdom in 1976. More foundations followed in the 1980s. The political and economic situation in the United Kingdom during these years resembled that in the United States in many ways. The central government was actively reducing the financing of local not-for-profit organizations, which, therefore, began to search for new ways to build and sustain resources. Apart from the United Kingdom, the community foundation concept also set down roots in Australia where the first community foundation was established in 1983. Thus, by the end of the 1980s, a total of approximately 340 community foundations existed in the Anglo-American world, most of them in the United States.
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The final decade of the twentieth century marked a watershed in the evolution of community foundations. It was characterized by two different developments: the explosive growth of community foundations in both numbers and assets in North America, and the global spread of the community foundation concept. In the United States, the overall number of community foundations almost tripled, and their assets skyrocketed at a hitherto unprecedented pace. This explosive growth was spurred to a great extent by the increasing popularity of donor-advised funds which allow donors a more active role in grant making from those funds. Although community foundations had offered donor-advised funds since the late 1970s, a new generation of donors sought a higher level of engagement in their philanthropy. Consequently, community foundations, which during their early years grew primarily from bequests, increasingly focused their development efforts on living donors. The upsurge of community foundations was further enhanced by the continuing growth of private wealth and the economic boom of the 1990s. That wealth, however, as Bernholz and colleagues (2005: 6) have noted, ‘‘created not only more philanthropy, but the sudden realization that philanthropy was a business and potentially a profitable market or product extension for financial service firms.’’ The launch of the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which entered the market in 1991, therefore, marked a turning point in the history of community foundations in North America. From this moment on, community foundations were facing sharp competition from charitable gift funds in what many of them considered their core business: providing options and services to donors. Many community foundations responded to this new competition by improving their operating practices and transactional efficiency. The new competitive environment also accelerated the development of National Standards for US Community Foundations which were adopted by the Council on Foundations (COF) in late 2000. These standards were designed to demonstrate transparency and fiscal responsibility, to guide sound policies and practices of accountability, and to distinguish community foundations from other philanthropic vehicles. As a result of these efforts, community foundations became one of the fastest growing forms of organized philanthropy in the United States. According to the Foundation Center (2008: 1, 4), in 2007, giving by 717 community foundations rose to a record US$4.1 billion, surpassing the rate of increase for independent and corporate foundations. Although community foundations constituted just 1% of all US grant-making foundations, they accounted
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for almost 9% of giving. In 2005, assets held by US Community Foundation amounted to a new record of US$49.9 billion. Like the United States, Canada saw an explosion of community foundation development during the 1990s. During the period from 1992 to 2007 the number of community foundations increased from 35 to 155. Today community foundations are located in all Canadian provinces and in the North West Territories. In 2006 they collectively held assets of roughly CAN$3 billion and granted over CAN$135 million for local priorities. Together they constitute one of that country’s largest philanthropic resources. While community foundations grew rapidly in the United States and Canada, the concept was successfully adopted in several European countries. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) community foundations emerged as part of the transformation of societies after the collapse of communism in 1989. The first community foundation in continental Europe was formed in the Slovak city of Banska´ Bystrica in 1994. Within a few years, the concept was also explored in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Bulgaria. Community foundations in CEE were often the first philanthropic organizations in the communities in which they emerged. Thus, they played an important role in reinventing philanthropy and civic engagement which had been thoroughly compromised during the socialist era. Similar roles were being performed by community foundations in the Baltic States and Russia. In Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, community foundations emerged at the turn of the century as part of the consolidation of democracy and civil society. In Russia, the first community foundation was registered in 1998 in the city of Togliatti. The Togliatti Community Foundation soon became the model for a countrywide movement which by the end of 2007 encompassed 27 community foundations. In Western Europe community foundations have become a well-established form of community-based philanthropy. They are widely seen as an instrument to promote philanthropy, especially among moderately wealthy donors. In the United Kingdom, where community foundations first emerged in the 1980s, the movement witnessed its most dynamic growth during the 1990s. By 2007, there were 55 foundations, most of them countrybased, holding total combined assets of over £141 million. With grants of over £70 million in 2006, community foundations, collectively, were the largest independent funding source to local charities and voluntary groups after government. The community foundation concept also spread rapidly throughout Germany. The first German community foundation was set up in 1996 in Gu¨tersloh
with assistance from the Bertelsmann Stiftung. Since then, the movement has gained considerable momentum. With over 200 community foundations in almost all parts of the country, the concept is, today, firmly grounded in Germany. Another example of the adaptation of the community foundation concept is in Italy, where the first community foundation was established in 1999 in Lecco. The concept was introduced and promoted by the Cariplo Foundation, a private foundation that originated from the privatization of the largest Italian savings bank. As a result of these efforts, by 2006, there were 22 community foundations, all of them located in northern Italy. In addition to the countries already mentioned, community foundations also emerged in Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia, and Turkey. Community foundations also developed in other parts of the world. In Latin America, Mexico has become the hub of community foundation development. The first Mexican community foundation was established in 1995 in the city of Oaxaca. In 2007, there were roughly two dozen formally established community foundations. They rely primarily on corporate and local government giving, and the bulk of funds received are not for endowment building, but for pass-through grant making. Besides Mexico, community foundations are also gaining a foothold in the Caribbean and in Brazil. They have also grown rapidly in Australia, where their number increased from three in 1997 to 28 in 2007. Likewise New Zealand, where the first community foundations was set up a decade ago, has seen a steady growth of this form of philanthropy. In Asia the community foundation concept is being explored in several countries, most notably in India, Thailand, and the Philippines. In addition, there are at least two community foundations known to exist in Japan and one in South Korea. Community foundations or community-foundation-like organizations also emerged in SubSaharan Africa. Most of them were established in the late 1990s. At present, community foundations exist in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, and other countries have expressed interest in following suit. South Africa is the furthest advanced. The Uthungulu Community Foundation, the first community foundation in Africa established in 1997, and other South African community foundations are promoting the concept nationally and internationally and are providing technical assistance to organizations and local communities in search of a sustainable development model. As this brief historical sketch shows, community foundations are expanding rapidly in both developed and developing countries, proving that the concept is
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adaptable to various societal contexts, cultures, and traditions of giving. Although the exact number of community foundations worldwide is difficult to determine, because the definition is complex and there are many hybrid models, a conservative count by Sacks (2008: 16) shows over 1,450 community foundations in at least 46 countries that meet the above-mentioned characteristics. It is, however, too early to tell whether the proliferation of the community foundation concept around the world will result in sustainable organizations everywhere. Community foundations are still in their infancy in many parts of the globe, and most foundations outside North America are still struggling to become sustainable organizations.
Key Issues Financial and organizational sustainability constitutes the primary challenge for the majority of community foundations worldwide. As measured by their assets, most community foundations outside the United States and Canada are still quite small. Due to their relatively small asset bases and the consequently small returns on investment, a significant part of their annual operating budgets must be secured by ongoing fund-raising activities. In order to achieve sustainable growth as an organization, these foundations, therefore, will have to intensify their asset development and capacity-building efforts. Even in the United States, sustainability continues to be a key issue for many community foundations. As Nico and colleagues (2007: 4) have pointed out, ‘‘more than 50percent of community foundations in the US are less than 10 years old’’ and ‘‘two thirds have less than $25 million in assets.’’ This means that despite the remarkable success stories of many individual foundations, a great number of US community foundations – like the majority of their counterparts in other countries – are still faced with the challenge of becoming sustainable organizations. On the other hand, while many North American community foundations have increased their management and marketing sophistication and successfully raised vast amounts of new, mainly donor-advised funds, asset growth became their main indicator of success. This tendency to focus primarily on building assets rather than addressing community problems prompted critics to argue that many community foundations had de facto developed into charitable banks for wealthy individuals and were losing sight of their core responsibility: to respond to the needs of the entire community. Bernholz and colleagues (2005), for example, posited that community foundations would risk irrelevance if they continued to use the size of their endowment as the primary definition of institutional success. They recommended that, in light
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of competitive pressures from financial service firms and rapidly evolving technology that connects donors directly and instantaneously to not-for-profit organizations, community foundations should shift their emphasis from managing financial assets and serving donors to community expertise and leadership. As a result, more US community foundations are rethinking their mission, vision, and values, trying to make community leadership both a moral and market imperative of their work. Last, but not least, the global growth of community foundations also corresponds with the changing notion of ‘‘community.’’ Community foundations have been historically defined by the geographic territories they serve. This traditional focus on location is, however, becoming increasingly limited in an era of growing international connectivity. Communication technology and other processes of globalization as well as the rise of new communities of identity, interest, and experience are forcing community foundations to rethink the concept of ‘‘community’’ which had been taken for granted for many years.
International Perspectives Despite the fundamentally local mission and orientation of community foundations, many of them are becoming more engaged in international activities. Modern information and communications technology allows for the rapid dissemination of knowledge, and has created an accelerating trend toward working across national borders. As a result, community foundations around the globe are becoming increasingly connected not only within their own countries but also internationally. Networking and peer learning opportunities, supported by private foundations, such as the C. S. Mott, the Ford, and the Bertelsmann Foundations, have fostered this development. This powerful trend is being reinforced by the growing interest of many donors in giving to international causes. They expect their community foundations to assist them in this endeavor. In response to this development, several community foundations have enhanced their expertise in transnational giving, while others have amended their charters and bylaws in order to be able to facilitate cross-border donations. The growing international linkages and interactions among community foundations are an expression of their evolving roles in an increasingly globalized world. Although available data are extremely limited, there is evidence that transnational giving by community foundations has grown rapidly in recent years. According to Renz and Atienza (2004: 22–23), transnational giving from US community foundations’ unrestricted or donor-advised funds quadrupled between 1998 and 2002. During the same period, the number of community foundations
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making international grants increased from 29 to 42. A more recent study by the same authors reports that between 2002 and 2004 US community foundations, which accounted for just over 1% of international giving, displayed the fasted growth in grant dollars – up 35% to US$39.2 million (Renz & Atienza 2006: 2–3). The Community Foundation Silicon Valley distributed about 5% of its grants in 2004 outside the United States. Its board formally approved giving outside the region as part of what the foundation does, and has amended its articles of incorporation accordingly. The revised articles state the foundation’s mission of serving local charities and local donors and point out that serving those donors includes making grants locally, nationally, and globally. A large part of what is driving this trend toward transnational giving is commonly known as ‘‘diaspora philanthropy’’ charitable giving from individuals who reside outside their homeland to their countries or communities of origin. Diaspora philanthropy occupies a unique position in the shifting philanthropic landscape, because it is both local and international. For this reason it is of particular interest for community foundations, especially in cities or regions with sizable immigrant population who maintain a sense of identity with their homeland. Against this background, community foundations are likely to play a more active role in facilitating diaspora giving and transnational giving in general.
Future Directions Community foundations have evolved into a truly international form of organized philanthropy. Their unique features have made them attractive for communities all around the globe. The worldwide spread of the community foundation concept corresponds with the ongoing internationalization of community foundation activities as is becoming manifest in their growing international connectivity and their increasing transnational giving. The forces of globalization also enlarge the concept of ‘‘community’’ which is no longer defined exclusively in terms of geography. With rapidly evolving communication technologies, a growing variety of social activities is taking place irrespective of the geographical location of participants. The upsurge of community foundations at the international level is, however, a fairly recent phenomenon, and their continued growth and sustainability are by no means a forgone conclusion. Yet, although they constitute only a minor share of the overall number of philanthropic organizations, community foundations are strategically positioned to foster the development of philanthropy on the local as well as on the international level.
Cross-References
▶ Cleveland Foundations ▶ Community Philanthropy ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Functions of ▶ Goff, Frederick Harris ▶ Philanthropy, Definition
References/Further Readings Bernholz, L. et al. (2005). On the brink of new promise. The future of US community foundations. Blueprint Research & Design, Inc. and the Monitor Institute, a member of Monitor Group, from http://www. communityphilanthropy.org/pdf/fullreport.pdf; 04/28/2008. Carson, E. D. (2005). Standing at the crossroads. Community foundations worldwide are at a critical juncture where they must decide between being a field or a movement. Foundations News & Commentary, 46(1), 34–39. Feurt, S. L. (1999). International perspective: Models; experience and best practice.’’ In Bertelsmann Foundation (Ed.), Community foundations in civil society/Bu¨rgerstiftungen in der Zivilgesellschaft (pp. 23–49). Gu¨tersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers. Foundation Center (2008). Key facts on community foundations. Outlook for community foundation giving. New York: Foundation Center, from http://foundationcenter.org/gainknowledge/research/ pdf/keyfacts_comm_2008.pdf; 22/12/2008. Hall, P. D. (1989). The community foundation, 1914–1987. In R. Magat (Ed.), Philanthropic giving (pp. 180–199). New York: Oxford University Press. Hammack, D. (1989). Community foundations: The delicate question of purpose.’’ In R. Magat (Ed.), An agile servant. Community leadership by community foundations (pp. 23–50). New York: Foundation Center. Hero deCourcy, P., & Walkenhorst, P. (Eds.) (2008). Local mission – Global vision. community foundations in the 21st century. New York: Foundation Center. Johnson, P. (2007). Diaspora philanthropy: Influences; initiatives, and issues, The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc. and the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University, from http://www.tpi.org/downloads/ pdfs/Diaspora_Philanthropy_Final.pdf, 04/28/2008. Johnson, P., & Johnson, S. P. (2006). Community foundations and international giving. Opportunities for Global Engagement, The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc. Magat, R. (Ed.) (1989). An agile servant. Community leadership by community foundations. New York: Foundation Center. Nico, E., et al. (2007). Growing smarter. Achieving sustainability in emerging community foundations. The James Irvine Foundation Community Foundation Series, from http://www.irvine.org/assets/ pdf/pubs/philanthropy/Growing_Smarter.pdf, 04/28/2008. Renz, L., & Atienza, J. (2004). International grantmaking III. An update on US foundation trends. New York: Foundation Center. Renz, L., & Atienza, J. (2006). International grantmaking update. A snapshot of US foundation trends. New York: Foundation Center, from http://www.usig.org/PDFs/intl_update.pdf, 04/28/2008. Sacks, E. W. (2008). An international perspective on the history, development and characteristics of community foundations. In P. Walkenhorst (Ed.), Building philanthropic and social capital. The work of community foundations (Rev. 2nd ed., pp. 13–56). Gu¨tersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers.
Foundations, Corporate Tittle, D. (1992). Rebuilding cleveland. The cleveland foundation and its evolving urban strategy. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Walkenhorst, P. (Ed.) (2008a). Building philanthropic and social capital. The work of community foundations (Rev. 2nd ed.). Gu¨tersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers. Walkenhorst, P. (2008b). From local institutions to transnational actors: Spread and evolution of the community foundation concept. In P. Hero deCourcy & P. Walkenhorst (Eds.), Local mission – Global vision. Community foundations in the 21st century (pp. 11–45). New York: Foundation Center.
Foundations, Corporate MICHAEL ALBERG-SEBERICH Forum for Active Philanthropy, Berlin, Germany
Introduction In his satirical book The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), the American author Ambrose Bierce defines ‘‘corporation’’ as ‘‘an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.’’ Bierce published this definition at a time when the American public was debating the risks of corporate monopolies. It was also a time when entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie were starting to address their responsibility to society by setting up foundations. Since the turn of the twentieth century the business community has constantly tried to define its role toward society not only as a business actor but also as a citizen. The corporate foundation is one of the instruments that a corporation uses to take on this role in society. Such foundations are often discussed under the umbrella of Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Citizenship or Corporate Philanthropy. The positioning of a corporation as a citizen and not only as a market actor is increasingly seen as a management principle of modern-day business.
Definition Strachwitz and Reimer (2005: 61), Schwertmann (2005: 209), and Mecking (2008: 317) agree that a key characteristic of a corporate foundation is that it is a separate legal entity set up by a business entity. In contrast to a ‘‘traditional’’ foundation, the corporate foundation is not established by an individual but by a for-profit organization. It often is an indication of a long-term involvement by the corporation in regard to a specific, strategic target (for example: promotion of the arts, the fight against AIDS). Such foundations in many countries have a tax-exempt status but often do not have a significant
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endowment but depend on funds paid by the corporation. Corporate foundations are also known in the United States context as company-sponsored foundations. More recently, European studies have called them corporate social responsibility (CSR) foundations. Fleishman (2007: 270) points out that corporate foundations are established by corporations to ‘‘signal to their stakeholders and the public at large their commitment to a high level of corporate social responsibility.’’ Anheier and List underline the close relationship between corporate giving programs and corporate foundations. They point out a key difference between the two, which is the higher autonomy that a corporate foundation has as an independent legal entity from the decision makers within a company (2005: 68). Along with the independent foundation, the operating foundation, and the community foundation, the corporate foundation is one of four foundation categories developed by the New York-based Foundation Center. As part of the greater family of foundations, corporate foundations are treated in many countries under the same legal regulations as other types of foundations. An exception to this rule is, for instance, France, where corporate foundations are regulated under a separate jurisdiction. There are several approaches to classifying types of corporate foundations, depending on the geographical area the authors are focusing on (CECP, 2008b: 27; BDS, 2007). In a European context it is crucial to point out that a corporate foundation is not the same as an industrial foundation. Thomson shows that especially in Europe, foundations can be owners of corporations. This means that such a foundation is ‘‘created to administer a large ownership stake in a particular company, very often donated to the foundation by the company’s founder’’ (Thomsen 2006: 237). In some countries, for example, Germany, such foundations can be the corporation. In other cases the foundation holds a major share of a company but is a separate legal entity with a charitable status; it may have charitable intent, and it uses a holding in a company to promote such a donor’s will. In summary, a corporate foundation is a private foundation that derives its grant-making funds primarily from the contributions of a profit-making business and/or its employees. The corporate foundation often maintains close ties with the donor company, but it is a separate legal organization, sometimes with its own endowment.
Historical Background The example of the United States shows that the corporate foundation is a rather new phenomenon in the world of philanthropy. Even so, the United States had already
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passed a law by 1935 to allow tax deductions for corporate charitable contributions; the so-called ‘‘golden age of corporate philanthropy’’ started after World War II. The first major company-sponsored foundations were founded in the late 1940s and 1950s in the United States (examples: Ford Motor Company Fund, 1949; AT&T Foundation, 1953). The corporate giving programs and corporate foundations that were set up at this time were the starting point for many corporate social responsibility programs as they are known today. The Foundation Center documents the development of corporate foundations throughout the decades. Of the presently active corporate foundations, most are quite young: just over one third have existed since the 1990s, while about 20% were established in the 2000s (2008b: 7).
Key Issues Corporate Social Responsibility
As corporate foundations are often seen as an integral part of a company’s corporate social responsibility strategy, many authors discuss the corporate foundation as part of the corporate philanthropy toolbox (e.g., Lenkowsky, 2002). Often, the corporate foundation carries the name of the corporation or is established on the occasion of a corporation’s anniversary. It can be seen as a long-term commitment to a cause by a corporation (Moon, 2002:3). In addition, a corporate foundation, if treated as rather independent, allows the engagement of the wider public in a cause. This includes those people who may have a rather critical attitude toward the company itself. Strachwitz and Reimer point out that this is plausible in a time when foundations are seen as favorable institutions in a society. History shows that, for instance, in the United States or France, foundations also have experienced times when they were not valued at all by the public (2005: 63). Foundation or Corporation
A key issue is the extent to which a corporation and its management influence the decisions of the foundation. Webb even considers it a key principle of a corporate foundation that company executives are also board members of the foundation (1994: 42). The downside of this observation is documented by Werbel and Carter, who showed in 2002 ‘‘that CEOs’ interests, as measured by membership in different organizations, was associated with foundation charitable giving’’ (1). The results of this study show the interdependence of company and corporation and underline how difficult it can be for a corporate foundation to position itself as an independent entity. There is a clear need for a transparent management of this relationship so the corporation can be an active
citizen that, in the long-term, sheds positive light on the company that set it up. Strategy and Impact
Since the corporate foundation is part of such a volatile relationship and was set up by a corporation that is supposed to earn a profit for its investors, its strategy is key. This is why Porter and Kramer’s 2002 article ‘‘The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy’’ has had such an influence on the strategy development of corporate foundations. They connected a corporation’s charitable involvement with new opportunities for the core business of the cooperation. Their pledge that giving ‘‘can often be the most cost-effective way – and sometimes the only way – to improve the competitive context’’ (2002: 7) has been highly influential in the corporate responsibility community (e.g., Leisinger, 2007: 322–324). For many corporate foundations, the intensive discussion of strategic philanthropy has started a concentration and realignment of their work (e.g., The SMART Company, 09.2006: 67–68). This means that many corporate foundations have started to implement impact assessment instruments, begun to figure out their social return on investment and see evaluation as a key tool of their work. Another driving factor of this development has been the introduction of venture philanthropy as a more targetoriented form of giving (e.g., Letts et al., 1997). Communication
The debate over strategic philanthropy has also been the basis for a closer look at the value corporate foundations have for the public relations activities of corporations. Strachwitz & Reimer point out that corporate foundations are not a useful tool for short-term gains for the marketing or branding of company (2005: 63). This perception is also shared by public relations experts. Nevertheless, researchers like Marquardt have developed an elaborate toolbox for the integration of foundations into the public relations strategy of a company. He sees the corporate foundation as a focused, long-term public relations instrument (Marquardt, 02.2002: 28). This means that corporate foundations have to carry the burden of being able to communicate their actions, and that they should – in general – shed a positive light on the corporations that set them up.
International Perspective Anheier documents in a comparative paper the development of the foundation sector in general in Europe. He points out that ‘‘the sheer complexity and richness of the phenomenon – historically, legally, politically as well as culturally’’ – makes it extremely difficult to identify a common denominator for foundations in Europe. The
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paper also sheds some light on the development of corporate foundations (2001: 5f., 24, 26). Gerber provides a summary of the development of corporate foundations in Germany and shows that their origins can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century (2006: 19–21). An overview of the current status quo of corporate foundations in Germany was published by the Association of German Foundations in 2007 (Bundesverband deutscher Stiftungen, BDS). In 2006 the Charities Aid Foundation and the Cabinet Office sponsored the study ‘‘Revealing the Foundations – A guide to corporate foundations in England and Wales,’’ conducted by The SMART Company. This shows that, driven by interest groups, more and more countries are exploring the specific needs of corporate foundations. An overview of corporate foundations and their history around the world is still missing, however. There are indicators that corporate foundations are thriving on all continents. Philanthropy Australia hosts a network of corporate foundations. In 2008 the ASEAN Foundation established a research program to foster a better understanding of corporate foundations in Asia and also to enhance the cooperation of such foundations. Haslam points out that corporate foundations are an intrinsic part of the ‘‘corporate social responsibility system’’ in Latin America (03.2004: 12), but a further interpretation of their role is still missing. Africa seems to be a key target destination for corporate foundations from all around the world but cannot refer to many corporate foundations that originate there.
Relevance In 2006 there were 2,548 registered corporate foundations in the United States. This number is small in comparison to the 64,405 independent foundations there (Foundation Center, 2008b: 3). In 2006 in Germany, for instance, the number of corporate foundations was 863 (BDS, 2007: 37). Considering that Germany has around 15,449 foundations (BDS, 2008: 42), the market share of corporate foundations is not as small as in the United States. The overall numbers still underline the special niche of corporate foundations. The list of the top 25 US foundations by giving in 2006 has only one corporate foundation. Nevertheless, corporate foundations play a role in the world of philanthropy, since their giving is considerable compared to their number: of the $42.9 billion given by the 72,000 US foundations, more than one tenth ($4.4 billion) comes from corporate foundations (Foundation Center, 2008a: unpag.). Furthermore, they have continually increased their giving since 1990 (Foundation Center, 2008b: 2). In addition to this, corporate foundations are
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a lot more likely to work with professional staff. This means that they often have a greater presence in the philanthropy community and shape professional standards in the field. In addition they again and again set trends, like the discussion about strategic philanthropy or the increasing international involvement of corporations through their foundations (Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), 2008a: 14). Corporate foundations always need to be considered as one instrument among many in a corporate social responsibility strategy. More than three-quarters of corporate giving is part of other corporate philanthropy programs, such as corporate giving, matching employee funds, corporate volunteering or in-kind contributions (Lenkowsky, 2002: 363).
Future Directions Things have changed since Ambrose Bierce defined the corporation. The corporate foundation can be seen as one way in which individuals take on responsibility within the corporate world. In addition, corporations are trying to evolve, amid all the dilemmas shown above, as corporate citizens themselves. This does not mean that a discussion about the role of corporations and their foundations has stopped. The intensive debate on globalization, for instance, again and again questions how businesses can take on greater responsibility for humankind (Leisinger, 2007: 318). Corporate foundations, and foundations overall, will also face questions in regard to their effectiveness and the ways of measuring their impact. This is especially true in at time where civil society organizations are asked to document their impact in new ways. Is the corporate foundation successful if it contributes to corporate targets or the wider public? Another development in this field are the increasing number of joint funds, like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, or public-private partnerships like the UN’s Global Compact. These show that also for corporate foundations cooperation is one way of solving global challenges like extreme poverty (e.g., Leisinger, 2007: 334). On a research level, there is a need to understand the corporate foundation and its principles a lot better all around the world. So far, the research in this field is very focused on the United States, where this form of a foundation evolved in its modern shape. Multinational companies have introduced the idea of this corporate foundation all over the world. We need a better understanding of this global phenomenon and its regional specifics. On a more practical level, there is a need for more professionals in this field. In the United States, the
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Association of Corporate Contributions Professionals and a great variety of academic institutes that also offer practical training for corporate foundation employees provide an example of an infrastructure that needs to develop all over the world.
Cross-References
▶ Carnegie Andrew ▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Civil Society-Business Relations ▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Effectiveness and Efficiency ▶ Evaluation ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ▶ Philanthropy, Definition and History ▶ Social Investment ▶ Strategic Philanthropy ▶ UN Global Compact ▶ Venture Philanthropy
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. (2001). Foundations in Europe: A comparative perspective. Civil Society Working Paper, No. 18. London. Anheier, H., & List, R. (2005). Dictionary of civil society, philanthropy and the non-profit sector. London: Routledge. Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen (BDS). (2007). Unternehmensnahe Stiftungen. Berlin. Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen (BDS). (2008). Stiftungsjahr 2007. Berlin. Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP). (2008a). Capturing the corporate philanthropy opportunity. New York. CECP. (2008b). Giving in numbers, 2008 edition. New York. Fleishman, J. (2007). The foundation: A great American secret. New York: PublicAffairs Books. Foundation Center. (2008a). Foundation growth and giving estimates. New York. Foundation Center. (2008b). Key facts on corporate foundations. New York. Gerber, Pia. (2006). Der lange Weg der sozialen Innovation – Stiftungen und sozialer Wandel. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. Haslam, P. (03.2004). The corporate social responsibility system in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ottawa: Focal Policy Paper – Canadian Foundation for the Americas. Leisinger, K. (2007). Corporate philanthropy: The ‘‘Top of the Pyramid.’’ Business and Society Review, 112(3), 315–342. Lenkowsky, L. (2002). Foundations and corporate philanthropy. In L. Salamon (Ed.), The state of nonprofit America (pp. 355–386). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Marquardt, J. (02.2002). Corporate foundation – Ausdruck bu¨rgerschaftlichen Engagements von Unternehmen. In Stiftung & Sponsoring. Mecking, Ch. (2008). Corporate giving. Unternehmensspende, Sponsoring und insbesondere Unternehmensstiftung. In H. Backhaus-Maul, Ch. Biederman, St. Na¨hrlich, & J. Polterauer (Eds.), Corporate citizenship in Deutschland (pp. 307–322). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.
Moon, J. (2002). Corporate social responsibility: An overview. In the International Directory of Corporate Philanthropy (3–14). London: Europa Publications. Porter, M., & Kramer, M. (2002, December). The competitive advantage of corporate philanthropy. Harvard Business Review, 5–16. Schwertmann, P. (2005). Unternehmensstiftungen im Spannungsfeld von Eigennutz und Gemeinwohl. In F. Adloff, U. Birsl, & P. Schwertmann (Eds.), Wirtschaft und Zivilgesellschaft – Theoretische und Empirische Perspektiven (pp. 199–222). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Strachwitz, R., & Reimer, S. (2005). Corporate foundations. In S. Reimer & R. Strachwitz (Eds.), Corporate citizenship (pp. 59–68). Berlin: Maecenata Verlag. The SMART Company. (09.2006). Revealing the foundations – A guide to corporate foundations in England and Wales. London. Thomsen, St. (2006). Industrial foundations: Foundation ownership of business companies. In K. Prewitt, St. Heydemann, & St. Toepler (Eds.), Legitimacy of Philanthropy foundations: United States and European perspectives (pp. 236–251). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Webb, N. (1994). Tax and government policy implications for corporate foundation giving. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 23(1), 41–67. Werbel, J., & Carter, S. (2002). The CEO’s influence on corporate foundation giving. Journal of Business Ethics, 40, 47–60.
Foundations, Definition and History RUPERT GRAF STRACHWITZ Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Introduction Foundations are among the oldest cultural phenomena of humanity. Biologists, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists agree that both giving and wishing to be remembered are anthropological constants that may be observed in any society; giving even with primates (Godelier, 1996). While any survey of existing foundations worldwide shows that neither the act of giving nor an endeavor to be remembered always leads to a foundation nor does a foundation necessarily include such reasonings, to realize that these basic instincts exist is essential in understanding the essence of a foundation. In modern organizational theory, foundations are classified as one of essentially two basic forms within civil society. While the majority of civil society organizations are associational in that members constitute the core structure (universitas personarum), a minority is defined by the will of its founder(s) and the assets the organization is entrusted with (universitas bonorum). At times, this has rendered foundations questionable in theory and practice. While societal theory on occasion has had severe doubts as to whether the rule of the dead over the living
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as implied by the binding will of the founder is compatible with democracy and the rule of law (e.g., Kant, 1798: 178–187), governments have feared the alternative source of power vested in an institution equipped with considerable assets (Turgot, 1753, quoted in Liermann, 1963: 173). Legislative action (viz. the US Tax Reform Act 1969) has aimed at curbing the power of foundations (Frumkin, 1999). Yet, they have survived societal changes, laid proof of an extraordinary longevity, and are currently exordinately popular with citizens and governments alike. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that foundations have an inherent cultural legitimacy.
The concept of foundations shares some commonalities with the concept of philanthropy. But they are not synonyms, foundations, as will be explained below, being a wider organizational form, while philanthropy includes a wider view of giving, most especially giving of time, which foundations do not. In defining a foundation, three distinct concepts of human planning need to be analyzed:
Definition
Ideally, a foundation will emerge when these three concepts unite. But, while the first two concepts are concerned primarily with the impulse to start a foundation, the third will emerge as the governing principle as a foundation enters into its own history. Marcel Mauss has exemplified that the frequently made assumption that loving one’s fellow man in general as prescribed by Christian doctrine (Matthew 22, 39) is the origin of philanthropy, is false. Not only can this doctrine be traced in Jewish scripture (see, i.e., Leviticus 19, 18), but also foundations are known to have existed in Biblical times. It emerges that it entered human thought worldwide much earlier, between the eighth and fifth century BC. Giving was, thus, transferred from an action restricted to one’s immediate kin to a universal and more anonymous sector of society (Armstrong, 2006). Buddhism, too, encompasses the notion of a general brotherhood in the context of which giving was a valued form of action. This also extends to China, whereas it had long been thought that Confucian philosophy precluded this. Mozi, in the fifth century BC, clearly opposed Confucius who he believed had distorted the ethic of compassion by limiting it to the family (Armstrong, 2006: 270). Plato presents a paradox, as he was no advocate of kindness to others, but did perform an act of philanthropy by leaving his private fortune to the Academy he had founded. In Islam, sharing one’s wealth with the less fortunate is considered one of the five principles of religious observance. The idea that man is inherently concerned with preserving the memory of himself is older. In ancient Egypt, that the living should remember the dead, was deemed essential for the latter’s eternal peace. More concisely, Indo-European tradition, which exercised a determining influence on the entire Mediterranean and northern as well as the Asian world from approximately the 4th millennium BC. lays a strong emphasis on an enduring memory in this world as the prime goal of human life. From about the fourth century BC, Greece and later particularly the
While defining a foundation seems to some to be a simple exercise, in that they are commonly defined as assetholding entities, an analysis of legal frameworks shows very diverse definitions. A key question is whether a global definition of a foundation applicable anywhere in the world exists, and if so, whether this definition is meaningful. While the US definition is comparatively narrow, a broader definition is commonplace in Europe, with significant differences between countries. Islamic foundations (awqaf ), highly important to Islamic culture and very numerous in all predominantly Islamic countries, have to this day a strong religious connotation and are usually operating, while both European and American foundations today are usually secular, with American foundations being predominantly grant-making. Foundations in Latin America tend to follow the European model, while those in India, Japan, and Australia follow the American model. Many institutions termed foundations in one culture would not be termed that in another. Foundations may pursue their goals by four distinct, albeit frequently overlapping functions: (a) Ownership (e.g., preserving a church building as a church in perpetuity) (b) Operational (managing an institution or operating projects) (c) Grant-making (to a prescribed beneficiary or by a selective mechanism) (d) Individual aid (e.g., to individuals in need) The matter is further complicated by the fact that in most languages, both the act of giving, if intended as a longterm investment, on one hand, and the institution as such, on the other hand, are termed a foundation (fondation/ fondazione/Stiftung, etc.), thus blurring the issue whether the term applies to a process or an institution. This is clearer when applying the word Trust, traditionally used in English law in describing the legal status.
(a) the concept of giving, (b) the concept of memory, (c) the concept of binding an institution to the will of its founder.
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Roman Empire saw a plethora of memorial foundations, set up as stone memorials to the founder with the added purpose of reverence to a god or goddess. Citizens donating theaters and other public buildings in a form bearing all characteristics of a foundation were careful to include the memory of themselves among its purposes. Modern-day philanthropists more often than not name their foundation after themselves, thus, indicating their wish to be remembered through their foundation. Finally, the concept of binding the institution to the will of the founder is, while not their invention, exemplified most clearly by the principles laid down by the founders of both Christianity and Islam. Christians believe that their Church is the foundation instituted by Jesus Christ, which entails following what he laid down in religion, ethics, and procedures. The Quran is seen by Muslims as the final and uninterpretable command of God. Both Jesus Christ and the Prophet of Islam may in this context be interpreted as giving the revelation they received to the world, thus incidentally falsifying the notion that the gift has in every instance to be material. If in this sense the major contribution to philanthropy is attributed to religion (Syed, 2005, 238), this has much truth in it, but it must be borne in mind that until two centuries ago, virtually any human endeavor and action was seen in the context of man’s relationship with God. As a defining principle of a foundation, adherence to the founder’s wishes, albeit including the space he or she left for interpretation, has certainly evolved as the strongest, while the existence of material assets, let alone assets of a nature that bear a revenue, is not definitory. In combination, the three definitory aspects render a foundation a long-term investment rather than a passing whim, one-off gift or continually developing body.
Historical Background Ancient foundations share all characteristics of a foundation in a broad historical sense. Yet, the history of modern foundations can be said to begin with the Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan in AD 313. The establishment of the Christian Church as a public legal body was decisive for the evolution of present-day foundation theory, both in Christian and in Muslim society, while Buddhist and Chinese, as well as Japanese theories lack this institutional development, thus, giving space for foundations in spirit, but, as far as can be seen, not in law until European legal systems were adopted. The incorporation of the Church included the right to act as a trustee, thereby enabling Christians to entrust their Church with material assets and a provision for their usage. From this moment on, the Church could occupy the same position previously held by urban communities who had
adopted a practice of trusteeship some centuries before, complementing the autonomous foundations of the type described above. Given the foundation-type nature the Church ascribed to itself in a theological sense, donors endorsed the immaterial goal prescribed by Christ himself, complementing the immaterial with increasing material assets. The Emperors Theodosius in the 4th and Justinian in the 6th century AD further developed this legal framework. Most particularly, the Codex Justinianus, issued around 530, made ample provision for piae causae, good works that were to enjoy special protection if performed by nongovernmental entities, most especially the Church. These pious deeds were not exclusively religious in a narrow sense, but included hospitals and alms houses, orphanages, and xenodochia, lodgings for travelers. The memorial foundations popular in the Roman Empire found their way into Christian society as well. Early memorial chapels (cellae memoriae) can be traced back as far the second century and were to develop into the overwhelmingly important donations toward the building and upkeep of churches in the form of a foundation throughout the Middle Ages. The stability of the Church as an institution in times of political instability complimented the intended longevity of foundations. Three elements are noteworthy in this development: (a) From this early age, trusts administered by one or several trustees, and autonomous incorporated bodies exist side by side. (b) Foundations with assets destined to serve the purpose prescribed by the founders in themselves (e.g., a memorial stone or chapel) exist beside those equipped with assets yielding a revenue through which the purpose was to be fulfilled. (c) The Islamic and Christian traditions of foundations can both be traced back to the Codex Justinianus, thus rendering this document the first legal base for foundations that is still relevant to a modern-day concept. Theologically, Origines and other Fathers had developed a theory that Church assets were held in trust for the poor. This was a source of conflict in that foundations not only served to help the poor, but also for other religious purposes, notably for building churches. On the other hand, the Church, by its political and legal status, its stability and continuity, and its comparatively good reputation became the prime caretaker of all matters concerned with social and health services. Donations toward these services were strongly recommended to people of affluence, while the question how institutionalized these donations were intended to be, remained unclear. The absence of a legal framework resulted in a plethora of individual models ranging from free gifts to very concise acts of foundations.
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As far as buildings were concerned, the foundation model was easier to realize so that to this day in some European countries, foundations as owners of Church buildings, some dating back to the 1st millennium, are the largest single subsector of the foundation sector. As in Roman times, foundations in Europe in the Middle Ages were initiated by the rulers, nobility, and commoners alike. They fitted the model of any structural initiation in that somebody with the charisma and/or material resources to do so would create an institution in perpetuity, destined to last longer than his, in exceptional cases her, lifetime. From the 12th century onwards, foundations developed predominantly as an urban phenomenon. In a local community where all strata of society contained a number of equals rather than one single ruler, there existed an urge to transgress this equality by creating a lasting memorial. Besides the Church, townships, and later universities, became the most important trustees. In fifteenth-century Italy, the importance of charitable foundations was enhanced by the notion that newly rich bankers, notably the Medicis in Florence, were pressured into donating huge sums of money to religious orders, toward the embellishment of their home town, and also to establish educational institutions. The pressure was political as well as religious, counterbalancing usury being the key argument. What is exemplified here is that the act of giving while instrumental to the purpose it was to serve is not necessarily based exclusively on a voluntary implementation. A similar rationale prompted the Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger to initiate the foundations that exist to this day. The sixteenth-century reformation initiated a process of opposition against the concept of autonomous foundations. Theologically, protestant teaching believed eternal life to depend entirely on God’s favor, whereas Catholic dogma upheld the necessity of good works. The first wave of state intervention following the reformation was not, however, due to theological arguments, but due to the ensuing breakdown of the medieval social order. While in urban communities prone to adopt new religion, the memorial urge proved stronger and ensured a continuing foundation activity, the rise of the national state was a more dangerous threat. Both in England and France, autonomous wealthy institutions were eyed with increasing suspicion. The more independent rulers became of pope and emperor on one hand, and nobles and other vassals on the other, the more they attempted to suppress any entity not subjected to their will. King Henry VIII of England was a typical example. The sovereignty of the state emerged as the prime framework of society, the polyarchy in which foundations as well as geographically and membership-defined entities had played
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a decisive role being deemed a dated societal model. Thomas Hobbes in England and Jean Bodin in France provided political theory in support of this notion, the latter strongly influenced by the religious wars in France that led him to adopt a more decisive approach. Peace and stability could only be maintained if the state was strong and had a monopoly on exercising power. While England, in maintaining this principle, did allow for independent charities to exist (see Queen Elizabeth I. Statute on Charitable Uses, 1601), France eventually prohibited any form of nongovernmental organization. Foundations were first severely curbed in 1749 and finally wiped out of the framework of society in 1791. The theoretical background for this was provided by Turgot in the Encyclope´die. The English example is particularly interesting in that it gave the American colonies a legal base under which their opposing belief in a plethora of self-organized structures could flourish. American philanthropy, while more often than not religious in a more general sense, was able to develop independently from an established Church (McCarthy, 2003). The French model that forbade any intermediaries between the citizen and the state was upheld in France until 1901, and as far as foundations were concerned up to 1983, when the first legal framework for foundations since 1791 was introduced. In a global perspective, however, it remained an episode, copied to some degree in Austria and Italy, and superseded by the concept of social economy in France and eventually by the concept of an autonomous civil society worldwide. Both in Europe and America a model of foundations evolved, independent of the State and the Church, with varying degrees of state supervision being introduced in different countries. Contrary to this, the Islamic model of waq’f as a predominantly religious body persists to this day. In the Osmanic Empire and later in Turkey, successful attempts were made to bring these religious institutions under state control, but it was only in the later 20th century that secular foundations began to exist. In continental Europe, the modern secular state as envisaged since the early eighteenth century and developed in practice in the nineteenth century permitted foundations to exist, while insisting on government regulation and control. Kant’s formula that the state must at all times have the liberty to intervene with the governance and the work of foundations was adopted in spirit if not in name (Kant, 1798). In as much as governments acquired a secular constitutional base and the monopoly of law enforcement, foundations were obliged to concur with a regulative framework that could be more or less stringent. Both in Europe and in North America, the new bourgeouisie acting in a vein of thought not unsimiliar to that of medieval town burghers became active philanthropists (Adam, 2004: 16). Social
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housing, educational, and arts institutions became the focus of their activity added to the traditional care for the relief of the poor. However, personal wealth was no prerequisite. A number of important foundations were started by public subscription or the fundraising success of a spirited individual. In many cases, the dividing line between a substantial gift and the founding of a separate institution was not clear, as some gifts were put in trust with an existing legal body. The term foundation retained a nonlegal definition encompassing an act of investive philanthropy as well as a legal and/or fiscal entity in itself. Throughout the nineteenth century, as Thomas Adam has shown (2004: 18), the foundation model developed in a close interchange among Great Britain, Germany, and USA. The wealth of American industrialists and financial tycoons eventually raised the level of assets involved to heights few Europeans could match. John Jacob Astor’s will of 1849 was the first endeavor on this scale, to be followed by university founders like Vassar, Cornell, and Stanford, later Johns Hopkins, and eventually by the hitherto unknown dimensions of philanthropy shown by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (Krass, 2002: 240). Carnegie is particularly interesting in that he reflected on his philanthropy theoretically and published numerous essays on the subject. Rather than providing relief to the destitute, his ambition was to ‘‘place within its (the community’s) reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise,’’; thus, paving the way for a paradigm shift in foundation goals. While educational institutions had existed in foundation form before, and relief institutions continue to exist in that form, contributions to societal change became the thrust of foundation activity (Anheier & Daly, 2007). This was matched by Carnegie’s conviction that foundations should not originate through bequests but through living and engaged donors (Krass, 2002: 242). European industrialists, notably Sir Henry Wellcome and Ernst Abbe, had similar thoughts, while on both sides of the Atlantic, other foundation models both continued to exist and were newly developed, most notably the community foundation model, first started in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914, and foundations started and funded by government in the tradition of ancient rulers. France, Italy, and Spain under the influence of French political theory, during this period did not contribute in any notable way to this development. These being predominantly Catholic countries, this may have prompted a common belief that foundations had something to do with typically protestant, more precisely, Calvinist ethics. But while Andrew Carnegie may well have considered himself as a chosen one, per Calvin (Krass, 2002: 243), it would be difficult to argue that a Catholic
entrepreneur might not have acted similarly, if private resources and a concurring legal framework had enabled him to do so. More decisively, formal equality of citizens inspired the more fortunate and those aspiring to rise in society, to construct memorials of themselves.
Key Issues Despite the known existence of other models, the model of the foundation created by the will of a wealthy, philanthropically minded individual became the dominating definition in the public arena. With it came a discussion that echoed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French thinking: considering their formidable size and possibilities, were foundations, the rule of the dead over the living and the rule of individuals over the fate of many, compatible with a society governed by democratic principles? (see, e.g., Report, 1970). With the dichotomy of ever higher taxes on one hand and tax breaks for philanthropic giving on the other, in fact rendering the community co-donors, this discussion has become ever more relevant. Answers throughout the twentieth century have oscillated between governments’ fear of losing overall power, theoretical considerations as to the desirability of pluralist think tanks and centers of activity, fiscal greed for posttax individual wealth, the urge of the citizens to contribute to society in assets as well as in time (Adloff and Sigmund, 2005: 258), and personal ambition and possibly vanity. It is worth noting that while Communist dictatorships had no use for institutions of this kind, Fascist regimes remained ambiguous in that high-ranking supporters actually set up foundations themselves, with assets quite regularly expropriated from victims.
Future Directions The history of foundations shows that there is a common denominator of foundations that is distinct from other civil society organizations. In modern civil society, given the notion developed over the past 20 years, foundations have acquired a position as one expression of self-determined engagement for public benefit (Strachwitz, 2008: 736), although the fact remains that not all foundations are by this definition part of civil society, belonging instead to the government or private sphere. At the beginning of the 21st century, foundations are more popular with the citizenry and their political leaders worldwide than they have been for a long while. They have become an instrument of devolution and privatization, as is best exemplified by the Italian banking foundations, instituted by law in the 1990s with the express aim of both privatizing the many state-owned banks and savings banks, and creating strong and independent grantmakers
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in the tradition of the nineteenth-century savings banks ideals. This movement bridges the gap between the necessities of realizing not-for-profit ideals in for-profit form, as in France in particular, and the strict borderline between for-profit and not-for-profit as exercised in Northern Europe, USA, and most other countries. In most countries, this has precluded or outlawed foundations with purely private goals, for example, providing an income to relatives or offspring. With few exceptions, like Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Austria, all nations with impeccable democratic credentials, law makers have deemed the questionable aspects connected to foundation activity to be tolerated only in connection with benefits to society at large. More generally, foundation activities on the scale of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Warren Buffett’s donation have added a new dimension to the legitimacy issue. While acknowledging both the undoubted real benefit to the beneficiaries and the advantages of a pluralist approach to social change and battling the challenges facing society, the undercurrent of questioning the legitimacy remains (Heydemann and Toepler, 2006: 5).
Cross-References
▶ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ▶ Carnegie, Andrew ▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Foundations, Functions of ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Grant-Making ▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ Hobbes, Thomas ▶ Mauss, Marcel ▶ Medici Family ▶ Legitimacy ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Christianity ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Islam ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Judaism ▶ Wakf ▶ Zakat
References/Further Readings Adam, Th. (2004). Philanthropy and the shaping of social distinctions – nineteenth-century US, Canadian and German cities. In T. Adam (Ed.), Philanthropy, patronage and civil society. Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Adloff, F., & Sigmund, S. (2005). Zur Soziologie der Philanthropie. In F. Adloff & S. Mau (Eds.), Vom Geben und Nehmen; Zur Soziologie der Reziprozita¨t. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Anheier, H., & Daly, S. (2007). The politics of foundations. A comparative analysis. London/New York: Routledge. Armstrong, K. (2006). The great transformation. The world in the time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Jeremiah. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Assmann, J. (1991). Stein und Zeit, Mensch und Gesellschaft im alten Aegypten. Muenchen: Beck. Bringmann, K., & von Steuben, H. (1995). Schenkungen hellenistischer Herrscher and griechische Sta¨dte und Heiligtu¨mer. Berlin: Akademie. Canella, M., & Puccinelli, E. (2009). ACRI (Associazione di Fondazioni e di Casse di Risparmio Spa (ed.), Italian banking foundations, identity, roots for the future. Rome: ACRI. Carnegie, A. (1889). Wealth. North American Review, 148(391), 653–664. Cohen, M. (2005). Foundations and charity in the communities of Medieval Egypt. In M. Borgolte (Ed.), Stiftungen in Christentum, Judentum und Islam vor der Moderne. Berlin: Akademie. Dogan, M. (2006). In search of legitimacy: Similarities and differences between the continents. In K. Prewitt, M. Dogan, S. Heydemann, & S. Toepler (Eds.), The legitimacy of philanthropic foundations: United States and European perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Feurt, S. (1999). International experience: Models, experience, and best practice. In Bertelsmann Foundation (ed.), Community foundations in civil society. Gu¨tersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation. Frumkin, P. (1999). Private foundations as public institutions: Regulation, professionalization and the redefinition of organized philanthropy. In E.C. Lagemann (Ed.), Philanthropic foundations: New scholarship, new possibilities Bloomington, (pp. 69–100). IN: Indiana University Press. Godelier, M. (1996). L’e´nigme du don. Paris: Librairie Arthe`me Fayard. Gregory, A. (1993). Families of fortune: Life in the Gilded Age. New York: The Vendome Press. Heydemann, S., & Toepler, S. (2006). Foundation legitimacy at the community level: The case of community foundations in the US. In K. Prewitt, M. Dogan, S. Heydemann, & S. Toepler (Eds.), Foundations and the challenge of legitimacy in comparative perspective (pp. 150–174). New York: Russell Sage. Hibbert, C. (1974). The rise and fall of the House of Medici. London: Allen Lane. Hoelscher, Ph. (2006). Italienische zivilgesellschaft im wandel. Berlin: Maecenata. Kant, I. (1798). Metaphysik der Sitten. In Kant, Werke in sechs Baenden, Band IV, Wiesbaden 1956, (2nd ed., pp. 303–634). Kogelmann, F. (1999). Islamische fromme Stiftungen und Staat. Wu¨rzburg: Ergon. Krass, P. (2002). Carnegie. Hoboken NJ: Wiley. Laum, B. (1914). Stiftungen in der griechischen und roemischen Antike (2 vols.) Leipzig: Teubner. Liermann, H. (1963). Geschichte des Stiftungsrechts. Tuebingen: MohrSiebeck Mauss, M. (1923–1924). Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’e´change dans les societe´s archaiques. L’anne´e Sociologique. Seconde se´rie. McCarthy, K. (2003). American creed, philanthropy and the rise of civil society 1700–1865. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mommsen, Th. [1882/86] (1992). Ro¨mische Kaisergeschichte. Mu¨nchen: Beck. Pickert, S. (2005). Die ro¨mischen Stiftungen der augusteischen Zeit. In M. Borgolte (Ed.), Stiftungen in Christentum, Judentum und Islam vor der Moderne. Berlin: Akademie. Report (1970). Foundations, private giving, and public policy. Report and recommendations of the Commission on Foundations and Philanthropy. Chicago, IL/London: The University of Chicago Press. Sauer, C. (1993). Fundatio und Memoria. Stifter und Klostergru¨nder im Bild 1100–1350. Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Signori, G. (2001). Vorsorgen – Vererben – Erinnern; Kinder- und familienlose Erblasser in der sta¨dtischen Gesellschaft des Spa¨tmittelalters. Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
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Sprengel, R. (2005). Frankreich. In R.G. Strachwitz & F. Mercker (Eds.), Stiftungen in Theorie, Recht und Praxis. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Sternberg, Th. (1991). Orientalium more secutus. Mu¨nster: Aschendorf. Strachwitz, R. G. (2005). Traditionen des deutschen Stiftungswesens – ein ¨ berblick. In R.G. Strachwitz & F. Mercker (Eds.), Stiftungen in U Theorie, Recht und Praxis. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Strachwitz, R. G. (2006). Die Stiftung in Kants Metaphysik der Sitten. Zeitschrift fuer Stiftungswesen 3/2007. Berlin: BWV. Strachwitz, R. G. (2008). Stiftungen in einer modernen Gesellschaft. Versuch einer Theoriebildung. In H. Kohl, F. Ku¨bler, C. Ott, & K. Schmidt (Eds.), Zwischen Markt und Staat. Ko¨ln: Heymanns. Syed, A. (2005). Muslim philanthropy and civic engagement. Berlin: Maecenata. Toepler, S. (1996). Das gemeinnu¨tzige Stiftungswesen in der modernen demokratischen Gesellschaft. Mu¨nchen: Maecenata. Turgot, A. R. J. (1751). Fondation. In Diderot/Le Rond d’Alembert (Eds.), Encyclope´die ou Dictionnaire raisonne´ des sciences, des artset des me´tiers, (28 vols. pp. 1751–1772) Paris. West, M. L. (2008). Indo-European poetry and myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foundations, Family KEVIN LASKOWSKI National Center for Family Philanthropy, Washington, DC, USA
Introduction Family foundations comprise the largest and fastest growing subset of private grantmaking foundations in the United States today. Of the nation’s 72,000 foundations, the Foundation Center (2008: 1) estimates that more than 37,000 of them are family foundations. Since the phrase ‘‘family foundation’’ is not a legal term, philanthropic infrastructure groups rely on self-reporting and other objective and subjective criteria to identify these philanthropic families. The 37,000 figure is, therefore, most likely a low estimate (for more on the criteria used to identify family foundations, see Foundation Center, 2008; Lawrence, 2000). Identified family foundations commanded $267 billion in assets and gave away more than $16 billion in grants in 2006 (Foundation Center, 2008: 1). Some of the world’s largest foundations, e.g., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, are familygoverned, as are most of the smallest. Approximately 60% of American family foundations reported less than $1 million in assets in 2006 (Foundation Center, 2008: 4). They give in a wide range of program areas in strikingly different ways but are united by the participation of the founding donor or the donor’s family. Esposito (2007)
contends that family foundations bring a family history, values, commitment, responsiveness, a cooperative approach, and sense of legacy and renewal to bear on community needs in a way no other kind of foundation can. Once the exclusive realm of ultra-wealthy families such as the Rockefellers in the early twentieth century, the family foundation world was ‘‘profoundly democratized’’ by the beginning of the twenty-first century (Gersick et al., 2004: 37). Both the number of family foundations and their overall giving have nearly doubled since 1998 (Foundation Center, 2008: 1). Since billionaire Warren Buffett’s highly publicized pledge of $37 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006, family foundations are receiving renewed attention as recognition of their vital social contribution grows.
Definition Family foundations have been an important part of civil society for more than a century. However, the phrase ‘‘family foundation’’ was only coined in the mid-1980s. Until that point, family foundations were simply known, like corporate foundations and some other grantmakers, by their general legal classification: private foundations. ‘‘Family foundation’’ is not a legal distinction but rather a term of art that refers to ‘‘a private foundation whose original donor and/or one or more relatives are still actively involved in the operations and/or control of the foundation’’ (Edie, 2002: 3). The phrase calls attention to the philanthropic sector’s growing understanding of unique characteristics, challenges, and opportunities of family grantmaking.
Historical Background While family foundations can be found around the world, ‘‘institutionalized family philanthropy is an American phenomenon’’ (Gersick et al., 2004: 37). The development of family foundations in the United States springs from a culture and a tax environment that mutually reinforce private initiative for the public good. Family foundations took shape along with the world of organized philanthropy around the turn of the twentieth century as the industrial era brought unparalleled wealth to many. As the United States government began to address vast differences in wealth through taxation, levying the first constitutional income tax in 1913, families created foundations as a way to meet mounting social needs, take advantage of tax exemptions for charitable organizations, and preserve family wealth. Assets of family businesses could be transferred to the family’s foundation and there sheltered from tax and takeover, thereby preserving many companies as family enterprises
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(Freeman, 1991: 22). For decades, foundations faced little regulation and few expectations. In 1961, Congress began an investigation into foundation activities that resulted in the seminal Tax Reform Act of 1969, which largely created what is now known as the modern grantmaking foundation. The term ‘‘private foundation’’ was legally defined for the first time. A new regime of excise taxes and reporting requirements was established. Furthermore, foundations were legally obligated to disburse a minimum amount for charitable purposes each year, a rule known as the ‘‘payout’’ requirement. The Act also closed the loophole that allowed families to preserve control of family businesses by requiring divestiture of substantial portions of such funds, known as excess business holdings, within 5 years of receiving them (Freeman, 1991: 23). Perhaps more important to family foundations, though, were the new rules against self-dealing, which presented a number of pitfalls for even well-meaning families. In an effort to curb certain abuses in the philanthropic sector, Congress essentially outlawed financial transactions between private foundations and so-called ‘‘disqualified persons.’’ These disqualified persons included directors, staff, ‘‘substantial contributors’’ to the foundation, and their relatives as well (Internal Revenue Code Secs. 4941 and 4946; see Edie, 2002; Sare, 2002). The hoped-for result of these changes was an institution assured of advancing its stated charitable purposes and not financially enriching its members. Despite these new requirements and restrictions, wealthy families continued to create family foundations into the 1980s. It would have seemed that families motivated solely by charity and the desire to reduce taxes would have abandoned the family foundation as a giving vehicle after 1969. The new regulations were seen as overly burdensome by some, and, when some new giving vehicles like donor-advised funds could be more taxadvantageous, the family foundation seemed doomed as a vehicle for charitable giving. However, for family foundations, the charitable impulse and tax incentives were always only part of the story. For families who choose this giving vehicle, the family foundation provided and continues to provide a sort of antidote to increasing family anxieties surrounding wealth and its obligations: ‘‘Beneficiaries of new wealth, by establishing family foundations, could simultaneously pursue a number of related goals: demonstrating socially responsible values about wealth to their children, counteracting envy and resentment in the community, and implementing their own vision of human, cultural, and environmental enhancement’’ (Gersick et al., 2004: 45).
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Thus, the family foundation became a phenomenon in its own right. No longer a mere creature of noblesse oblige and tax incentives, the family foundation became a conscious choice of concerned families. In the 1980s, the philanthropic infrastructure began to offer services tailored to the unique needs of these family philanthropists. In 1986, the Council on Foundations held its first family foundation program. In 1994, the Council created the Committee on Family Foundations and launched the Program on Family Philanthropy the same year. In 1997, the first organization dedicated exclusively to family foundations and family philanthropy, the National Center for Family Philanthropy, was founded. By 2000, the Foundation Center, in cooperation with the National Center for Family Philanthropy, was developing methods of identifying and tracking important statistics on family foundations. Following up on its study of multigenerational family foundations, Generations of Giving (Gersick et al., 2004), the National Center embarked on an initiative to monitor indicators of family foundation effectiveness in 2004. Today, family foundation services are a part of the regular work of community foundations, Jewish federations, regional associations of grantmakers, banks, financial planners and advisory firms, and other organizations the world over. While family foundations as a group have a rich history, most of the field is still relatively young and poised to grow even more. Nearly 67% of family foundations have been established since 1990 (Foundation Center, 2008: 4). Moreover, the United States finds itself in the midst of the greatest wealth transfer in its history. Havens and Schervish (1999) estimate that the 55-year period from 1998 to 2052 will witness $41 trillion pass from one generation to the next. They further estimate that the $41-trillion transfer will include $6 trillion in charitable bequests, likely generating a new ‘‘Golden Age of Philanthropy.’’
Key Issues Certain challenges are more or less common to all grantmakers: defining some sort of mission or purpose, developing a process for making a difference, making grants, and being accountable, among them. For family foundations, these issues take on important nuances that can make some tasks more challenging in some instances and provide distinct opportunities in others. Donor Intent and Mission
Esposito (2008) divides the motives of founding family philanthropists into three groups: ● Value-based motives: religious or personal beliefs about the importance of giving and the meaning of wealth
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● Family history-based motives: a family’s experience with a geographic community, a particular illness, or a close relationship to a valued institution, such as a center for the arts or university ● Community needs-based motives: thoughts and feelings about where resources are needed within a particular community Beyond the associations and identifications that spur charitable feeling (Schervish and Havens, 1997; Ostrower, 1995; Esposito, 2002), family foundation donors seek to accomplish some goal – or set of goals – that requires the creation of a long-standing, if not permanent, institution in which family members might be involved. Because donors are attempting to act on personal values with family members for public needs, Esposito (2002) encourages donors to ask what they are attempting to accomplish with their gifts and to communicate that vision to ensure that the personal, the familial, and the charitable do not conflict. Gersick et al. (2004: 34) note that family foundations are often ‘‘caught between honoring their legacy from the past and present, and maintaining commitment for the future.’’ Without clarity around issues of purpose, grantmaking can quickly become scattered, ineffective, and unrewarding. A clear, well-developed, reviewed sense of mission and purpose is, in fact, ‘‘the single best predictor’’ of engaging and effective family foundation performance (Gersick et al., 2004: 187). Family Dynamics and Governance
Philanthropic families must perform a careful balancing act: engage the personal interests and talents of trustees while working collectively as a family for a public purpose. Family dynamics inevitably affect the foundation’s governance, grantmaking, management, and administration. Even as some families strive to become more strategic, more professional, or more business-like in their grantmaking practice, there is no escaping the family’s history and culture, the relationships fostered or repressed by the foundation’s activity. Successful family foundations recognize this, examine and discuss this culture, and develop processes to effectively and fairly govern amidst these conflicts. Conflict typically arises within and among family groupings, i.e., between the donor and other family members, within and between a family’s branches, between family and nonfamily board and staff, and between generations, especially during times of transition and change (Hamilton, 2002). Differences of opinion can clash with long-held roles in family hierarchies and play out across branch and generational lines. Anticipating this, many families pursue practices that avoid conflict. For example, a family might create a system
of discretionary grants, a practice that allows individual trustees to make grants outside the standard approval process (Born, 2001). They are often employed to allow family members to pursue their own charitable interests to much success while preserving the family’s shared philanthropic mission. If discretionary grants are used, however, to avoid discussion and conflict around certain types of grants, the discretionary system may soon the foundation’s mission and turn a family philanthropy into a collection of trustee fiefdoms. Similarly, families may elect too many board members for fear of rejecting or offending a relative only to find board meetings are unmanageable. In these instances, the family may successfully avoid anticipated conflict, but it fails to invest in the policies that will make for better grants and eventually help when serious conflicts arise. Geographic Dispersion
Grantmaking can be challenging if family members do not live in the same area. In the foundation’s early years, family members may have lived, built their wealth, and made grants all in the same geographic area. It is for this reason that the family foundation’s earliest mission focus is a specific geographic community. As family members mature, move away, and put down roots in new communities, the timing and location of meetings may become difficult to coordinate. Family branches living apart may begin to develop their own family cultures and charitable interests, which not only clash with those of their relatives but erode the family’s larger shared mission. Creative families learn to stretch their philanthropy to embrace new communities and causes without abandoning their original community. Some have even embraced the distance as a way of promoting cross-fertilization of ideas and practices in different geographic areas (Stone, 1999: 53). Succession
Securing the future by successfully welcoming a new generation of capable philanthropists to the foundation board ranks among the most important issues facing foundations (Association of Small Foundations, 2007: 11). It is in this way that a family’s legacy of giving endures. Successful succession includes passing on both a philanthropic ethos and the technical skills required of foundation trustees. Esposito (2003) advises developing clear, fair criteria for participation on the family board, encouraging personal accomplishments and charity, and not limiting participation in the family philanthropy to board membership. The result is a generation prepared for leadership
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should they choose to assume such roles within the family foundation or in another charitable pursuit. Succession used to indicate transferring power from one clearly defined generation to the next, typically when the donor turned over the foundation reins to his children. Today, though, there are four generations, each with its own ‘‘generational personality,’’ above the age of 21, sitting on family foundation boards (Goldseker, 2006). So-called Traditionals, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials each bring different ideas and opinions shaped by their generation’s historical experience. Earlier foundations learned to negotiate the transition from one generational worldview to the next. Today’s foundations manage all four simultaneously. While much has been done to address next generation engagement, comparatively little has been developed for the senior generation or to address this new multigenerational landscape (Buhl, 2008). Successful succession has become less a matter of transferring power than one of effectively involving several generations in a common project. Effectiveness and Evaluation
Throughout the philanthropic sector, there is increasing emphasis on effective grantmaking for high impact. Family foundations want to see their philanthropic dollars go as far as possible. Whether the foundation’s grants serve a beloved hometown, fund research into a cure for a disease that took a relative’s life, or simply carry the family name, members are personally invested in seeing the foundation succeed. Families are increasingly adapting and developing evaluation and monitoring techniques appropriate to their grantmaking situation. However, like most nonprofit institutions but unlike their family business counterparts, family foundations lack a single ‘‘bottom line.’’ The profit discipline that may guide a family in its financial dealings does not carry over into its philanthropic choices. Ylvisaker (1999: 371) contends: ‘‘Family businesses and fortunes are usually disciplined by the bottom line and hierarchical, often patriarchal management; family fortunes sooner or later become divided or inherited into individualized control. Foundations, with a single corpus and collective decision-making, are quite another proposition.’’ Many families, however, find this lack of a bottom line liberating and seize the opportunity to take risks with their charitable dollars. Others embrace multiple bottom lines. Socially responsible and missionrelated investing form a significant part of the work of many family foundations who feel that their investment goals and their charitable goals can be aligned. Philanthropic evaluation methods typically concentrate on assessing the impact of individual grants and
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organizational efficiency. Even if the family foundation was performing well as a grantmaker and as a board, these metrics ignore the effect the foundation has on the donor family. Gersick et al. (2004: 3) argues: ‘‘Success must also be measured by the family members’ commitment to the foundation’s work, the satisfaction they take in doing that work together, and the foundation’s ability to evolve and remain vital from one generation to the next.’’ Family foundations commission foundation histories, conduct board retreats, and create committees to successfully engage the broader family in the work of an effective, enduring family institution. Perpetuity
Most family foundations are endowed in perpetuity. One reason is the family foundation provides the possibility of engaging generation after generation of future family members. A 1994 Foundation Center survey found that 69% of foundations plan to exist in perpetuity (Renz and Lawrence, 2004: 10). The Association of Small Foundations’ 2007 membership survey discovered that 72% of family foundation respondents formed to exist in perpetuity and plan to stay that way (Association of Small Foundations, 2007: 11). Nonetheless, more are discussing alternatives to perpetuity (Stone, 2005). Younger donors want the pleasure of seeing the impact their dollars will have and have chosen to give more now rather than leaving wealth to future generations. Family foundations concerned about preserving a donor’s explicit wishes may set a closing date for the foundation to prevent funds from being used in another way. Without the restrictions imposed by investing for perpetuity, foundations may feel free to increase their yearly payout to fund larger projects or make more grants without worrying about the possibly shortened life of the foundation. In this way, endowing for perpetuity is becoming less of an assumption among family foundations and more of a considered and discussed choice. Accountability
As stewards of a public trust, family foundation trustees are accountable in different ways to state and federal regulators and the general public amid growing scrutiny and a sometimes uninformed community. Political and media debates around the role and scope of the philanthropic sector continually resurface. Populist reformers concerned about undue family influence floated proposals to limit family control of foundations as early as 1965 (Freeman, 1991: 36). Such limitations have seldom gained traction because, as Nason (1989: 46) contends: ‘‘Family decisions might be enlarged and improved by
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nonfamily advice, but it would be contradictory and counterproductive to eliminate family control.’’ Still, many feel that increased transparency and greater community input would keep family foundations accountable.
▶ Philanthropy, Definition and History ▶ Tax Deductions for Charitable Organizations in the United States
References/Further Readings Future Directions As the size and influence of family foundations has grown so has the level of inquiry. Some are revisiting the payout issue: should foundations be asked to disburse more than the required 5% each year? Should administrative expenses continue to count toward the charitable distribution? Others are examining the diversity or lack of diversity on family boards. Should family foundations be required to have nonfamily board members? Finally, some regulators are questioning the nature and purpose of tax-exempt status and whether or not the public is served by family-controlled foundation boards endowed in perpetuity. Family foundations remain a vital part of civil society, funding necessary programs in everything from the arts and health care and research to the environment and human services as they attempt to reconcile the personal, the familial, and the charitable in a common philanthropic endeavor. Family foundations are the fastest growing portion of the foundation sector, and as more people ‘‘give while they live,’’ explore a more focused, strategic kind of philanthropy, and involve family, this form of giving will continue to be popular. With that potential and popularity has come considerable scrutiny as proposals to limit the size and regulate the composition and life span of family foundations are perennially suggested. However, as Ylvisaker (1999: 375) argues, ‘‘There is something distinctive and precious about family foundations that suggests they should remain as they are: a unique opportunity for families to make and leave their mark on the society around them, to share with others the fortune they have enjoyed and the creative energies they so often possess.’’
Cross-References
▶ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ▶ Buffett, Warren ▶ Council on Foundations ▶ David and Lucile Packard Foundation ▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Independent ▶ Governance, Organizational ▶ Lilly Endowment
Association of Small Foundations. (2007). 2007–2008 Foundation Operations and Management Survey. Washington, DC: Association of Small Foundations. Born, J. (2001). Discretionary grants: Encouraging participation . . . or dividing families? Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Buhl, A. (2008). Passing the baton? Generations sharing leadership. Passages series. Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Edie, J. (2002). Family foundations and the law: What you need to know (3rd ed.) Washington, DC: Council on Foundations. Esposito, V. (2002). The founder’s hopes: From values to vision. In V. Esposito (Ed.), Splendid legacy: The guide to creating your family foundation (pp. 1–15). Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Esposito, V. (2003). Successful succession: Inspiring and preparing new generations of charitable leaders. Passages series. Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Esposito, V. (2007). What’s family got to do with it? The value of family in family philanthropy. Family Philanthropy Online Teleconference Series, 20 September. Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Esposito, V. (2008). Values, vision, vitality: Pursuing excellence in family philanthropy. Presentation to Sheatufium Conference on Civil Society, 19 June, Sheatufim: The Israel Center for Civil Society. The Foundation Center. (2008). Key facts on family foundations. New York: The Foundation Center. Freeman, D. (1991). The handbook on private foundations (Rev. ed.). Washington, DC: Council on Foundations. Gersick, K. (2004). Generations of giving: Leadership and continuity in family foundations. New York: Lexington Books/Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Goldseker, S. (2006). Beyond duty and obligation. Foundation News and Commentary, January–February. Hamilton, D. (2002). Managing conflict and family dynamics in your family’s philanthropy. Passages series. Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Havens, J., & Schervish, P. (1999). Millionaires and the millennium: New estimates of the forthcoming wealth transfer and the prospects for a golden age of philanthropy. Boston, MA: Social Welfare Research Institute, Boston College. Lawrence, S. (2000). Family foundations: A profile of funders and trends. New York: The Foundation Center/Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Nason, J. (1989). Foundation trusteeship: Service in the public interest. New York: The Foundation Center. Ostrower, F. (1995). Why the wealthy give: The culture of elite philanthropy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Renz, L., & Lawrence, S. (2004). Foundation growth and giving estimates: 2003 preview. New York: Foundation Center. Sare, J. (2002). Facing important legal issues. In V. Esposito (Ed.), Splendid legacy: The guide to creating your family foundation (pp. 59–75). Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Schervish, P., & Havens, J. (1997). Social participation and charitable giving: A multivariate analysis. Voluntas, 8(3), 235–260.
Foundations, Functions of Stone, D. (1999). Grantmaking with a compass: The challenges of geography. Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Stone, D. (2005). Alternatives to perpetuity: A conversation every foundation should have. Passages series. Washington, DC: National Center for Family Philanthropy. Ylvisaker, P. (1999). Family foundations: High risk, high reward. In V. Esposito (Ed.), Conscience and community: The legacy of Paul Ylvisaker (pp. 370–375). New York: Peter Lang.
Foundations, Functions of VOLKER THEN, KONSTANTIN KEHL Universita¨t Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
Introduction Foundations are inherently political institutions. In that capacity they are dependent on and a formative element of the political culture of a country and its society. Foundations very much depend on the third sector regime, and different models of foundation sectors in societies can be distinguished. These models in turn have a strong influence on the roles which foundations play in society. At the heart of the political nature of foundations lies their independence – of any other controlling force. They have no owners, no members, are usually not subject to direct political or state intervention, and do not depend on clients or market forces. Their legal status grants them a substantial degree of autonomy, only to be limited by the binding forces of their charter and mission as determined by their donors or founders. As a result of this particular position in society, foundations enjoy an extraordinary degree of freedom. At the same time however, they are subject to public pressure for legitimacy. Their largest numbers are public benefit institutions, and this status requires them to pay attention to public perceptions of their appropriate contributions to the public good. The lack of direct control should therefore not lead to the false assumption that foundations can act without constraints and without regard to the public in general and public opinion of their specific work in particular. This could also be described as a situation of competition for public acceptance and legitimacy. In this competitive framework, foundations have both public institutions and other private institutions as their competitors – even though with different implications. While public institutions directly compete with foundations as to their contribution to the public good, private institutions can both
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serve as competitors for the public benefit as well as for the private market delivery of services and goods. This sector consideration positions foundations in their respective competitive relationship within each society and determines the framework for the roles which they can play in society. When considering their roles, one should of course keep in mind that they are contingent upon history and have changed over time considerably reflecting the changes of value systems, political systems, religious frameworks and structures of the economy. For the purpose of this overview, it seems to be appropriate to limit the considerations to foundations in modern, democratic societies based on market economies. The very nature of modern foundations as autonomous institutions needs to be guaranteed by a constitutional legal system and the rule of law. In societies without such a political and economic framework, foundations may exist – but will ultimately either face conflicts with the political system, serve as subversive powers to help change a system, or even cease to exist as a result of political oppression. In such a perspective, as Smith and Borgmann (2001) suggest, foundations can even be interpreted as an indicator of emancipation trends and forces in society.
Definition Different models of the foundation sector provide for a framework of explanation for the functions of foundations in society. The functions depend upon the visions of the relationship between the state and politics on the one hand, and the foundation sector on the other. Anheier and Daly (2007) distinguish six different models of that relationship: ● The social democratic model assumes a highly developed welfare state and describes foundations ‘‘in a well defined relationship with the state’’ and includes a strong share of operating foundations which ‘‘either complement or supplement state activities.’’ ● The state-controlled model refers to foundations which are ‘‘ultimately subservient to the state.’’ Law, administrative procedures, and oversight provide for tight control of foundation activities by the state. ● In the corporatist model, foundations exist in a ‘‘subsidiarity relation’’ with the state, and may be part of the social welfare or educational system, frequently combining grantmaking and operating activities. ● The liberal model describes foundations acting largely in parallel to the state and seeing themselves as an alternative to the state.
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● In the peripheral model, foundations are seen as fairly insignificant institutions even though they are regarded as ‘‘worthwhile institutions as long as they do not challenge the status quo.’’ ● The business model sees foundation as ‘‘instruments of corporate citizenship’’ helping businesses ‘‘in reaching out to communities and customers by serving the public benefit in enlightened but ultimately selfinterested ways.’’ Each of the regime types exists predominantly in a number of countries. In Europe, the social democratic model prevails in all Scandinavian countries, the state-centered model in France, Luxemburg, and Belgium. The corporatist model can be divided in two subcategories, the civil society-centered variety in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, and the Mediterranean version in Spain, Italy, and Portugal. The liberal model describes the situation in the United States and the United Kingdom, the foundation sectors are peripheral in Ireland and Greece, and the statist model applies to the Central and Eastern European countries. Particularly with regard to the above mentioned relationship to the political culture of a country and its society, it is not surprising that the six foundation sector types show certain parallels to the well-known welfare (state) regime classification established by Esping-Andersen (1990) and the nonprofit sector models, which Salamon and Anheier (1998) derive from Moore’s (1966) and Esping-Andersens’ work. Their theoretical approach treats the nonprofit sector as an essential part of a social system, whose role and scale depend on a complex set of historical forces. In each of the six regime models, foundations play distinct roles. In total, seven foundation functions could be identified against the backdrop of an international set of case studies carried out by Anheier and Daly (2007), exploring the contributions of foundation to societies: ● Complementarity: ‘‘Foundations serve otherwise under-supplied groups under conditions of demand heterogeneity and public budget constraints.’’ ● Substitution: ‘‘Foundations become providers of public and quasi-public goods’’ and substitute for public action by the state. ● Redistribution: Foundations are seen as contributors to social justice by redistributing resources in society. ● Innovation: Foundations are agents of change by stimulating innovations ‘‘in social perceptions, values, relationships, and ways of doing things.’’
● Social and policy change: Foundations are working to promote ‘‘structural change and a more just society’’ by helping to recognize new needs or give a voice to the underprivileged. ● Preservation of traditions and cultures: Foundations protect past achievements against social, economic, or cultural changes seen as a threat to them. ● Promotion of pluralism: Foundations promote and protect pluralism and diversity in society, work in favor of civil liberties potentially endangered by the state and provide for a challenge to economic, social, and cultural policies seen as worthwhile of reform. It is however important to note that those roles are an appropriate description of foundation activities only in as far as foundation representatives are aware of them and these roles are reflected in their visions and used to guide strategic thinking of foundation representatives. In particular, these roles were identified in the grantmaking approaches of foundations and really showed in foundation activities. Anheier and Daly (2007) of course highlight that the roles are dependent on feasibility ‘‘in terms of resources, capacity, approach, and competence’’ of the foundation. However, these roles do not coincide with the self-perceptions of foundation executives when asked to distinguish roles, and actually the very difficulty of foundation representatives to describe their normative premises help to shed light on the identity of foundation sectors in different countries.
Historical Background Historically, the legal situation of foundations and their roles were not always as much determined by the political and legal systems of the nation states. During most parts of premodern history, their point of reference was the predominant religion and they were institutions tied in with the religious institutions in society serving social purposes with a reference to religious transcendency and the personal expectations of donors to live on beyond their own limited lifetimes in the memories of their beneficiaries and society at large. In this concept, foundations were part of the faith-based institutions in society and served religious as well as social purposes. Referring to Aydin (2001), this observation is not limited to Christian societies and also applies to other religions. It can even be assumed even though this assumption does not seem to have been tested that foundations serve an anthropological quest for transcending the individual’s limited lifespan and establishing a lasting memory of the person’s contribution to society. Interestingly enough, this anthropological notion shows strongly in countries where democracy
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and political freedoms had not existed for most of recent history and only recent transformation processes brought about democracy or at least the right to establish foundations. Donors in these countries seem to share such an interest in personal memory, even though they may not be religious people in a more formal sense and seem to have very secular values. However, as Anheier and Leat (2006) point out, the long term traits of approaches to philanthropy are combined with more medium term developments of philanthropic cultures since the nineteenth century, characterized by a move from charity to scientific philanthropy and further on to strategic philanthropy in most recent debates.
Key Issues Looking at the role models in greater detail offers some further insights. The complementarity role is widely accepted as an appropriate description of foundation activities and largely relies on the subsidiarity principle, i.e., the assumption that social or public tasks and decisions should be dealt with at the lowest possible level in society. In addition, the role implies that the state should become active only if the citizens themselves, private organizations and civil society in general are incapable of addressing or resolving a social problem. The role is also being interpreted by foundation executives in two substantially different ways: They either see complementarity very much as a partnering relationship or as a bargaining and critical relationship. This reflects the position of civil society in more general terms towards the state and its administration. A great degree of variation emerges between a transition country in Eastern Europe (critical position towards former Communist structures) and a country in Western Europe, where partnering refers to a division of labor between foundations and the state based on different competences and backgrounds of experience. As Salamon (2006) argues, even partnering relations can be critical for foundations, e.g., when their flexibility and innovative potential are being reduced by formalization and bureaucratization encouraged by public authorities. This effect of ‘‘third party government,’’ to which foundations commit by contracting with governmental institutions, not infrequently leads to the situation that they are perceived as a mere extension of the state, and not as civil society organizations. Substituting for state functions relates foundation activities in a very direct way to state policies and action. With a perceived increasing degree of variation and unpredictability of state action, the substitution role transforms the volatility of political strategies into a challenge
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to the autonomy of foundations. Foundations find themselves in a growing need to clarify the distinct character and the value of their own contribution to society whilst their ‘‘competitor,’’ the state, creates a blur of roles. The challenge can again take different forms, depending more on reform contexts in providing social and public services in Western Europe and on the path to democratization in Eastern European countries. The preservation of cultures and traditions is only being reluctantly featured by foundation executives. It runs counter the prevalent tendency to see foundation activities as a strategic approach to resolve social problems and to consider strategic philanthropy. Against this picture of foundations as progressive and forward-looking organizations, cultural preservation is only strongly pronounced in a few countries like Italy and Switzerland, while regarded with some skepticism by most other foundation representatives. The redistribution role of foundations is also seen as less prominent among foundation roles by executives from most of the European countries. While rooted in the early days of modern philanthropy in nineteenth century industrialization which included giving back to society what had been accumulated as wealth due to entrepreneurial success, the role is regarded with skepticism more recently because of both its lack of feasibility and its limited scale among foundation spending. Mere redistribution may be seen as an expression of traditional charity, while modern approaches to philanthropy are concerned with root causes and therefore with social change and social justice. On the one hand, foundations simply lack the resources (even when regarded as the sector as a whole) to have a substantial impact on the reallocation of financial resources in society. On the other hand, they do not spend the vast share of their budgets for the benefit of disadvantaged social groups or classes but rather fund a lot of activities which in turn benefit the middle classes from whose upper strata the resources may have originated. Realizing the full potential of the social and policy change role requires a full strategic comprehension of the environment in which foundations operate and the way in which public policies shape the outcome of foundation strategies and vice versa. The role itself can be understood in quite different ways, reaching from changing attitudes, how people think about policy issues to structural and institutional innovations or reorganizations and to political reform approaches changing the framework of sectors or institutions in society. Foundations seem to realize the potential for performing this role,
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while many of their executives are somewhat skeptical as to the success which foundations may be able to realize in performing this task. Promoting pluralism can again take different forms: For some foundations it means the promotion of experimental opportunities in society or the promotion of diversity itself, while in other contexts it refers to bridging between different areas or communities. The first of these two options has again a close connection to the autonomy and degrees of freedom which foundations enjoy. If this is the case, the capability to meet this role successfully depends on the financial structure of the foundation, i.e., on the question, whether it exists based on an endowment or receives cash donations or transfers from public budgets. The latter cases limit the freedom of a foundation because it may actually be seen as dependent either on particular stakeholders and donors or on public policy preferences. Finally, we need to consider the innovation function of foundations. Following Kanter (1983), Anheier and Daly (2007) tested the innovation role of foundations against four criteria: The situation is characterized by ‘‘a degree of uncertainty in relation to both the process and outcome,’’ the innovations are knowledge-intensive, and they may be controversial. In addition, innovations ‘‘reach across established boundaries in organizations, fields, and sectors.’’ The uncertainty criterion refers to the unique capacity of foundations to take risks without having to pay attention to owners, shareholders, members, or other controlling stakeholders. This positions them to pursue long term strategies in particular, and proceed in a flexible way involving long-term steadfast commitments, which creates a competitive advantage against any public sector action in this regard. Foundations frequently seem to invest their knowledge to create innovation by applying existing ideas to new fields of practice rather than supporting the creation of completely new ideas. In this capacity foundations may serve the role of an innovation agent or scout to identify new needs in the provision of public services and then initiating a reaction which is first organized by the foundation sector and may then prompt the public sector to change policies. However those processes can be timeconsuming: A current example in the context of social welfare policy can be given for Germany, where several large foundations run multi-generation housing developments including community work to stimulate selforganized care-potentials within the neighborhood supplementing professional care. As Kehl and Then (2009a, 2009b) pointed out, it took almost 20 years of strategic planning and gaining experience to pave the
ground for a first social return on investment analysis of these pilot projects. It was confirmed that multigeneration housing has the ability to reduce the cost of care significantly, improve the health conditions of residents and stimulate a higher level of volunteer contributions compared to conventional settings. Because society was shown to benefit in many ways from substantial investments required, the debate on financing communitybased infrastructure among policy makers, academia and civil society representatives has gained substantial momentum. This already refers to the superior capacity of foundations as compared to public sector and other civil society organizations to cross sector and field boundaries. Foundations maybe particularly well positioned for networking approaches connecting institutions otherwise not working together. The third criterion of addressing controversial issues is actually a good test of a foundation’s capacity to innovate at all. If the foundation board and executives only start programs and projects not likely to stir public and social controversy, the potential for innovation may be more limited than what the foundation would be prepared to admit in the first place. This argument also identifies limitations of the innovative role of foundations: the composition of their governing bodies (gender, age, professional affiliations, field, and sector competences), the way the foundation operates (receiving open grant applications only or soliciting programmatic thinking and inviting partners to collaborate and develop program approaches), and the degree of public communication which the foundation is prepared to organize and accept.
Future Directions The functions of foundations in society depend very much on the relationship between the state and foundations, be it competitive or collaborative. This relationship requires key attention when trying to understand the functions and roles of foundations. While foundations like to see themselves as innovative institutions, which act independently of the state and take up tasks which the state and government are less well positioned to do, this notion is challenged by the resulting dependency on the policy environment and the development of public budgets. The preferred roles of the innovator and policy change agent contrast to the roles of preservers of cultures and traditions as well as redistributors which are less well received among foundation executives interviewed by Anheier and Daly. While foundations are very reluctant to be seen as substituting for public responsibilities, their innovative and change ambitions require more strategic thinking to find ways
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to live up to the challenge and play the role of the change agent effectively. According to Anheier and Then (2004), this will be a key professional task for the future given an increased pressure from sector competition as well as increased public attention which shows as competitive pressure for legitimacy.
Cross-References
▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Esping-Anderson, Gøsta ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Independent ▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ Governance, Organizational ▶ Government–Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Nonprofit Management ▶ Nonprofit Organizations and Sectors, Comparative perspectives, Regime Types ▶ Nonprofit Organizations, Functions of ▶ Philanthropy, Definitions of ▶ Social Change Organizations ▶ Social Investment ▶ Social Origins Theory ▶ Subsidiarity ▶ Third-Party Government
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. K., & Daly, S. (2007). The politics of foundations. A comparative analysis. London/New York: Routledge. Anheier, H. K., & Leat, D. (2006). Creative philanthropy. Towards a new philanthropy for the twenty-first century. London/New York: Routledge. Anheier, H. K., & Then, V. (2004). Zwischen Eigennutz und Gemeinwohl. Neue Formen und Wege der Gemeinnu¨tzigkeit. Gu¨tersloh: Bertelsmann. Aydin, D. (2001). Turkey. In A. Schlu¨ter, V. Then, & P. Walkenhorst (Eds.), Foundations in Europe (pp. 259–267). London: Directory of Social Change. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kanter, R. M. (1983). The change masters. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kehl, K., & Then, V. (2009a). Strategiebildung im Sozialsektor: Die Lebensra¨ume der Stiftung Liebenau. In R. Buber, & M. Meyer (Eds.), Fallstudien zum Nonprofit Management. Praktische BWL fu¨r Vereine und Sozialeinrichtungen, (2nd Ed.). Stuttgart: Scha¨ffer & Poeschel. Kehl, K., & Then, V. (2009b). Bu¨rgerschaftliches Engagement im Kontext von Familie und familiennahen Dienstleistungen. Gemeinschaftliche Wohnmodelle als Ausweg aus dem Unterstu¨tzungs- und Pflegedilemma? Expertise des Centrums fu¨r soziale Investitionen und Innovationen (CSI) zum Bericht zur Lage und den Perspektiven des ZivilEngagements in Deutschland. Berlin: WZB. Moore, B. Jr. Jr. (1966). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Salamon, L. M. (2006). Government-nonprofit relations from an international perspective. In E. T. Boris & C. E. Steuerle (Eds.), Nonprofits & government. Collaboration & conflict (pp. 399–437). Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Salamon, L., & Anheier, H. K. (1998). Social origins of civil Society: Explaining the nonprofit sector cross-nationally. Voluntas, 9(3), 213–248. Smith, J. A., & Borgmann, K. (2001). Foundations in Europe: The historical context. In A. Schlu¨ter, V. Then, & P. Walkenhorst (Eds.), Foundations in Europe (pp. 2–34). London: Directory of Social Change.
F Foundations, Grantmaking ELIZABETH T. BORIS The Urban Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Introduction Modern grantmaking foundations continue the tradition of philanthropic organizations that have existed around the world for thousands of years. The term ‘‘philanthropy’’ comes from the Greek and means ‘‘love for mankind,’’ a term that foundations embrace as a broad mandate to benefit the public in fundamental ways that go beyond ameliorating suffering and meeting immediate needs. Since the explosion of individual wealth in the 1990s, the number of foundations has grown sharply in the United States and in other countries. Foundations provide legal structures that allow donors to realize their charitable objectives by making grants over a period of years or in perpetuity. Grantmaking foundations are valued as flexible, independent, legally sanctioned entities that can channel private wealth for a wide variety of public purposes, such as supporting efforts to solve social problems, creating knowledge, and strengthening civil society. Increasingly, diverse donors, organizational structures, and activities characterize modern foundations, permitting them to meet the philanthropic goals of a new generation that often seeks direct involvement in foundation programs and measurable impacts for grants. Foundations today may combine grants, loans, business ventures, investments, and foundation-managed programs to achieve philanthropic missions. Foundation legal structures and permissible activities, however, vary from country to country. In some countries, government imposes few limitations on foundation activities and beneficiaries, while in other countries, government strictly regulates foundations. This article will describe grantmaking foundations mainly in the United States. The section on international
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perspectives will briefly describe grantmaking foundations in other countries.
Definition There is no legal definition of a grantmaking foundation in the United States, nor is there a universally accepted definition of such foundations worldwide. A general working definition of a foundation is ‘‘an independent nonprofit, nongovernmental philanthropic organization that receives money or other assets from individuals or corporations and uses the interest on those resources to make grants to qualified nonprofit organizations, individuals, and others for public benefit.’’ Grantmaking foundations in the United States may be established as nonprofit corporations or charitable trusts, by living donors or by donors’ estates after their death. Any type of organization may call itself a foundation, however, whether or not it makes grants, and some grantmaking foundations use other terms such as ‘‘trust’’ or ‘‘fund’’ or ‘‘corporation.’’ For example, the Carnegie Corporation is one of the first US grantmaking foundations, created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund is a grantmaking foundation initiated by the children of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1940. The Ford Foundation, created by Edsel Ford in 1936, is also a grantmaking foundation, but the New America Foundation is not a grantmaking foundation despite its name. It is a public policy think tank that promotes dialogue and research. In the United States, grantmaking foundations are ‘‘charitable’’ organizations. They are tax exempt, nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations recognized under United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Code Section 501(c)(3). Donations to grantmaking foundations are deductible, within certain limits, for income tax purposes, because these foundations conduct or support ‘‘charitable,’’ activities devoted to education, religion, promotion of health, relief of poverty, assistance to government, and other public benefits. Types of Foundations
Within the category of US charitable organizations, there are several types of grantmaking foundations and many types of operating organizations that provide services, conduct research, advocate, and generally serve the public through direct charitable activities, although some of those both operate programs and make grants. The IRS term for charitable organizations that have broad public support is ‘‘public charities.’’ Most public charities provide services or operate programs, although there are several types of grantmaking foundations such as
‘‘community foundations’’ that are public charities. They receive donations from many sources and use those resources to make grants for charitable purposes. Charitable organizations that do not have a broad base of contributors are called ‘‘private foundations.’’ Private foundations have less favorable tax status and a stricter regulatory framework than public charities. Most grantmaking foundations in the United States are classified as private foundations because they are created by an individual, a family, or a corporation and therefore do not have broad public support. Private foundations fall into a ‘‘residual’’ IRS category that includes both grantmaking foundations and direct service organizations that do not have sufficient public support (contributions) to qualify them for the more favorable tax-deductible status of public charities. Private foundations created by individuals, sometimes called ‘‘independent foundations,’’ may have living donors or families involved in their activities. Such foundations are often called ‘‘family foundations.’’ There are also ‘‘private operating foundations,’’ set up by individuals and families primarily to run an institution or a service program, which in some cases also chose to make grants. Private foundations that are created by business corporations are called ‘‘corporate foundations.’’ Examples include the Metlife Foundation, the Caterpillar Foundation, and the Wells Fargo Foundation, among others in every industry. These are legal entities separate from the sponsoring corporation that receive donations from that corporation and use those resources to make grants for charitable purposes. Few corporate foundations have substantial endowments; most receive gifts from the corporation and annually make grants with all or part of those contributions. Community foundations are classified as ‘‘public charities’’ and are subject to a less restrictive set of regulations than are private foundations. Traditionally, community foundations serve a specific city or region. For example, the New York Community Trust serves the New York City area and the San Francisco Foundation serves that city. Some community foundations such as the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, serve a state. In recent years, groups of individuals have formed grantmaking foundations that are modeled on community foundations, but benefit specific causes or underserved populations such as women, Native Americans, African Americans, and others. Women’s foundations, for example, began in 1972 with the creation of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national grantmaking foundation supported by women contributing mostly modest amounts of money to benefit underserved women and girls.
Foundations, Grantmaking
Currently, the Women’s Funding Network has an international membership of 128 women’s funds that have assets of more than $450 million. There are also government-sponsored grantmaking foundations such as the National Science Foundation. These are not private foundations, and are usually excluded from statistics and descriptions of the US foundations. Scope of US Foundations
The number of US grantmaking foundations in 2006 is estimated by the Foundation Center (2008b) at 72,477 with assets of about $614.6 billion see Table 1. They made grants of $39 billion. Donors contributed almost $36.6 billion to existing and newly created foundations. Private
Foundations, Grantmaking. Table foundations, 2006 (dollars in millions)
1 US
grantmaking
2006 All foundations No. of foundations
72,477
Total giving
$39,004
Total assets
$614,656
Gifts received
$36,569
Independent No. of foundations
64,405
Total giving
$27,457
Total assets
$509,077
Gifts received
$21,591
Corporate No. of foundations
2,548
Total giving
$4,098
Total assets
$19,730
Gifts received
$4,374
Community No. of foundations
717
Total giving
$3,596
Total assets
$49,942
Gifts received
$6,033
Operating No. of foundations
4,807
Total giving
$3,853
Total assets
$35,906
Gifts received
$4,571
Source: The Foundation Center, Foundation Growth and Giving Estimates, 2008. Includes only foundations that awarded grants in the latest fiscal year
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foundations are the most numerous, and among them independent foundations account for 64,405 and corporate foundations 2,548. Community foundations number 717. There are no statistics available on other types of grantmaking public charities. A small proportion of US foundations hold the majority of assets and employ staff. Only an estimated 3,000 US foundations employ paid staff. Approximately 49 foundations that have endowments of $1 billion or more make over 22% of all US foundation grants. Most foundations have assets of less than $1 million dollars and do not employ staff. Foundation Activities
Grantmaking foundations pursue their charitable purposes mainly by making grants to operating nonprofit organizations (mostly public charities), which may deliver a service, such as education or training displaced workers; conduct basic or applied research in fields such as economics, biology, and medicine; perform concerts or plays; assess public policies; and many other activities. US foundations also make grants to individuals for scholarships, fellowships, prizes, and awards for outstanding achievements or contributions in a variety of fields. Such grants must have transparent processes approved by the IRS. Foundations may also make grants to government entities and business corporations although such grants are unusual. Foundations traditionally gave the largest share of their grant dollars for educational purposes followed by health and human services. In the most recent data shown in Table 2, grants related to health were slightly higher than those for education, and grants for international affairs are higher than in the past. In addition to making grants, foundations may use their resources and staff to provide services directly, conducting and publishing research, managing a facility such as a museum, holding conferences, building the capacity of nonprofits that they fund, and other activities. Grantmaking foundations engage in such direct service activities more frequently in recent years, according to Renz and Elias (2007). Some, usually the larger staffed foundations, also make loans or program-related investments using their assets to further their missions. While private foundations have great latitude in their grantmaking and other charitable activities, they may not engage directly or indirectly in electoral politics or lobby the government, except when proposed or existing legislation affects their status. Governance and Staffing
Grantmaking foundations are generally governed by a board of directors, if they are a nonprofit corporation or
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Foundations, Grantmaking. Table 2 US Foundation Grants, 2006 (dollars in thousands)
Subject
Dollar amount
Percent of total
Arts and culture
2,329,708
12.2
Education
4,306,090
22.5
Environment and animals
1,145,100
6.0
Health
4,394,462
23.0
Human services
2,645,895
13.8
International affairs, development, and peace
1,019,739
5.3
Public affairs/society benefita
2,042,490
10.7
Science and technology
550,591
2.9
Social sciences
259,092
1.4
Religion
412,955
2.2
Other Total
16,912
0.1
19,123,033
100.0
Source: The Foundation Center, Foundation Giving Trends, 2008. Based on a sample of 1,263 larger foundations. Due to rounding figures may not add up a Includes Civil Rights and Social Action, Community Improvement and Development, Philanthropy and Voluntarism, and Public Affairs
by a board of trustees if the foundation is set up as a trust. Board members are responsible for overseeing the integrity of the foundation’s finances and grantmaking programs and usually meet several times annually to make decisions and review the foundation’s work. The role of the board varies depending on the size and nature of the foundation. In foundations that do not employ staff (the majority of foundations in the United States) boards determine the policies and the grant recipients, and may be assisted by consultants and investment managers. If the foundation employs paid staff, board members make or enforce the foundation’s policies and procedures and may also approve grant decisions recommended by staff. In the largest foundations, boards often delegate funding decisions to staff except for very large grants. Those foundations are likely to employ grantmaking, administrative, and investment staff who conduct the day-to-day operations of the foundation. They may also hire consultants for specific tasks, such as evaluation of grant outcomes. Boards of foundations often include national and community leaders, business and financial experts, and people with knowledge of the foundation’s grantmaking interests. Family foundation boards are likely to consist of the foundation’s donor, family, friends, business associates, and trusted advisors. Top management of the
sponsoring corporation usually sits on corporate foundation boards. Community foundation boards usually include business and community leaders and major donors. Endowments
Most donors endow their private foundations with assets that consist of stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments. The interest on the endowment is used to make grants. Increasing numbers of new foundation donors choose not to endow their foundations. Instead, they make yearly or periodic gifts to the foundation and use those contributions to make grants, a pattern usually followed by business-sponsored foundations. Some of these ‘‘pass through’’ foundations are endowed over time, or receive an endowment gift from the donor’s estate. Other donors stipulate that their foundations die when they do, or within a specific number of years. These ‘‘limited life’’ foundations also seem to be increasing. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest grantmaking foundation, is a prominent example. It will cease operation 50 years after the death of the donors. Endowments of community foundations consist of aggregated gifts made by many donors. The income and sometimes the principal of the endowment are used to make grants. There are a variety of ways that donors can contribute to community foundations, among them are named funds, donor advised funds, special purpose funds (for schools or the arts), and undesignated funds. Community foundation staff and board members oversee the investment and management of the assets and the grantmaking. Regulation of Foundations
All foundations in the United States are regulated under specific rules designed to promote transparency and accountability and ensure that foundations serve the public interest, rather than the private interests of donors. The Internal Revenue Service is the national agency that oversees foundations, enforces regulations, and conducts research. Grantmaking foundations must annually complete and file with the IRS comprehensive public information reports, Form 990-PF for private foundations and Form 990 for public foundations. Both forms provide financial and governance information but Form 990-PF also requires lists of grants, direct charitable programs, and investment activities. Those reports must be available to the public. Private foundations must pay a tax on their investment income, are prohibited from engaging in certain forms of financial transactions between donors and other closely affiliated persons, are prohibited from acquiring certain types of risky ‘‘jeopardy’’ investments, are mandated to
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annually pay out in grants and related administrative expenses a minimum of 5% of their endowment by the end of the following year, are limited in the amount of voting stock they may hold in any one company, and are prohibited from lobbying and political activity, except in their own defense. See John Edie (1987) for a discussion of the regulations. Community foundations and other public foundations do not have these restrictions. The regulations also limit the income tax deduction for donor’s gifts of cash to private foundations to 30% of income, compared to a 50% limit for cash gifts to public charities.
Historical Background At the turn of the twentieth century Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Margaret Olivia Sage initiated the modern grantmaking foundation with the considerable wealth each had accumulated from business ventures. This was a new form of organized philanthropy designed to attack the root causes of poverty through the application of scientific methods then becoming the norm in business. These foundations pioneered systematic and professionally staffed grantmaking that sought to identify and vet worthy projects for the foundations to fund. At about the same time Fredrick Goff created the first community foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, by converting moribund charitable trusts into a community foundation with the mission of using those resources and attracting other donors to meet the needs of the Cleveland, Ohio area. Today, community foundations are growing more quickly than private foundations, though from a smaller base, and they are increasingly being formed outside the United States. The numbers of foundations with more than $1 million dollars grew slowly for the first few decades of the twentieth century, and were created with increasing frequency during the decade of the 1950s. Growth leveled off during and following the Congressional hearings on foundations during the 1960s. In the mid-1980s, the formation of new foundations took off. There were 398 foundations created per year in the 1980s compared to 822 per year during the boom years of the 1990s. See Wing, Pollak, & Blackwood (2008) for creation rates of the large foundations. The wealth accumulated during the 1990s fueled a surge of new foundations in the United States. Giving by businesses was not legitimized until 1953 when the Supreme Court declined to review a New Jersey court decision in A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. v. Barlow that corporations have the right to make philanthropic contributions. Since then, major corporations have
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created both endowed and pass-through foundations that make grants to a variety of causes both in the United States and in other countries where they have operations. The achievements of grantmaking foundations are significant, although largely unknown and unappreciated. Their role was critical in the first half of the twentieth century when the United States was moving from a collection of states to a nation that required research, data, analysis, and solutions to problems that the country was not equipped to handle. Joel Fleishman (2007) describes historical and contemporary examples of foundation impacts including the Rockefeller Foundation’s grants that fueled the Green Revolution by increasing crop yields and modernizing agriculture in Mexico and other countries (1943), the Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation’s grants that funded the Children’s Television Workshop and Sesame Street (1966) making a reality of educational television in the United States, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s grants to curb tobacco use that changed attitudes and behavior leading to a reduction in tobacco use (1991). Because of their contributions and the dominant pluralistic philosophy in the United States, foundations have thrived and grown as individual wealth in the United States has increased, but their ability to affect change is more limited now than in the midtwentieth century because government has more capacity and controls more resources than it did at that time. Foundations have always had staunch supporters and fierce critics. The inherent elitism of donors controlling vast sums of tax-exempt wealth and making decisions outside of the democratic process has made them lightning rods for populist attacks and attempts to limit their activities. The United States Congress has periodically held hearings on foundations. The Walsh Commission of 1916 resulted in a populist critique of concentrated wealth, the Cox Committee of 1952 examined whether foundations were engaged in ‘‘un-American’’ activities, and the Reece Committee was concerned with subversive activities. None of these investigations found serious abuses. The decidedly hostile tone of the Congressional Hearings organized by Representative Wright Patman beginning in 1961 led to the 1965 Treasury Department Report on foundations. That report acknowledged the societal benefits conferred by foundations, but also identified problem areas and suggested solutions. The regulations that emerged in the restructuring of the tax code in the Tax Reform Act of 1969 owed much to the findings and recommendations of the Treasury Report. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 was pivotal in the history of US foundations. It created a regulatory framework
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that promoted transparency through detailed financial reporting to the public and it provided the tools for enhanced government oversight of foundations. As a result, foundations are required to report the amounts and purposes of all grants, detail grantmaking expenses separately from investment expenses, report changes in investments, compensation of key foundation staff and board members, and all financial dealings with donors, trustees, and other insiders. To ensure that foundations do not hoard their assets, a minimum payout was established, calculated as a percentage of average investment assets. That amount was set at 5% in 1981. Foundations were also subjected to an excise tax on their investment income designed to pay for monitoring foundations and the charitable sector, although the tax revenue was never used for that purpose. The regulations promoted better and more transparent practices within foundations, but tended to curb grantmaking that could be construed as controversial or political in nature. The requirements of the Tax Reform Act also promoted the professionalization of larger foundations that began to hire administrative, program, legal, and investment staff to ensure that they complied with the Act’s requirements. In 1973 the privately organized Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, known as the Filer Commission (after its chair John Filer) commissioned research designed to help inform and shape the regulatory landscape in the aftermath of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. The 91 papers written for the Filer Commission began to fill a long-standing gap in empirical research on foundations and the nonprofit sector. The history of the Filer Commission and the earlier Peterson Commission reported by Eleanor Brilliant (2000) reveals how foundations and donors tried to mitigate the proposed regulations affecting foundations. After the Tax Reform Act, foundation leaders set about strengthening the organizations that provide services to and outreach for foundations. They increased the Foundation Center’s services to grant seekers and revamped the Council on Foundations, a national membership organization. Since the mid-1980s a large network of national and regional associations of foundations evolved. These groups hold educational conferences, promote good practices, and lobby legislatures and government agencies on behalf of foundations. In addition, affinity groups of grantmakers promote peer learning about grantmaking programs for distinct populations and specific fields.
Key Issues Historically, key issues concerning foundations fall into the areas of transparency and accountability, personal
benefit, public benefit, efficiency and effectiveness, political use of foundations, and the overarching issue of donor control and the legitimacy of foundations in a democracy. Congress periodically voices concern about whether the public benefits created by foundations equal or exceed the foregone taxes, whether the mandatory payout of 5% of investment assets is high enough, whether foundation salaries and administrative expenses are too high a proportion of their payout, whether foundation boards and staff reflect the diversity of society, and whether foundations benefit sufficiently the underserved, especially minorities, in society. Occasional scandals reported in the media suggest that government oversight of foundations is weak and that unscrupulous donors and families can use foundation resources for their own benefit. Actual data on the scale of abuses and many of the other issues are quite limited. Recent research is beginning to shed light on expenses and activities of foundations, identifying patterns and typical costs (Boris et al., 2008), and there are also efforts to document impacts (Fleishman, 2007) and measure performance. There is less vocal concern about the power of foundations, although the creation of mega foundations and growth in foundation endowments by the beginning of the twenty-first century has caused some to question whether there should be a limit on the size or life of foundations, and others to question whether more immediate use of foundation resources would benefit society more than payouts of 5% of assets each year in perpetuity.
International Perspectives Organized philanthropic structures exist throughout the world in every culture. As in the United States, however, there is no single definition of a foundation, and the legal framework differs from country to country. Many foundations in Europe do not make grants, but are equivalent of the US operating foundations or service providing charities because they operate programs, like a medical facility or museum, rather than making grants. Research reported in Anheier (2001), for example, estimates that there are 80,000 to 90,000 foundations in Western Europe and Turkey, but Heydemann and Toepler (2006) suggest that those totals would have to be reduced significantly if they included only grantmaking foundations that fit US definitions. Although the US style grantmaking foundation is a relatively new organizational form in many countries, it has become popular and the number of private and community foundations is growing quickly. The European Foundation Center (2007), a membership association of foundations, reports expansive growth
Foundations, Grantmaking
in the number of foundations in the countries of the European Union since the 1980s, with between 28% and 40% of all foundations created in the last 10 years. It has adopted a functional definition of foundations that states ‘‘public benefit foundations’’ are: "
Independent, separately-constituted non-profit bodies with their own established and reliable source of income, usually but not exclusively, from an endowment, and their own governing board. They distribute their financial resources for educational, cultural, religious, social or other public benefit purposes, either by supporting associations, charities, educational institutions or individuals, or by operating their own programmes.
Wealthy donors in Russia, Hong Kong, India, South Africa and other countries are increasingly creating private foundations, emulating US billionaire peers such as Bill Gates and George Soros. There has also been a deliberate effort to promote the creation of community foundations in many countries, notably in England and Mexico. Comparing US foundations with those in other countries, however, is complicated by the lack of data and by differing definitions and legal structures. Unlike in the United States, in some countries foundations may own businesses or benefit the donor family.
Future Directions There are many unanswered questions about foundations that need to be addressed with good research. Among the big ones are: Why do people create foundations? What do foundations accomplish? Who do they benefit? Are the results achieved by foundations commensurate with the cost of foregone tax revenue? With a new generation of very wealthy donors who operate globally, comparative studies of motivations for creating foundations would inform those seeking to design new philanthropic structures, tax and legal frameworks, and incentives to promote organized giving for public benefit. Research reported by Elizabeth T. Boris (1987) identified six clusters of motives from a survey of foundations: altruistic concerns (welfare of others, religious heritage, social responsibility, family tradition, personal philosophy); personal beliefs (concern with particular issues, political beliefs, philosophy, repay society for good fortune); instrumental motivations (flexibility of a foundation, tax incentives, systematic giving); memorial (memorial for self, family, personal satisfaction); community motivations (lack of heirs, commitment to a specific community); peer pressure (social pressure to
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create a foundation, personal satisfaction). How do these motivations compare to those of current donors? Changes in motivations over time and cross-national comparisons of motivations would be especially relevant, as would comparisons of differing motivations for choosing among giving to family foundations, community foundations, and other public grantmaking foundations, and to commercial donor-advised funds. It would also be useful to know if there are systematic differences among donors who choose to give during their lifetimes and those who give the bulk of their donations through their estates when they die. A growing literature, mostly historic, describes the achievements of foundations, but there are no generally accepted methods or accessible data that permit reliable large-scale measurement of impact or effectiveness. Recent foundation donors who employ business models resembling venture capital investment tend to require measures of outcomes. Their foundations invest in organizations, providing staff and consultants to assist with planning and capacity building. Grantee agencies must collect performance and outcome data to demonstrate their achievements. There are no reliable data on the extent of this ‘‘venture’’ model of foundation philanthropy or on the outcomes they achieve compared to other modes of grantmaking. As in the rest of the nonprofit sector, the common measures mostly capture how much foundations spend, not what they produce or accomplish. Theoretical and empirical work that differentiates among foundation practices and outcomes is rare. A notable exception is Francie Ostrower’s research (2004) that develops a typology based on differences in the attitudes and practices of staffed foundations with regard to effectiveness. More frustrating to some policy makers, there are no comprehensive data on the populations that benefit from foundation grants and programs. While the philanthropic ethos has long been to benefit society with long-term problem-solving grants, fueling innovation, and building knowledge, there is an increasingly vocal demand that foundations provide more direct benefit to the poor and underserved in society. In reality, there are few ways to influence foundation agendas. Congressional interest, however, is powerful and large foundations tend to react to the prevailing political pressures. Foundations are products of wealth accumulation. In the United States, the creation of foundations helps to legitimize wealth by permitting people to give away assets with little government interference and significant tax benefits. The contributions of foundations to society are many, but their role in engaging the country’s social,
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business, and government entrepreneurs to help address society’s intractable problems is a positive contribution in itself. Being involved in foundations educates them about the needs and the difficulty of making change in complex social, environmental, and policy areas. Innovation and advocacy can result. Assessing foundation contributions from a historical perspective is ongoing, but assessing their accomplishments from an efficiency or effectiveness perspective is a future task.
Cross-References
▶ Boards ▶ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ▶ Carnegie, Andrew ▶ Cleveland Foundation ▶ Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs ▶ Council on Foundations ▶ Endowment, Definition and Management of ▶ Ford Foundation ▶ Foundations, Corporate ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundation Center ▶ Foundations, Independent ▶ Foundations, Family ▶ Goff, Frederick ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Philanthropy ▶ Rockefeller Foundation ▶ Rockefeller Brothers Fund ▶ Rockefeller, John D., Sr. ▶ Sage, Olivia
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. (2001). Foundations in Europe: A comparative perspective. In A. Schluter, V. Then, & P. Walkenhorst (Eds.), Foundations in Europe: Society, management and law. London: Directory of Social Change. Boris, E. (1987). Creation and growth: A survey of private foundations. In T. Odendahl (Ed.), America’s wealthy and the future of foundations. New York: Foundation Center. Boris, E. T., Renz, L., Hager, M., Elias, R., Somashekhar, M. (2008). What drives foundation expenses and compensation? Results of a three-year study. Washington D.C.: The Urban Institute. Boris, E. T., & Wolpert, J. (2001).The role of philanthropic foundations: Lessons from America’s experience with private foundations. In H. Anheier & J. Kendall (Eds.) The third sector policy at the crossroads. London: Routledge. Brilliant, E. L. (2000). Private charity and public inquiry: A history of the Filer and Peterson commissions. Bloomington/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Edie, J. A. (1987). Congress and foundations: Historical summary. In T. Odendahl (Ed.), America’s wealthy and the future of foundations. New York: Foundation Center. European Foundation Centre (2007). Comparative highlights of foundation laws. Brussels, Belgium: European Foundation Centre.
Fleishman, J. L. (2007). The foundation: A great American secret. New York: Public Affairs. Foundation Center (2008a). Foundation giving trends. New York: Foundation Center. Foundation Center (2008b). Foundation growth and giving estimates. New York: Foundation Center. Heydemann, S., & Toepler, S. (2006). Foundations and the challenge of legitimacy in comparative perspective. In K. Prewitt, M. Dogan, S. Heydemann, & S. Toepler (Eds.), The legitimacy of philanthropic foundations. New York: Russell Sage. Ostrower, F. (2004). Attitudes and practices concerning effective philanthropy. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Renz, L., & Elias, R. (2007). More than grantmaking: A first look at foundations’ direct charitable activities. New York: Foundation Center Wing, K. T., Pollak, T. H., & Blackwood, A. (2008). The nonprofit almanac 2008. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press.
Foundations, Grant-Seeking SIMONA SˇKARABELOVA´ Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Introduction It is only recently that foundations have begun to receive the long-overdue attention that they deserve, from researchers in various countries and internationally. This increased interest in foundations has led to the discovery of a wellpredictable fact, namely, that the foundation landscape is very rich and varied. First attempts have been made, especially in North America and Europe, at mapping the rich variety of forms and roles of foundations, and at classifying what is increasingly being exposed as a very heterogeneous phenomenon. The first comparative studies also emphasized the need for a comprehensive definition of what a foundation is: What is it that, in spite of all the differences, characterizes this type of organization? As a rule, the notion of what a foundation is varies from country to country along several dimensions. The ‘‘rich tapestry’’ of the various forms of foundations (Anheier, 2001; Hopt & Reuter, 2001) complicates a complete understanding of them, as it produces a highly complex, often confusing terminology. In order to find the common core that sets these organizations apart from the others, the definitions that have been offered for international comparison invariably come up with three indispensable characteristics: (1) A foundation is an asset that is dedicated to serving a purpose. (2) It must have a revenue-generating asset or aggregation of assets, which gives it a reliable source of income. (3) It must rest on an
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original deed – typically, a charter that defines the purpose which the financial resources must serve. This basic prototype of a foundation is then classified using various other criteria, such as the type of founder (individual, corporate, community, government-sponsored foundations, etc.), or the type of activity (grant-making, operating, mixed foundations). For practical use, the distinctions between grant-making and operating foundations and between individual and corporate foundations are usually considered sufficient. But a thorough study of the foundation phenomenon in any country usually offers a much more varied picture. In its third draft (1995), the European Foundation Centre (EFC) has offered a typology of foundations in Europe that lists 18 ‘‘of the most common foundation types in Europe’’ in four generic categories. What is interesting for the discussion that follows below is that even though the EFC’s definition of a foundation follows the established canon, describing foundations as ‘‘separately-constituted nonprofit bodies with their own established and reliable source of income (usually, but not exclusively) from an endowment or capital,’’ the typology itself recognizes the existence of so-called fund-raising foundations (European Foundation Centre, 2003, 6). The typology describes them as ‘‘foundations that are almost exclusively dependent on annual fund-raising from a variety of sources to obtain the funds that they will, in turn, distribute each year.’’ It goes on to characterize their ‘‘approach to the distribution of financial resources’’ as happening ‘‘via grant-making to associations, charities, individuals or nonprofit organisations.’’ And finally, it warns that ‘‘if the organisation raises funds primarily for a single purpose that it manages, such as a hospital, school, or for membership or social services, it should be classified as an association or charity, even if it has foundation in its name.’’ So, the EFC typology recognizes the existence of grantseeking foundations, besides grant-making foundations, but, in the discussion, stumbles over some of the typical difficulties these organizations pose for a coherent theory: Can fund-raising foundations use their financial resources in any of the same ways that other foundations do, or can they only re-grant what they raise? Can they serve a single purpose or a single institution, or do they have to award grants to a plurality of causes, and to a wide choice of applicants? And, are they foundations in the first place? One feels from the way the typology treats them, and from their place at the end of the list, that fund-rasing or grant-seeking foundations are, somehow, ‘‘improper,’’ and not really foundations. But nothing is farther from the truth. They are a well-established type of foundation, probably as old as the (modern) foundation concept itself;
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they are present in most countries, their numbers are impressive and growing, and they display a variety of subtypes and interactions with other organizations that prove their viability. In spite of the large numbers of grant-seeking foundations in existence, no substantial research has been carried out that would focus on this type of foundation. Grantseeking foundations are sometimes mentioned in passing in general discussions of foundation types, but they do not appear as a separate entity in statistical surveys, nor have they been subjected to mapping or research. Very little is known about this set of foundations as a result, and so a student of the phenomenon has to rely on anecdotal evidence scattered in a handful of articles, and on brief mentions in instruction manuals for foundation trustees and managers.
Definition A grant-seeking foundation takes the legal form of a foundation, but is created without substantial assets. Instead, it depends for its financial health on annual fund-raising from a variety of sources, like most other nonprofit organizations do. Its funding may come from appeals to the general public or to a specific group (such as ‘‘friends’’ or alumni), from grants from corporate funders and other foundations, or from governmental support. Grant-seeking foundations may also have an endowment or capital, or may be in the process of building it, but it is the dependence on fund-raising that distinguishes them from endowed/assetbased foundations. There are several terms that are used to describe this set of foundations and some specific members of the set: grant-seeking or fund-raising, collector/distributor or regranting, and parallel or special purpose foundations (also special fund-raising foundations). Grant-seeking or fund-raising are by far the most established terms used, and the most justified; collector/distributor or re-granting are used only for those foundations that collect funds from various sources and then redistribute them through their grant-making programs; and parallel or special purpose refers to those foundations that are set up by organizations such as universities and hospitals to seek gifts and grants in order to support the parent organization. Grant-seeking and fund-raising are the appropriate terms to be used because they classify these institutions by the one decisive criterion, namely their source of funding. The other terms mix two criteria (source of funding and type of activity) or refer to only one subtype of the grant-seeking foundation. Grant-seeking foundations are to be seen in contrast with foundations that operate on the basis of income
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derived from their assets. It is the criterion ‘‘source of funding’’ that distinguishes the two basic types. (It is likely, however, that in real life there are few clear-cut cases; a lot of foundations will be hybrids: asset-based foundations may match the income from their assets with annual fund-raising, and the funding portfolio of grant-seeking foundations may include some endowment, some annual gifts, and a lot of year-round fund-raising.) A specific case is the community foundation: these foundations collect funding from the members of a community and tend therefore to be organized as grantseeking foundations.
Key Issues Subtypes
The grant-seeking foundation is not a neat category whose members follow the same pattern of organization and behavior. The attribute ‘‘grant-seeking’’ (‘‘fundraising’’) refers to only one criterion that enables classification of foundations into two broad categories, namely the (dominant) source of income. Within their own category, however, grant-seeking foundations display the same wide variety of forms and play the same multifarious roles as foundations in the other category of endowed/ asset-based foundations. Thus, if one examines grant-seeking foundations from the perspective of their purpose or mission one finds that all the familiar types are represented, ranging from a single-purpose foundation supporting an annual school prize to a multipurpose community foundation that supports a variety of causes through a large number of grantmaking and operational programs. If one takes the type of activity that they use to fulfill their mission as a criterion, one can draw the same distinctions as in other foundations, distinguishing grant-making, operating, and mixed foundations, to say nothing of more refined subcategories such as prize-awarding or research foundations. By the type of beneficiary, there are foundations whose support is open to the general public through open grant competitions; other foundations limit their support to certain groups, to organizations only or individuals only, to certain types of organization only (such as nonprofits), etc.; still others collect funding for designated recipients only or for a single designated recipient; and finally, some foundations collect funding for their own programs and activities. A fund-raising foundation can be founded by an individual, group of individuals, a nonprofit organization, a for-profit firm or a government agency. In terms of
independence, there are wholly independent foundations at one extreme of the scale and foundations controlled by their founders at the other, with all shades of connectedness and semi-dependence in between. Since there are no substantial data and literature on grant-seeking foundations, it is difficult to know how numerous they are and which of the subtypes mentioned above are the most common. Arlett (1996) discusses one subtype, the ‘‘parallel’’ foundation, noting that their numbers are steadily rising. Citing from the 1995 Association for Healthcare Philanthropy annual survey Giving in Canada, he highlights the fact that 92% of the responding hospitals had parallel foundations. The instruction manuals and the anecdotal evidence also create the impression that (at least in North America) the grant-seeking foundation that serves one ‘‘parent’’ institution is by far the most common type. Flassenberger (2004, 29) seems to associate fund-raising foundations with the development in Central and Eastern European countries after the fall of communism and considers them to be a transitional phase in the life of those foundations that were set up without an asset but decided to build up an endowment of their own. Rosenmayer et al., (2004) carried out a large national survey of foundations in the Czech Republic and found that 62% of all the responding foundation-like organizations were ‘‘parallel’’ foundations, established to support and serve their parent organizations. Most of them were set by/for educational, health care, social care and cultural institutions, and churches. From a cursory look at individual examples of grantseeking foundations, it seems evident that geographically they operate on all levels, the local, regional, national, and international, even though, judging from the apparent prevalence of ‘‘parallel’’ foundations mentioned above, the local/regional foundations are likely to dominate. Rationale
Why do grant-seeking foundations get established? If an organization such as a college needs to begin fund-raising, why set a foundation, and not appoint a fund-raiser or establish a fund-raising department? If one wishes to raise funding for a cause, why not organize an appeal or a collection? Because of the lack of research, there is little understanding of the reasons, nor is there enough data to substantiate the claims that have been made so far. Fram (2002) interviewed personnel of 26 organizations with parallel foundations in the Rochester and Buffalo, New York metropolitan areas and he summed up the most frequent motivating reasons for the establishment of parallel foundations as follows:
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● Privately donated funds and public funds cannot be commingled. ● There is a community perception that the parent nonprofit organization might not be stable over a long period. ● Parent board members are unable or unwilling to be involved with fund-raising. ● The parent nonprofit needs to raise capital or special program funds. ● Assets may need to be protected from legal suits. ● Funds must be more effectively used or managed. Unfortunately, these claims are based on too small a sample and his probe has remained a sole attempt. Fund-raising foundations with national and international activities are often established by/in richer parts/ countries with a view to helping impoverished regions or nations. The fund-raising is done in the developed country/countries and then the finances and/or the aid are transferred to, and distributed in, the developing country, either directly to the recipient(s) or with the help of a local intermediary. For example, the Swiss diversethics Foundation supports underprivileged communities in the Mekong Sub-Region (Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand). Also, fund-raising foundations can be established in the free world to collect funding and to support individuals, groups, initiatives, or causes in countries with repressive regimes, where it would be difficult or impossible to set up a formal organization or to raise funding locally. So, for example, during the Cold War the Oxford-based Jan Hus Educational Foundation raised funding and organized support for the socalled underground university in Czechoslovakia, or the Charter 77 Foundation in Stockholm supported Czechoslovak dissidents and their activities in the 1980s. Foundation or Not?
A grant-seeking foundation appears to be a clear case of a contradictio in adjecto. Is it not the original gift that constitutes the very essence of what is understood regarding the concept of a foundation? How can a foundation serve its purpose without a reliable source of income from a separate, independent, revenue-generating asset? The very words that different languages use for this type of institution (foundation, foundation, fundacio´n, fundaca˜o, fundazzione, Stiftung, stichting, stiftelse, nadace, nada´cia, zaklada) refer to the asset (the root meaning of fund, fonds, zaklad) or to the act of donating it (the root of stift, nadace). Yet, the fact remains that grant-seeking foundations in their several basic forms are wellestablished in a number of countries and their numbers
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are reported to be rising. The idea of institutionalizing the fund-raising effort for a cause or for an organization seems as old as the concept of an endowed foundation. Medieval hospitals, orphanages, churches, schools, and colleges were set up as endowed foundations themselves or separate funds were created for their support. It seems that in the case of grant-seeking foundations the concept of a reliable income has to be extended to include permanent year-round fund-raising. However, the grant-seeking foundation is a borderline case. A number of its subtypes continue to raise the question of whether or not they can still be classified as foundations or are already something else. Whether or not they are independent entities or parts of other organizations and whether or not they are nonprofit organizations or rather parts of government or business. If a grant-seeking foundation spends the funds that it collects to operate its own programs, is there anything left that distinguishes it from a general charity or association? If a ‘‘parallel’’ foundation serves a single parent organization, is it an independent organization, and a separate entity, or is it de facto a unit of the parent organization? Do grant-seeking foundations differ in a meaningful way from appeals and collections? If a fund-raising foundation re-grants moneys raised from other donors, does it act independently or is its fund-raising controlled by the end-recipient and its grant-making by the donor? If a ‘‘parallel’’ foundation is established and/or controlled by government or business does it belong to the nonprofit sector or the other sectors? If a grant-seeking foundation raises funding for several organizations, does it not act like a commercial consultancy or service provider rather than a nonprofit entity? There are no answers to these and other questions because there is no definition of the foundation that is consistent with the existence of grant-seeking foundations. At the moment, grant-seeking foundations are included in the foundation community as a rule, albeit with some hesitation, but often some subtypes of the grant-seeking foundation are excluded (see EFC, 2003, quoted above). And sometimes they are not considered to be foundations at all. For example, in reaction to the mushroom growth in the number of foundations after the fall of communism, most of which were being established without assets and many of which were not in fact foundations at all but rather membership-based associations or corporations, even if their founders called them ‘‘foundation,’’ several Central/East European countries instituted new legislation in the course of the 1990s that strictly defined foundations as nonmembership-based organizations that must be in the possession of revenue-generating
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assets (e.g., Czech Law No. 227/1997 On Foundations and Funds or Slovak Law No. 34/2002 On Foundations and the Change of the Civil Code). (As a consequence of the implementation of the new legislation in 1998, the number of registered foundations in the Czech Republic dropped from over 5,000 to around 200 [in 2007, there were over 400 foundations]. In Hungary, where no such legislation was introduced, the number of foundations remained high, circa 22,000 in 2005.) Independence, Control, Governance
As the most common subtype of the grant-seeking foundation seems to be the ‘‘parallel’’ foundation, established to raise funds for a single ‘‘parent’’ recipient, the issue of independence and the related problems of control and governance occupy a prominent place in all the advice and instructions that are offered to board members and leaders of these ‘‘twin’’ arrangements. To find a good balance between the two organizations and to eliminate the inevitable tensions between their governing bodies and executive officers is a key initial task for those that set up the foundation and a key long-term requirement on their governance. There is plenty of potential for disagreement: the board of the parent organization does not understand fund-raising and the foundation board does not have full understanding of the mission and the programs of the organization; the board of the parent organization feels it does not have sufficient control over the fund-raising plan and activities; the foundation board feels the funding should be used differently from the decisions of the parent board; the parent board thinks the foundation is too expensive; the foundation thinks it is understaffed and underfunded to do the job that is required of them; since there exist two organizations with two separate boards, their respective missions, goals, and objectives can begin to diverge over time; if there is tension between the boards, there may be even more misunderstanding and suspicion between staff members; and so on and so forth. The advice usually given is to think twice before setting up a parallel foundation. The reasons for establishing a foundation should be given all the careful thought and planning that is required. The two key questions are: Why should I spend so much energy and finance to set up an arm’s length entity? And why would a donor give to a parallel foundation rather than to the organization itself? If the decision to create a parallel foundation is made, equally careful thought should be given to the bylaws of the foundation, to the overlap between the two boards, and to effective communication between them.
Future Directions As emphasized above, research on foundations that would include grant-seeking foundations is very sparse indeed, and substantial research that would specifically target these foundations is practically nonexistent. That is why basic research is needed to map this subsystem of philanthropy, identify the various types of the grant-seeking foundation, explore the reasons for their existence, and study their behavior. Such study would undoubtedly contribute to the understanding of organized philanthropy as such and feed back into general theory of foundations. With the new knowledge, one should be able to review the general definition of foundations so as to include the existence of grant-seeking foundations and to establish more clearly the borderline between foundations and other nonprofit forms.
Cross-References
▶ Charta 77 Foundation ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Functions of ▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ Fundraising ▶ Philanthropy, Definition of
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. K. (2001). Foundations in Europe: A comparative perspective. In A. Schlu¨ter, V. Then, & P. Walkenhorst (Eds.), Foundations in Europe (pp. 35–81). London: Directory of Social Change. Arlett, A. (1996). Parallel foundations – too many, too trendy and too hasty. The Canadian Fundraiser, November 27, 1996, from http:// www.charityvillage.com/cv/research/rfm4.html; 08/20/2008 European Foundation Centre. (2003). Typology of foundations in Europe. As of October 1995, reworded 2003. Brussels: European Foundation Centre, from http://www.efc.be/ftp/public/EU/EURweb/ EFCtypology.pdf; 08/20/2008 European Foundation Centre. (2005). Foundation facts and figures across the EU –associating private wealth for public benefit. Brussels: European Foundation Centre, http://www.efc.be/ftp/public/EU/ EURweb/Facts_Figs_publication.pdf; 08/20/2008 Flessenkemper, T. (Ed.) (2004). T-Kit on funding and financial management. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, from http:// www.youth-partnership.net/export/sites/default/youth-partnership/ documents/Publications/T_kits/9/tkit9.pdf; 08/20/2008 Fram, E. H. (2002). Fundraising foundations: What are they, & how are nonprofits using them? Nonprofit World. September/October 2002, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5384/is_200209/ai_n 21319077; 08/20/2008 Hopt, K. J., & Reuter, D. (Eds.) (2001). Stiftungsrecht in Europa. Cologne: Carl Heymanns Verlag. Lavery, R. (1999). Considering a parallel or special interest foundation for your public library – Part 1. Signal, Fall, from http://www.sols.org/ links/clearinghouse/fundingdev/resources/foundations/parallel1.htm; 08/20/2008
Foundations, Independent Lavery, R. (2000). Considering a parallel or special interest foundation for your public library – Part 2. Signal, Spring, from http://www.sols. org/links/clearinghouse/fundingdev/resources/foundations/parallel2. htm; 08/20/2008 Rosenmayer, T., Hya´nek, V., Peka´rkova´, P., Pospı´sˇil, M., Sˇkarabelova´ S., & Tu˚mova´ Z. (2004). Ekonomicke´ vy´sledky nadacˇnı´ch subjektu˚ v roce 2002 [Foundation-like Organisations: Facts and figures 2002]. Brno: Centre for Nonprofit Research.
Foundations, Independent DAVID C. HAMMACK Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Introduction Independent foundations provide, within the limits permitted by governments and courts, an institutional device for holding, investing, and distributing funds for charitable, religious, scientific, artistic, and other approved purposes. Independent foundations can advance the ideals of civil society by providing multiple sources of initiative. Able (within the terms of their charters and within the bounds permitted by government) to shift resources at will, they can support new initiatives or advance special and minority agendas. Critics sometimes argue that foundations should be under the very close control of legislative majorities or ruling coalitions, but foundation defenders emphasize that their wealth is very limited, and that foundations must work in accepted ways and in cooperation with others if they are to have any significant impact. Through a foundation as by other philanthropic means, a donor can seek to transform financial capital into symbolic capital: through a foundation, a donor can also simply seek to advance a cherished purpose.
Definition An independent foundation is generally understood to be autonomous, self-governing, separate from the control of government (national, provincial, or local) and from such ‘‘operating’’ entities as religious institutions, schools, hospitals, arts organizations, and other charities (although of course government-sponsored as well as ‘‘private’’ operating entities can be in many important ways free from direct political direction). Some independent foundations are devoted to specific, narrowly defined purposes; others are at liberty, under their charters and applicable law, to turn from one charitable purpose to another as their boards decide. Independent foundations reflect a political
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system’s willingness to allow legal and political ‘‘space’’ for concerted independent action, to limit the powers of government, to permit an active civil society, to respect rights in private property.
Historical Background Successive periods and different national contexts have seen distinctive patterns of foundation giving. In general, foundations must always seek to leverage their financial gifts with knowledge and to fit them into larger contemporary institutional developments. Fueled by great industrial and commercial fortunes and encouraged by the waning of religious restrictions, independent foundations first became prominent towards the end of the nineteenth century. For discussion of religious and other foundations, see the articles in this book on ‘‘Charity and religion,’’ ‘‘Foundations, definition and history,’’ ‘‘Law, foundations,’’ and ‘‘Wakfs.’’ Germany produced the most notable nineteenthcentury foundations. In late nineteenth-century Germany, hundreds of foundations, some of them of considerable size, provided significant funding for scientific research, for the assembling of collections in museums of natural history and of art, and for universities, as well as for experiments in the improvement of housing, public health, and the amelioration of poverty. German foundations worked closely with national, provincial, and municipal governments, but they retained considerable scope, and they made possible many projects that governments could not complete by themselves. They provided a device through which successful businessmen could demonstrate commitment to public causes and to widely valued purposes, advance their social ambitions, exert influence on public affairs, and reinforce their economic positions. By the time of the World War I, the Koppel Foundation, the Hamburg Scientific Foundation, and many others were providing important support to the Prussian Academy of Science, Frankfurt University, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical and Electrical Chemistry, the German Medical School in Shanghai, annual exchanges of faculty between the University of Berlin and Harvard, and the German Museum in Munich, among many other similar institutions. Other foundations underwrote experiments in lowincome housing, elementary and adult education, job training, and other causes. The great disruptions of the 1920s and 1930s brought this era of the German Foundation to an end. Notable nineteenth-century American foundations underwrote individual hospitals, colleges, libraries, arts institutions, and religious missions, as well as clusters of such organizations in particular cities and within the
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context of particular religious communities. Nineteenthcentury foundations provided some degree of support and security for the ministers and teachers whose work made possible the growth of several Protestant religious denominations. The Peabody Fund and several of Andrew Carnegie’s funds promoted the creation of tax-supported local and state-wide public school and library systems across the United States. The Baron deHirsch Fund, created from a European but established in New York, undertook a changing portfolio of measures to ease the adjustment of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe to the United States. For several decades after 1900 and especially after 1920 the several Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Guggenheim foundations, and many others, extended the German approach (well known by American donors who sometimes collaborated with German philanthropies) by working to help build the modern American research university, the scientific and academic disciplines, and the university-based medical research and hospital center. The Russell Sage Foundation worked with several others to bring a sort of voluntary order to America’s highly decentralized and often inadequate networks of social service organizations. Pittsburgh millionaire and former US Secretary of the Treasury A.W. Mellon used his eponymous Educational and Charitable Trust to dispense funds for America’s National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to purchase much of its core collection, and to fund other charitable projects, especially in his home city. Similarly the Duke Endowment for the Carolinas was established to support four universities as well as Methodist ministers in two states. Most generalizations about American foundations derive from the work of the foundations named above, and of a number of other foundations that pursued allied purposes. Less noted have been the very substantial contributions made by several American foundations to the League of Nations and its supporting institutions and to the education, travel, research, and conferences of specialists in international fields. Also less noted was the support provided by the Danforth, Texas Baptist, Eli Lilly, Luce and many regional funds (especially in the South and West) for Protestant causes in the United States and abroad; and of the W.K. Kellogg and several other foundations for rural and small-town educational, public health, and university extension efforts. In Britain, the government prevented the a very large gift of funds for the subsidy of housing. Historians have also documented several notable failures of mid-century efforts of American foundations. It seems clear that foundations failed to assure universal access to the best modern health care; to make secondary
education more effective for all students; to promote really effective voluntary responses to poverty; to promote various ‘‘moral reforms’’ having to do with alcohol, drugs, and sex. British foundations are perhaps the most studied among European foundations. Among the best-known independent foundations in Britain, the Carnegie UK Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have emphasized changing programs in support of libraries, adult education, social services, and other efforts to build effective community institutions, while the Rhodes Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Wolfson Foundation have emphasized universities and scientific research. During the 1920s and 1930s America’s Rockefeller Foundation also supported scientific and social scientific research in the United Kingdom. The British government has on occasion taken strong action to force foundations to conform to established national policy despite explicit statements of a donor’s intent, as its actions to restrict the housing scheme of the William Sutton Trust (founded 1900) made clear. In the United States, incomes grew rapidly in the decades after 1940; greater wealth allowed Americans to pay far more for education, health care, social services, and the arts. Stimulated by greatly increased payments for their services and by extraordinary levels of private giving, the nation’s colleges, universities, hospitals, and arts organizations grew rapidly. Meanwhile the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, and the Great Society transformed the scope and scale of the US federal government. By the 1960s federal spending on health, higher education, scientific and medical research, and social support dwarfed the gifts that foundations could offer. And with federal funds came federal strings, limiting the potential impact of private grants. For several decades after World War II, America’s foundations struggled to redefine their roles in response to these dramatic changes. Private purchases of service and government funding did not displace private giving in the United States: rather, they transformed and vastly expanded work in most of the fields (especially in health, science, education, job training, and poor relief) to which private donors direct their gifts. Foundations changed their approaches in many ways. The Ford Foundation, the most notable new foundation of this period, often followed foundation actions of previous decades, making very large gifts to universities and arts organizations and seeking to increase the numbers of institutions capable of operating at the ‘‘world class’’ levels already established by others. But the Ford Foundation also moved in new directions. It supported social
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advocacy through the Fund for the Republic, through voter-registration drives, through the Vera Institute for Justice, and other initiatives. Its Gray Areas project sought new ways to empower people in impoverished communities to overcome their subordination and poverty. It underwrote massive efforts to support democracy, effective government, and economic and social development in India and other nations then emerging from colonialism. Most other independent American foundations had to begin to think of their work in ways that were more narrowly targeted. Rather than build new institutions, they increased their support for existing institutions in their home regions, with substantial grants to private as well as state universities, not-for-profit as well as county hospitals. The larger foundations supported the creation of new fields (population studies, area studies, particular areas of biochemistry) rather than of wholly new institutions such as research universities or medical centers. Smaller foundations funded particular projects. They joined with others in funding responses to new diseases like AIDs, or to efforts to cure diseases ignored by the National Institutes of Health because they afflict relatively small populations. Or they helped expand important regional arts initiatives, like the Houston Opera Theater, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. During the 1950s and 1960s, some independent foundations in the United States came in for considerable Congressional criticism. Too many financial advisors had encouraged clients to seek to protect family financial interests through the creation of a foundation. A very few foundations supported voter registration or other political efforts, often seen as part of the Civil Rights Movement, that provoked strong objection from existing interests. Congress and the US Treasury responded by tightening the regulations designed to prevent donors from using foundations for their ‘‘self-inurement’’ and for narrow electioneering purposes. The new regulations, together with the economic realities of the 1960s and 1970s, significantly slowed the growth of foundations in the United States. When more rapid expansion of American foundations resumed in the 1990s and 2000s, foundations seemed to enter a new era. Foundation leaders are accepting the reduced relative wealth of the funds they control, the increasing size and complexity of their fields of interest, and the diversity of the foundation field itself. Many now emphasize focus, seek to define objectives appropriate to their relative resources, and to find niches in which they can achieve results that they can measure and that can be sustained. Even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest ever created, emphasizes the fact that its
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resources are very limited in relation to its desire to improve public health throughout much of the world. Many foundations are seeking social innovations that markets, including markets funded with government vouchers, will support. Others (Rowntree and Wellcome in Britain, the Milbank Memorial Fund, the R. W. Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation in the United States) accept that ‘‘big government’’ is unlikely to shrink, and have worked creatively to find ways to help state as well as federal policy-makers find ways to more effectively deliver elementary and secondary education, medical care, job training, support for children and youth, and assistance to the elderly. Still others seek above all to increase leadership capacity in key segments of society, or to preserve cultural, artistic, environmental, social, and religious values. In much of the rest of the world, foundations have been expanding in numbers and importance as efforts to expand individual civil and property rights, to increase prosperity, to address inequality and social exclusion, and to build notable institutions of science and the arts, have called forth new institutions. Foundations have reemerged as notable features of German life, pursuing both the religious, scientific, educational, social, and cultural projects like those of their earlier predecessors, and – as through the Volkswagen Foundation and the German Marshall Fund – post-World War II agendas of international understanding. (For other cases, see the story of the Tata Trusts, and related articles in this volume on foundations and associations of foundations in many different nations.)
Key Issues If the global crisis of 2009 does not force a change in direction, a new foundation era may well be emerging, an era characterized by acceptance of foundation variety, an understanding of the severe limits on foundation resources and capabilities, often by a strong commitment to distinctive values, by a search for leverage, by a focus on measurable and sustainable results. But it is never clear whether a new era has emerged until long after the event. Among the great current issues are these: Will independent foundations retain and expand their independence, or will governments force them to return to the meek support of government priorities? Will foundations once again see a great decline in their resources, in relation to the scale of the fields they wish to address? Will foundations be able to find nonprofit and government partners capable of joining in large enterprises? Will it be possible for large foundation-supported enterprises to become selfsupporting? Or so at least it seemed in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the global financial crisis of 2009.
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International Perspectives As this article has suggested, the term ‘‘independent foundation’’ is used with distinctive meanings in different nations. In some cases, reference is to a national regulatory or funding agency that is, and is seen to be, separate from the immediate control of government or political influences. Such an agency often focuses on questions relating to medicine, drugs, or technical or accounting standards. Some ‘‘independent foundations’’ are designed to distribute funds for cultural, scientific, or medical research purposes. Others are set up to gather money from many donors for the care of people who suffer from a particular disease, and for research into its treatment, cure or prevention. Still others are designed explicitly to preserve funds for members of a family. National laws and practices determine governance arrangements for independent foundations. National funding and regulatory agencies are usually controlled by boards appointed by national governments – to that extent limiting their autonomy. Nationally-approved professional associations or corporations sometimes select governors. In some Nordic nations, certain kinds of public-serving foundations must be set up as associations open to the membership of all who are interested. In Great Britain, the United States, and in some other parts of the world, a small self-perpetuating board usually makes all decisions regarding investments and donations, subject to state and federal laws. In the United States, where individual states control the terms under which foundations incorporate and national law controls their federal (but not state or local) tax status, ‘‘independent foundations’’ have dominated the foundation field since early in the twentieth century. In the United States, an independent foundation holds its own substantial fund, usually invests that fund for long-term growth, and decides from year to year how to spend the income from the fund. So long as the foundation gives to broadly defined ‘‘charitable purposes’’ an amount equivalent to the average value of its assets over the past 3 years, it avoids most federal income taxes and donors reduce taxes on their incomes. At present there are more than 70,000 independent foundations in the United States. The majority of these funds have less than $1 million in assets and no regular employees; the 3,000 largest employ nearly all the professional foundation staff. Public attention naturally focuses on the very largest foundations – the 40 or so whose assets exceeded $1 billion in 2007–2008 – and even more on the very largest – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – and the best-known of the oldest very large foundations – founded by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, members
of the Guggenheim family, W. K. Kellogg, Eli Lilly, Andrew W. Mellon. Altogether, foundation grants add up to a substantial total: $41 billion in 2006 according to the Foundation Center. Recent surveys suggest that family and independent foundation giving is at a much lower level in the United Kingdom and in Europe in general: on the order of perhaps $3 billion in the United Kingdom, perhaps somewhat more in Europe, much less in other parts of the world. Many US laws and practices encourage people to give for a very wide range of purposes. It is likely that the possibility of giving through the device of an independent foundation encourages wealthy Americans to give more than they would if such an institution was not available to them. Other nations that have recently made their laws more supportive of the creation of foundations also intend to encourage giving, as well as to strengthen the autonomy of civil society. Independent foundations have in many cases provided sustained and sometimes very creative and effective support for educational, health-related, research, social service, religious, and artistic activities. Because they manage funds for long-term efforts, they can take continuing action to build not just individual institutions but self-sustaining clusters of nonprofit schools, hospitals, clinics, research institutes, social service agencies, and arts organizations. These institutions may be government-sponsored or ‘‘private’’ and more or less independent. Independent foundations in the United States can support individual creative efforts in religion, the arts, social study, the sciences, health, or community development, provided that they honor certain restrictions on grants to individuals. They can also support entire communities of people committed to shared goals, whether religious, cultural, social, or scientific. Because their resources are in every case very limited in comparison to national budgets or indeed the annual expenditures in any of the fields they address, foundations necessarily tailor their giving to particular fields, and to the context of the particular time and place in which they operate. Each field, in each era, offers its own opportunities and imposes its own constraints. As property-holding entities, foundations depend on the laws of the nations in which they are founded. But foundations also act across borders. An independent foundation can sometimes advance a national purpose more effectively than can a national government. Of course, every national government must also consider whether the foundations based in its territory are operating in accord with national purposes abroad – and whether grants from foundations based abroad are advancing acceptable purposes. Private donors at times chafe against restraints
Foundations, Independent
imposed by their home governments; private citizens often chafe against prohibitions by their own governments against accepting foundation grants (or other gifts) from abroad. When foundations operate across borders they inevitably raise questions, and a rich and sometimes contentious literature explores these questions. Among the leading topics addressed by this literature are the roles of the German Koppel Foundation and the American Rockefeller and Luce foundations in building modern universities in early twentieth-century China, of the Rockefeller and other foundations in shaping social science, and of certain American foundations during the postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan and during Cold War-era struggles in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere.
Future Directions The challenges facing those who study independent foundations are very much related to the ‘‘key issues’’ facing the foundations themselves, noted above.
Cross-References
▶ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ▶ Carnegie, Andrew ▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs ▶ Ford Foundation ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Functions of ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ German Marshall Fund ▶ Joseph Rowntree Foundation ▶ Kellogs, WK ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Lilly, Eli ▶ Nuffield Foundation ▶ Rhodes Trust ▶ Rockefeller Foundation ▶ Russell Sage Foundation ▶ Tata Trusts ▶ Volkswagen Stiftung ▶ W.K. Kellogg Foundation ▶ Wakfs ▶ Wellcome Trust
References/Further Readings Adam, T. (Ed.) (2004). Philanthropy, patronage, and civil society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Anheier, H., & Hammack, D. C. (Eds.) (2009). American Foundations: Studies on roles and contributions. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming.
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Anheier, H., & Toepler, S. (Eds.) (1999). Private funds, public purpose: Philanthropic foundations in international perspective. New York: Kluwer. Arnove, R. F. (1980). Philanthropy and cultural imperialism: The foundations at home and abroad. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bulmer, M. (1984). The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, diversity, and the rise of sociological research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cannadine, D. (2006). Mellon: An American life. New York: Knopf. Coleman, P. (1989). The liberal conspiracy: The Congress for cultural freedom and the struggle for postwar Europe. New York: Free Press. Curti, M. (1965). American philanthropy abroad. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Fox, D. M. (2006). The significance of the Milbank Memorial Fund for policy: An assessment at its centennial. New York: Milbank Memorial Fund. Garside, P. L. (1999). The conduct of philanthropy: The William Sutton Trust, 1900–2000. New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone. Gordon, L. (1997). Wealth equals wisdom? The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in India. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 554, 104–116. Hammack, D. C. (Ed.) (2001, June). Symposium: The quiet revolution in the nonprofit sector: Law, policy, and commerce. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 30(2), 157–173. Hammack, D. C., & Wheeler, S. (1994). Social science in the making: Essays on the Russell Sage Foundation, 1907–1972. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Karl, B. D., & Katz, S. N. (1981). The American Private Philanthropic Foundation and the public sphere, 1890–1930. Minerva, 19, 236–270 (1981, published 1983). Korey, W. (2007). Taking on the world’s repressive regimes: The Ford Foundation’s International Human Rights Policies and practices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuehl, W. F., & Dunn, L. K. (1997). Keeping the covenant: American internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Lagemann, E. C. (1989). The politics of knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, philanthropy, and public policy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Lagemann, E. C. (Ed.) (1999). Philanthropic Foundations: New scholarship, new possibilities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. McCaughey, R. A. (1984). International studies and academic enterprise: A chapter in the enclosure of American learning. New York: Columbia University Press. O’Connor, A. (2001). Poverty knowledge: Social science, social policy, and the poor in twentieth-century U.S. history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ostrower, F. (1995). Why the wealthy give: The culture of elite philanthropy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parmar, I. (2006). Anti-Americanism and the major foundations. In B. O. Connor & M. Griffiths (Eds.), The rise of Anti-Americanism (pp. 169–194). London: Routledge. Prewitt, K., Dogan, M., Heydemann, S., & Toepler, S. (Eds.) (2006). The legitimacy of philanthropic foundations: United States and European perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Quigley, K. F. F. (1997). For democracy’s sake: Foundations and democracy assistance in Central Europe. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Sealander, J. (1997). Private wealth & public life: Foundation philanthropy and the reshaping of American Social Policy from the progressive era to the new deal. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Schneider, W. H. (Ed.) (2002). Rockefeller philanthropy and modern biomedicine: International initiatives from World War I to the Cold War. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Smith, J. A., & Borgmann, K. (2001). Foundations in Europe: The historical context, and Helmut K. Anheier, Foundations in Europe: A comparative perspective. In A. Schluter, V. Then, & P. Walkenhorst (Eds.), Foundations in Europe: Society, management and law. London: Bertelsmann Foundation, The Directory of Social Change. Sutton, F. X. (1987). The Ford Foundation: The early years. Daedalus, 116, 41–92. Walden, J. W. H. (1909), The universities of ancient Greece. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. Wheatley, S. (1988). The politics of philanthropy: Abraham Flexner and medical education. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Foundations, Operating STEFAN TOEPLER1, OLIVIER CHAVAREN2 1 George Mason University, Arlington, VA, USA 2 George Mason University, Paris, France
Introduction Although operating foundations are historically the older form, the surge of grantmaking foundations in the twentieth century – particularly in the United States – resulted in a relative lack of policy and analytic interest in foundations that are not primarily grantmakers. As a result, the American research focus has been on the distributional impact of foundations on the nonprofit sector rather than on the way foundations operate. In Europe, the situation is somewhat different. Medieval hospice foundations survived over the centuries, and transformed into modern hospitals or homes for the elderly, the disabled or the needy; they remain vital parts of the European foundation communities. Thus largely for historical reasons, operating foundations either dominate the foundation sectors in some countries, such as Italy and France, or account for a substantial part of the total foundation universe, as is the case in Germany (Anheier & Toepler, 1999; Schlu¨ter et al., 2001). Likewise in the Islamic world, many religious endowments (wakfs) are akin to operating foundations in that they hold or support mosques, schools (madrassas) or hospitals. While operating foundations maintain a strong and visible presence in European foundation communities and many other parts of the world, they appear to figure less prominently in the Anglo-Saxon world and especially in the United States. This is because in the common law tradition, there is less of a clear-cut distinction between
operating foundation and other (endowed) charitable institutions. This is not to say that there are no operating foundations to speak of. As of 2007, the J. Paul Getty Trust, operating its cluster of museums and research institutes in Los Angeles, had the third largest financial endowment of all US foundations ($10.1 billion) after the Gates ($38.9 billion) and Ford Foundations ($13.8 billion). Another operating foundation, the Casey Family Programs, engaged in child welfare services, also made the list of the 25 largest US foundations with a $2.5 billion endowment (see Table 1). In addition, there are other institutions that are de facto operating foundations although they are not normally considered as such in the United States. This includes the Howard Hughes Medical Institute with a 2007 endowment of close to $19 billion, the governmental Smithsonian Institution, and arguably a variety of colleges and hospitals.
Definition Foundations appear in a wide variety of types, legal forms, and sizes, and pursue a broad range of objectives. This makes it hard to get a firm grasp of the institutional form as a whole. Nevertheless, there are some basic commonalities. Foundations can generally be defined as assetholding entities, usually endowed by a single donor, that are dedicated to charitable or philanthropic causes and have organizational structures to fulfill their objectives. The ways in which goals are pursued allow for a general distinction between operating and grantmaking foundations, the former of which are more actively involved in carrying out the intended activities than the latter. Generally, two types of operating foundations can be distinguished: (a) foundations that operate and maintain specific institutions (such as hospitals, homes, schools, research institutes, museums, and other cultural institutions), and (b) foundations that operate their own programs and projects rather than specific institutions, but do not primarily fund organizations. The Bertelsmann Foundation in Germany or the Kettering and Russell Sage Foundations in the United States are prominent examples of the latter case. While the structural differences between grantmaking foundations and service-providing nonprofits are considerable, operating foundations are much closer in nature to other nonprofits. Specifically, operating foundations combine the economic independence, inherent to the endowed foundation form, with the service-delivery aspects of nonprofit service providers. The main difference to grantmaking foundations is that operating foundations do not rely on external parties to pursue their purposes and thus allow for ‘‘more direct donor participation in specific
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Foundations, Operating. Table 1 Twenty-five largest US foundations, by asset size (2007) Foundation/(state)
Assets
1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (WA)
$38,921,022,000
2. The Ford Foundation (NY)
13,798,807,066
3. J. Paul Getty Trust (CA)
10,133,371,844
4. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (NJ)
10,094,684,000
5. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (CA)
9,284,917,000
6. W. K. Kellogg Foundation (MI)
8,402,996,155
7. Lilly Endowment Inc. (IN)
7,734,860,156
8. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation (CA)
6,350,664,410
9. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (IL)
6,178,196,933
10. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (NY)
6,130,849,710
11. Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (CA)
5,836,161,877
12. The California Endowment (CA)
4,773,842,000
13. The Rockefeller Foundation (NY)
3,810,308,773
14. The Kresge Foundation (MI)
3,329,856,115
15. The Annie E. Casey Foundation (MD)
3,326,105,746
16. The Starr Foundation (NY)
3,300,622,910
17. Carnegie Corporation of New York (NY)
3,137,026,487
18. Tulsa Community Foundation (OK)
3,136,698,010
19. The Duke Endowment (NC)
2,981,737,964
20. Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Inc. (GA)
2,715,991,495
21. The Annenberg Foundation (PA)
2,685,286,093
22. Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (MI)
2,629,297,079
23. John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (FL)
2,618,700,006
24. Casey Family Programs (WA)
2,490,713,955
25. The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Inc. (MD)
2,278,259,681
Source: The Foundation Center, 2008. http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/topfunders/top100assets.html (Retrieved on August 22, 2008)
charitable operations’’ (Rudney, 1987: 195). The key distinction from typical nonprofits relates to the financial independence from other stakeholders (e.g., funders), although financial independence is all but a constitutive characteristic of operating foundations. Operating foundations nevertheless leave the donor a high degree of control. Such control and participation are less likely in other nonprofit service providers, where funding restraints may also lead to compromises in regard to the services offered and shared control between different groups of demand-side stakeholders (Gronbjerg, 1993). Perhaps more importantly, operating foundations not only allow donor participation and control, but also the pursuit of very specific preferences of the donor that might not otherwise be addressed by other nonprofit organizations. In such instances, operating foundations may be the preferred choice, since the success of
grantmaking foundations as financial intermediaries depends on the availability of suitable grantees for carrying out the intended purposes that perhaps may not yet exist. In other instances, operating foundations will be the means of choice for the preservation of memorials or monuments if other support is not available, or for maintaining collections in a specific context. John Paul Getty’s original stipulation to display his collection in his home – as well the famous case of the Barnes Collection, can serve as examples for the latter case.
Historical Background Some observers have argued that the earliest foundations can be traced back to Antiquity and examples include the Library of Alexandria as well as Plato’s Academy (Coons, 1938). Graeco-Roman law, however, did not recognize the foundation as a legal construct. As Plato
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bequeathed his Academy to his nephew, assets needed to be transferred to trustees tasked with fulfilling the donor’s wishes. Operating foundations as legal constructs developed in the fifth and sixth century, as Justinian Law began to allow bequests for religious and charitable purposes (ad pias causam) to establish independent, though Church-supervised institutions (Coing, 1981). This enabled the widespread emergence of hospice foundations, which were typically devoted to perform the biblical Corporal Works of Mercy (feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, cloth the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, visit prisoners, bury the dead). The Islamic wakf foundations developed at about the same time. Monasteries and universities were also established as foundations during the Middle Ages. Joined by research institutes and cultural institutions in foundation form since the nineteenth century (Strachwitz, 2006), the operating foundation continued to evolve, culminating in the modern project-oriented foundation in the twentieth century.
Key Issues Legal Definition in the United States
Outside the United States, the difference between operating and grantmaking foundations is seen as a functional one, depending mainly on the donor’s intentions or the way a foundation sees itself, but has no further legal bearing. US tax law differs considerably in this respect. According to section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, a private foundation is an organization that is organized and operated exclusively for charitable purposes. In the logic of the tax system, section 501(c)(3) is primarily designed for private foundations, although the majority of organizations qualifying under it are public charities. Four categories of exclusions are laid out in section 509 (a). Section 509 (a)(1) defines the main types of excluded organizations. Explicitly mentioned are churches, schools, or colleges, and hospitals or medical research organizations; other publicly supported organizations also fall into this section as well as organizations operated for the benefit of certain state and municipal colleges and universities, and governmental units. All publicly supported organizations, except the specifically mentioned types, must pass a support test, which is satisfied when the organization normally receives at least one third of its total support from governmental units and/or from contributions made by the general public. Section 509 (a)(2) excludes publicly supported organizations that are not only governmentally or publicly supported, but also receive income on their own. In these cases, organizations must receive at least one third of their support from grants,
contributions, and related income, but no more than one third from investment and unrelated business income. Thus, organizations are excluded from private foundation status under section 509(a) that either conduct specific, explicitly mentioned types of activities or that are broadly supported by the general public. Section 509 (a)(3) furthermore excludes organizations that may be endowed by a single donor, family, or corporation. Entities classified here are supporting organizations that have close relationships with 509 (a)(1) or (2) organizations, and are established exclusively for the benefit of, for performing the functions of, or for carrying out the purposes of the latter. 509 (a)(3) organizations must be operated, supervised, or controlled either by or in connection with publicly supported organizations. They give up a significant degree of independence and cannot be controlled by the founder. The fourth category excludes organizations for the purpose of testing products for public safety. The residual (i.e., all 501 (c)(3) organizations not exempted under section 509) are classified as private foundations that have in common the fact that they lack significant public support. For private operating foundations, an additional subcategory was introduced by the Tax Reform Act of 1969. According to the then-introduced definition, operating foundations ‘‘make qualifying distributions directly for the active conduct of their educational, charitable, and religious purposes, as distinct from merely making grants to other organizations for these purposes’’ (Internal Revenue Service, 2008). Although most of the restrictions on private foundations in general also apply to operating foundations, they enjoy some advantages. For instance, donors can deduct charitable contributions at the same percentages as for donations to public charities. Contributions to private grantmaking foundations, in contrast, have considerably lower deduction limits. Grantmaking foundations that contribute to operating foundations face lighter monitoring burdens than they do for contributions to other grantmakers. Furthermore, operating foundations are not subject to the 5% payout requirement. To qualify for the status of operating foundation, a private foundation must pass an income test and another test that can be either an asset, a support, or an endowment test. The basic income test prescribes that qualifying distributions for the active conduct of activities must equal at least 85% of either the adjusted net income or the minimum investment return, whichever is less. Qualifying contributions include administrative expenses as well as assets acquired for the direct execution of the tax-exempt purposes. Each of the additional tests is basically designed to reflect the specific needs of certain
Foundations, Operating
types of purposes. The assets test is intended to apply to museums, libraries, and similar institutions; the support test to special-purpose foundations; and the endowment test to the organizations such as research foundations (for details, see Internal Revenue Service, 2008). Another subcategory, exempt operating foundations, was created in 1984. Exempt operating foundations are – in contrast to other operating and nonoperating foundations – not subject to an excise tax on net investment income. In order to qualify, an organization must already be an operating foundation and have received public support for at least 10 years. In addition, at all times of the year, the governing body has to be broadly representative of the general public. The introduction of the hybrid exempt operating form was intended to ameliorate the disadvantaged position of endowed museums and similar institutions vis-a`-vis hospitals and colleges. Beckwith and DeSirgh (1987: 282) note in this context that the creation of an exempt operating foundation category was a ‘‘significant development in that it signals the inability of Congress to develop or specify a generic definition for institutions such as museums and libraries – as it has done for such entities as churches, universities, and hospitals. Consequently, many of these institutions are classified as private foundations.’’ Problems Arising from the US Tax Classification
The sophisticated system of exclusions leads to a number of complications with regard to differentiating between operating foundations and other public charities. First, since churches, schools and colleges, hospitals, and medical research organizations are explicitly mentioned in section 509 of the Internal Revenue Code, these kinds of institutions receive public charity status automatically, even if they would not normally pass the public support test. Although many (though not all) of these organizations could be regarded as operating foundations from a functional point of view, they are usually not counted as such by virtue of their tax classification. As illustrated by Table 2, for example, if universities with their endowments would be counted as operating foundations, the list of the largest US foundations would be largely dominated by them. The same would be true for hospital endowments. Clearly, from a functional point of view, the boundaries between operating foundations and public charities are somewhat fuzzy and may be blurred even further by discretionary classification decisions at the tax administration level. The salient example is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which, according to a settlement agreement with the Internal Revenue Service, is classified as a medical research organization,
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Foundations, Operating. Table 2 Select US private universities’ endowments (2007)
Institution (state)
2007 Endowment funds ($000)
Harvard University (MA)
34,634,906
Yale University (CT)
22,530,200
Stanford University (CA)
17,164,836
University of Chicago (IL)
6,204,189
Johns Hopkins University (MD)
2,800,377
Source: 2007 NACUBO Endowment Study, ß 2008 National Association of College and University Business Officers
although it is formed by an endowment and held assets of $18.7 billion in 2007. Had the outcome of the ‘‘settlement’’ been different, the HHMI would be the second largest foundation in term of assets – considerably larger than the Ford foundation. Second, the residual character of the classification of foundations contributes to blurry boundaries between operating foundations and other nonprofits in another way. Following the tax definition, foundations are organizations that neither directly engage in specific activities nor receive broad support from government or the general public. Thus failed public charities (i.e., organizations that did not or have not yet succeeded in attracting a sufficient amount of public support) are automatically included in the private foundation category. Since these organizations are normally neither able nor willing to make primarily grants to other organization, they end up classified as operating foundations. Since having significant assets is not a constitutive criterion for a purely technical classification as operating foundation, many US operating foundations are indeed not operating foundations, but ‘‘nonpublic charities,’’ as John Simon once said. It becomes clear at this point that the choice between the legalistic American and a more functional approach to the classification of foundations has a severe impact on the size and understanding of the operating foundation sector. If a functional approach is chosen, the combined assets of grantmaking foundations have to be put in perspective by including public charities with significant endowments in the analysis of operating foundations. Although those ‘‘nonpublic charities’’ currently listed as operating foundations would have to be subtracted, the loss would be offset by adding other endowed institutions. Judging from this point of view, the US operating foundation sector would be considerably larger than it appears to be now. Table 3 shows the accumulated assets of grantmaking and operating foundations, as well as the assets
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Foundations, Operating. Table 3 Number and assets of endowed institutions (assets in millions) Type
Number
%
Nonoperating foundation
Assets
%
67,670
83.81
578,749,355
Operating foundations
4,807
6.0
35,906,295
2.0
Institutions of higher education
1,977
2.4
467,090,494
25.9
Hospitals
4,565
5.7
685,915,030
38.1
Medical research organizations
1,723
2.1
33,406,369
1.9
80,742
100.0
1,801,067,542
100.0
Total
32.1
Sources: NCCS Core File (Public Charities, circa 2006)
of some types of public charities that are specifically excluded by law from the private (operating) foundation category. Although grantmaking foundations still account for more than 83% of all endowed institutions, their combined assets constitute merely one third of the total. This is due to the concentration of assets within the trilogy – institutions of higher education, hospitals, and medical research organizations – which accounts for 65.9% of all assets. This high figure is also the result of the share attributed to the institutions of higher education, which stand for more than a quarter of all combined assets (Table 3). What the US foundation sector would look like if such operating foundations were added to the mix remains anybody’s guess, but chances are that the dominance of the grantmaking foundation would not be as pronounced by far as it appears to be on the surface. However, having an endowment is not a sufficient criterion to decide what is a foundation and what is not. Using the example of private universities again (Table 2), Harvard and Yale universities were founded and originally financed by the governments of their respective Colonies. As such, they lack most of the characteristics of an operating foundation even by European standards. The case is quite different though with other private universities, such as Stanford, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins, which all had a donor (Rockefeller among others in the case of Chicago) who initiated the establishment of the institution with sizable financial commitments. For all practical purposes, they are as much a foundation as are the Getty Trust or the Rockefeller Foundation. Comparative Implications
For comparative purposes, the divergent approaches to the definition of foundations may easily carry the danger of comparing apples to oranges, as long as the crossnational differences in the treatment of operating foundations are not sufficiently accounted for. One way to circumvent the problem is to restrict comparative
analysis to grantmaking foundations, thereby adopting the American view of foundations as financial intermediaries. Following the American implicit assumption that a capital-based endowment (and hence the ability to make grants) is the defining characteristic of a foundation would, in turn, have severe consequences for our understanding of the European foundation field. Nongrantmaking, operating foundations would drop from sight. Using rough data provided by Anheier (2001), this would mean that the foundation communities would shrink by at least 25% in Germany, by 30% in Finland, by 40% in Italy, and by 70% in Ireland. In Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and France, the foundation sector would essentially disappear. Conversely, including operating foundations, that is, endowed institutions, into the analysis also leads to a number of significant problems. In this case, the question arises where to draw the line between true foundations and other organizations that happen to have endowments. Clearly, definitions that emphasize the existence of a single founder/donor as an additional characteristic to differentiate between foundations and other organizations are not on the mark either. While this might help preclude organizations that raised endowments from a large number of smaller donations, that same might be true for organizations that had a founder/donor providing a small initial endowment that grew, however, over time by additions from multiples sources. To the extent that an operating foundation ‘‘essentially acts like a well-endowed nonprofit organization’’ (Schearer, 1997: 307), it might arguably indeed be preferable to adopt the first approach of concentrating on grantmaking foundations, as they embody the more distinctive characteristics of the foundation form. Especially with regard to foundations that basically operate serviceproviding institutions, such as nursing homes, hospitals, or museums, it appears questionable whether there are indeed sufficient differences between these foundations and similar,
Foundations, Operating
endowed institutions in other legal forms to justify a separate analysis. However, as suggested above, there are some conceptual markers that indicate very specific roles for operating foundations, and whether or not these translate into differences in organizational behavior remains a question in need of empirical investigation.
International Perspectives As a consequence of these definitional problems, a firm comparative picture of operating foundations is virtually impossible to obtain, as any data remain restricted to the most basic of statistics, such as the number of operating foundations and their share of all foundations. In Germany, for example, operating foundations account for about 22% of all foundations and mixed foundations (i.e., both operating and grantmaking) for another 17% (Adloff & Velez, 2001). In Italy, purely operating foundations accounted for nearly 40% of all foundations in the late 1990s with another one third of all foundations being mostly operating with some grantmaking programs (Barbetta, 1999). Unfortunately, it remains impossible to further quantify the field in economic terms. This is particularly so since many European foundations do not have financial endowments, but hold physical assets (such as art collections, real estate, facilities) instead that escape easy valuation (Doppstadt et al., 2002). Incidentally, the same holds true in the United States: for example, the Getty Center in Los Angeles (building cost of $1 billion in the early to mid-1990s) and the museum’s art collections are not reflected in the Trust’s endowment of $10 billion.
Future Directions The recent emergence of a number of project-oriented operating foundations primarily in Europe has been viewed as an indication of a new pattern in the establishment of foundations, which, according to some observers, may alter the future composition of the foundation sector (Strachwitz, 1994). Whether or not this will be the case, these projections are based on the assumption that project-oriented operating foundations provide a more suitable organizational form for an ‘‘active’’ pursuit of foundation policies as opposed to the administrativereactive character of traditional grantmakers. In the United States, this coincides with a notable trend among grantmakers to manage programs or projects themselves, although this is still a far cry from the European-style mixed foundation model. Nevertheless, in the light of recurring criticism of the short-term, uninvolved funding practices of US foundations (see Letts et al., 1997; Senator Grassley, 2008), a reevaluation of operating foundations as an alternative philanthropic vehicle might prove useful.
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▶ Bertelsmann Foundation ▶ Common Law and Civil Society ▶ Endowment, Definition and Management of ▶ Foundations, Definitions and History ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Law of ▶ Fugger, Jacob ▶ Getty, J. Paul ▶ Institut Pasteur ▶ Madrassa ▶ Philanthropy, Definitions and History ▶ Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH ▶ Rockefeller, John D., Sr. ▶ Russell Sage Foundation ▶ Tax Deductions for Charitable Contributions in the United States ▶ Wakf
References/Further Readings Adloff, F., & Velez, A. (2001). Operative Stiftungen. Opusculum No. 8. Berlin: Maeceanata Institute. Anheier, H. K. (2001). Foundations in Europe: A comparative perspective. In A. Schlu¨ter, V. Then, & P. Walkenhorst (Eds.), Foundations in Europe. London: Directory of Social Chang. Anheier, H., & Toepler, S. (Eds.) (1991). Private funds, public purpose: Philanthropic foundations in international perspective. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Barbetta, G. P. (1999). Foundations in Italy. In H. K. Anheier & S. Toepler (Eds.), Private funds, public purpose: philanthropic foundations in international perspective. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Beckwith, E., & DeSirgh, J. (1987). Tax law and private foundations. In T. Odendahl (Ed.), America’s wealthy and the future of foundations (pp. 267–293). New York: Foundation Center. Coing, H. (1981). Remarks on the history of foundations and their role in the promotion of learning. Minerva, XIX(2), 271–281. Doppstadt, J., Koss, C., & Toepler, S. (2002). Vermo¨gen von Stiftungen: Bewertung in Deutschland and den USA. Gu¨tersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers. Grassley, C. (2008). Retrieved from http://grassley.senate.gov/news/press_ releases.cfm? selectedMonth=12&selectedYear=2008&selectedIssue= Education Gronbjerg, U. (1993). Understanding nonprofit funding. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Internal Revenue, Service. (2008). Tax exempt status for your organization. Publication 557 (Rev. ed.). Washington, DC: Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service. Letts, C., Ryan, W., & Grosman, A. (1997). Virtuous capital: What foundations can learn from venture capitalists. Harvard Business Review, 2, 36–44. NACUBO. (2008). 2007 Endowment study. Washington, DC: National Association of College and University Business Officers. Rudney, G. (1987). Creation of foundations and their wealth. In T. Odendahl (Ed.), America’s wealthy and the future of foundations. (pp. 179–202). New York: Foundation Center.
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Schearer, S. B. (1997). Building indigenous foundations that support civil society. In L. M. Fox & S. B. Schearer (Eds.), Sustaining civil society: Strategies for resources mobilization (pp. 305–325). Washington, DC: Civicus. Schlu¨ter, A., Then, V., & Walkenhorst, P. (Eds.) (2001). Foundations in Europe: Society, management, law. London: Directory of Social Change. Strachwitz, R. G. (1994). Stiftungen–nutzen, fu¨hren und errichten: Ein Handbuch. Frankfurt: Campus. Strachwitz, R. G. (2006). Supporting culture and education: A german perspective. In K. Prewitt, M. Dogan, S. Heidemann, & S. Toepler (Eds.), The legitimacy of philanthropic foundations (pp. 217–235). New York: Russell Sage. Toepler, S. (1999a). On the problem of defining foundations in a comparative perspective. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 10(2), 215–225. Toepler, S. (1999b). Operating in a grant-making world: Re-assessing the role of operating foundations. In H. Anheier & S. Toepler (Eds.), Private funds, Public purpose: Philanthropic foundations in international perspective (pp. 163–181). New York: Kluwer /Plenum.
Introduction In 2008, there were six so-called political foundations in Germany: Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Hanns Seidel Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Heinrich Bo¨ll Foundation, and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. They serve as important think tanks and providers of civic education programs in Germany. They are also the biggest grantmakers of undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships for German students. Abroad the political foundations are promoting democracy assistance and development aid on behalf of the German government in more than 150 countries. They substantially contribute to the political discourses in German and European politics and are textbook examples for the interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity in the political system of Germany.
Definition
Foundations, Political MATTHEW FREISE Westfa¨lische Wilhelms-Universita¨t Mu¨nster, Mu¨nster, Germany
Each political foundation is organisationally independent, but closely affiliated to one of the political parties represented in the German federal parliament (see Table 1). They are almost fully financed by public subsidies. The amount of theses subsidies is dependent on the parliamentary representation of their respective affiliated party. In contrast to their names, just the Friedrich
Foundations, Political. Table 1 Political foundations in Germany
Foundation
a
Affiliated to
Establishment Legal form Headquarters
Annual Budget (2007)
Percentage of the federal Staff in subsidies for political 2007 foundationsa (abroad)
Friedrich Ebert Foundation
Social Democratic Party (SPD)
1925
Voluntary Bonn association
€111 million
35%
609 (95)
Konrad Adenauer Foundation
Christian Democratic Union (CDU)
1955
Voluntary St. Augustin association
€109 million
31.5%
535 (83)
Friedrich Naumann Foundation
Free Democratic Party (FDP)
1958
Foundation Potsdam
€43 million
11.3%
175 (29)
Hanns Seidel Christian Foundation Social Union (CSU)
1966
Voluntary Munich Association
€45 million
11.3%
270 (31)
Heinrich Bo¨ll Alliance 1990/ Foundation Green Party
1996b
Voluntary Berlin association
€43 million
11.3%
210 (26)
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
1998
Voluntary Berlin association
€14 million
Not yet in allocation formula
75 (5)
The Left
Fixed in 2005, renegotiation likely in 2009 Successor of the Rainbow Foundation (established in 1988) as an umbrella for several green political foundations
b
Foundations, Political
Naumann Foundation is based on the legal form of a foundation. The other political foundations are voluntary associations.
Historical Background As a consequence of the failed first German democracy, the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), and the catastrophe of the subsequent Nazi rule (1933–1945), politicians in the Western part of divided Germany drew the conclusion that the state had to assume the obligation for the civic virtue of its citizens. However, the experience from socialist and national socialist systems forbade the state to be personally in charge for the reeducation and the definition of democratic values. Hence, the Federal Republic of Germany introduced a model of civic education based on a specific interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity which is a dominant principle of state action also in other German policy fields. It refers to the fact that the smallest units (family or civil society groups) are responsible for themselves, and that the state as the larger unit should only intervene when the smaller units are not able to deal with their tasks on their own. At the same time the state has to enable smaller units to execute their task by financing these services and by entrusting them with public tasks. In the course of this principle of state action German politics in the late 1950s decided to foster civic education programs in Germany by entrusting the most influential societal actors to implement the democratic education of the public without exerting influence on the thought values as long these were in harmony with the constitution (Vieregge, 1977). The selected partners of the state were the Protestant and the Catholic Church, the trade unions, the employer’s federations, and the four dominant political parties represented in the German parliament at that time. According to German federal electoral law, parties need at least 5% of the votes to be represented in the parliament. To avoid an illegitimate party financed by the state, the political parties were obliged to assign the task of civic education to affiliated independent organisations which are offering civic education programs for all citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Therefore the Friedrich Ebert Foundation served as a role model. Founded already in 1925 from donations to commemorate the death of Weimar Republic’s president Friedrich Ebert by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) the foundation was dedicated to fight workers’ discrimination by providing national education and scholarships for workers. After the foundation was banned during Nazi rule it was reinstituted in 1947 and totally restructured in
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1954 as an organisation which is affiliated to the Social Democratic Party for the purpose of enhancing civic virtue in Germany. In 1955 and 1958 the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) followed suit and established their own civic education organizations, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (founded as ‘‘Society for Christian Democratic Education Work’’ and renamed for Konrad Adenauer in 1964) and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (renamed as Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in 2007). In 1966, the Christian Social Union (CSU, which is only active in Bavaria and cooperating in a joint parliamentary group with the CDU in the federal parliament) founded the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Munich. For 30 years these four organizations constituted the political foundations which were responsible for civic education programs in Germany. In addition, the two big churches in Germany, the trade union’s Hans Bo¨ckler stiftung, and the employer’s federation (the latter today less important) developed their own civic education programs which are financed mainly by the state. Furthermore, the federal state and the single states (‘‘La¨nder’’) introduced their own agencies for civic education which are taking up topical and historical subjects by issuing scientific publications, by organizing seminars, events, study trips, exhibitions, and competitions, and by providing extension training for journalists. The focus of these agencies lies on imparting neutral political knowledge (on the basis of common democratic values), while the political foundations are also conveying the values of their respective affiliated parties. In the course of the establishment of the Green Party in the 1980s and its first success in the elections of the German federal parliament in 1983 the number of political foundations enlarged. Already in 1988 the Rainbow Foundation (Regenbogenstiftung) served as an umbrella organization for various organizations affiliated to Green social movements. In 1996 the Heinrich Bo¨ll Foundation finally displaced the Rainbow Foundation and was recognized by the Green Party as their political foundation. The youngest of the currently existing six political foundations is the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation which is affiliated to the leftwing party The Left which is a successor of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). It is represented in the Federal Parliament since the reunification of the two German states in 1990. It was recognized by the Party to serve as their political foundation in 1996 and launched its Berlin headquarters in 2000. Over the past 50 years the political foundations have built up a dense network of institutions dedicated
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to the civic education of the German citizens all over the country. They maintain regional offices and academies which are providing seminars, round table discussions and other informational meetings on a broad spectrum of political and societal topics. These events are open in principle for all citizens of Germany and they are widely accepted: In 2007, more than 450,000 citizens participated in the programs of the six political foundations. However, although the membership in a political party must not be required for taking part in the events, the political foundations became important talent hotbeds and think tanks for their respective political parties (Lepszy, 2009). For instance, many seminars target the education of junior politicians. A common seminar offered many times every year by all political foundations in their regional offices and academies instructs new members of city parliaments how to understand municipal budget plans. Typically a member of the CDU will join such a seminar at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation while a member of the Green Party will take part in a seminar hosted by the Heinrich Bo¨ll Foundation. Almost every member of a party represented in the German federal parliament has participated in the programs of his respective political foundation. Furthermore, the political foundations serve today as important think tanks by providing input to the programmatic discourses inside their parties. Many party platform reforms have been influenced by the headquarters of the political foundations which maintain departments on central policies. The political foundations also maintain comprehensive archives documenting the history of the parties and the ideological development in Germany. For instance, the Archive of Social Democracy operated by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn is the largest European specialized library on the development of social democracy and socialism. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation also operates the house of Karl Marx birth in Trier as a museum. Finally, the political foundations serve as important meeting places for their parties by providing conference facilities. For instance the annual Twelfth Day convention of the federal and the Bavarian parliamentary groups of the Christian Social Union (CSU) is traditionally held at the civic academy of the Hanns Seidel Foundation at the small village of Wildbad Kreuth. In a nutshell, the political foundations in Germany are in principle open for everybody, but in practice they are ideologically committed to their respective political party. These strong ties between party and foundation are also represented in the management level of the political foundations. Usually, the boards are staffed with merited
former politicians who enjoy broad acceptance inside their parties. For instance, in 2008, former chairman of the Federal parliamentary group of the Free Democratic Party Wolfgang Gerhard is chairing the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and former prime minister of Thuringia Bernhard Vogel is the chief executive of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. This strong personal interweavement can be observed in all six political foundations. Critics of the model of political foundation have complained many times about the affiliation of the foundations with their parties and described them as illegitimate ‘‘self-service shops for the established political parties’’ (Vieregge, 1977). However, the federal constitutional court made clear in its leading decision in 1986 that the financing of the political foundations is in line with constitutional requirements (Lepszy, 2009). This also holds true for the provision of scholarships for graduate and postgraduate students. Since the late 1960s the six political foundations have provided more than 5,000 scholarships on behalf of the federal government to highly skilled students which are sharing their values. Today, the political foundations are the biggest grantmakers of scholarships in Germany. In contrast to their functions inside Germany the activities of the political foundations abroad are relatively indisputable. In the 1960s the federal government started carrying out its first foreign aid programs. As a successor of the Nazi regime it was clear that the German state did not have the legitimacy to indoctrinate other nations on how to establish democracy. That is why German politics transferred the principle of subsidiarity to its foreign aid policy. The state is in charge of common diplomacy and short-term, not value-based development aid (for instance financial and technical emergency aid after natural disasters), while value-based democracy assistance is delegated to the political foundations. Since the early 1970s the political foundations maintain organizationally independent but on behalf of and financed by the German federal government development aid on the basis of their political values (Mair, 2000). In 2007, they were active with more than 300 project officers in more than 150 countries world wide and developed specific strategies in long-termed democracy promotion. All political foundations spend approx. half of their annual budget for their foreign offices. In 2007, the political foundations were allocated approx. €370 million from the federal budget. The allocation formula of the subsidies is negotiated by the political foundations themselves. They communicate it to the parliamentary budget committee which usually accepts it. As a benchmark they refer to the election results of their
Foundations, Political
political parties of the past four federal elections. The outcome of this is that the political foundations are dependent on the results of their parties and in strong ideological competition. Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Friedrich Ebert Foundation as the political foundations of the two leading German parties currently receive each approx. one third of the public subsidies while each of the other foundations get an eighth (see Table 1). The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is not yet included in this allocation formula and receives a special grant from the federal budget. In the course of the upcoming budget negotiations it will be included in this formula. They will likely take place after the next federal elections in autumn 2009. Regarding their tasks all political foundations are organizationally structured in four central departments which are relatively independent from each other: ideological think tank, civic education, international development cooperation, and scholarship organization (Lepszy, 2009).
Key Issues The political foundations have drafted their self-conception and have formulated their position in 1999. According to this, their aims are: ● To achieve interest among citizens for political questions as well as to support and promote their political involvement through civic education. ● To develop essentials of political activity as well as to promote dialog and the transfer of knowledge between research, politics, the state and the economy through the support of the sciences and of political research and consultancy. ● To research the history of the political parties and the political and social movements. ● To promote the academic education and qualification of talented young people through granting scholarships and organizing tutoring programs. ● To promote the arts and culture through events, scholarships, and the maintenance of works of art. ● To support European integration and contribute to the understanding between nations through organizing information and international meetings. ● To offer help in development and contribute to the creation of democratic, free, and rule of law structures that serve human and civil rights through programs and projects.
International Perspectives In international comparison, the German model of development aid and democracy promotion is unique. On behalf of the state the political foundations provide
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democracy assistance programs by promoting human rights, self-determination, rule of law, democratic participation, minority rights and peaceful civil society activism. Special emphasis is laid on long-termed elite programs. Usually the project officers carry out a comprehensive monitoring of the political and societal landscape for identifying promising persons who could function as future democratic political leaders. Those persons are provided for instance with scholarships at German universities or internships in the German administrative system or in German companies. In many countries the political foundations have successfully attended the democratic transition process by educating the later decision makers. For instance the Friedrich Ebert Foundation trained emerging Portuguese social democrat politicians during the Salazar dictatorship. The Portuguese Social Democratic Party was founded in an academy of the foundation in the city of Bad Mu¨nstereifel. The political foundations celebrated similar success during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s by training democratic elites in Greece, Spain, Latin America and East Central Europe. Another focus of the democracy promotion is laid on the capacity building of civil society groups, church related organizations, political parties and political youth organizations. While the political foundations are in strong ideological competition in Germany, they closely cooperate abroad and carry out joint programs often since they are all sharing similar democratic values based on the German model of a strong welfare state with subsidiarian elements. Nevertheless, every political foundation has special target groups they are focussing on in regard to the values of their own ideology. Friedrich Ebert Foundation traditionally supports trade unions, while Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Hanns Seidel Foundation make grants to Christian movements and employer’s associations. Friedrich Naumann Foundation concentrates on associations of small and medium sized entrepreneurs. Heinrich Bo¨ll Foundation is focussing on ecological movements, but also on grassroots associations, in particular on women’s associations and human rights groups. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation supports foremost social movements, women’s associations and associations promoting democratic socialism. All six foundations are also strongly cooperating with universities, other scientific institutions and the free media. Therefore the approx. 300 project officers of the foundations employ a huge number of local employees. For the German government this sharing of foreign aid programs is of great advantage, since it allows it to concentrate on pure diplomacy without intervening in the domestic affairs of the target countries. All value-based
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work is financed but delegated to the political foundations. In turn, the political foundations declare themselves as civil society actors which are independent from the state. This allows them to act more courageously than a government could ever do since it is bound to the restrictions of diplomacy. However, the political foundations have been critically observed by the authorities of their target countries which sometimes constrict their activities. For instance, Russia disbarred the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in 2006 after it organized several seminars for the opposition movement. In 2008, the Chinese government held the foundation responsible for the worldwide anti-Chinese protests and the violation of the Olympic torch relay.
Future Directions Since the German party system is currently in a process of change since the left-wing party ‘‘The Left’’ has established itself in the German parliament, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation will likely be able to expand its national and international activities in the upcoming years. After the federal elections in 2009 the allocation formula for public subsidies will be changed. Hence, the public grants for the other political foundations will probably decline. A self declared great challenge for the political foundations for international activities will be the development of strategies to fight the negative aspects of globalization and international terrorism.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Friedrich Ebert Stiftung ▶ Friedrich Naumann Stiftung ▶ Hanns Seidel Stiftung ▶ Heinrich Bo¨ell Stiftung ▶ Konrad Adenauer Stiftung ▶ Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung ▶ Subsidiarity ▶ Think Tanks
References/Further Readings Annual Reports 2007 of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (available at www.kas.de), Friedrich Ebert Foundation (www.fes.de), Hanns Seidel Foundation (www.hss.de), Friedrich Naumann Foundation (www.freiheit.org), Heinrich Bo¨ll Foundation (www.boell.de), Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (www.rosalux.de). Konrad Adenauer Foundation et al. (1999). Joint declaration on the public financing of political foundations. Bonn: Self-published. Lepszy, N. (2009). Politische Stiftungen. In U. Andersen & W. Woyke (Eds.), Handwo¨rterbuch des politischen Systems der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (pp. 571–577). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.
Mair, S. (2000). Germany’s Stiftungen und Democracy Assistance: Comparative advantages, new challenges. In P. Burnell (Ed.), Democracy assistance. International co-operation for democratization (pp. 128–149). London: Frank Cass. Vieregge, H. V. (1997). Parteistiftungen. Zur Rolle der Konrad-Adenauer-, Friedrich-Ebert-. Friedrich-Naumann- und Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung im politischen System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Foundations, Public Law or Government E´VA KUTI Budapest School of Management, Budapest, Hungary
Introduction Although their visibility is very limited, government foundations (sometimes existing under public law, and in many other cases, taking the form of private foundations) are present in the overwhelming majority of the national nonprofit sectors. The otherwise extremely rich international literature pays practically no attention to these special kinds of foundations. If at all they get a mention, in the research papers focusing on foundation issues, this is usually not more than a ‘‘footnote style’’ remark on their existence and specificities. However, a thoroughgoing search for these kinds of remarks in the collections of comparative studies (Salamon, 1997; Anheier & Toepler, 1999; Schlu¨ter et al., 2001; Zimmer & Priller, 2004; Anheier & Leat, 2006; Anheier & Daly, 2007) results in the discovery of a whole set of various government-initiated foundations. They are established by kings, parliaments, and central and local governments; they can be both grant-making and operating foundations; their legal status can be either private or public law entity. The rationale for establishing these government foundations includes a wish to decentralize governance, to accelerate privatization, to enable partnership with private capital, to guarantee the independence of specific policy areas, and to allow the participation of experts and civil society representatives in decision making.
Definition Foundations that exist under public law are mainly used by public authorities in order to organize public interest activities and to make redistribution decisions outside their own bureaucracy. Only the public authorities can be the official founders; private individuals do not have a
Foundations, Public Law or Government
right to establish public law foundations. If they still want to use this legal form, they have to seek the consent of authorities in order to get their intentions through the registration process. The public law foundations are generally provided with some endowment by their founders and/or receive regular support in the form of annual budget grants or some guaranteed income. They are kept financially accountable by relevant public authorities, while their professional activities can be more or less independent. The government nominees are not necessarily in a dominant position in their boards. The founding authorities can initiate the dissolution of a public law foundation if they think its function can be more efficiently fulfilled by another type of organization. The property of the dissolved public law foundation generally reverts to its founder. Apart from these special provisions, the basic legal regulation of private foundations applies to public law foundations as well. The legal form of public law foundations is available only in some Roman law countries, while the public authorities may have similar decentralization intentions everywhere. As a consequence, the vast majority of government-created foundations take the form of private foundations. As far as their objectives, activities, establishment, and financing mechanisms are concerned, these government foundations are not very different from the public law foundations. The only important difference is that, because of their private foundation status, they are not subjected to direct government control. This, theoretically unlimited, independence of government-created private foundations, together with the public origin of their funding, raises the issue of accountability.
Key Issues The public accountability of government-created private foundations (with endowments originating from the state budget) is rather problematic. Once established, such foundations become independent and operate on the same principles as any other private foundations. Thus, they take over certain public tasks and money without becoming accountable to the public. Unlike government agencies, market firms, and voluntary associations, private foundations have no equivalent set of stakeholders that would introduce a system of checks and balances. Thus, the establishment of government foundations under private law and their involvement in the provision of public services essentially eliminate democratic control over some originally government-conducted activities and circumvent legal procedures provided by constitutional and administrative law to control improper conduct of governmental affairs.
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The complexity of this problem has its origins in two conflicting principles. On the one hand, as third sector institutions, foundations have the right to be independent and free from state scrutiny. This is the very reason of their existence. If the public authorities do not want to let them decide on the use of public money, government foundations should not be created. On the other hand, foundations enjoying public support are supposed to be accountable to the public; and democratic governments, responsible to the people who elect them, are obliged to enforce the accountability requirements. Once this dilemma is highlighted (and this happens sooner or later in every country) by foundation scandals and explored by policy analysts, a wide variety of ideas also emerge. Different actors of the policy community tend to suggest different solutions. The most extreme among them is the proposition of minimizing (or simply abolishing) the relations between the government and the foundation universe. The majority of the experts are looking for a sophisticated system of regulations, while several others suggest institutional solutions. The latter accept that foundations play several different roles in economy and society and try to find separate legal forms for those, which take over government tasks. These are the foundations that assist the government in the income redistribution, in implementing policies, or in delivering services in the fields (e.g., education, health, social care, etc.) in which the state is clearly responsible for meeting at least basic citizens’ needs. If they are established in a specific legal form (such as the public law foundation) reserved for government foundations, their administrative obligations and public scrutiny can also be specific, obviously much stricter than those of the private foundations. While the administrative and accountability implications of drawing a clear dividing line between government and private foundations are undoubtedly advantageous, some other effects may be dangerous. If the government has its own foundations, these are likely to become a privileged part of the foundation sector, to the detriment of their private counterparts. Their stronger economic position can easily be translated into more lobby power and more political influence. (The rapid growth of their economic weight and the emergence of some special tax advantages available only for public law foundations in some countries seem to prove that these concerns are quite plausible.)
International Perspectives The public law foundation, which is the most clearly defined form of government foundations, can only exist in the ‘‘civil law’’ countries in which organizational forms
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and the related rights and obligations are spelled out in explicit legal codes (van der Ploeg, 1995). However, the distinction between the private and government foundations can also be detected in the legal system of the ‘‘common law’’ countries. For example, the law distinguishes two species of foundations in the UK. One is the ‘‘fundatio incipiens,’’ which may be created by a royal charter, by an act of parliament, or by a private individual acting under Royal license; the other is the ‘‘fundatio percipiens,’’ or endowment, which is created by a gift made by a private founder. Whether or not they have a specific legal status, and whether or not they are regarded as a separate part of the nonprofit sector, the government foundations are present in most of the developed countries though the intensity of this presence is very uneven. While public law foundations represent an economically important part of the foundation sector in Germany and in some Eastern European countries, local authorities are forbidden to set up foundations in France. (This perfectly fits the French tradition of distrust toward foundations: Even private foundations were formerly obliged to give a place to a state official on their board of directors. His/her role was to check the legality of the foundations’ activities. Since 2003, the role of this ‘‘government commissioner’’ has been changed to ‘‘observer’’.) The roles played by government foundations in different countries are also varied. The state-established foundations can be an important vehicle of the privatization of public service delivery; they may take a growing part in the distribution of public funds; and they can also contribute to the development of public–private partnership. As a part of the transition to democracy and market economy, a special kind of privatization has occurred in Central and Eastern Europe for the last 2 decades. The failure of the state-dominated welfare system (lack of appropriate financing and flexibility, poor efficiency, unequal and unjust distribution of the welfare services, etc.) made modernization and restructuring inevitable. The need for a new partnership between public and private service providers was quite obvious, but the potential social entrepreneurs did not have sufficient money to invest. Thus, the development of the nonprofit service provision depended heavily on government policy, including regulation, direct and indirect support, and contracting-out arrangements. Facing this challenge and recognizing the citizens’ expectations, the new democratic governments took the lead. Thousands of government foundations were created by them in order to provide welfare services and many state-run institutions were
converted into a foundation form in the countries of the former Soviet block (Zimmer & Priller, 2004). Similar tendencies can also be identified in Western Europe where the roles of government and nonprofit organizations have to be redefined in the context of the reform enforced by the crisis of the welfare state (Anheier & Kendall, 2001). Though the government use of the foundation form for privatization purposes is less frequent here than in the transition countries, the practice still exists. Examples can be quoted from countries as different as Italy and Sweden. Hundreds of specific groups of publicly controlled, local-level welfare institutions, museums, and other cultural institutions (including La Scala Opera House of Milan) are transformed into a foundation form in Italy. Lots of ‘‘appropriation foundations’’ are set up by public sector bodies in Sweden; two public sector universities have also been turned into appropriation foundations. While the use of the foundation form as a vehicle of privatization seems to be much more popular in the transition countries than in the more developed part of the world, the government foundations’ role in the distribution of public grants is very similar indeed. These foundations established, endowed, and/or regularly supported by public authorities are supposed to develop a less centralized and more participatory way of distributing public grants, to let stakeholders have a voice in the redistribution process. The social control over the redistribution process is guaranteed by the structure of the boards. They usually consist of experts and representatives of the target fields (e.g., culture, research, employment, etc.). They are expected to assure that the main flows of redistribution are consistent with the policy objectives and the actual grant-making procedure still remains free from politicization. This technique of the distribution of public grants is not new at all. Its early predecessor is probably the AngloSaxon arts council model. The arts councils were originally established in order to remove arts policy, or at least direct support of the arts, from the normal government agenda, in the hope of ‘‘insulating’’ the culture from politics. The number of fields (research, innovation, local and community development, social inclusion, environment, etc.), where such an ‘‘insulation’’ seems to be desirable has increased a lot for the last decades. When the government decides to establish a foundation (e.g., the Polish Science Foundation in Poland, the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, the National Employment Foundation in Hungary, the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs in the UK, etc.) and let it disperse the public funds as it sees fit, the objective is to remove the
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details of allocation and the responsibility for the results of particular projects from the sphere of partisan politics. Thereby, the government allows judgment to be made by actors who are closer to the actual target field and probably have more and more relevant information on the applicants and their planned projects. Of course, there are some limits to the insulation from politics, which are possible with any government-financed foundations, especially if they do not have a large endowment and receive the funds to be distributed on a periodic basis. This dependence is somewhat weaker in the case of the Lottery-resourced foundations of the Netherlands, Belgium, and the UK, which benefit from an annual allowance given by their respective National Lotteries. (In this context, it is also worth mentioning the rather extreme example of the Czech Republic, where the government distributed some parts of its privatization income among private foundations. Thus, more than 50% of the total Czech foundation endowments were donated by the state in this framework without creating any further dependence.) The degree of autonomy can also be decreased by the government’s entitlement to nominate board members. Nevertheless, the use of the government foundations is likely to minimize the intrusion of politicians and bureaucrats in the distribution process and maximize the influence of other kinds of stakeholders.
Future Directions As Anheier and Daly (2007, p. 28) pointed out, ‘‘the complementarity role of foundations is similar to the subsidiarity principle, which established a division of labor between public and private institutions. It stipulates that decisions should always be taken at the lowest possible level or closest to where they will have their effect.’’ In theory, the government foundations should be the very embodiment of the subsidiarity principle. If this is so, is simply not known. The operation of these foundations is neither explored nor documented enough. They are treated (and usually neglected) as borderline cases. The scope of the research projects is generally limited to the private foundations, which meet all criteria of the nonprofit definition, including the one on the nongovernmental character of these organizations. To develop a clear picture of the government foundations, their types, number, economic importance, and to measure the efficiency and impacts of their various activities represent a major challenge. A lot of further work, a whole series of both quantitative and qualitative analyses, would be necessary in order to answer even the basic questions about the contribution of government foundations to the
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solution of public problems. Cross-national studies seem to be especially important in order to understand the nature of relationships between government foundations and their private and public partners in countries with different traditions of the government–nonprofit cooperation.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Civil Law and Civil Society ▶ Common Law and Civil Society ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ GONGOs ▶ Government–Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ Law, Foundations ▶ Organizational Forms and Development ▶ QuANGOs ▶ Subsidiarity
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. K., & Daly S. (Eds.) (2007). The politics of foundations. A comparative analysis. London/New York: Routledge. Anheier, H. K., & Kendall, J. (Eds.) (2001). Third sector policy at the crossroads. An international nonprofit analysis. London/New York: Routledge. Anheier, H. K., & Leat, D. (2006). Creative philanthropy: Towards a new philanthropy for the 21st century. London/New York: Routledge. Anheier, H. K., & Toepler, S. (Eds.) (1999). Private funds and public purpose: Philanthropic foundations in international perspective. New York: Plenum. Salamon, L. M. (Ed.) (1997). The international guide to nonprofit law. New York/Chichester/Weinheim/Brisbane/Singapore/Toronto: Wiley. Schlu¨ter, A., Then, V., & Walkenhorst, P. (Eds.) (2001). Foundations in Europe. London: Directory of Social Change. van der Ploeg, T. J. (1995). Supervisory powers relating to foundations: a comparative analysis of foundation law. Voluntas, 6(3), 255–274. Zimmer, A., & Priller, E. (Eds.) (2004). Future of civil society. Making Central European nonprofit organizations work. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu¨r Sozialwissenshaften.
Fourier, Charles STEVE VAN ECK
Basic Biographical Information The French utopian philosopher, Charles Fourier, was born Franois Marie Charles Fourier on 7 April, 1773 in Besancon, France, to the son of a wealthy cloth merchant to whom he served as an apprentice from the age of six. As
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the sole surviving son, it was in accordance with his father’s will that Fourier claim the head of the family cloth firm and enter commercial life upon his father’s death, or he would have to forfeit a substantial inheritance. Fourier found the commercial life unsatisfying, even repugnant, nonetheless Fourier began his career as a clerk, traveling salesman, and unlicensed broker at age 20, upon his father’s death. Although Fourier held little hope that his writings would be published or produce an income, Fourier wrote prolifically throughout his career in the cloth trade.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Fourier’s writing focused on the development of an imagined social economy where the quest for personal gratification would necessarily advance the state of civil society. In this imagined world, the friction between labor and desire would become extinct through the formation and mechanisms of interest-based associations. These associations would encompass a balanced diversity of shared interests and personal characteristics, and a contrast of sexes, ages, incomes, and educations. Fourier’s utopian visions inspired writers on the social economy, civil society, and labor movements including Karl Marx and other utopian visionaries such as Robert Owen and Henri Saint-Simon. Besides other visionaries, Fourier inspired applications of his ideal society model as an associational community, which he termed the ‘‘phalanx.’’ In the early 1830s Fourier drew a substantial following, which led to Fourierist movements in France, Romania, and the United States. In the United States and France, several phalanxes were established between 1843 and 1858, which had on average a life span of 2–5 years. As a social thinker, Fourier served as an intellectual bridge between the Enlightenment Era’s rationality and the instinctual sentiments of the Romantic age. He imagined communities of strong associations that bound intentional communities. He saw these intentional communities as a means to move beyond the ‘‘jailhouse of commerce’’ and into a social economy rooted in communal associations. Fourier died alone in a rented room in Paris. He was buried in Montmartre cemetery before many of his ideals would be tested in the formation of small phalanx communities.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Labor Movements/Labour Unions ▶ Owen, Robert ▶ Social Economy ▶ Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy
References/Further Readings Fourier, C. (1971). Design for Utopia; selected writings of Charles Fourier. 10. New York: Schocken Books. Fourier, C., & Franklin, J. (1901). Selections from the works of Fourier. London: S. Sonnenschein & Co. Fourier, C., Morell, J. R., & Doherty, H. (1968). The passions of the human soul and their influence on society and civilization. Reprints of economic classics. New York: A.M. Kelley.
Freedom House CLAUDIA BODE-HARLASS
Address of Organization 1301 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 6 Washington, DC 20036 USA www.freedomhouse.org
Introduction Freedom House describes itself as being a ‘‘clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world’’, working to advance the ‘‘expansion of political and economic freedoms’’ worldwide.
Brief History Freedom House was founded in 1941 with the original aim of encouraging popular support for America’s entry into the Second World War. The organization was from its onset convinced that the only force against totalitarian ideologies was the spread of democracy around the world. During the last 60 years, Freedom House was among other things concerned with military juntas in Latin America, the Apartheid regime in South Africa and Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. From 1995 until 2006 the organization was also home to the Centre for Religious Freedom reflecting the widespread agenda of Freedom House. Especially in the aftermath of the terror attacks in New York and Washington, DC in September 2001 and the following global ‘‘war on terror,’’ Freedom House has been criticized for being a propaganda machine of the US government and international right wing forces because it had defended the war in Iraq arguing that it would help to democratize the Middle East.
Mission The basic idea on which Freedom House is built is that freedom is only possible in political systems that are
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democratic and based on the rule of law where governments are accountable to their citizens. Therefore, the organization supports civil society initiatives and democratic reformers in countries where freedom is either partially or totally denied. At the same time as acting as a ‘‘proponent of democratic values,’’ Freedom House is opposing dictatorships from either side of the political spectrum and challenges ideas and forces that are denying all people their right to be free. In this sense, the organization puts a special emphasis on the rights of women as well as on minority groups.
Activities The activities of Freedom House are divided into advocacy, action, and analysis. In its advocacy work, the organization is focusing on introducing higher standards in international bodies dealing with human rights issues as well as on informing politicians and decision makers of the human rights situation and the degree of freedom in countries around the world. Freedom House is working directly with the US government, briefing the Congress as well as the Senate on a variety of human rights issues, and is also present in international forums. Besides, the organization is widely known for its annual reports, especially for its analysis ‘‘Freedom of the World.’’ Published every year since 1972 this report offers a ranking of every country in the world regarding the degree of freedom existing there. But Freedom House is also publishing a number of other reports focusing on certain areas of interest like press freedom, issues of governance, corruption, and transparency as well as women and minorities. Its actions range from holding conferences and trainings for individuals and groups promoting democracy and human rights to directly funding such organizations in countries in transition.
Structure and Governance Freedom House is governed by a Board of Trustees comprising business and labor leaders as well as former government officials, scholars, and journalists. The organization’s headquarters is based in Washington while a second US-office is based in New York. In addition, Freedom House has a European office based in Hungary and several others in countries like Lebanon, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and South Africa.
Funding While Freedom House receives some funding from individuals and private foundations, its main source of donor money is provided by the US government through its Agency for International Development (USAID) and the
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State. Other governments, such as for example Department of the Netherlands and Hungary, are also among the donors of Freedom House as is the European Commission with its European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights. In 2006 the total budget of the organization was about US$26 million.
Accomplishments Besides its annual report ‘‘Freedom in the World’’ being an important source of information for scholars, journalists, and interested people alike, Freedom House was the founder of the Community of Democracies, an alliance that promotes a greater voice for democracy at international forums like the United Nations. Furthermore, the organization played a leading role in building the Coalition for Southern Sudan that helped pave the way to the peace agreement in the region. Freedom House is also supportive of a number of democratizing initiatives all around the world.
Cross-References ▶ Advocacy ▶ Good Governance ▶ Human Rights
References/Further Readings Freedom House. (2009, January). Freedom in the world 2009. Setbacks and resilience. Washington, DC. Freedom House. (2005, October). Women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa. Washington, DC.
Freedom of Association KARLA SIMON Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA
Introduction The freedom of association is protected by both international and regional human rights instruments. As the discussion below will illustrate, the protection of this important freedom is enshrined in national constitutions as well. In some countries (e.g., the United States), even though the Constitution does not specifically protect the freedom of association in the First Amendment, protection has been inferred in the case law (NAACP v. Button).
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Definition Freedom of association means the freedom to associate but also the freedom not to associate. The freedom of association includes the right to associate informally. It also implies the right to form legally registered (incorporated) organizations, such as associations, foundations, and not-for-profit corporations (civil society organizations or CSOs).
Historical Background Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (Universal Declaration) states that ‘‘[e]veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.’’ Article 20 protects the right of individuals to ‘‘peaceful assembly and association.’’ Although the Universal Declaration did not have binding effect when it was unanimously adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, it has come to have normative force. Many of the provisions of the Universal Declaration have acquired binding legal status by being included in subsequent multilateral treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). In addition, regional systems for protection of the freedoms enshrined in the Universal Declaration are relevant to consider. These include: the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention), the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter), the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS Charter), the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (American Declaration), the American Convention on Human Rights (American Convention), and the Arab Charter on Human Rights (Arab Charter). (With regard to the last of these, the right is restricted to citizens; a restriction to citizens would appear to be inconsistent with Human Rights Committee General Comment 15, 1994 – ‘‘[a]liens receive the benefit of the right of peaceful assembly and of freedom of association.’’) The discussion here focuses on the ICCPR, as the most widely subscribed binding human rights instrument of relevance, and the European Convention, as the instrument with the best developed jurisprudence regarding the freedom of association. It is also important to note that the freedom of association is closely entwined with the rights to freedom of expression and assembly (and also freedom of religion), and the case law in Europe so demonstrates. The ICCPR creates direct binding obligations for the 161 countries that are states parties to it. Articles 19, 21, and 22 of the ICCPR guarantee the rights of expression, peaceful assembly, and association, respectively. By its
terms, the ICCPR not only explicitly guarantees rights enjoyed by individuals, but also requires States Party to adopt laws or other measures assuring protection for these freedoms. As a result, many countries have provisions protecting the freedom of association and related freedoms in their Constitutions. The ICCPR was strengthened by the adoption in1966 and the entry into force in 1976 of the First Optional Protocol (Optional Protocol). The Optional Protocol allows the Human Rights Committee established under the ICCPR to receive and consider communications from individuals who allege that their rights guaranteed by the ICCPR have been violated. The Optional Protocol has 111 signatories, but its complaint procedures, by being optional, are not as effective as the complaint procedures under the European Convention and the American Convention. The European Convention entered into force in 1953 and has been ratified by all 44 states that are members of the Council of Europe and is legally binding on those states that are parties to it. The European Convention enshrines the rights of freedom of expression (Article 10), association (Article 11), and peaceful assembly (Article 11). Article 25 of the European Convention establishes a complaint procedure that permits petitions addressed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from ‘‘any person, nongovernmental organization or group of individuals claiming to be the victim of a violation.’’ Accordingly, legal persons such as formal CSOs, individuals, and even informal CSOs may file complaints in the European Court for violations of rights protected by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention. In the American system for the protection of human rights, the situation is little more complex. The OAS Charter, which established the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Inter-American Commission), does not specifically protect any rights, but those are affirmed in the contemporaneous American Declaration, of which Article IV (expression), Article XXI (assembly), and Article XXII (association) are most relevant here. Under the American Convention on Human Rights, the rights to freedom of expression (Article 13), peaceful assembly (Article 15), and association (Article 16) are also protected, and it is this document that sets up the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court). Individuals, groups or persons, and nongovernmental entities ‘‘legally recognized in one of member states of the OAS’’ are permitted to submit petitions to the Inter-American Commission ‘‘containing denunciations or complaints’’ with regard to alleged violations of the
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Convention. Because the Commission is a treaty body of the OAS Charter, it therefore does not matter whether a state is a party to the Convention in order for the Commission to have jurisdiction over the petition. On the other hand, the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court is limited to those states that are parties to the American Convention. Finally, it must be noted that only the Commission can bring a case to the Inter-American Court. Although the freedom of association is protected under these instruments, the protection is not absolute. All three of the instruments provide for limitations on the exercise of the freedoms of association, assembly, and expression, and they do so in general by restricting what states can do to constrain their exercise. Using language that is virtually identical to or has the same meaning as the regional instruments, the ICCPR places curbs on state interferences with the rights – they must be ‘‘prescribed by law and . . . necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public order (order public), the protection of public health and morals or the protection of rights and freedoms of others.’’ The language regarding the freedom of expression is a bit different and includes reputational injuries as well as limitations on advocacy of racial hatred, etc. In the African Charter, Article 10 states the following: ‘‘(1) Every individual shall have the right to free association provided that he abides by the law. (2) Subject to the obligation of solidarity provided for in 29 no one may be compelled to join an association.’’ This regional instrument thus provides a smaller degree of protection than the ones mentioned heretofore because the limitation ‘‘provided that he abides by law,’’ grants lesser protections than the limitations in the ICCPR and the European and American Conventions. Nevertheless, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) has stated explicitly that ‘‘[i]n regulating the use of this right, the competent authorities should not enact provisions which would limit the exercise of this freedom’’ (ACHPR /Res.5(XI) 92: Resolution on the Right to Freedom of Association (1992)). The African Charter is also not as clear on the extent to which non state parties can bring a communication to the attention of the Commission, though it seems to be possible for individuals to do so (Article 55).
Key Issues Not only does the freedom of association protect the right to associate, it also includes the freedom not to associate. This principle is confirmed in Africa not only by the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, but also by case law in various countries, such as Ghana
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and Nigeria, where mandatory membership in groups has been held to violate both constitutional and regional human rights norms. In the case of Agbai v. Okogbue in Nigeria, the Supreme Court held that the provision of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of association also embraces the notion of freedom of non-association. As such, the customary law ‘‘age groups’’ could not be deemed mandatory in modern day jurisprudence (Iheme, 2002). In the ‘‘CIBA case,’’ a similar result was reached by the Ghanaian Supreme Court, which struck down legislation creating a Council of Independent Business Associations (CIBA), in which membership was mandated by law. The Supreme Court held that the Constitution of Ghana would forbid mandatory membership in an association of this type, even if the members agreed to the legislation (New Patriotic Party v. Att’y Gen’l, Supreme Court of Ghana, 1997). In some instances, however, joining an association, e.g., to which a state has delegated regulatory obligations, is permitted to be mandatory (Chassagnou case, 1999). This rule, from a case in the European Court of Justice, also appears to be accepted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Advisory Opinion 585). The freedom of non-association has been protected in the United States only where organizations have what are called ‘‘expressive’’ associational rights (Rotary Int’l v. Rotary Club of Duarte, 1987). Thus, an organization cannot exclude women simply because of their gender. On the other hand where membership of certain persons, e.g., avowed homosexuals, would prevent the organization from sending its preferred message, then the organization has a protected freedom to exclude them (Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 2000).
International Perspectives Recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights make it clear that there is a right protected by international law to establish a formal CSO and that any such organization, once formed, enjoys the full protection of the European Convention from any interference or restriction by the state. These decisions are discussed in the paragraphs that follow. In the landmark 1998 decision in Sidiropoulos and Others v. Greece, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously held that the refusal by Greek courts to establish a Macedonian cultural association was an interference with the applicants’ exercise of their right to freedom of association. The Court unequivocally stated that ‘‘the right to form an association is an inherent part’’ of the right to freedom of association. The Court went on
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to say, ‘‘[t]hat citizens should be able to form a legal entity in order to act collectively in a field of mutual interest is one of the most important aspects of the right to freedom of association, without which the right would be deprived of any meaning.’’ Of equal importance is another 1998 decision in United Communist Party of Turkey and Others v. Turkey, holding that the action by the government of Turkey to dissolve the United Communist Party of Turkey (UCP) was a violation of Article 11 of the European Convention. The Court stated that ‘‘the Convention was designed to maintain and promote the ideals and values of a democratic society.’’ Since ‘‘political parties make an irreplaceable contribution to political debate, which is at the very core of the concept of a democratic society,’’ they can be shut down only for ‘‘convincing and compelling reasons.’’ Furthermore, political parties are essential to the protection of the freedom of speech, guaranteed in Article 10 of the European Convention. A third significant decision was rendered in 1999 in ¨ ZDEP) v. Turkey. This Freedom and Democracy Party (O decision further clarifies the importance of the freedom of association, linking it specifically to the freedom of expression in Article 10 of the European Convention. In the ¨ ZDEP case, the government of Turkey had dissolved a O political party on the grounds that its ‘‘program was apt to undermine the territorial integrity of the State and the unity of the nation.’’ The Court found that action by the state to be ‘‘radical,’’ noting that the party was ‘‘penalized solely for exercising its freedom of expression’’ because it was dissolved before it began any activities. ¨ ZDEP cases also held that The Court in the UCP and O the freedom of association would be largely theoretical and illusory if it were limited to the founding of an association, since the government could immediately disband it. ‘‘It follows that the protection afforded by Article 11 lasts for an association’s entire life and that dissolution of an association by a country’s authorities must accordingly satisfy the requirements of paragraph 2 of that provision.’’ ¨ ZDEP cases provide The Sidiropoulos, UCP, and O strong international law protection for the right to establish legally recognized CSOs and the right of those CSOs to operate with a minimum of limitations and restrictions. They also articulate very clear rules limiting the circumstances in which the freedom of association can be interfered with or restricted. These decisions under the European Convention have global significance, for, as indicated earlier, Article 11 of the European Convention, protecting freedom of association, is virtually identical to Article 22 of the ICCPR and Article 16 of the American Convention. In addition, the circumstances in which
interferences with the freedom of association are permitted are limited in a similar manner in the three instruments. In construing the permitted interference language in all three cases, the European Court of Human Rights emphasized that such interferences are permitted only under very limited circumstances. Application of the exceptions (situations in which interferences are permitted) must be ‘‘construed strictly,’’ only ‘‘convincing and compelling’’ reasons can justify restrictions, any restrictions must be ‘‘proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued,’’ and that there must be ‘‘relevant and sufficient’’ evidence for ‘‘decisions based on an acceptable assessment of the relevant facts’’ before a restriction can be justified. In none of the cases was an interference permitted. In Refah Partisi and Others v. Turkey, on the other hand the ECtHR held, over a strong dissent of three judges, that it was not a violation of the right to freedom of association under Article 11 of the European Convention for Turkey to dissolve a political party that had a long-term policy of setting up a regime based on Sharia (Islamic) law within the framework of a plurality of legal systems and that did not exclude recourse to force in order to implement its policy and keep the system it envisaged in place. In its opinion, the Court did not back away from any of the principles it had enunciated in its prior cases, though the evidence and reasoning relied upon by the Court have proven controversial. More recent decisions of the ECtHR confirm the basic principles of Sidiropolous and UCP, distinguishing Refah on its facts. These include United Macedonian Organization Ilinden-Pirin. In addition to the regional jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, the right of individuals to form associations was confirmed by an important resolution of the United Nations General Assembly on ‘‘Human Rights Defenders’’ (UN Declaration, 1998). This declaration states that ‘‘[e]veryone has the right, individually and in association with others, to promote and to strive for the protection and realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms at the national and international levels.’’ Finally, States Party to the ICCPR are required to adopt such legislation and other measures as are necessary to give effect to the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, and to assure that every person has effective remedies to redress any violation. States may impose certain narrowly tailored restrictions on CSOs exercising these rights, but they may not discriminate among individuals with respect to the exercise of these rights. This means, for example, that states cannot restrict to citizens the right to create or participate in a CSO, but must treat all persons within its territory on the same
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terms. In countries where resources traditionally have been concentrated in the hands of the state, this nondiscrimination principle becomes even more important.
Future Directions In many countries the freedom of association is respected only in the breach. In China, for example, people must have permission to form CSOs, and that permission is frequently unavailable (Simon, 2009). It is also clear that the trend toward greater freedom in this regard (referred to by Lester Salamon as an ‘‘associational revolution’’) (Salamon, 2004) has entered a new phase, with greater and greater restrictions being imposed in many countries. Thus, the question for the future is the extent to which the very strong jurisprudence in the European Court of Human Rights will prevail as time goes on.
Cross-References
▶ Associations, Definitions and History ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Council on Foundations ▶ Human Rights ▶ ICNL ▶ Law, Nonprofit Associations ▶ Professional Associations
References/Further Readings Board of Directors of Rotary Int’l v. Rotary Club of Duarte, 481 U.S. 537 (SCOTUS 1987). Boy Scouts of America and Monmouth Council, et al. v. James Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (SCOTUS 2000). Chassagnou et al. v. France, judgment of 29 April 1999 ECJ, appl. nos. 25088/94, 28331/95, 28443/95) (which involved the question of whether statutorily regulated hunting associations must be deemed to be organizations that are governed by public law). Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (A/RES/53/144, 9 December 1998). ¨ ZDEP) v. Turkey, Grand Chamber Freedom and Democracy Party (O 1999. Iheme, E. (2002). Freedom of Association in a Nigerian Community – Old Usages, New Rules. The International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, 4. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Advisory Opinion OC585, November 13, 1985 (the principal holding was that the mandatory membership in the journalists’ association in order to practice journalism did not violate the freedom of expression). But see separate opinion of Judge Rafael Neito-Navia, who suggested that mandatory membership would violate freedom of association. New Patriotic Party v. Att’y Gen’l, Supreme Court of Ghana, 1997 (CIBA case). Refah Partisi v. Turkey, Grand Chamber ECtHR 2003. Salamon, L. (2004). The Global Associational Revolution. Foreign Affairs.
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Simon, K. W. (2009). Regulation of Civil Society in China: Necessary Changes after the Olympic Games and the Sichuan Earthquake, 32 Fordham Int’1 L. J. 101. Sidirpolous and Others v. Greece, Grand Chamber ECtHR, 10 July 1998. United Communist Party v. Turkey, Grand Chamber ECtHR, 30 January 1998. United Macedonian Organisation Ilinden – Pirin and Others v. Bulgaria, ECtHR 20 October 2005.
Freemasons GUNNAR GLAENZEL
Address of Organization Grand Lodge of D.C. 5428 MacArthur Blvd NW Washington, DC 20016-2524 USA www.dcgrandlodge.org
Introduction Freemasonry is an international fraternity movement committed to an attitude of tolerance, democracy, and human dignity. Freemasons advocate self-fulfillment, helpfulness, peace, and social justice and harmony.
Brief History In its contemporary form, freemasonry dates back to the early eighteenth century when it was a secret movement for democracy. The very term, however, originates from medieval masons who associated as illegal trade unions in huts called ‘‘lodges.’’ Freemasons themselves date back their history to ancient times and claim the heritage of the builders of the Egyptian pyramids. As a result, there is no official founding date, although a significant landmark was the foundation of the first Grand Lodge in London in 1717.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas Freemasons are primarily concerned with their own moral and spiritual development which they view as a precondition for contributing to society. Masonic rituals and symbolism, kept secret to externals and being essentially the same all over the world, are meant to help the individual find insight for personal development and selffulfillment. By learning to lead an increasingly conscious and responsible life, she/he will carry masonic values into society and promote universal progress in terms of humanistic values.
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Activities By far the most important masonic activity is the regular gathering as a lodge where the masonic ritual is practiced. These meetings are announced publicly, yet held behind closed doors. Apart from the secret ritual, there are no obligatory activities stated explicitly, yet general guidelines for appropriate masonic behavior (‘‘ancient charges’’) are published as ‘‘Constitutions of the Free-Masons.’’ In line with the central mission uniting all Freemasons despite their great diversity, philanthropic activities and long-term commitment in charitable projects are generally an integral part of masonry. They may also arrange lectures and discussions.
Structure and Governance There are between five and six million Freemasons worldwide organized in lodges usually registered with local authorities as associations. Each lodge is recognized as such by becoming member of a Grand Lodge and subject to its jurisdiction. These sovereign Grand Lodges, however, do not always accept one another; rather, they have to recognize others through a formal process and may then associate and cooperate in larger formations (e.g., ‘‘United Grand Lodges of Europe’’). There is no such organization governing Freemasonry worldwide.
impact can be attributed to their Freemasonry must remain largely uncertain. Therefore, it can be summarized that Freemasonry has substantively influenced humanity in general and politics and civil society in particular; yet possibly to a large extent this influence has to be spoken of as indirect.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment ▶ Civil Society History V: 19th Century ▶ Dunant, Jean-Henri(Henry) ▶ Ford, Henry ▶ Rothschild Family ▶ Secret Societies ▶ Washington, George
References/Further Readings Bullock, S. C. (2004). Foreword: Masons, masonic history, and academic scholarship. In A. de Hoyos & S. B. Morris (Eds.), Freemasonry in context: History, ritual, controversy (pp. ix–xiii). Lanham: Lexington Books. Jacob, M. C. (2006). The origins of freemasonry: Facts & fictions. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Ridley, J. (2000). The freemasons. London: Robinson.
Funding At the organizational level Freemasonry has two funding sources: On the one hand, being registered as associations, Freemasons finance their basic activities through membership subscription fees. On the other hand, charitable work is funded largely by means of voluntary donations; Freemasons donate roughly $1 billion annually. In more abstract terms however, Freemasonry is supported and promoted by individual Freemasons’ behavior and contributions in multiple societal sectors.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions The impact of Freemasonry on humanity is hard to assess, for Freemasonry is intended to impact primarily indirectly through individual Freemasons’ actions outside the narrow context of organized masonic life. While it is obvious that in several centuries of existence, both lodges and individual Freemasons have founded uncountable numbers of philanthropic organizations, the consequences of masonic thought and behavior are less easily attributable directly the Freemasonry. It is beyond doubt, however, that numerous Freemasons have had major impact on human history, such as Winston Churchill, 14 US presidents, and ten Nobel Peace Prize winners. Nevertheless, the extent to which these individuals’
Freire, Paulo MARTIN HO¨LZ
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, Paolo Freire was an educator who became known as the founder of the ‘‘pedagogy of the oppressed.’’ Following his studies in law and philosophy, Freire worked for 10 years with the Servicio Social da Industria (Industry Social Services), ultimately as director of the Department for Education and Culture in the state of Pernambuco. With his dissertation on the education of illiterates, Freire earned a doctoral degree from the University of Recife in 1959 and became Professor of Philosophy and History of Education. He went on to serve as the Director of the Cultural Extension Service at the University of Recife and was appointed in 1963 to lead the National Literacy Program. In 1964, he was arrested and forced to emigrate after a military coup. Following a stopover in Bolivia he fled to Chile, where he worked for the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform, and later to
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked for the Office of Education of the World Council of Churches. He returned to Brazil in 1980 where he was employed by the Center for Educational Studies. Freire was later appointed the Secretary for Education of the State of Sao Paulo and taught at the University of Campinas and the Catholic University of Sao Paulo. He died in Sao Paulo in 1997.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Freire is perhaps best known for the development of a problem-posing concept of education he named ‘‘pedagogy of the oppressed.’’ Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Fanon, Marx, Hegel, and Rousseau and by liberation theology, Freire was convinced that change in the unjust and inhumane Brazilian society in which he lived could be achieved only through education. Through education, the oppressed would be able to fully join society. His educational method, in which students would learn to read and write within some 40 hours, was based on the principles of conscientization and dialog. Through conscientization, the student reflects on his or her own circumstances and can then enter into dialog with the teacher, rather than remain in a hierarchical student-teacher relationship. Freire introduced these literacy programs beginning in 1962 in the impoverished northeastern region of Brazil, spreading throughout the country by 1963. Throughout his working life, Freire was involved in founding new institutions to disseminate his method. Today institutes in such diverse countries as Canada, Israel, South Africa, Spain, and the United States are implementing, exploring, and further developing his method and theoretical foundations. Freire was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 1986 and was the first person to receive the King Baudouin International Development Prize in 1980 for his contribution to the spread of adult literacy.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society Theory: Gramsci ▶ Civil Society Theory: Hegel ▶ Civil Society Theory: Marx ▶ Civil Society Theory: Rousseau ▶ Fanon, Frantz ▶ World Council of Churches
References/Further Readings Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury. Freire, P. (1978). Pedagogy in process. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education. South Hadely, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Mayo, P. (1999). Gramsci, Freire and adult education: Possibilities for transformative action. London: Zed Books. Taylor, P. V. (1993). The texts of Paulo Freire. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press.
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Friedrich Ebert Stiftung MATTHIAS FREISE
Address of Organization Godesberger Allee 149 D-53175 Bonn Tel.: ++49 228 883 0 www.fes.de
Introduction The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES – Friedrich Ebert Foundation) is the oldest German political foundation. It is closely affiliated to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and serves as a social democratic think tank by providing civic education.
Brief History Founded in 1925 as a foundation of the SPD, FES was named after Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), a social democrat and the first President of the German Democratic Republic. Originally, the main concern of the foundation was to work against discrimination of workers by providing scholarships and research grants. During the Nazi rule, FES was banned. It was reinstituted in 1947 and totally restructured into a charitable organization ‘‘for the advancement of democratic education,’’ in 1954. Since the 1960s, the FES has been working in the areas of development aid and democracy promotion worldwide, in addition to its education programs.
Mission FES is committed to the ideology and basic values of social democracy. Its aim is to assist citizens in Germany and abroad in responding to changes in politics and society, and thus enable them to participate, in a critical and proactive manner, in promoting peace and understanding between peoples, supporting the democratization of the state and society, strengthening civil society, and gaining recognition for human rights.
Activities To pursue its mission, FES is active in four fields: 1. In its two headquarters in Bonn and Berlin, FES serves as a social democratic think tank through its research and consulting activities. It provides a large number of publications and has institutionalized influential discussion circles. It also operates the Archives of Social Democracy in Bonn.
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2. FES maintains 13 regional offices and four academies all over Germany for discussion forums and specialsubject conferences. 3. On behalf of the Federal Ministry of Science, FES grants graduate and postgraduate scholarships to approximately 2,000 students, who share the foundation’s values. 4. Abroad, FES maintains its own representations in 70 countries and is active in more than 100 countries in the field of sociopolitical development cooperation. Thereby, special focus is laid not only on capacity building for trade unions, but also on cooperation with politicians and NGOs.
Structure and Governance FES is a registered voluntary association. In 2007, it had a total staff of 609 employees. Usually, the management board comprises merited politicians of the SPD.
Funding FES is almost fully funded through grants from the federal budget and the German states. Donations and fees contribute only an insignificant part of the budget, which amounted to €111 million in 2007.
Accomplishments FES has successfully supported democracy and freedom movements, for instance, the African National Congress, and played an important role in overcoming dictatorial regimes in Greece, Spain, and Portugal by training the later political elites of these countries.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Foundations, Political ▶ Think Tanks
References/Further Readings Braun, B. (2005). 80 Jahre Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung – Eine Außenansicht. In Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (Ed.), 80 Jahre Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (pp. 6–12). Bonn: FES.
Friedrich Naumann Stiftung fu¨r die Freiheit MATTHIAS FREISE
Address of Organization Karl-Marx-Straße 2 D-14482 Potsdam Germany www.freiheit.org
Introduction The Friedrich Naumann Stiftung fu¨r die Freiheit (FNS – Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom) is a German political foundation. It is affiliated to the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and serves as a think tank by providing political and societal education, based on the values of liberalism and individual freedom.
Brief History FNS was founded in 1958 in Bonn by a group of liberal politicians to establish a systematic civic education program inspired by liberal values. The foundation was named after Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919), a Protestant theologian and influential liberal politician during the times of the German empire. In 2001, FNS moved its headquarters to Potsdam. In 2007, the foundation added the extension ‘‘for freedom’’ to its name.
Mission FNS is committed to the ideas and basic values of liberal democracy. It is dedicated to the development of structures that are democratic, market-oriented, and based on the rule of law so that more and more people can live in liberal and democratic societies.
Activities To pursue its mission, FNS is active in four fields: 1. It serves as a liberal think tank by maintaining the Liberal Institute (founded in 1985), which is involved in research and consulting activities. It provides a large number of publications and has institutionalized influential discussion circles. FNS also operates the Archive of Liberalism. 2. It maintains a civic education center, the Theodor Heuss Academy in Gummersbach, a virtual academy, and nine regional education institutes offering conferences, seminars, and workshops. 3. On behalf of the Federal Ministry of Science, it grants graduate and postgraduate scholarships to approximately 600 students. 4. Its international political dialog program provides a discussion forum for a wide range of liberal issues. The foundation’s counseling programs focus on candidates for political office, liberal political parties, and other civil society organizations in transition countries. Furthermore, it organizes a European Union and a Transatlantic Dialogue program. In 2007, FNS maintained 44 field offices that are coordinated by seven regional headquarters.
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Brief History
Unlike the other German political foundations, FNS actually operates under the legal form of a foundation. Usually the management board is filled with eminent politicians of the FDP. FNS had a total staff of 175 employees in 2007. In addition, the foundation employs 229 local people in the project countries.
David Brower founded Friends of the Earth US in 1969, after resigning as executive director of the United States Sierra Club because of disputes over campaign tactics and targets. Offices were established in San Francisco in 1969, Paris and London in 1970 and Sweden in 1971. The FoEI federation was founded in Sweden in 1971, by groups from France, Britain, the United States and Sweden.
Funding FNS is almost fully funded through grants from the federal budget, the German states, and the European Union (95% of the budget). Donations, fees, and earnings of the foundation contribute just an insignificant part of the budget, which amounted to approximately €43 million in 2007.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Civic Education ▶ Foundations, Political ▶ Think Tanks
References/Further Readings Mair, St. (2000). Germany’s stiftungen und democracy assistance: Comparative advantages, new challenges. In P. Burnell (Ed.), Democracy assistance. International co-operation for democratization (pp. 128–149). London: Cass.
Friends of the Earth SAM ROYSTON, SARAH HARDS
Address of Organization Friends of the Earth International Secretariat P.O. Box 19199 1000 GD Amsterdam The Netherlands www.foei.org/
Introduction Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) describes itself as ‘‘the world’s largest grassroots environmental network.’’ The federation includes member groups in 77 countries, with about 1,200 staff and 5,000 local activist groups. Overall, FoEI claims over two million supporters worldwide.
Mission/Objectives/Focus Areas National FoE groups are autonomous from FoEI, however, according to their 30th anniversary report, groups do have shared values ‘‘that place people and the environment above the profit motives of the current global economic paradigm.’’ In addition, FoEI membership criteria state that groups should work on the ‘‘main environmental issues in their countries,’’ putting them in the context of ‘‘social, political and human rights.’’ According to the FoEI website, key themes running through campaigns include ‘‘protecting human and environmental rights,’’ ‘‘protecting the planet’s disappearing biodiversity,’’ and ‘‘the repayment of ecological debt owed by rich countries.’’ Currently, key issues for many national groups include climate change, food, deforestation, trade, and globalization.
Activities Campaigns operate on many levels, from grassroots mobilizations by local groups to international campaigns. Local groups often have considerable autonomy and may run locally-specific campaigns. FoE uses diverse tactics. Political pressure is a key tool, with targets ranging from local councils to international summits. The organization has also made legal challenges through the courts of many countries, targeting corporations or government agencies. However, FoE also enjoys a degree of ‘‘insider’’ status in certain countries, and FoEI has consultative status with some UN bodies. Campaigns often use visual imagery and the media, for example, with the construction of a giant sandbag dyke in The Hague during international climate negotiations in 2000. FoE has recently begun using new media, such as ‘‘cyberactivist’’ email lists, video-streams, and blogs. Both FoEI and national groups produce many publications and reports every year.
Structure and Governance FoE’s structure has four broad layers. First, local groups often cover single towns or communities. Not all countries have local groups, but in some, such as the UK, there is a well-established network. The second layer is the national
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groups. Roughly half call themselves ‘‘Friends of the Earth’’ in their own languages; others use different names. Thirdly, regional coordinating bodies cover Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa. Finally, the FoEI federation unites the national groups. National groups are autonomous of FoEI, but agree to abide by its principles. The federation’s policies are decided at a biannual general meeting, in which all members have an equal say, regardless of size or resources. This meeting elects an Executive Committee, which employs and oversees the work of an International Secretariat of approximately 25 staff and volunteers. Doherty (2006) notes that this federal structure makes FoEI distinct from other large international environmental NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.
Funding National groups are funded from diverse sources, including individual subscriptions, foundations, and trading. They vary greatly in their annual income. Some groups in developing countries (for example Swaziland and Papua New Guinea) receive financial support from foundations or aid agencies in the developed world. FoEI is financed by donations from member groups, and from governments and foundations. In 2007 they reported an income of over €2.4 million. Of this, €340,000 was from membership fees from national groups.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions FoE has a record of changing legislation. FoE England, Wales and Northern Ireland recently led a successful campaign for a climate change law, obliging the UK to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. The legislation, passed in November 2008 is the first of its kind in the world. FoE also has a record of mobilizing public opinion, notably in anti genetic modification campaigns. For example, in January 2008 FOE France was a major player in the successful campaign to ban the only genetically-modified maize grown in the country. The organization is also adept in using legal systems. For example, in 2006, FoE US successfully brought litigation challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to pollution in the Anacostia River.
Cross-References
▶ Federations, Nonprofit ▶ Greenpeace ▶ INGOs ▶ NGOs and Sustainable Development ▶ Sierra Club ▶ World Wildlife Fund
References/Further Readings Doherty, B. (2006). Friends of the earth international: Negotiating a transnational identity. Environmental Politics, 15(5), 860–880. Friends of the Earth International. (2001). Sparks of hope, fires of resistance. Amsterdam: FoEI. Lamb, R. (1996). Promising the earth. London: Routledge. MacNaghten, P., & Urry, J. (1998). Contested natures. London: Sage.
Fugger, Jakob MATTHIAS FREISE
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1459 in Augsburg (Holy Roman Empire, today Germany) to a merchant family and educated in commerce in Venice, Jakob Fugger went on to build up a pan-European industrial empire and to become the richest and most influential merchant and banker of his time. Fugger’s business idea was to lend money on a grand scale to European rulers for warfare and other political purposes, among them the later Holy Roman Emperors of the German Nation, the Habsburg kings Maximilian I and Charles V to whom Fugger became also an important mentor. In return the rulers gave as payback shares of their mines to Fugger’s company so that he was able to control the European mining industry and to establish a silver and copper monopoly, which contributed to the accumulation of his inconceivable fortune. Fugger also secured the right to sell papal indulgences from Pope Leo X. When he died in 1525 in his hometown he had laid the foundation for the Fugger dynasty which strongly influenced European politics until 1650. In Germany, the name Fugger stands up until today as the prototype of capitalist action.
Major Contributions In addition to his vast fortune, Fugger is known for comprehensive patronage in his hometown and elsewhere in Europe. In harmony with the Catholic doctrine, strictly religious Fugger adhered to the principle of caritas et memoria which requires generous donations to the poor by the rich. In contrast to the modern understanding of charitableness, these donations were not free of selfinterest. Instead the patronage was connected to a reward: the beneficiaries must care for the salvation of the donor by honoring Fugger’s memory. Therefore Fugger founded the Fuggerei, the oldest social housing project in the world. Up until the present it is a walled independent
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medieval enclave in the city of Augsburg and serves as a place where needy Catholic citizens can be housed. Today the Fuggerei consists of 8 alleyways, 67 houses with 140 flats and several administrative buildings. By 2008, 150 inhabitants lived in the Fuggerei for an annual rent of 88 Eurocent (the equivalent of one Gulden which was fixed by Fugger himself) and three daily prayers for the salvation of the Fugger family. The Fuggerei is operated by the Fu¨rstlich und Gra¨flich Fuggersche Foundation. This foundation also maintains other buildings and artistic works which have been donated by the Fugger dynasty, among them the Fugger Castles in the cities of Kirchheim and Babenhausen, the Fugger Chapel in the Annakirche in Augsburg and the Thekla Church in Welden (Augsburg Rural District). Also in other places formerly under Fugger rule there are a number of well designed churches of pilgrimage such as in Biberbach (Augsburg Rural District) or in Kirchhaslach (Unterallga¨u Rural District).
Cross-References
▶ Charity and Religion ▶ Foundations, Operating ▶ Philanthropy and Religion, Christianity
References/Further Readings Graf Fugger von Glo¨tt, U. (2004). The Fuggerei. The oldest social settlement in the world. Augsburg: Wißner. Kluger, M. (2008). The Fugger dynasty. The German medici in and around Augsburg. Augsburg: Context.
Fundacio´n ONCE MARTIN HO¨LZ
Address of Organization C/ Sebastia´n Herrera, 15 28012 Madrid Spain www.fundaciononce.es
Introduction Fundacio´n ONCE para la Cooperacio´n e Integracio´n Social de Personas con Discapacidad (ONCE Foundation for Cooperation and Social Integration of Persons with Disabilities) is a Spanish grantmaking foundation dedicated to ensuring the social integration of people with disabilities and improving their quality of life. It is unique that it
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is funded primarily by a percentage of the sales of lottery tickets through ‘‘la ONCE,’’ Spain’s national organization for the blind.
Brief History The history of Fundacio´n ONCE begins in 1938 with the founding of ‘‘la ONCE,’’ the Organizacio´n Nacional de Ciegos Espan˜oles (National Organization for the Spanish Blind). La ONCE is a public law corporation created in agreement with the government, whose membership is open to all Spanish citizens who have certified a certain level of visual impairment. ONCE’s main purpose is to provide educational, employment, and other services to and advocate for the blind in Spain. Its primary source of funding is the sale of lottery tickets licensed by the government. Fundacio´n ONCE was founded in 1988 as an expression of solidarity of the members of ‘‘la ONCE’’ with others who experience different types of disability, whether physical, psychological, or mental. In 1989, Fundacio´n ONCE created FUNDOSA, an umbrella for numerous social enterprises, to ensure workplaces for the disabled.
Mission/Objectives Fundacio´n ONCE’s mission is fourfold. It seeks to achieve the full integration of the disabled in Spanish and European society; to improve the quality of life of the disabled through the development of work integration, training, and employment programs; to encourage universal accessibility for people with limited mobility; and to ensure equal opportunities to make the integration of the disabled into society a reality.
Activities Fundacio´n ONCE makes grants to organizations and implements activities within the framework of two ‘‘plans,’’ or programs. Within the employment and training program, Fundacio´n ONCE provides funding for the creation of employment and occupational centers, the promotion of self-employment and social enterprises, and skills and other training. Under its accessibility program, it supports enhanced access to communications and collective transport, individuals’ access to their workplaces, and the promotion of personal autonomy and independent living. As set out in ‘‘la ONCE’s’’ agreement with the government, at least 60% of Fundacio´n ONCE’s resources are allocated to promoting stable employment and training for the disabled, while the remaining portion is dedicated to activities designed to achieve full accessibility. From its inception in 1988 to the end of 1997, Fundacio´n ONCE
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had made grants in support of some 22,000 projects totalling more than €1.1 billion.
Structure and Governance The main governing body of Fundacio´n ONCE is the Patronato, or Board of Trustees, which consists of delegates not only of ‘‘la ONCE,’’ but also of the main umbrella groups representing organizations of and for people with other disabilities and of the Spanish government. An executive committee is responsible for day-to-day activities.
Funding One of Fundacio´n ONCE’s key sources of income is the 3% of lottery sales dedicated to it by ‘‘la ONCE.’’ In addition, it relies on income from its social enterprises under the umbrella of FUNDOSA and revenues from other investments.
Major Accomplishments According to its annual report, in 2007, Fundacio´n ONCE approved funding for more than 1,300 projects providing people with disabilities employment opportunities and security and improving their access to communications, workplaces, and transport.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Social Enterprise
References/Further Readings Alvarez Ilzarbe, M. J. (2007). Servicios financieros accessibles para todas las personas. Madrid: Fundacio´n ONCE and BankInter. Fundacio´n ONCE. (2007). Turismo para todos. Desde la accessibilidad a la excelencia. Madrid: Fundacio´n ONCE and Fundacio´n ACS.
Fundraising WENDY SCAIFE Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Introduction Fundraising is mushrooming worldwide for various reasons. Governments increasingly cannot fully meet community need and many issues are so complex, costly, and global that only cross-sector input, including corporate, foundation, and individual support, will resolve them.
Against this backdrop, fundraising (or ‘‘development’’ or ‘‘resource mobilization’’ as it is variously known) is becoming more widespread in nonprofit organizations (NPOs). As both a profession and volunteering role, fundraising is increasingly sizeable, specialized, and academically probed. While fundraising practice varies across cultures, some core principles are a compelling need/case, strong, committed leadership willing to both give and seek funding, viable funding sources and infrastructure to facilitate giving (such as policies, people, technology, and accountability).
Definition The language of fundraising has some counterpoint with sales, marketing, law, and even religion, politics, and finance. The word itself in the corporate realm denotes sourcing investment to run or grow a business. Similarly in nonprofits, fundraising is about locating the resources an organization needs to achieve its aims on behalf of those it serves. Common definitions focus on raising money for a nominated cause or program. ‘‘Resource mobilization’’ is a frequently used term in some countries, again borrowing from the rubric of finance but emphasizing as well the idea that an NPO needs more than just funds and will seek people, their time and in-kind resources too. Ideally fundraising/resource mobilization will be from stable, ethical, diverse, and sustainable sources. Another variation on the fundraising theme is found in the word ‘‘development’’. Often used interchangeably with fundraising, it refers in essence to the whole process of garnering resources. It embraces creating the climate to ask for funds through, for instance, public relations and communication, and focuses more on the planned, yearround activity that buttresses successful asking for support. The fundraising function will often be called the Development Office (and sometimes ‘‘Advancement,’’ particularly in universities). Legal terms are found in the field (e.g., beneficiary: the organization or client benefiting from the funding/work; bequest: a gift in a will; and charitable trust: an entity set up for charitable purposes that grants to needy causes and organizations). So too, political jargon is present (e.g., campaign: a planned drive to raise funds; and constituencies: the type of groups or markets who logically may support a cause such as parents, alumni, or staff). Sales lingo is rife though considered an inappropriate import by some that adds a manipulative feel that is alien to ethical fundraising (e.g., cold list: a database that is not yet tested; identification, qualifying, cultivating, soliciting, and closing prospects: working to locate, assess, involve, and request support of the most likely potential donors). Faithbased expressions are plentiful (e.g., mission: the ultimate
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goal/s the organization has been set up to accomplish; stewardship: acknowledging and recognizing supporters and ensuring faithful use of their input to help the mission). The vocabulary of marketing is also well represented (e.g., acquisition and renewal: asking for first time support and then renewing that support; relationship fundraising: relating to donors as individuals with unique interests, needs, and preferences in supporting the cause and building their engagement with the organization and its ambassadors over time). It would be remiss to define fundraising without mentioning philanthropy as the two are intricately linked. Fundraisers take the message of worthy projects and causes to people who may want to give, and help these givers get involved and stay engaged in the mission. Fundraising has been linked strongly with people’s values and facilitates the expression of the beliefs people hold dear. Philanthropy normally relates to the ideal of articulating a love of humankind – and animal kind too. Increasingly, philanthropy is being associated with planned and structured giving rather than spontaneous, once-off gestures (e.g., through the deliberate decisions to forge a charitable foundation or donor advised fund or provide a major gift or bequest). Fundraisers will speak of a‘‘fundraising tripod’’ - referring to the three key income streams in a balanced fundraising organisation. The first stream is annual or budget fundraising, which involves the year in, year out activities that enable the organisation to operate. Annual fundraising might include activities such as direct mail, telemarketing, membership campaigns, special events, art unions/lotteries, face-to-face/direct dialogue giving and the like. The second stream is major giving, referring to major gifts and capital campaigns that provide larger contributions often toward a particular sizeable need such as a new hospital wing or a piece of research equipment. The third income stream is labelled deferred giving and encompasses bequests/legacies and other gifts that may flow beyond a supporter’s lifetime such as charitable remainder trusts, annuities and insurance policies.
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The Islamic religious endowment (wakf) has been dated to the seventh century. The teachings of Maimonides and collecting the tithe have long been part of the Jewish faith and the bulk of the world’s temples for all religions reflect the existence of philanthropy and fundraising. St Thomas Aquinas in 1250 highlighted two kinds of almsgiving – corporal and spiritual works of mercy, which highlight the practice of charity towards neighbors often collected through church fundraising. The Church’s fundraising role is underscored again in the Middle Ages with records of administering benevolent trusts. England’s 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses has cast a long shadow of influence beyond the UK as to what people support and recognize as charitable works. The tradition that still underpins fundraising today of those of means formally helping those in need was reinforced in the seventeenth and eighteenth century by merchants in Western Europe establishing organizations to fulfill worthy purposes. The foundation movement that sparked the common fundraising practice of grant seeking emerged most prominently in activities such as the large scale philanthropy in the USA of nineteenth century. There it was underpinned by writings such as Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth and the establishment of the Foundation model through such leading families of the time including the Rockefellers, and the Straus and Peabody families. Prominent universities also added to the fabric of organized fundraising with the first recorded US fund drive in 1643 for Harvard raising £500. The field blossomed during the twentieth century to now reflect consultants, specialist fundraising roles, and a shift from volunteer-only roles to volunteer-staff partnerships in larger organizations with paid professionals.
Key Issues Assorted issues and trends are molding fundraising today and tomorrow. Six multifaceted forces each with mini trends embedded are explored here. Relationship Fundraising
Historical Background Fundraising, philanthropy and charity are inextricably linked across the eons and very often religion has figured in the mix as well. Most religions and ancient civilizations had some focus on aiding those in need and archaeology verifies this moral stance in Egypt and Bablylonia, as does Christianity’s Old Testament of the Bible. The moral imperative to lift the quality of life in classical times backboned Ancient Greece and Rome with citizens funding sports, disaster relief and amphitheaters.
In the face of academic and practitioner research indicating poor donor relations, an important movement is the emphasis on relationship fundraising. In the 1990s, writers such as the UK’s Ken Burnett were signaling that the fundraising practice pendulum had swung too much in favor of an organization view at the cost of understanding and serving the all-important supporter. The term ‘‘relationship fundraising’’ was coined from the for-profit sphere’s ‘‘relationship marketing’’ and has grown more recently through the work of commentators such as
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Simone Joyeux and Tom Ahern. This trend has confirmed the centrality of such concepts as two-way donor communication, ‘‘high-touch’’ rather than ‘‘high-tech,’’ donor research, and enthusiasm to recognize and respect individual donor preferences in their interaction with the cause. The movement is perhaps a response to the trend of donor fatigue that has emerged with the proliferation of charities, perhaps exacerbated by the tenet and reality that ‘‘your best future donors are your best current donors’’. Studies such as Sargeant’s various works on donor lifetime value underline this reality but more importantly show donor loyalty is predicated on a sustained relationship, actively nurtured. Donor fatigue also raises the specter of so-called ‘‘invasive’’ fundraising methods. Telemarketing, for instance, attracts criticism despite enough numbers supporting this outreach to make it a viable fundraising option for many organizations. Much press has been given to the ‘‘chugging’’ (charity mugging) phenomenon, especially in the UK. Known generally as ‘‘face-to-face’’ or ‘‘direct dialog’’ fundraising, this approach involves charity representatives engaging people in the street and inviting their support via an ongoing direct debit. It has proved particularly fruitful for some cause areas and some donor markets and less popular with others. Keys have been the training and credibility of the askers and donor care to ensure retention. Detractors suggest unsolicited direct approaches by phone, mail, or in person are in fact harmful to the professional name of fundraising and counterproductive to achieving support. This debate is likely to continue. Also under this broad trend of donor centric fundraising is the new academic field of philanthropic psychology (see, for example, the work of Jen Shang), channeling the concepts of psychology into everyday practice to better understand and serve donors, rather than relying on industry ‘‘rules of thumb’’. Demographics
In many countries, giving and volunteering by younger generations is declining, despite a robust youth philanthropy movement evident in organizations such as Youth Philanthropy and Service in the USA, Youth Bank in Europe or Asia’s Youth for Causes. A related issue for many causes is the different cause preferences of younger demographics and their consequent need to appeal to a market far removed from their traditional Depression or postwar era donors. Relationship fundraising embraces the need to speak to different demographics in different ways and certainly direct dialog and internet fundraising vehicles reflect for instance tailored outreach to often a
younger supporter. Gender, race, and generation are progressively driving fundraising trends more and more. The demographic pattern of many nations points toward a bequests ‘‘bonanza’’ with an intergenerational wealth transfer much discussed. Pitted against this factor are the aging of the baby boomers, their longer life expectancy and funds needed to maintain that life. Ethnicity is increasingly a force, with people of the same race forming organizations to marshall local and diaspora giving. In gender terms, women have become a focus of study both as philanthropists and philanthropic influencers. An interesting development has been the advent of giving circles as a popular means of group giving particularly for women, whereby group members give the same amount annually, meet to decide its destination and often get involved beyond the monetary contribution. Giving circles are one of a range of new methods of fundraising as the next trend highlights. New Technologies, New Methods
Technology is facilitating fundraising processes. For instance, reports can be generated quickly onsite or offsite. Money can be saved. Take for example, the ability to send out a strategic direct mail appeal to just the areas that reflect a similar demographic profile to current supporters, rather than a mass mailing. Planning, monitoring, and management are light-years ahead of days past. It is ever easier to turn raw data into insights about where fundraisers should direct their time for best return to the mission outcomes. Accountability and transparency are ever more attainable. Off-the-shelf programs have replaced laborious single organization processes and are adding momentum to benchmarking efforts. Relationship building is cheaper and easier. Mass-customization has heralded the era of bespoke fundraising to individuals. Outreach to new donor markets now knows no borders, carrying challenges for fundraising legislation and potential competition for local nonprofits from international ones. Rural, regional, or international supporters can be better sourced and served, and individual preferences met. Similarly, awareness of needs across the globe has materialized. The needs of indigenous and fundraising in culturally appropriate ways have become more prominent. Recurrent giving has been facilitated through automation, impacting positively on both the amount and duration of donor support. Online giving has become a convenient reality that from small beginnings is now coming into its own in myriad ways. Electronic fundraising (e-fundraising) has moved far beyond a ‘‘Donate Now’’ button on the website to include the Web 2.0 social networking tools, virtual fundraising events, blogs, email
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blasts, charity portals, online video, podcasts and Wikis. Mobile fundraising is also growing from the early ‘‘download a ring tone’’ phase to volunteer and member recruitment and rapid donation channeling and outreach when a crisis strikes. Viral marketing, where supporters take the message easily into their own networks, is seeing causes and campaigns become infectious with strong dollar results. Committed donors can readily become fundraisers for the cause themselves in their unique networks. Highly interactive websites offering virtual tours of causes at work and enabling supporters to set up their own pages for event fundraising are just some of the developments driving fundraising forward. Virtual volunteering has been facilitated, online gift registries (e.g., buy a goat for a village instead of a 40th birthday present), In Memoriam pages, merchandise sales, online communities, online auctions – the list of fundraising flow-ons from this trend is large and growing. As a result, more spotlight has been thrown on integrated fundraising. Donors often have many touch points with an organization beyond their donation and this holistic relationship now possibly surpasses the more siloed interactions of the past. Using the many online and offline means of donor communication to reinforce one another and enable crossover to more economic modes has seen the advent of Integrated Fundraising Manager roles in organizations. Multi-channel fundraising is growing. Changing Face of Corporate Involvement
The traditional concept of corporate giving has become blurred. While some philanthropy is still evident, debate continues as to the extent of enlightened self-interest at work in such giving. The range of clearly mutual benefit arrangements based on a strong business case has matured. Cause-related marketing, which links product purchases with a percentage donation to charity has been around since the 1980s and continues today. Detractors suggest increased sales because of the charity association often outweigh the charity benefit while others point to some alliances trivializing the cause. For instance, critics of the many pink products targeting the female market with a breast cancer linkage claim overexposure has desensitized many to the issue. Perhaps the more challenging development for many fundraising charities though has been the increasing desire by companies to adopt a charity partner. The upsides are many and often lucrative for NPOs, ranging from employee volunteers, executives on loan, recurrent workplace giving, gifts in kind, special event participants, access to new networks and brand visibility. The challenges include locating and then servicing such a partnership, which commonly has
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concrete goals for both parties. Mission drift is possible and the quest for partnerships that embrace small and medium npos rather than just large national entities is ongoing. The Corporate Social Responsibility juggernaut has moved many new business players into charity involvements but lack of realistic expectations and the different philosophies sometimes confront charity/community partners. A related issue is the impetus by some companies to bypass NPOs and set up community mission delivery activities on their own, with mixed success. Professionalization and Public Trust
In the wider context, the totally volunteer organization still dominates the nonprofit landscape but the increasing use of paid, professional staff has had implications. Often such focus by dedicated, qualified personnel has multiplied outcomes and shifted organizations toward their real potential. Public perception of paying staff, including fundraisers has not necessarily kept pace. Major concerns about fundraising or administration cost ratios continue to emerge from donor studies and the need for public education about the realities of sustaining and growing organizations is clear. So too, the role of capacity building to ensure the most effective use of donated money is highlighted. Wide-ranging opinions are evident in donor studies also about the role of marketing per se for NPOs. Fundraising charities straddle the need to be businesslike and efficient but not a business or a slick marketing machine. Branding is a rising topic in academic and practitioner literature of NPOs that is very much part of development. Arguably, the best charities long term are those with a sturdy infrastructure that girds a wide volunteer net, despite the inherent investment in high caliber people, technology, and visibility required. By the same token, capacity building in winning sustained funding for organizations is an ongoing concern in the face of charity failures and cases of ethical flaws. The question of duplication – too many charities serving the same goals – and potential waste arises consistently in donor feedback as well. The issue of training professional fundraisers and attracting the best and brightest to the field impacts on cost ratios. Fundraisers who are productive, supported, trained, and professionally qualified are most likely to nurture supporters, achieve mission results, stay in the profession and mentor others. Such professionalization carries with it an expectation of a specialist’s salary yet in the minds of many donors and others, NPO staff should be willing to work for significantly less than commercial rates. Such philosophical questions about fundraising salaries, and appropriate cost ratios continue to unfold in media
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and in forums of the mounting numbers of watchdog organizations scrutinizing NPOs on behalf of donors and the community. This underlying issue of patchy trust in the NPO sector and of professional fundraising remains a fullbodied challenge. Accountability and transparency loom large in this trust building exercise but are challenged by the difficulty that donors may desert organizations that reveal a cost of fundraising a particular donor feels is excessive. International efforts to strengthen fundraising ethics and standards are well underway. The supply of not just fundraisers but also fundraising volunteers and campaign leaders is also shaping as a robust issue. A leadership deficit and the pending retirement of baby boomer fundraisers leaves a gap. The New Givers
Much has been written in recent years about the new breed of philanthropist who has eschewed the cheque writing, arms length giving of a bygone era in favor of hands-on involvement in programs to which they contribute their time, expertise, networks, and donations. This ‘‘impact philanthropist’’ joins the population of family, community, and corporate foundations, that have traditionally operated or have sprung to life following money made in the dot.com revolution or measures such as tax deductibility to recruit more high net worth individuals into philanthropy. National efforts to promote a greater culture of philanthropy (e.g., The UK’s Giving Campaign) often target the people with capacity to give but no involvement in the past. This more active philanthropist often seeks more precise impact measures than NPOs may have offered in times past. They appear also more likely to fund capacity building and infrastructure needs rather than just programs and projects alone. Sometimes these new givers may be venture philanthropists, philanthrocapitalists, or social entrepreneurs, borrowing the principles of venture capital and business to fund innovation and/or infrastructure often over a longer term and in differing ways, such as low-interest loans or start-up capital. The area of individual giving has long been dominant as a funding source for nonprofits, far outweighing corporate giving. Models of mega-giving such as the Gates and Buffett examples have thrown a spotlight on philanthropy that has promoted giving by those with capacity.
International Perspectives International fundraising organizations and conferences have existed for some time but fundraising continues to be unique in its regulation, operation, and growth from
country to country. Fundraising in Europe is said to have experienced significant growth in recent decades. Philanthropy carved out many of the landmarks of the continent’s past and the great cathedrals, universities, and museums stand testament to this rich history of giving to community causes. The past century however, reflects a shift from philanthropic to government funding. More recently, an upswing in the population of fundraising organizations and moves toward professional fundraising can be observed, as well as increased cross border fundraising and fundraising training standards amongst the Euro-market. Much vaunted potential for fundraising exists outside the Europe/US axis. Increasingly, organizations are testing the potential for local and international funds in the marketplaces of India and China, as well as other parts of Asia and points in South America. Increasing global exchange is also occurring amongst scholars who conduct national giving studies in countries such as The Netherlands, South Africa, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Australia, the UK and the USA.
Future Directions Future progress in fundraising is likely to derive from the trend areas noted here and the increasing internationalization of the field. Higher investments in high caliber people, technology, and visibility look set to make fundraising more prominent within and outside of organizations. In research terms, beyond the national giving studies, more applied and theoretical research is flowing, as postgraduate courses in fundraising and nonprofit studies mature. This research agenda spans motivations, triggers, decision making processes, funding sources, fundraising vehicles and a host of other directions but the critical mass of fundraising research and researchers remains as yet ripe for growth but full of promise.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Association of Fundraising Professionals ▶ Brand, Branding ▶ Carnegie, Andrew ▶ Charity, History of ▶ Corporate Giving ▶ Donor, Donor Intent ▶ Giving Circles ▶ International Committee on Fundraising Organizations ▶ Planned Giving ▶ Wakf
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References/Further Readings Ahern, T., & Joyaux, S. (2007). Keep your donors: The guide to better communication and stronger relationships. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Bekkers, R., & Wiepking, P. (2007). Generosity and philanthropy: A literature review (October 28, 2007). Available at SSRN: http:// ssrn.com/abstract = 1015507 Burlingame, D. F., & Young, D. R. (Eds.) (1996). Corporate philanthropy at the crossroads. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Burnett, K. (2002). Relationship fundraising. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. The Foundation Center (2005). The foundation center’s guide to proposal writing (4th Ed.), New York: The Foundation Center. Greenfield, J. M. (2001). The nonprofit handbook: Fund raising (3rd Ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Grønbjerg, K. (1993). Understanding nonprofit funding: Managing revenues in social service and community development organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Hart, T. (2007). E-philanthropy: Leveraging technology to benefit charities and donors. In A. Sargeant, & W. Wymer (Eds.), The nonprofit marketing companion (pp. 196–208). London: Routledge. Hogan, C. (2004). Prospect research: A primer for growing nonprofits. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett. Hopkins, B. R. (2000). The first legal answer book for fund-raisers. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Hopkins, B. R. (2001). Starting and managing a nonprofit organization: A legal guide (3rd Ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Mullin, R. (2002). Fundraising strategy, charities aid foundation. Kent: West Malling.
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Sargeant, A. (2004). Marketing management for nonprofit organisations (2nd Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sargeant, A., & Jay, E. (2004). Fundraising management. London: Routledge. Sargeant, A., & Woodliffe, L. (2007). Gift giving: An interdisciplinary review. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 12(4), 275–307. Sargeant, A., & Wymer, W. (Eds.) (2007). The Routledge companion to nonprofit marketing. London: Routledge. Shang, J., Reed, A., & Croson, R. (June 2008). Identity congruency effects on donations. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(3), 351. Smith, G. (1996). Asking properly: The art of creative fundraising. London: White Lion Press. Sprinkel-Grace, K. (2005). Beyond fundraising: New strategies for nonprofit innovation and investment (2nd Ed.). San Francisco, CA: Wiley. Tempel, E. R. (Ed.) (2003). Hank Rosso’s achieving excellence in fund raising (2nd Ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Varadarajan, P. R., & Menon, A. (1988). Cause-related marketing: A coalignment of marketing strategy and corporate philanthropy. Journal of Marketing, 52(July), 58–74. Warwick, M. (2001). Fundraising on the Internet: The e-philanthropy foundation organization’s guide to success online. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Warwick, M. (2004). Revolution in the mailbox. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Wymer, W., Knowles, P., & Gomes, R. (2006). Nonprofit marketing: Marketing management for charitable and nongovernmental organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Basic Biographical Information Born in Porbandar, Gujarat (India) to a high-ranking official of a princely state, and influenced by various religious and Arcadian traditions, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi rose to be the chief protagonist of nonviolent resistance campaigns against racial discrimination in South Africa (1893–1914) and of a massive, largely nonviolent nationalist movement against British colonialism in India (1915–1947). In so doing, he transformed nonviolence from being an ethical principle governing interaction between individuals into a powerful, political force on a large scale, the weapon of the disadvantaged in their ‘‘battle of right against might.’’ Gandhi’s social activism greatly contributed to traditions of civil society and social capital in diverse political and cultural settings across the world.
Major Contributions His political and philosophical ideas – dialogic resistance, satyagraha (truth-force), the significance of individual conscience, swaraj in the sense of control over the individual self so that the need for state regulation diminishes, noncooperation with evil, sarvodaya (welfare of all) – committed him to creating and refining civil society institutions. He saw these as empowering the people; they could be used to curb the coercive or corruptible tendencies of the state. So, in the course of his political career he founded a number of voluntary organisations and ashram communities, led different types of collective action programs, ran journals and published widely on many burning issues. (His writings run into 100 volumes of collected works.) But he also wished, at Independence, to dissolve the Indian National Congress as a political party. He desired to transform it into a people’s service organisation, preferring its civil society orientation to its statist role. Gandhi believed in active citizenship, in individuals and voluntary associations critiquing and guiding the state, but also in working with it when the situation so demanded. His exhortation, ‘‘be the change you wish to
see’’ meant engaging with a range of social, political, economic, and educational problems (from untouchability to the school curriculum) and concomitantly strengthening a variety of movements and self-help groups. His ‘‘constructive programs,’’ for which he felt he was born, included activities for economic self-reliance, revitalising panchayats (elected village councils), establishing schools, inculcating sectarian harmony and eradicating untouchability. They became the cornerstone of his social capital networks. Gandhi was the recipient of many funds from members of the public and capitalists. He used them with discrimination and accounted for them meticulously. Many modern activists have been inspired by Gandhi to use civil society sites to mount a check on governmental excesses or in rejecting the hegemonic discourse of ‘‘development.’’ In independent India, the Sarvodaya and Bhoodan movements of the 1950s were inspired by Gandhian values while the ‘‘new social movements’’ of the 1970s and later, demanding lower-class emancipation, women’s rights, environmental protection and a nonbelligerent foreign policy for India, have used aspects of Gandhian resistance. The movement against large dams on the Narmada River, led by Baba Amte and Medha Patkar, is a case in point. Outside India, Gandhi’s legacy has found expression in the politics of moral activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi and the Mahatma’s erstwhile comrade, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The peace and ecology movements of the global North too have successfully deployed many Gandhian principles. Finally, there are those such as Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Malcolm X. They may not fully endorse nonviolence as a principle but have fought for the ‘‘self-pride’’ and the self-assertion of the oppressed in exemplary ways. All these movements and people and their beacon, Gandhi, have expanded and enriched civil society interventions in the lives of nation states.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in South Asia ▶ Civil Society History VI: Early and Mid 20th Century ▶ Collective Action ▶ King, Martin Luther, Jr. ▶ Social Movements
H. Anheier, S. Toepler (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-93996-4, # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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References/Further Readings Brown, J. (1989). Gandhi: Prisoner of hope. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Hardiman, D. (2003). Gandhi in his time and Ours. Delhi: Permanent Black. Parekh, B. (1989). Colonialism, tradition and reform: An analysis of Gandhi’s political discourse. New Delhi: Sage. Parel, A. J. (Ed.) (1997). Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and other writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudolph, L. I., & Rudolph S. H. (2006). Postmodern Gandhi and other essays: Gandhi in the world and at home. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Gardner, John W. JAN SACHARKO
Basic Biographical Information Born in 1912 in Los Angeles to real estate brokers, John William Gardner would later go on to be a cabinet secretary to Lyndon B. Johnson, director of Medicare and many other Great Society programs, and founder of organizations that would profoundly affect civil society. Gardner would attend Stanford University, earning both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in psychology before receiving his doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley in 1938. He taught psychology at universities in Connecticut and Massachusetts, joined the Marine Corps during World War II, and eventually was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. After the war he worked at the Carnegie Corporation, becoming president in 1955. For his contribution to education reform in the country while in that position, he would receive the 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom and gain the attention of President Johnson. Shortly thereafter he was selected for Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). After three years as Secretary, Gardner would continue to make his mark on civil society with the organizations he founded dedicated to bringing together people and causes and the many books he wrote on leadership. Gardner died in 2002 in California of complications related to cancer.
House Fellows Program. Gardner briefly chaired the Urban Coalition after resigning from the cabinet in 1968. In 1970 he founded Common Cause, a grassroots movement that opposed the Vietnam War, pushed for greater government accountability, and worked to increase voter turnout. Based on his experience in Washington he felt that ‘‘everybody’s organized but the people’’ and that with Common Cause they would build a lobbying group that would truly represent the people and not special interests. They worked to pass the 26th Amendment that lowered the voting age to 18, spent years working on campaign finance reform (which would pass the House of Representatives days before Gardner’s death in the form of the McCainFeingold bill), and urged Congress in many ways to open up their processes. The Watergate scandals would provide the opportunity for them to press their causes. Gardner left Common Cause in 1977 and chaired the committee that founded Independent Sector, a coalition of hundreds of nonprofit organizations, foundations, and philanthropy programs working together to create a stronger democracy with active citizens and open and accountable government. He served as chairperson there until 1983. In 1985 Independent Sector created the ‘‘John W. Gardner Leadership Award’’ to recognize outstanding work on the part of nonprofit and philanthropic leaders. He would return to teach at Stanford, writing his well known book ‘‘On Leadership’’ in 1990. Stanford University established the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities in 2000 to honor Gardner’s life of service.
Cross-References ▶ Independent Sector ▶ Leadership
References/Further Readings Gardner, J. W. (1990). On leadership. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Gates, William H. III REGINA LIST, JESSE O. BOLLINGER
Major Contributions
Basic Biographical Information
As HEW Secretary, Gardner’s reach affected millions of Americans as he helped establish Medicare, enforced the Civil Rights Act, and created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among other activities. While serving under Johnson, he also drafted the framework for the White
William H. Gates, cofounder of Microsoft and consistently ranked as one of the most generous philanthropists today, was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington (United States). After graduating from the prestigious private Lakeside School in Seattle, Gates attended Harvard
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University until his junior year when he left in order to pursue business and technical ventures with childhood friend Paul Allen. In 2007, some 30 years later, Harvard bestowed Gates with an honorary doctor of laws degree. Together with Paul Allen, Gates founded the Microsoft Corporation, creator of the Windows operating system, the Office suite of applications, and Xbox, among others. Under his leadership, Microsoft grew into a multinational corporation employing some 70,000 people worldwide. In July 2008 Gates completed his transition from a day-to-day role at Microsoft to focus more time and energy on his charitable work. Although he no longer serves as Chief Software Architect, he remains nonexecutive Chairman of Microsoft and the largest individual shareholder with more than 8% of the company’s common stock. Gates has also published several works on his thoughts about technology and the future, including The Road Ahead in 1995 and Business @ the Speed of Thought in 1999. The proceeds from both texts were donated to charities important to Gates.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Gates’s reputation as one of today’s most generous philanthropists begins around 1994, when he and his wife Melinda used the sale of a portion of his stockholdings to create the William H. Gates Foundation. In 1999, the Foundation’s name was changed to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and in 2000 it merged with the Gates Learning Foundation to make it the among the largest philanthropic foundations in the world. Now devoting the bulk of his time to his philanthropic endeavors, Gates has used his renown to promote his causes. Using the 2008 World Economic Forum meeting as a platform, Gates, the ‘‘impatient optimist,’’ introduced his idea of ‘‘creative capitalism,’’ an approach where ‘‘governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities.’’ Gates is convinced that ‘‘this hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others can serve a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone.’’ His proposal quickly launched a lively discussion online and in various forums and has already resulted in numerous publications. Gates has been recognized prominently for his wealth – ranked the richest man (or among them) in the world since 1998 – and for his philanthropy – regularly listed among the most generous philanthropists. In 2005, he was knighted Knight Commander by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to UK enterprise
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as well as his activities in the fight against poverty and, along with his wife Melinda and rocker Bono, was named by Time magazine ‘‘Person of the Year.’’
Cross-References
▶ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ World Economic Forum
References/Further Readings Bishop, M., & Green, M. (2008). Philanthrocapitalism: How the rich can save the world. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Gates, B. (1996). The road ahead. New York: Penguin Books. Gates, B. (1999). Business @ the speed of thought. New York: Warner Books. Kinsley, M. (2008). Creative capitalism: A conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and other economic leaders. New York: Simon & Schuster.
GCAP ▶ Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP)
Geldof, Bob LISIUNIA ROMANIENKO
Biographical Information Bob Geldof was born in 1951 in Dublin County, Ireland. He attended a private Catholic institution of higher education which exposed him not only to a rich tradition of liberation theology missionary work in the southern hemisphere, but also what he saw as institutional rigidity and injustices. He first gained notoriety as a member of the punk band Boomtown Rats. He soon combined his musical aspirations with community organizing skills and philanthropic pedagogy to reach out internationally. In recognition of his efforts to mobilize resources as well as his philanthropic leadership, Geldof was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded numerous humanitarian distinctions, and granted honorary degrees from several universities.
Major Accomplishments Bob Geldof has explored the revolutionary potential and pushed avant-garde arts activism throughout his career.
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Through experimental music, video, and performing arts projects, Geldof has inadvertently challenged some critics of popular culture, and demonstrated the potential impact of pop music on politics and aesthetic culture alike. As a community-organizer with an ability to mobilize human and technological resources internationally, Bob Geldof has encouraged civic engagement among youth. In particular Geldof sought to enable diverse audiences to participate in effective and joyful pop culture rituals as a form of resistance to social, economic, and cultural injustices (Fokidis, 2007). Through the assistance of celebrity collaborators, Bob Geldof organized revenue-generating music and live concert fundraisers such as, ‘‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’’ by Band Aid and trans-Atlantic events such as Live Aid to benefit Ethiopian famine victims. Bob Geldof subsequently spearheaded other cultural activities including the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, Hands Across America, USA for Africa, ‘‘We are the World,’’ Sun City Artists United Against Apartheid, ‘‘We Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City,’’ Make Poverty History, Drop the Debt, Peace TV, numerous other film and multimedia projects, and most recently, Live 8 to attract attention to the G8 Summit.
Cross-References
▶ Cosmopolitanism ▶ Fundraising ▶ Make Poverty History ▶ Philanthropy in Africa ▶ Social Marketing
References/Further Readings Chesters, G., & Welsh, I. (2006). Complexity and social movements: Multitudes at the edge of chaos. London: Routledge. Fokidis, M. (2007). Hijacking cultural policies: Art as a healthy virus within social strategies of resistance. Social Analysis, 51(1), 58–67. Weitzman, E. (2008). No fun: Aporias of pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. German Quarterly, 81(2), 185–202.
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) ALLYSON REAVES
Address of Organization 1744 R Street NW Washington, DC 20009 USA www.gmfus.org
Introduction The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) is a nonpartisan American public policy and grantmaking institution dedicated to promoting greater cooperation and understanding between North America and Europe. Founded in 1972 through a gift from Germany on the 25th anniversary of the Marshall Plan as a permanent memorial to Marshall Plan assistance, GMF maintains a strong presence on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to its headquarters in Washington, DC, GMF has seven offices in Europe: Berlin, Bratislava, Paris, Brussels, Belgrade, Ankara, and Bucharest.
Brief History After World War II, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan, in which it allocated some $17 billion over 4 years to the recovery and rebuilding of Western Europe. In appreciation for Marshall Plan aid, the German government established the German Marshall Fund of the United States with a gift of $108 million in 1972. The German government renewed its commitment to GMF with subsequent rounds of funding in 1986 and 2001 that resulted in a substantial endowment. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, GMF rapidly expanded its grantmaking work to Central and Eastern Europe and played an instrumental role during the 1990s in assisting with the transitions to democracy in this region.
Mission/Objective/Focus Area Since its inception, GMF has brought Americans and Europeans together to increase understanding and to build future transatlantic networks among the political, media, business, and nonprofit communities. Through its grantmaking and programmatic initiatives, GMF seeks to stimulate the exchange of ideas and promote collaboration between North America and Europe. GMF staff and fellows are increasingly sought out by politicians, journalists, and the public to comment on or provide a context for particular policy challenges facing North America and Europe.
Activities Throughout its history, GMF has demonstrated work in grantmaking, convening, programmatic initiatives (including fellowships and exchange programs), and research in transatlantic policy issues. GMF offers a variety of papers and analyses by GMF staff and Transatlantic Fellows. In addition to its influential grantmaking, GMF also organizes high-level conferences, like the Brussels Forum, which brings together American and European political, corporate, and intellectual leaders to address pressing challenges currently facing both sides of the Atlantic.
Getty, J. Paul
GMF also works closely with partner organizations to sponsor several fellowship and exchange programs designed to provide both broad cultural exposure and more targeted opportunities for learning about specialized policy areas. These programs – the Marshall Memorial Fellowship, the Comparative Domestic Policy Fellowship, Congressional Leaders Program, the Journalism Program, the Transatlantic Fellows Program, and its newest program, the Transatlantic Academy – attract a wide range of candidates and reflect GMF-specific areas. Research and policy initiatives are designed to increase transatlantic cooperation and decrease tension around difficult issues, and are carried out by both GMF and its partner institutions. Such initiatives include supporting key institutions working on transatlantic issues, convening policymakers in a variety of forums, supporting in-house scholars, conducting transatlantic public opinion surveys, and developing issue-related projects.
Structure and Governance GMF is an American institution with an American Board of Trustees. Guido Goldman and Marc Leland serve as Board cochairmen, and Craig Kennedy serves as president.
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transatlantic partnership. Building on the successful model of BTD, in 2007, GMF created the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation (BST), a $20 million publicprivate partnership and GMF’s second trust for the wider Europe region. Like BTD, BST is also supported by USAID and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, with additional support from the Romanian government and Ministry of Defence, Government of Latvia. Based in Bucharest, Romania, BST provides grants to local and national NGOs, governmental entities, community groups, policy institutes, and other associations to implement projects in three programmatic areas: Civic Participation, CrossBorder Initiatives, and East-East Cooperation.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Social Capital in Central and Eastern Europe ▶ Charles Stewart Mott Foundation ▶ Partnerships ▶ Think Tanks
References/Further Readings Bollag, B. (2001). Community foundations across Eastern Europe advance ‘‘Step by Step.’’ The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Funding GMF draws from its endowment and seeks partnerships with foundations, governments, and corporations to further its work to strengthen transatlantic relations. GMF has received grants from the European Union, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and others in support of its programs. As of its 2007 fiscal year, total assets were $254,055,581 and total giving amounted to $6,361,843.
Accomplishments In 2003, GMF partnered with USAID and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to create The Balkan Trust for Democracy (BTD). A 10 year, $30 million grantmaking initiative that supports democracy, good governance, and Euroatlantic integration in Southeastern Europe, BTD is structured to allow both European and US partners to join the effort to strengthen transatlantic cooperation in the Balkans. Since its founding, additional contributions from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Belgrade, the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), the Tipping Point Foundation, Compagnia di San Paolo, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark have made BTD a true
Getty, J. Paul DAVID B. HOWARD
Basic Biographical Information Jean Paul Getty was born in 1892 in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA). His father, George Getty, would soon start an oil business that would propel his son toward being one of the world’s first billionaires. When his family moved to California in 1903, Getty attended private school in Los Angeles, California and graduated from Polytechnic High School in 1909. He then toured Europe before attending the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley. He finally graduated from Oxford University in England with a degree in economics and political science in 1914. By becoming a successful ‘‘oil man’’ in his own right, Getty made his first million by the age of 24. When Getty’s father died in 1930, J. Paul became president of the George Getty Oil Company (successor to Minnehoma Oil), but his mother inherited the controlling interest in the firm. Getty continued to acquire assets during the Great
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Depression, gaining a controlling interest in Pacific Western Oil Corporation and eventually securing control of Getty Oil. He also began to dabble in real estate, purchasing the Hotel Pierre in New York City. In 1957, Fortune magazine named Getty the richest man in America. In 1967, all of Getty’s companies were merged into the Getty Oil Company, which became the $3 billion base of Getty’s fortune. He now owned 80% of Getty Oil and its nearly 200 affiliated companies and he remained president of Getty Oil until his death in 1976 at Sutton Place, Britain, where he lived the last 25 years of his life.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions An avid art collector since the 1930s, Getty viewed art as a civilizing influence in society and strongly believed in making art available to the public for its education and enjoyment. He opened the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, to the public in 1954. The museum housed collections of Greek and Roman antiquities, 18th-century French furniture, and European paintings. When most of Getty’s personal estate, including his art collections, passed to the J. Paul Getty Trust in 1982, the Trustees sought to make a greater contribution to the visual arts through an expanded museum as well as a range of new programs. The Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Research Institute, and the Grant Program were founded in the 1980s. The Grant Program, which furthers the work of all Getty programs and administers the Getty Leadership Institute, became the Getty Foundation in 2005. The J. Paul Getty Trust continues Getty’s vision, supported by directions from his will, which calls for ‘‘the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.’’ In 2006, the J. Paul Getty trust was the third largest foundation in the United States, with assets in excess of $10 billion. As an operating foundation, however, annual giving almost fully supports the Getty museums and other programs.
Cross-References
▶ Civil Society and Cultural Organizations ▶ Foundations, Operating
References/Further Readings Getty, J. P. (1976). As I see it: The autobiography of J. Paul Getty. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Hewins, R. (1960). The richest American: J. Paul Getty. New York: Dutton. Lenzner, R. (1986). The great Getty: The life and loves of J. Paul Getty, richest man in the world. New York: Crown. Pearson, J. (1995). Painfully rich: J. Paul Getty and his heirs. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony JAN R. BUSSE
Basic Biographical Information Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, was born in 1938 in Edmonton, North London. He is regarded as one of the most important contemporary sociologists of international relevance and has published some 40 books and 200 articles. Giddens was the first member of his family to go to university. He was educated at the University of Hull (B.A. 1959) and the London School of Economics (M.A. 1961) and achieved his Ph.D. degree (1976) from King’s College, Cambridge. He started his academic career at the University of Leicester before he moved to King’s College, Cambridge, where he became Professor of Sociology. From 1997 to 2003 Giddens was Director of the London School of Economics. In June 2004 he was appointed as a member of the House of Lords for the Labor Party.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Apart from his seminal elaborations on structuration theory, modernity, and globalization, Giddens’s work on the third way in politics is of crucial importance as it represents the intellectual framework for New Labour. Giddens was one of the most important advisers of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The third way can best be described as the path beyond statist social democracy (Old Left) and right-wing neoliberalism (Old Right) aiming at modernizing social democracy. In particular, Giddens identifies five dilemmas by which social democracy is being challenged so that there is the need for a theory of the third way: globalization, individualism, blurring of the opposite between left and right, changes in the meaning of political agency, and ecological problems. Based upon these insights, Giddens develops a six-point framework for a reconstituted radical politics: repair damaged solidarities, recognize the centrality of life politics, accept that active trust implies generative politics, embrace dialogic democracy, rethink the welfare state, and confront violence. According to Giddens, third way politics should aim at helping people to cope with the major revolutions of our time: globalization, transformations in personal life and our relationship to nature. In this sense, the third way represents a discussion on how to reform the welfare state structures of government, how to live in a multicultural society, how to deal with gender revolution, and how to approach risk scenarios.
Gide, Charles
Cross-References ▶ Third Way ▶ Welfare State
References/Further Readings Bryant, C. G. A., & Jary, D. (2001). The contemporary Giddens: Social theory in a globalizing age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond left and right – The future of radical politics. Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. (1998). The third way. The renewal of social democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A., & Pierson, C. (1999). Conversations with Anthony Giddens. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gide, Charles ANAEL LABIGNE, REGINA LIST
Basic Biographical Information Charles Gide, an economist of solidarism and founder of the French theory of social cooperation, was born on June 24, 1847 at Uze`s in France into a Protestant family. Gide studied law and economics in Paris, where his older brother Paul Gide, the father of the famous Nobel Prize-winning author Andre´ Gide, was a Professor of Law. His thesis on the rights of associations with religious purposes, which had been prohibited in France since 1792, can be considered an essential input into the French association legislation, the famous Law of 1901, enacted almost 30 years later. Afterwards he became a professor at the Universite´ de Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at the Universite´ de Paris and finally at the Colle`ge de France.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions Beginning in his student days, Charles Gide harbored reservations about the prevailing liberal doctrines and orthodox economic theory. On the other hand, he could never agree with the socialist doctrines of egalitarianism and violent expropriation. In 1885, out of this historic context-bound dilemma, he was attracted to a group of people in Nimes (mainly the social activists Auguste Fabre and Edouard de Boyve) who tried to put social cooperation into practice. They organized the first congress, the Congre`s de la Coope´ration Franc¸aise in Paris, and within a few years Gide became a spokesperson for cooperative thinkers in France. Gide saw the creation of
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the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) in 1895 as a possibility to link the cooperative movement with the broader goal of global peace and justice. Gide’s involvement in these efforts enabled him to define a new, independent type of economic thought (and was important to the whole French cooperative movement that followed). After completing his Principles of Political Economy (1883), which was to go through 27 editions in 49 languages, Gide announced in 1889 the formation of a new economic school of solidarity. According to La coope´ration. Confe´rences de propagande (1906), cooperatives are the concrete expression of solidarity in the economic sphere. Together with Les Socie´te´s Coope´ratives de Consommation (1904) (engl.: Consumers’ Co-operative Societies, 1922), these works have become classics in the field of cooperativism. What makes Gide important to civil society studies is his application of solidaristic principles to economic thought and practice, for example, when he argues that consumer associations are the preeminent form of cooperatives and that they can enable working people to find a better way of life with more independence and freedom. As both an economist and a moralist, Gide considered cooperativism as having a direct link with social progress through the values of sharing, justice, tolerance, and solidarity. Not long before his death, Gide founded the Institut International d’e´tudes coope´ratives at Baˆle, France in 1931. Today there is a French Association Charles Gide Pour l’E´tude De La Pense´e E´conomique, which unites researchers adhering to this line of thinking and organizes events for exchange and discussion (www. charlesgide.fr).
Cross-References
▶ Cooperatives, History and Theory of ▶ Desroche, Henri ▶ International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) ▶ Mutual Organizations, Mutual Societies ▶ Social Economy ▶ Solidarity
References/Further Readings Gide, C. (1906). La coope´ration. Confe´rences de propagande. Paris: Recueil Sirey. Gide, C. (1922). Consumer’s co-operative societies. New York: Knopf. Lavondes, A. (1953). Charles Gide: Un Pre´curseur De l’Europe Unie et De l’ONU. Uze`s, France: Editions La Capitelle. Maitron, J. (1974). Dictionnaire Biographique Du Mouvement Ouvrier Franc¸ais. Charles Gide. Paris: Les E´ditions Ouvrie`res.
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GIFE ▶ Grupo de Institutos, Fundaco˜es e Empresas (GIFE)
Gift/Giving FRANK ADLOFF Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Introduction and Definition The social sciences are broadly based on the dichotomy between self-interest and altruism. This distinction can already be found in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Circumventing these alternatives, it can be claimed, in contrast, that the dichotomy of interest and morality is transcended or dissolved by the effect of the gift as an initiator of social reciprocity. The long drawn-out and largely unproductive debate over the question of whether social action can be better explained through theories of rational choice and self-interest or through norm, culture, altruism, and socialization can be overcome by using this theoretical tradition. The classic point of reference for thinking on gift-giving and reciprocity is the famous text by the anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss, the nephew of Emile Durkheim. ‘‘The Gift,’’ published in 1925, deals with the anthropological research on economic exchange from a systematic and theoretical point of view. Mauss (1990) synthesized the research of his time, especially that of Bronislaw Malinoswski and Franz Boas, and laid the foundation for economic anthropology. All subsequent social theorists pondering the gift refer to his work, the spectrum of ideas ranging from rational choice theories through normativist approaches to attempts to overcome the dichotomy between interests and norms. Generally speaking and following Alain Caille´ (2000a: 47), the gift can be defined as ‘‘every allowance of goods or services made without a guarantee of return, with a view to creating, maintaining, or regenerating the social bond.’’ The gift rests on a paradox, since it cannot be attributed to one set of motives.
Historical Background Premodern gift-giving represents according to Marcel Mauss a system of total prestations (prestations totales): giving, taking, and reciprocating are the basic collective
activities through which archaic societies reproduce themselves. Mauss emphasizes that the reciprocal presenting of gifts with the aim of establishing relationships rests on the voluntary and obligating aspects of giving, taking, and giving back simultaneously. Mauss places two variants of premodern gift-giving in the center of his analysis: the so-called kula ring on the Melanesian Trobriand Islands and the potlatch among northwest American Indians. He differentiates in this regard between more and less strongly agonistic gifts. Nonagonistic gifts create a sphere of approximate equivalences and mutual indebtedness in which the accumulation of wealth does not assume primacy. Gifts provoke counter gifts and in this way permanently ‘‘feed’’ mutual indebtedness and obligations, which cannot be conclusively settled. An example of this is the kula ring on the Trobriand Islands, in which two kinds of adornments – necklaces and bracelets – circulate in opposite directions between the islands. After ceremonial gift-giving the actual exchange of goods (gimwali), in which bargaining and trading takes place, begins. The offering of gifts establishes and maintains relationships of solidarity at the outset before the thus framed and selfinterested exchange of goods can start. Furthermore, in this form of gift-giving the attempt is made to build reputation through the fact that the decorative objects are of differing status. The more strongly agonistic gift, in which the fight for reputation takes place much more openly, can be seen paradigmatically in the potlatch of the peoples of the northwest Canadian coast, described by Mauss as a ‘‘war of wealth.’’ This is embodied in a reciprocal increase in gifts which continues until a clan or a chief has to drop out of the cycle of giving ever greater amounts; for only one can win in potlatch, the winning being in status. Everything here is based on the principles of antagonism and rivalry (cf. Godelier, 1996, 2002). Mauss drew attention not only to the interconnection of gifts and arrangements of reciprocity, but also to a further phenomenon of gift-giving in archaic societies. There, the gift or given object is usually not divorced from the identity of the giver. Mauss asks what it is that motivates the receiver of the gift to give something back, and in his interpretation of gift-giving among the Maori he arrives at the conclusion that the spirit of the giver ‘‘resides’’ in the given, compelling the receiver to make a counter gift. That the gift received contains something obligating rests for Mauss on the fact that the thing received is not inanimate. Even after the giver has handed it over, it is still a part of him, and through it he has power over the receiver. This interpretation launched a long
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debate in anthropology which mostly revolved around attempts to demystify the thesis of things imbued with souls (cf. Le´vi-Strauss, 1987 [1950]; Sahlins, 1972). In his essay Mauss was clearly pursuing goals connected to the present, positioned as he was in the French tradition of a critique of utilitarianism. Mary Douglas (1990) has demonstrated that his essay is actually about ‘‘politics’’ and human solidarity. Mauss was in fact less interested in the evolution of different forms of social interaction than in universals which can be found in every society (Geary, 2003). He was concerned with a third principle of solidarity, that of a form of reciprocal recognition through gift-giving and resting on social ties and indebtedness. The social contract, which Mauss perceives in the archaic and premodern societies, serves him as a model for the renewal of the contemporary social contract through the recognition of reciprocal indebtedness. The danger that he saw was that modern social relations would increasingly follow the model of barter, market, and contract – thus Mauss’ warning that homo oeconomicus still lay in store for us. Sociologists have tended to view the transition to modern society as the dissolution of ceremonial giftgiving and the differentiation of the system of reciprocity into, on the one hand, strict market logic and, on the other, a (residual) cultural logic of giving presents in the private sphere (cf. Berking, 1999). However, in contradiction of the view expressed in approaches based on differentiation theory, it was part of Mauss’ intention to show that the development of modern market societies did not lead to the disappearance of noneconomic motives as part of processes of social exchange – an argument already advanced by Emile Durkheim (1964 [1893]). The fixation in perspective on assumptions based in differentiation theory has hidden the fact that there is sufficient space in modern societies too for intermediary forms that follow the logic of the gift. However, some contemporary sociologists, especially Jacques Godbout and Alain Caille´, are involved in a reexamination of the concept of gift-giving and trying to use the concept for a new foundation of social theory and modern society. Godbout (1998) and Caille´ (2000b) discuss the two contradictory aspects of gift-giving: the aspect of voluntary giving and the obligation to give. Gift-giving is voluntary because it cannot be forced; it is obligatory because a violation of the norm of reciprocity will be socially sanctioned. They claim that this duality is often not adequately recognized, in such different strands of thinking represented by Derrida (1994, 1995), Bourdieu (1990, 1998), Blau (1964), Axelrod (1984) or
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Gouldner (1973). They all have, according to Caille´ and Godbout, a one-sided concept of the gift because they presuppose that a real gift has to be totally separated from self-interest. Only a gift without calculation that does not create social bonds would be a true gift and, at the same time, an inconceivable gift. Caille´ (2000b, 2001 [1994]), in contrast, sees the gift as being stretched out across a square comprising ‘‘interest in,’’ ‘‘interest for,’’ duty and spontaneity. If, asymptomatically, it approaches one or two of these four poles of action, a giftbased relation is transformed into an economic exchange, pure love or an ethics of duty. In a nondifferentiated state the gift-based relation is a basic mode of social interaction that cannot be reduced to one of these poles. For the same reason, Marcel He´naff (2002) emphasizes that the ceremonial gift as described by Mauss should not be confused with an economic gift but also not with an altruistic moral gift. What Mauss describes as a ceremonial or ritual gift can also be described in modern societies as gift exchange and the reciprocity associated with it, representing an independent mode of action, which can however tip over to one of the poles. Relations of reciprocity are in this sense foundational for relations of social interaction in everyday life and contain a latent and prereflexive normativity; when the course of daily events is disturbed and reflections thus occur, it is conceivable that one of the poles receives priority. On the microlevel people are permanently giving each other nontangible ‘‘things’’ in everyday face-to-face situations. This idea, so central to sociology, has however been interpreted too rarely in relation to the theory of gifts and reciprocity. Furthermore, the position can be advanced that in modern societies there is, besides the circulation of goods and services on market principles or through state redistribution, also a third area in which circulation is founded on the principle of gift and counter-gift. The most typical areas are those of, on the one hand, primary sociality, that is of friendship and family, and on the other, the so-called third or nonprofit sector.
Key Issues This article will be closed with some reflections on giftgiving and reciprocity in the sphere of the nonprofit sector. In investigations of philanthropic actions (that is donations and endowments of time, money, and ideas) it has regularly been established that resources are made available without a guarantee of a response that can be determined in advance. Therefore, the motive of giving and the effect evoked of reciprocity must initially be separated, even if they may be interwoven. For the subjective truth of the giver may be that he gives without the
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expectation of a counter-gift and yet simultaneously knows that he is ‘‘objectively’’ setting a cycle of obligations of reciprocity in motion. It is also conceivable that the donation which to the outside appears spontaneous may be felt by the giver to be an expression of gratitude or debt – e.g., to a hospital in which she was once treated or towards society in general. In relation to contemporary philanthropy Ilana Silber (1998) emphasizes that the modern gift is frequently a gift to strangers. It is precisely in the nonagonistic, individual donation to a relief organization that no relationship exists between giver and receiver, and the expectation of direct reciprocation becomes redundant (cf. also Titmuss, 1997 [1970]). If no third party learns of the gift then, phenomenologically speaking, this gift comes very close to the Christian conception of caritas and expresses a real relationship to strangers and others. With the transition to modern society gifts and connected (reciprocal) relations do not become obsolete, but on the contrary have in several social spheres undergone a radicalization and (in Max Weber’s sense) rationalization. For while in many social spheres a tendency towards balanced reciprocity (barter) has made itself felt, the charitable gift shaped by Judeo-Christian thought becomes, in the transition to modernity, universalized, radicalized, and ‘‘introverted’’ (Caille´, 2000b). Universalized gifts are no longer directed only at nearby social groups but also towards strangers, the radicalized gift no longer expects reciprocation, and the introverted gift sets itself apart from the theatrically staged gift visible for all to see. Anonymous donations or foundations and trusts operating discreetly correspond exactly to this type of giving. If, however, the donor or benefactor is known, chains of reciprocity may be set in motion. Frequently, it is not the receiver but a third party who responds to the gift: for example the peers within a donating elite. The culture of philanthropy may also include the practice of peers attempting to surpass each other in willingness to donate and endow in order to achieve prestige within the peer group or other social groups – this closely resembles the agonistic gift as described by Mauss in relation to the potlatch. Moreover, the gift – if it is not effected among equals but instead is asymmetrically orientated – often expresses a social position or place in a hierarchy and protects these (cf. Adloff, 2006). Thus, Randall Collins (Collins & Hickman, 1991), for example, has indicated how important it is in American society regularly to be philanthropically active in order to belong to ‘‘high society,’’ for it is only in this way that high economic status can also be ennobled and legitimated culturally and symbolically.
Gifts are always sign systems and carriers of identity and even in the medium of money donated questions of personal ties and identity are resolved. In a qualitative study of the culture of elite philanthropy in New York City Francie Ostrower (1995) found confirmation for this thesis. Elites whom she interviewed described philanthropy as a distinct elite culture. According to Ostrower, philanthropy is on the one hand an expression of an elite culture and collective identity and at the same time a method for integrating philanthropic elites. Gifts that are so to speak immobilized in the form of works of art exhibited in museums or professorial chairs are clear examples of the representation of ties of identity and thus express patterns of social relations and distinctions in relation to other social groups. The field of philanthropic giving has over the last decades become highly organized and institutionalized. Associations in which resources are pooled but not primarily for the aim of making profit and foundations, i.e., social agencies of value-oriented giving, are only two typical forms of organization. For Max Weber the association was the ideal type of sociation, since in associations citizens form horizontal networks, act in solidarity with each other and organize themselves in terms of a civil society. In foundations the common good is normed into an ide´e directrice through the concrete act of establishing a foundation and setting its goals and then put into effect in terms of action – as an ideal type fed from the proceeds of a fortune and on the long run the benefactor no longer participates in this process. Furthermore, there are organizations which professionally run the ‘‘begging’’ for donations that precedes giving, i.e., fundraising. In this respect the figure of the fundraiser serves as an intermediary between the giver and the receiver of the money and has to attempt to take account of the interests, motivations, and value commitments of both sides. Modern giving would be simply unthinkable without medialized and institutionalized forms of requests for donations. A market exists in which emotional and moral ties are ‘‘traded,’’ with the goal of awaking, binding, and perpetuating individual motivation. Finally, the third or nonprofit sector is in fact characterized by a high degree of interorganizational arrangements of reciprocity (cf. Adloff & Sigmund, 2005). In American philanthropy there are for example strong tendencies to subject nonprofit organizations to stricter controls by the financial backers and to make funds conditional on the fulfilment of clearly defined tasks.
Future Directions It can be concluded that the various forms of giving embedded within the modern gift economy in reciprocal
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arrangements not only selectively initiate and reproduce social relations but also stabilize and systematize the latter, these relations appearing in institutionalized and organized form. Consequently, gifts and evoked reciprocity should be studied as an autonomous principle of social action occupying an important place between rationalized forms of purely benevolent action on the one hand and selfinterested action on the other (Silber, 1998). The prevailing dichotomy of utilitarian and normativist thinking not only obscures our view of the irreducible logic of gift and reciprocity, it also causes the ubiquity of this logic in modern societies to disappear analytically. But the gift is an expression of both voluntariness and obligation, and is connected to much more than just economic transfers: it is just as much a carrier of identity and a tie-sign, an expression and carrier of interpersonal ties and trust.
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ Civil Society Theory: Rousseau ▶ Durkheim, E´mile ▶ Fundraising ▶ Identity ▶ Philanthropy, definitions and history ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Social Trust ▶ Solidarity ▶ Titmuss, Richard ▶ Weber, Max
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Collins, R. & Hickman, N. (1991). Altruism and culture as social products. Voluntas, 2(2), 1–15. Derrida, J. (1994). Given time: I. Counterfeit money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1995). The gift of death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, M. (1990). Foreword: No free gifts. In Mauss, Marcel (Eds.), The gift (W. D. Hallis, Trans.; pp. vii–xviii). New York/London: W. W. Norton. Durkheim, E. (1964 [1893]). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press. Geary, P. J. (2003). Gift exchange and social science modeling. The limitations of a construct. In G. Algazi, V. Groebner, & B. Jussen (Eds.), Negotiating the gift. Pre-modern figurations of exchange (pp. 129–140). Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Godbout, J. T. (1998). The world of the gift. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Godelier, M. (1996). L’e´nigme du don. Paris: Librairie Arthe`me Fayard. Godelier, M. (2002). Some things you give, some things you sell, but some things you must keep for yourselves: What Mauss did not say about sacred objects. In E. Wyschogrod, J. -J. Goux,& E. Boynton (Eds.), The enigma of gift and sacrifice (pp. 19–37). New York: Fordham University Press. Gouldner, A. W. (1973). For sociology. Renewal and critique in sociology today. New York: Basic Books. He´naff, M. (2002). Le prix de la ve´rite´. Le don, l’argent, la philosophie. Paris: E´ditions du Seuil. Le´vi-Strauss, C. (1987 [1950]). Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge & Kegan. Mauss, M. ([1925] 1990). The gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (W. D. Hallis, Trans.). New York/London: W. W. Norton. Ostrower, F. (1995). Why the wealthy give. The culture of elite philanthropy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine. Silber, I. (1998). Modern philanthropy: Reassessing the viability of a Maussian perspective. In W. James, N. J. Allen (Eds.), Marcel Mauss. A centenary tribute (pp. 134–150). New York: Berghahn Books. Titmuss, R. M. (1997 [1970]). The gift relationship. From human blood to social policy (original edition with new chapters). Oakley, Ann/ Ashton, John (Eds.). New York: New Press.
References/Further Readings Adloff, F. (2006). Beyond interests and norms: Gift-giving and reciprocity in modern societies. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 13(2), 407–427. Adloff, F., & Sigmund, S. (2005). Die gift economy moderner Gesellschaften – Zur Soziologie der Philanthropie. In: Adloff, F. & Mau, S. (Eds.), Vom Geben und Nehmen. Zur Soziologie der Reziprozita¨t (pp. 211–235). Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Berking, H. (1999). Sociology of giving. London: Sage. Blau, P. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. New York: Wiley. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason, On the theory of action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caille´, A. (2000a). Gift and association. In A. Vandevelde (Ed.), Gifts and interests (pp. 47–55). Leuven: Peeters. Caille´, A. (2000b). Anthropologie du don. Le tiers paradigme. Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer. Caille´, A. (2001 [1994]). The double inconceivability of the pure gift. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 6(2), 23–38.
Gift Relationship MATT BOWDEN Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, UK
Introduction The gift relationship is a foundational concept in the understanding of civil society. Because it embodies the idea of exchange of goodwill between actors the concept is central to the appreciation of its constituent concepts of trust, reciprocity, and solidarity. Furthermore, one knows from the literature on social capital that everyday exchange and reciprocation between actors produce social ties and create social bonds. However, while crucial to
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social capital, the gift relation has a dark side that presents a challenge for the nature of democracy in civil society; while gifting creates ties and underpins social bonding, it also reproduces systems of power and domination. In this latter sense it may indeed be contrary to the principles of participation upon which civil society is founded. Furthermore, the practice of gifting has proved to be resilient despite social change. To define the gift relation, three main theoretical contributions are outlined and considered: the first from Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), who emphasized the religious, symbolic, and moral origins of the gift relation; the second from Richard Titmuss (1907–1973), who argued that the ethic of the gift relationship was embodied in the practice of voluntary blood donation that underpinned social citizenship; and the third from Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), who argued that gifts constituted a form of master–slave relationship based upon internalized obligation which tied the receiver to an unrecognized system of power.
Definition: Three Contributions to the Theory of the Gift Relation The gift relation predates the money-based economy, and the cultural practice of gifting has survived a number of major social transformations in human history. Marcel Mauss (1950) [1990] began his anthropological account with the idea of the gift economy being a ‘‘system of total services’’ exemplified in the ‘‘potlatch’’ as practiced by the North West native American tribal groups: the Haı¨da and the Tlingit. Here the potlatch also involved hostility and rivalry between nobles: tribal chiefs contracted on behalf of all their subjects and they engaged in the destruction of property as a challenge to visitors or neighboring groups to reciprocate; to destroy produce or valuables in equal or greater quantities. Mauss provided an exposition drawn from anthropological works throughout Polynesia and South Asia (including, for instance, Malinowski’s study of the Trobriand Islands) to demonstrate that although there were some local variations, such potlatch systems were widespread in this part of the world for a substantial period of time. In this analysis, Mauss identified that the obligation attaching to exchange of goods carried spiritual power; the object given was endowed with a symbolic value greater than its material worth. An example of this chosen by Mauss is the Maori Hau which encapsulated the spirit that moved with the object. If you were given a gift and you passed it on to another, for which you received goods as reciprocation, you would be compelled to pass these on to the original source of the gift. The object was endowed with
a soul and it was believed that it had a homing instinct to return to its place of origin. Harm would befall one if one did not uphold the spirit of the Hau (Mauss, 1950, pp. 15–16). The spiritual power of the Hau thus acted as a form of external constraint upon individual actors. According to Mauss, the potlatch involves obligation and honor on the one hand, but also status, and ultimately, freedom on the other. Trade is premised upon the money economy whereas the potlatch involves prestige. Citing Malinowski’s study of the Trobriand Islands, Mauss draws attention to the practice of the hoarding of yams: Islanders stockpiled them not for accumulating wealth but to give them away so as to gain prestige for their families. By virtue of its incorporation in ancient Roman, Hindu, and Germanic laws the practice of gift reciprocation from archaic societies entered into early formal contracts resulting in its survival into contemporary society. Following his mentor Emile Durkheim, Mauss’s version of the gift relation ties the practice to an objective morality. Gift and reciprocation is contrary to rationality in that it has spiritual and moral origins. An individual is not free of obligation, nor purely self-interested, as the concept of the rational agent of both classical and contemporary liberal economics. Rather he or she acts relative to the groups and subgroups (civil society) of which they are part. Human agents practice the gift relation by virtue of human sociability. From Mauss’s version of the gift, one can conclude that social practices cause economic effects, and not the reverse. That is not to say that the gift relation is entirely nonrational, for in Mauss’s framework it involves the maximization of status and prestige which outweighs utility and wealth based on money. The act of giving is thus part of social potentiality and the origin of altruism; it connects individual action to social groups, to culture, and to the wider society. Titmuss (1970) conceptualized the gift relation as a form of social altruism best expressed in systems of voluntary blood donation. Social good is about the expression of confidence in humanity; donors and beneficiaries are unknown strangers. People, he argued, ‘‘cause good’’ in the act of blood donation because they express faith in the future altruism of such unknown strangers. In this context, Titmuss (1970, p. 243) argued that the market was an exclusionary device that separated people from their right to give. In this line of thought, there is no expectation of individualized reciprocation: one is not bound by obligation but by securing one’s well-being in the future. This involves some degree of rational calculation as it entails securing future provision contingency. The organization of voluntary blood banking is a redistributive system and underlines the principles of
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social insurance in some social security systems. However, Titmuss’s definition might be criticized for being rather one-dimensional. In this regard, Sahlins’s (1974) typology of gift relations distinguished between generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity. Generalized reciprocity refers to gifts where one does not have to give in order to receive; this represents the ideal of a ‘‘pure gift’’ where the obligation to reciprocate is blurred and typical of that which operates in kin networks. Balanced reciprocity involves direct and immediate reciprocity between giver and receiver where goods of equal value are exchanged. Negative reciprocity refers to the maximization of advantage by one person at the expense of the other, described by Sahlins (1974, p. 195) as ‘‘the attempt to get something for nothing with impunity.’’ Developing this typology, reciprocity might be considered in four senses when applied to the analysis of welfare states (Adloff & Mau, 2006, pp. 115–116). The first of these relates to generalized reciprocity associated with systems of compensatory redistribution underpinning basic incomes policies where the welfare state follows a ‘‘normative-relational’’ logic of solidarity between classes. The second form of balanced reciprocity underlines social insurance which safeguards both social status and living standards and works according to the logic of equivalence whereby benefits can be expected in correspondence with the contributions already made. A third form, risk reciprocity, relates to the provision for the preservation of social minima based upon the logic that society accepts responsibility for social risks not caused by those affected. The fourth sense of reciprocity derives from the idea of the resocialization of those in need, or a reciprocity of obligation found in residualized welfare regimes. Here, the ‘‘deserving poor’’ are gifted on the basis that they should orient their behaviors to avoiding poverty. This establishes a relationship of debt and expectation on the part of the giver in that it places an onus of redress from the debtor; the recipient is expected to change their values and norms so as they can reenter the labor market (Adloff & Mau, 2006, p. 117). In the gift to strangers as articulated by Titmuss’s deployment of the theory of the gift, the notion of reciprocation is made redundant by the anonymity the exchange. This might be contrasted with staged gifting; a social ritual where the gift giving is rehearsed or stylized into moments that underline the beneficence of the donor. Adloff and Mau (2006) point out that unlike Titmuss’s radical conceptualization of the gift relation, such staged gifting where the benefactor is known sets off ‘‘chains of reciprocity.’’ In this latter sense, the gift relationship can be said to involve a process of social
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stratification between givers and receivers, and between the deserving and nondeserving. That the gift relation acts as a means of stratifying groups into classes, is central in the work of French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu. His concern was for the ways in which the gift sets off relations of domination and subordination. Moreover, Bourdieu’s sociology is one that seeks to understand actors’ strategies in the context of social structures. The gift is a form of cultural practice that as a symbolic act produces an unrecognized effect in shaping the dispositions of the actors involved in the exchange. In his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Nice,1977) introduces the concept of symbolic violence in connection with exchanges of credit, gifts, and domestic labor. From his analysis of the Kabyle society in Algeria, he pointed out that to appropriate the labor of one, a master first had to tie-in or create a bond with the laborer and had to ‘‘win’’ them personally. These pre-capitalist relations of domination had to be disguised or misrecognized and so personal dependence had to be transfigured for if they were not ‘‘euphemised’’ they would reveal the inequality and injustices of the situation. Thus the gift acted as a symbolic form of violence because overt violence in pre-capitalist economies was not a sufficient form of domination. Thus the euphemization of the relations of domination had to take a more invisible form and for Bourdieu, this was exemplified in the relations surrounding credit, hospitality, and gifts. Those tied to masters were dominated through codes of honor, debt, and gratitude. For Bourdieu, the offer-acceptance of the gift represented a shared denial by master and servant of the objective reality of the exchange relations. In Bourdieuian theory such practices survive in the contemporary capitalist world because they have become embedded in contemporary culture and are reproduced by a variety of institutions. The gift relation therefore is a type of practice that is played out in various fields: in the education field for instance, this takes the form of the passing-on of knowledge from the teacher to student; Bourdieu’s point is that the gift cannot be divorced from the social relations of cultural reproduction. The legitimization of the master–pupil relationship in schools further legitimizes the system of schooling which reproduces class cultures (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Crucial is the content of the exchange and for Bourdieu this is various forms of capital; social and cultural capital are gained by the bearer of gifts; donors and benefactors strategize to maximize cultural capital, the accumulation of which is necessary in order to achieve symbolic power which is a prerequisite for legitimate domination over the receiver of the gift.
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Key Issues and Future Directions Civil society is premised upon a form of social peace reflected in the idea of the social contract. Thomas Hobbes argued that the route out of the state of nature, a war of all against all, was the quelling of individual passions and the surrendering of authority to a sovereign power; a commonwealth that guaranteed the social order so that civil society could flourish. What Mauss had discovered was a way in which individuals and small groups could avoid the state of nature without the need for a sovereign power. The archaic societies found social peace without formal law. In this way, Mauss had established the gift as a form of political contract underpinning civil society (Sahlins, 1974). In contemporary civil society considerable attention has returned to the network as an organizational form. Networks take many shapes ranging from the role of local networks in producing social capital, to networks of firms in achieving economies of scale and scope (see Piore & Sabel, 1984 for a discussion), and from online communities (Wellman & Gulia, 1999) to global networks of commercial interests and a global civil society (Holton, 2008). Over the last two decades also, there has been a growing interest in the role of policy networks in governance (see for instance, Rhodes & Marsh, 1992). In this context the gift relation has been crucial to expanding understanding of the distinct properties of networks as they operate alongside market and state organizations. Networks might be seen as an emergent form of governance and coordination and a means of dealing with the social order outside of rational calculation and rational legalism. Markets operate on the basis of price and competition (rational calculation) that generates competition; states on the basis of command, rules, and authority (rational legalism) that generates complicity; and networks on the basis of trust and reciprocity that generates cooperative behavior. In this sense, the network form is premised upon an economy of goodwill resources. However, networks are not devoid of strategy on the part of actors who engage by virtue of the temporal dimension of gift relations; they operate on the edge of the reciprocated and nonreciprocated gift. The deferral of the return obligates one person to the other setting off a relation of social debt; nonreciprocation relates to a blurred sense of the future prior to the closure of a gift transaction, between which trust acts as the cement that holds the relationship together (Thompson, 2003). The gift relation is central in civil society for it is the basis of social engagement in networks regardless of the market and the state. Despite multiple social, economic, and political transformations the archaic practice of the gift has survived and is seen in everyday practice and social ritual. A key
lesson here is the extent to which cultural practices are resilient and so social transformation can only ever be partial. The rise of late modern consumer societies, rather than replacing gifting with pure utility, has facilitated the expansion and deepening of the gift relation in terms of the type of gifts exchanged, the level of expense to which parties go to purchase gifts, and the commercialization of gifting festivals and practices such as weddings or religious festivals such as Christmas. Such consumption reproduces the practice of gifting and only alters the medium through which social obligations are expressed and social ties secured (see Caplow, 1984).
Cross-References
▶ Altruism ▶ Bourdieu, Pierre ▶ Coalitions and Networks ▶ Global Civil Society ▶ Hobbes, Thomas ▶ Mauss, Marcel ▶ Reciprocity ▶ Social Capital, Definition of ▶ Social Trust ▶ Solidarity ▶ Titmuss, Richard
References/Further Readings Adloff, F. (2006). Beyond interests and norms: Toward a theory of giftgiving and reciprocity in modern societies. Constellations, 13(3), 407–427. Adloff, F., & Mau, S. (2006). Giving social ties: Reciprocity in modern society. European Journal of Sociology, 47(1), 93–123. Bourdieu, P., & Nice, R. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. -C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage. Caplow, T. (1984). Rule enforcement without visible means: Christmas gift giving in Middletown. American Journal of Sociology, 89(6), 1306. Carrier, J. (1991). Gifts, commodities, and social relations: A Maussian view of exchange. Sociological Forum, 6(1), 119–136. Holton, R. J. (2008). Global networks. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mauss, M. (1950[1990]). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge. Piore, M., & Sabel, C. (1984). The second industrial divide: Possibilities for prosperities. New York: Basic Books. Rhodes, R. A. W., & Marsh, D. (1992). Policy networks in British government. Oxford: Clarendon. Sahlins, M. (1974). Stone age economics. London: Tavistock. Schrift, A. D. (Ed.) (1997). The logic of the gift: Towards and ethic of generosity. London: Routledge. Shaw, R. (2003). Theorizing breastfeeding: Body ethics, maternal generosity and the gift relation. Body Society, 9(2), 55–73. Thompson, G. F. (2003). Between hierarchies and markets: The logic and limits of network forms of organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Girl Scouts Thompson, G. F., Frances, J. et al. (Eds.) (1991). Markets, hierarchies and networks: The co-ordination of social life. London: Sage/Open University Press. Titmuss, R. (1970). The gift relationship: From blood donation to social policy. Lonon: Allen & Unwin. Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999). Virtual communities as communities: Net surfers don’t ride alone. In M. A. Smith & P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in cyber space (pp. 167–194). London: Routledge.
Girl Scouts SALVATORE ALAIMO
Address of Organization 420 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10018-2798 USA www.girlscouts.org
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speaking and money management. An estimated 200 million boxes of cookies are now sold annually. Girl Scouts collected over one million articles of clothing that were sent overseas to victims of World War II. On March 16, 1950, the organization was reincorporated as the Girl Scouts of the USA when chartered by the US Congress. The four age levels of Brownie, Junior, Cadette, and Senior Girl Scouts were introduced in 1963, and the Daisy Girl Scout age level for girls 5 years old or in kindergarten was introduced in the 1980s. GSUSA evolved in the 1990s to address societal issues that impact the lives of girls including the P.A.V.E. The Way (Project Anti-Violence Education) program; Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, a mother-daughter prison visitation program; and health and physical fitness through their Girl Sports initiative. GSUSA more recently has infused technology as a means for providing resources to local councils, engaging girls on the Internet through online troop meetings, and offering various technology-based interest badges.
Introduction Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) describes itself as ‘‘the world’s preeminent organization dedicated solely to girls – all girls – where, in an accepting and nurturing environment, girls build character and skills for success in the real world.’’ The volunteer-led, member-based organization provides opportunities for girls to learn about health, the environment, career choices, and other important topics while encouraging their service to the community.
Brief History On March 12, 1912 Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts based on the British model of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides from their founder Sir Robert Baden-Powell, whom she met in 1911. The organization started with sixteen girls enrolled in two troops in Savannah, Georgia (United States) and grew to approximately 70,000 Girl Scouts by 1920. The organization was incorporated as Girl Scouts, Inc. in Washington, DC on June 10, 1915. The number of interest badges girls could earn continued to grow throughout the next 2 decades including Economist, Interpreter, Journalist, Motorist, and others. In the 1930s Girl Scouts exemplified the organization’s foundation of service to others when girls and adults collected clothing, gathered food, made quilts and engaged in other community relief efforts during the Great Depression. The first commercially baked sale of Girl Scout Cookies also took place in the 1930s. The annual sale has helped brand the organization and provide an activity that enables girls to learn public
Mission GSUSA’s mission is to ‘‘build girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.’’
Activities GSUSA provides policies, program modules, training for staff and volunteers, and overall support for the 100+ local councils across the United States. The national office also engages in research and advocacy. The Girl Scout Research Institute (GSRI) conducts studies that address the complex and ever-changing needs of for the healthy development of girls. GSUSA’s Public Policy and Advocacy office in Washington, DC works in partnership with local councils to ‘‘inform and educate key representatives of the government’s legislative and executive branches about issues important to girls and Girl Scouting and lobby for increased program resources.’’
Structure and Governance GSUSA is a federated 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization and their national headquarters located in New York City has more than 400 employees and a board of directors with members from across the United States. The 144 local councils that together serve more than three million girls and adults are each separate 501(c) (3) organizations with their own staff and boards of directors. However, safety standards, program standards and modules, policies, the cookie sale structure and
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procedures, and other relevant guidelines come from the national office. Within these guidelines there is some flexibility for troop or group leaders and other adult volunteers delivering the Girl Scout Program to adjust to local and individual girl needs. GSUSA is a member of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts consisting of ten million girls and adults in 145 countries.
Funding The largest portion of GSUSA’s total operating revenue according to its 2007 annual report was membership dues which accounted for 40%. Other sources of revenue included merchandise sales at 18%, contributed airtime at 16%, gifts and grants at 10%, investment income at 9%, training/meeting revenue at 5% and other sources accounting for 1%. GSUSA’s contributions, gifts and grants for their fiscal year ending 2006 were fairly evenly split between direct public support from individuals, corporations, and foundations at 52% and 48% from more than ten federal agencies including National Science Foundation, US Department of Education, and the US Department of Agriculture among others.
Major Accomplishments/Contributions The Girls Scouts by emphasizing character and service to community as the foundations of the Girl Program and its intended outcomes have helped instill the values of service, helping others, and contributing to civil society while helping girls develop their full potential. They accomplish this by helping girls through a myriad of activities to ‘‘relate to others with increasing understanding, skill, and respect; develop values to guide their actions and provide the foundation for sound decision-making; and contribute to the improvement of society through their abilities, leadership skills, and cooperation with others.’’ These foundations are evident in the Girl Scout promise and Law in which the Promise states, ‘‘On my honor, I will try: To serve God and my country, To help people at all times, And to live by the Girl Scout Law’’ (see The Girl Scout Law at http://www.girlscouts.org/program/gs_central/promise_law). Many of the more than 50 million Girl Scout alumnae have reflected on Girl Scouts’ impact on their lives and have emphasized how they carry the skills they learned and continue to have such values throughout their adult lives.
Cross-References
▶ Brands and Branding ▶ Federations, Nonprofit
References/Further Readings Shultz, G. D., & Lawrence, D. G. (1988). Lady from Savannah: The life of Juliette low. New York: Girl Scouts of the USA. Soto, C. (1987). The Girl Scouts. New York: Exeter Books.
Giving Circles ANGELA M. EIKENBERRY University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA
Introduction Giving circles involve individuals pooling money and other resources, and then deciding together where to give these away. They are growing in popularity among various types of donors – especially women; people of various racial, ethnic, and religious groups; and people of more modest means – in the United States and, increasingly, in other parts of the world. It is impossible to say how many giving circles exist because of their grassroots nature. Since the US-based Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers began to track these groups in 2004, the number of giving circles identified has more than doubled to well over 500 groups; indeed, there is a strong indication that many more exist and more continue to be created (Rutnik & Bearman, 2005). Most giving circles are relatively new, having started only in the last five to ten years. They have been identified in at least 44 states and the District of Columbia in the United States; they have also been found in Australia, Canada, England, Japan, Scotland, and South Africa.
Definition Bearman (2007) defines giving circles as individuals coming together and pooling their dollars, deciding together where to give the money (and other resources such as volunteer time), and learning together about their community and philanthropy (p. 1). According to Eikenberry (2006), giving circles also tend to provide many social opportunities to members. Another unique feature of giving circles is that they are typically not tied to any one charity, though some (as donor-advised funds) do rely on community foundations or other host institutions to be fiscal agents. It is the members who decide to what charities or to which individuals funds should be distributed. There are exceptions, however. In a few giving circles that are associated with universities, for example, the members remain independent in that they still decide
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where the money is to be given, but they are limited to giving within the university. Giving circles come in many shapes and sizes, and have differing foci. There are three major ‘‘ideal’’ types of giving circles: small groups, loose networks, and formal organizations. Small group giving circles consist of a small number of people who tend to pool funds in equal amounts, ranging from $50 to $5,000 (there are also several small groups where the amount paid into the fund is left to the discretion of the individual). In small group giving circles, typically all of the members are involved in agenda setting, discussion, and decision making; leadership is often shared. The two major foci of small group giving circles are social and educational activities. The social aspect is emphasized through informal group interaction and discussions. The educational aspect is relatively informal, taking place through the grant-making process, site visits, meetings with nonprofit staff, and information sharing among group members. Some small groups have staff support (typically provided by a community foundation) to help with administration or fiscal management. An example of a small group is AsiaNextGen, a group of young professional Asian Americans seeking to address community needs and to engage in high-impact philanthropy by coming together and strategically funding issues of common interest in New York City. This group started in 2004 with five friends, who donated $4,000 each, growing out of a networking event of young professionals in New York City who had gathered at a reception sponsored by the Asian American Federation of New York. The Federation continues to host the giving circle. The goals of the group are as follows: to impact social change, leverage monetary contributions, infuse expertise and skills with financial and intellectual capital, and educate and evolve a new generation of philanthropists. Funding decisions and education about community issues are informed by guest speakers or workshops about philanthropy and issue areas, site visits to nonprofit organizations, group discussions, and connections to philanthropic networks. Loose network giving circles are frequently structured in such a way that a core group of people overseeing the group – who do the ongoing organizing, planning, and grant decision making – are surrounded by a loosely affiliated group of individuals who tend to come together around a specific event such as a potluck dinner or other type of fund-raiser. There is, typically, no or a very low minimum fee to participate. There is also typically no paid staff support within these groups; rather, they are often completely volunteer-driven. Members praise these groups’ flexibility and organic nature, low overheads, and
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non bureaucratic structure. Loose networks seem to be especially attractive to women; many who participate in these groups see it as an opportunity to fit ‘‘doing good’’ into their busy lives. What is also unique about these types of giving circles is that they tend to give money and inkind gifts directly to individuals in need, or to individuals doing good work. Thus, grant decision making often occurs in an ad hoc fashion, in response to the needs of individuals. An example of a loose network is Washington Womenade, which raises money by holding occasional potluck dinners where attendees donate $35 to a fund that provides financial assistance to individuals who need help paying for prescriptions, utility bills, rent, food, and so on. Membership in the group is fairly loose except for a core group of organizers. ‘‘Members’’ show up at events when they choose to and the focus of their time together is highly social, though there is some discussion at events about funding recipients. In 2002, Real Simple magazine did a story on Washington Womenade, leading to the creation of more than 40 Womenade groups across the country. This article also inspired Marsha Wallace to start Dining for Women, now a national network of more than 177 small groups across the country in which women meet for dinner on a monthly basis and pool the funds they would have spent eating out, to support internationally based grassroots programs helping women around the world. Formal organization giving circles are more formal in their structure and decision-making processes than the other two types of giving circles; looking very much like a traditional voluntary organization structure with a board or lead group, committees, and often, professional staff support. They are also larger and the cost to participate tends to be high compared to small groups and loose networks; the modal amount being $5,000–$5,500. The grant decision-making process typically involves committees or investment teams making grant decisions directly or making recommendations for a full membership vote. The major activities of formal organizations are education and engagement. Formal organizations also tend to have some kind of formal educational programming in addition to grant making and other informal educational opportunities. In addition, many formal organizations provide opportunities for members to volunteer with nonprofit organizations. Among the three types of giving circles, formal organizations are the most systematic and comprehensive in efforts to educate and engage members in the community. Social Venture Partners (SVP) has probably become the most well-known formal organization giving circle in
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the United States and Canada. SVP started in 1997 in Seattle and now has expanded to approximately 25 SVPtype giving circles in the United States and elsewhere. Its major foci are educating members about philanthropy and community issues and creating long-term, engaged relationships with funding recipients. The cost to join SVP is usually around $5,000. SVP also asks members to volunteer at the nonprofit agencies they fund, providing consulting and capacity-building support. SVP affiliates fund in various areas but often take an interest in issues related to youth and education.
Key Issues Are Giving Circles Really New?
There is some debate about how new giving circles really are, if they are new at all. Indeed, the idea of people voluntarily getting together to get something done is an old and far-reaching tradition in the United States and elsewhere. However, the environment in which giving circles have emerged and in which they operate – a philanthropic sector that is increasingly modernized, where traditional voluntary associations are losing numbers rapidly as suggested by Putnam (2000) and others, and individuals want to be engaged in their communities in new, but more fragmented, ways as suggested by Wuthnow (1998) – and their characteristics noted above do seem new for today’s philanthropic environment. What is also unique about giving circles is their underlying, express purpose: to give away resources for community betterment. Earlier institutions such as Women’s Clubs and Rotaries often did not start or sustain such a focus; the philanthropic aspect either emerged later or was secondary to the main intent of the group. Compared with other philanthropic mechanisms, such as check writing or foundation giving, giving circles seem to be something different in that they offer a more engaged, personal experience and enable individuals of less wealthy means to actively participate in organized philanthropy at a more significant level. Giving Circles’ Impacts
Another key issue regards what kinds of impacts giving circles have on society. Most giving circles’ stated focus is on giving away resources and otherwise increasing the charitable resources provided to nonprofit organizations and individuals in need or doing good work. Although financial support from giving circles is an important resource for mostly small, community nonprofit organizations (and individuals in need), it may not be as important as the other resources giving circles can bring to the
table for funding recipients such as good connections, access to new donors and volunteers, and a signal to others that the organization is worthy of support. Interviews conducted by Eikenberry (2008) with nonprofit executives who have received support from giving circles also indicate that their relationship with giving circles can be somewhat challenging in that it can be time consuming, short term, and generally more complex as giving circle members – as a group – sort out their own motivations and funding priorities. Additionally, to what degree giving circles increase and provide resources to where they are most needed in communities – that is, to address identified collective problems – is questionable to some extent. Eikenberry (2007) found that giving circles generally do a poor job of getting resources to where they are most needed (from a community perspective). For example, smaller and less formal giving circles are not very systematic about where and how much they fund, so are unable (and in some cases unwilling) to do the research needed to determine where funds might be best spent to address community issues in a more comprehensive fashion. This is not surprising, considering some of the shortcomings of voluntarism: it cannot sufficiently and evenly distribute resources and is short-term in focus and fragmented when it comes to addressing problems. Even larger and more formal giving circles are limited in the resources they can bring to bear on community issues. Research by Bearman (2007) estimates that giving circles in the United States have given more than $65 million over the course of their existence; however, this is only a fraction of the $260 billion given privately in the United States in 2005 alone as indicated by Giving USA (2006), and an even tinier percentage of what the government could spend on social-welfare-related areas. For example, according to Boris and Steurle (1999), private donations to charitable organizations have in the past represented less than 10% of the federal government’s spending on social welfare. Yet, giving circles are more than just funding agents; they are, perhaps more importantly and predominantly, groups meant to meet the needs of its members. Most giving circles do not seem to be very intentional about promoting or consciously bolstering this aspect of their giving circle even though it may be one of the most important aspects of attracting and keeping members and providing long-term effects on members’ philanthropy as well as making the most important contribution to democratic governance. One exception is the Social Venture Partners (SVP) model, where staff and leaders have realized that SVP may be more about creating processes or avenues for individuals to grow and
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learn than it is about creating a product such as growing funding for nonprofit organizations. To this end, SVP Seattle created a ‘‘Philanthropy Development Framework’’ for helping members in their personal philanthropic development. The framework consists of seven topic areas: financial planning and giving vehicles; values, motivation, and integration; issues; nonprofit sector; cultural competency; volunteering; and grant making (Social Venture Partners, 2006). SVP Seattle provides workshops and other educational forums to support growth in these areas. Giving circles do seem to follow a long tradition of self-help/mutual aid in the United States and around the world. They certainly share the self-help/mutual-aid ethos, described by Kurtz (1997), of anti-big, antibureaucratic, and anti-impersonality, favoring experience over expertise while reaffirming the traditions of community, neighborhood, values, and self-reliance. Indeed, many members say they appreciate the simple, nonbureaucratic nature of the giving circle model. In addition, like selfhelp groups, social learning takes place in giving circles through instruction, reinforcement, and modeling. Many groups have guest speakers who educate on areas of expertise, while interactions among members provide natural ‘‘reinforcers’’ for the approved behavior of voluntary giving. Finally, some members say they support and participate in giving circles because they want to promote an ethic of philanthropic behavior in others, whether they are peers, their children, or family members. Thus, giving circles are also infused with an ideology that puts great store in the importance of voluntary giving and influencing members with this ideology. The effects on members, then, could be seen as giving circles’ most important contribution to society and democratic governance. Giving circles appear to encourage people to become involved in the community in a meaningful way, though in a different way than traditional ‘‘join for life’’ voluntary associations. Members seem to be motivated to go beyond passive consumption and private concerns to create a new civic space where debate and deliberation are generally encouraged, especially during the grant-making process. This seems to be so even in giving circles where socializing is as or more important than the charitable aspect of the group. Members frequently learn about and discuss important social issues (but typically not political or personally controversial issues like abortion or gun control). Giving circles are limited to the degree to which they explicitly tie in to political activities and outcomes and thus, larger social change; however, it appears that through the process of participating in the giving circle, members learn about
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themselves, others in the group, and issues in the community (see Eikenberry, 2009). Giving circles seem to truly serve as ‘‘laboratories for democracy’’ in the sense described by de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, though it is still hard to say what influence this has on political and democratic outcomes.
International Perspectives So far, giving circles have largely been an American phenomenon, but they are starting to grow in number in other locations as noted earlier. Social Venture Partners has affiliates in Canada and Japan while the original London-based Funding Network has emerged as a model that has now spread to Leeds, Oxford, Scotland, South Africa, Southwest England, and Toronto. The Funding Network started in London in 2002 and brings people together to act as a ‘‘marketplace’’ to which individuals can bring projects that work toward a fairer, healthier, and more sustainable world; provide a mutually respectful setting where those who might like to join with others in funding such projects get to meet and hear those doing the work; and promote a paradigm of social change giving. The cost to join The Funding Network in London is £75 per individual or couple or £200 for corporate membership. In addition, members are asked to make a minimum pledge amount of £100 during funding meetings held occasionally throughout the year. Funding Network members provide funds to charities that first must be ‘‘sponsored’’ by a group member and then chosen by a committee to make a pitch to the entire membership at a funding meeting. At this event, members pledge – in an auction-like format – money to the charities of their choosing after charities present to the group in attendance. The group funds in the areas of human rights, environmental sustainability, health, education, and conflict prevention and resolution, favoring small-scale, difficult-to-fund projects. So far, the Funding Network has raised more than £1.5 million for 250 plus charities.
Future Directions Giving circles are a good example of the paradigm shift to a more engaged, donor-driven, or ‘‘supply side’’ philanthropy as described by Schervish and Havens (2001), emerging in the United States and elsewhere in recent years. That is, through giving circles, donors want more control over where and how their gift is spent and thus emphasize impact and accountability with funding recipients while mistrusting large, bureaucratic institutions. Within this context, Eikenberry (2008) outlines several issues nonprofit professionals, especially in smaller
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organizations, might consider related to potential future relationships with giving circles. First, if a nonprofit organization wants to attract giving circle funding, the best way to do so is through networking, building awareness, and essentially ‘‘being out there’’ to be found by giving circle members. In most cases, giving circles seek out organizations as a potential funding recipient as opposed to organizations seeking out giving circles. What seems to happen in most instances is that someone in the giving circle had heard about or was already familiar with an organization (and in most of these cases knew the director or someone on staff) and put the organization forward for potential funding. At the same time, nonprofit professionals should be somewhat cautious in seeking giving circle funding. Working with giving circles can be time consuming and difficult in some cases, so the nonprofit professional needs to make sure it is a good match. There can be a lack of sustainability and uncertainty that comes with funding from giving circles; it can be difficult to count on funding from year to year, especially from giving circles that are still formulating their own processes and funding focus. Tension can also occur when giving circle members are ‘‘too directive’’ in their giving, so that it can clash with the already established board governance structure of the organization. On an indirect level, by targeting their gift for a particular area or thing, the giving circle in some ways takes over organizational governance by taking away the board or staff ’s decision about where funding might best be spent. On a more direct level, some giving circles (such as some SVPs) require or strongly recommend that one of their partners hold a seat on the board of the organizations they fund. This again might usurp power from the board to form and govern itself and the organization. Nonetheless, nonprofit and philanthropic professionals should be heartened by the potential for giving circles to increase individual donors’ giving by attracting more diverse groups to the giving or organized side of philanthropy. In the short term, this could have negative impacts on institutional fund-raising through such means as direct mail or workplace and federated giving; however, in the long term, this could mean increasing the overall philanthropic pie because donors may be more committed and satisfied with their giving. On a broader societal governance level, if the greatest benefit of giving circles is what they do for members rather than nonprofit organizations or the broader community, this may change expectations about what these and other philanthropic voluntary institutions might be able to do to address problems in the community
and generally enhance human well-being. The self-help/ mutual-aid aspect of giving circles can enhance the civic engagement of individuals in society, but this does not necessarily translate into more democratic outcomes in addressing individual needs. In fact, the two aspects of meeting members’ needs and meeting community needs can be in conflict: a tension may exist between meeting the needs of members – such as enabling members to engage in the community or influencing their giving and civic behaviors – and meeting the needs of the community – such as funding for nonprofits’ general operating costs or for needs that are not of special interest to members but are needed by nonprofit funding recipients. Thus, in the case of giving circles, the self-help/ mutual-aid side does, and perhaps should, take prominence as their future value is assessed.
Cross-References
▶ Associative Democracy ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Mutual Organizations, Mutual Societies ▶ Self-help Groups ▶ Venture Philanthropy
References/Further Readings Bearman, J. E. (2007). More giving together: The Growth and impact of giving circles and shared giving. Washington, DC: Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, from http://www.givingforum.org/s_ forum/bin.asp?CID=611&DID=5316&DOC=FILE.PDF; 4/28/08 Boris, E., & Steuerle, E. (1999, October 1). What charities cannot do. The Christian Science Monitor, 11. Eikenberry, A. M. (2006). Giving circles: Growing grassroots philanthropy. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 35(3), 517–532. Eikenberry, A. M. (2007). Philanthropy, voluntary association and governance beyond the state: Giving circles and challenges for democracy. Administration & Society, 39(7), 857–882. Eikenberry, A. M. (2008). Giving circles and fundraising in the new philanthropy environment. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 19(2), 141–152. Eikenberry, A. M. (2009). Giving circles: Philanthropy, voluntary association, and democracy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Giving USA Foundation (2006). Giving USA 2006. Glenview, IL: Giving USA Foundation. Kurtz, L. F. (1997). Self-help and support groups: A handbook for practitioners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rutnik, T. A., & Bearman, J. (2005). Giving together: A national scan of giving circles and shared giving. Baltimore: Forum for Regional Association of Grantmakers, from http://www.givingforum.org/ givingcircles/research.html; 2/28/05 Schervish, P. G., & Havens, J. J. (2001). The new physics of philanthropy: The Supply-side vectors of charitable giving. Part 1: The material side of the supply side. The CASE International Journal of Educational Advancement, 2(2), 95–113.
Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) Social Venture Partners Seattle (2006, March). Realizing civic and philanthropic potential through social venture partners Seattle: Lessons learned and future direction. Seattle, WA: Author. Wuthnow, R. (1998). Loose connections: Joining together in America’s fragmented communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) EVELYNE SCHMID
Address of Organization GCAP Global Secretariat P.O. Box 933, Southdale 2135 Johannesburg South Africa www.whiteband.org/
Introduction Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) is a worldwide alliance of a wide range of regional, national, and local campaigns dedicated to ending poverty and inequality. Thousands of member groups have formed platforms in more than 110 countries, involving NGOs, trade unions, community groups, faith groups, women, and youth organizations as well as other groups and celebrities. Together with the UN Millennium Campaign, GCAP has annually mobilized millions of people against poverty.
Brief History GCAP was launched at the World Social Forum in Brazil on January, 2005 in preparation of campaigns targeting the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, the UN World Summit in September and a meeting of trade ministers in December. While the coalition was initially founded as an alliance to campaign for a breakthrough on poverty in 2005, the members decided to prolong their efforts until the end of 2007. The Make Poverty History campaigns in different countries regrouped under the GCAP coalition. In May 2007, member constituencies voted to extend the alliance until at least 2015, the year by which the Millennium Development Goals are to be achieved.
Mission The movement demands solutions to address public accountability, just governance and the fulfillment of human rights, trade justice, a major increase in the quantity and quality of aid and financing for development, debt cancellation and gender equality in poverty eradication policies.
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Activities GCAP’s main activities are the joint campaigning efforts by which GCAP attempts to show world leaders the size and the scale of the concerns about world poverty. At important moments, the movement organizes the socalled White Band Days, asking all who want their governments to do more in the fight against poverty to wear a white band.
Structure and Governance Coalitions and groups come together to create platforms at the national level, layered under regional networks. Any nonprofit organization willing to support the messages and actions through mobilization and participation can join. Each national coalition may have its own identity and campaign plans, but helps to ensure that campaigners in development come together at key moments to speak with one voice against poverty. A General Assembly consists of the national coalitions and constituency groups and a Global Council establishes accountability between all GCAP constituents.
Funding Member groups of GCAP are responsible for their own funding but the movement provides limited technical support to some coalitions.
Accomplishments In 2005, GCAP was awarded the 2005 International Achievement Award of the Inter Press Service news agency, recognizing its role in the partnership between the United Nations Millennium Campaign and civil society. The organization was also awarded the Guinness World Record Certificate in November 2006, 2007, and 2008 in recognition of the largest recorded mobilization on any one issue in history.
Cross-References
▶ Civicus ▶ Civil Society and Gender ▶ Coalition and Networks ▶ Federations, Nonprofit ▶ INGOs ▶ Jubilee 2000 ▶ Make Poverty History ▶ Nonprofit Sector and Poverty Reduction ▶ Social Movements ▶ Transnational Forums and Summits ▶ World Social Forum
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References/Further Readings GCAP. (2007). Report of Activities 2007, from http://www.whiteband.org/ Action/materials/gcap-publications-and-booklets/gcap-booklet-2007/ gcap-annual-report-2007-english; 11/17/2008. GCAP. (2008). Stand up take action for the millennium development goals toolkit, from http://www.makepovertyhistory.com.au/getdoc/ 319cfb47-d94a-4540-b066-eef42b1fa41d/StandUpToolkit08.aspx; 11/17/2008. Owain, J. (2005). The global call to action against poverty. Development, 48(1), 107–109.
Global Civil Society SABINE SELCHOW London School of Economics, London, UK
Introduction Global civil society is a relatively new concept. It has entered academic, political, and public discourses in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Over the course of its brief life so far, the concept has become popular – even as it remains somewhat nebulous.
Definitions Within contemporary debate, the term ‘‘global civil society’’ is utilized in multiple ways. In public and political discourses, in which the term ‘‘civil society’’ has become extremely popular, ‘‘global civil society’’ is used to capture phenomena and actors as diverse as the multifarious protesters in Seattle at the time of the 1999 WTO talks, transnational social movements and campaigns like ‘‘Make Poverty History’’ and ‘‘Jubilee 2000,’’ as well as (most commonly) leading Northern-based international nongovernmental organizations, such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Oxfam. Among social and political scientists, the term ‘‘global civil society’’ is used either descriptively or normatively and, most of the times, both descriptively and normatively. For some analysts, ‘‘global civil society’’ is simply the sum of its associations, in particular, international nongovernmental organizations that spread across the world. Other analysts deploy the term more narrowly, to refer to those nongovernmental actors that explicitly address global governance institutions and regimes. Others again conceptualize ‘‘global civil society’’ as a sphere in which a (global) social contract is negotiated. With regard to the Political Science and International Relations discourse, the focus on ‘‘global civil society’’ has
meant a general shift away from the traditional emphasis on state politics. This shift is motivated by the belief that ‘‘it is more probable that future politics will originate less in the actions of the ‘great women and men’ of state, than in patterns of everyday politics, of politics among people’’ (Lipschutz, 2000: 84). In this sense, the concept of ‘‘global civil society’’ is regarded as much as a description of an existing reality as it is considered to be a promotion of a ‘‘political idea’’ (Kaldor, 2003a: 3), a ‘‘new world-view, radically different from any that has existed before’’ (Keane, 2001: 23). Despite its increasing popularity in academic discourses, the concept of ‘‘global civil society’’ often lacks rigorous definition. Explicit reflection on the attribute ‘‘global’’ in ‘‘global civil society’’ is rare. The term is often used synonymously with ‘‘transnational civil society,’’ and the attribute ‘‘global’’ is often only used intuitively and somewhat imprecisely to indicate the ‘‘new’’ or contemporary character of those sociopolitical phenomena to which the term ‘‘global civil society’’ is applied (see, e.g., Anheier et al., 2001). Five explicit though different definitions of global civil society are provided by (1) the editors of Global Civil Society, an annual publication by the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); (2) John Keane (2001); (3) Ronnie D. Lipschutz (2005); (4) Mary Kaldor (2003b); and (5) Jan Aart Scholte (1999): 1. In Global Civil Society, global civil society is defined in a broad sense as ‘‘the sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organizations, networks, and individuals located between the family, the state, and the market and operating beyond the confines of national societies, polities, and economies’’ (Anheier et al., 2001: 17). 2. For John Keane (2001: 23), the term global civil society denotes ‘‘the contemporary thickening and stretching of networks of socioeconomic institutions across borders to all four corners of the earth, such that the peaceful or ‘civil’ effects of these nongovernmental networks are felt everywhere, here and there, far and wide, to and from local areas, through wider regions to the planetary level itself.’’ 3. Ronnie D. Lipschutz (2005) investigates global civil society ‘‘as a central and vital element in an expanding global neoliberal regime of governmentality, which is constituted out of the social relations within that regime and which, to a large degree, serves to legitimise that regime.’’ 4. For Mary Kaldor (2003b), global civil society is a sphere in which ‘‘a social contract is being negotiated
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across borders establishing a set of global rules involving states as well as international institutions.’’ 5. For Jan Aart Scholte, ‘‘global civil society encompasses civic activity that: (a) addresses transworld issues; (b) involves transborder communication; (c) has a global organization; (d) works on a premise of supraterritorial solidarity,’’ although, as he acknowledges, these characteristics of civic activity do not necessarily need to appear together (1999: 10). Activities are considered ‘‘civic activities’’ by Scholte when they involve ‘‘a deliberate attempt – from outside the state and the market, and in some other organized fashion – to shape policies, norms, and/or deeper social structures’’ (1999: 4).
Historical Background Two factors together explain the rise of the concept ‘‘global civil society.’’ First, the concept arose because the idea of ‘‘civil society’’ experienced a renaissance in the 1990s. ‘‘Civil society’’ was introduced into political theory largely through English and Scottish thinkers conceptualizing political life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it was further prominently developed and reframed in the nineteenth century (to refer to bourgeois society) by thinkers such as Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel and Karl Marx. In the first part of the twentieth century, ‘‘civil society’’ largely fell into oblivion until it was rediscovered and reinvented as a useful concept and a political keyword, in the 1980s, among dissidents and political activists in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Kaldor, 2003a). The second factor that explains the rise of the concept of ‘‘global civil society’’ is the sociopolitical developments at the end of the 1980s when the end of the Cold War, with the breakdown of the bipolar bloc system through the disappearance of one of the two super powers, accelerated, and intensified a complex set of social processes of increasing interconnectedness, which were experienced as fundamentally transforming sociopolitical reality. They have come to be collected together under the label ‘‘globalization.’’ Conjoining of the attribute ‘‘global’’ with ‘‘civil society’’ encodes these perceptions of a globalizing world in that, on the one hand and in empirical terms, the concept of ‘‘global civil society’’ denotes an attempt to capture the implications that contemporary developments of ‘‘globalization’’ have for the sociopolitical phenomena that are captured with the label ‘‘civil society.’’ And, on the other hand and in more conceptual terms, the concept connotes an attempt to reconceptualize the established political scientific concept of ‘‘civil society’’ into ‘‘global civil society’’ – that is to conceptualize the traditional political scientific notion of ‘‘civil society’’ in times of ‘‘globalization.’’
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Key Issues There is an intense debate about what ‘‘globalization’’ is (e.g., Held et al., 2003). This debate revolves around the conditions and consequences of the sociopolitical processes that are commonly denoted with this label. It is about their origins and driving forces, about how to deal with them and, not least, how ‘‘new’’ they actually are. Yet, despite this spirited debate about extent and shape, there is a basic agreement and a shared sense that contemporary times are shaped by processes entailing an increasing interconnectedness. These processes are multifaceted and include both forces and features of integration and diversification. The most obvious manifestation of ‘‘globalization’’ and, at the same time, one of its driving forces are new media technologies, such as prominently the internet, which have come to affect and even transform individual lives and communities in fundamental senses. ‘‘Action at a distance’’ and ‘‘time/space compression’’ are key concepts capturing the rescaling of sociopolitical life, which shapes contemporary times. With regard to politics, there is a broad consensus that (the idea of) borders and of the nation-state as hitherto understood are undergoing a transformation. There is a basic consensus that democratic self-determination can no longer be achieved merely through the constitution of democratic structures within a contained (national) society in combination with an external statist self-assertion, as it had previously been the touchstone of the international political system. Rather, globalization processes and global problems, such as environmental degradation, epidemics, the flow of capital and terrorism, do not stop at borders. Thus, they challenge the governance of sociopolitical life in fundamental ways. Individuals have begun to speak of and experience a global democratic deficit. In particular, the uneven development of global governance structures and regimes on the one side and the growing power of globally-active corporations on the other side has opened regulatory gaps. These gaps are widely experienced as a threat and as an unwanted side-effect of (economic) globalization. They have brought the question of ‘‘global justice’’ into the awareness of a growing number of people worldwide and onto the agenda of a number of political activists. In general, there seems to be something like a growing ‘‘global consciousness,’’ which triggers and guides contemporary political activism. This global consciousness refers to the increasing acknowledgment of ‘‘global issues,’’ in other words of issues, such as climate change, which have an impact on literally everybody. At the same time it refers to a growing perception of an ‘‘imagined community of mankind’’ (Anheier et al., 2001: 17).
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(a) In empirical terms, the multifaceted outcomes and processes of increasing global integration have a manifold impact on civil societies and on civil society activism. On the one side, civil society activism is shaped by these developments. On the other side, these developments have become the concern of activists and the targets of activism. (b) In conceptual terms, the multifaceted outcomes and processes of increasing global integration, which became most evident after the change in the world political order in 1989, have affected the way in which sociopolitical reality is understood and analyzed. As International Relations theorist James N. Rosenau (1990: 5) put it, ‘‘observers [were left] without any paradigms or theories that adequately explain the course of events.’’ This has lead to the emergence of the concept of ‘‘global civil society,’’ potentially offering itself as a new conceptual tool in order to grasp this ‘‘brave new world’’ (Bartelson, 2000: 192). Globalization and Civil Society Activism
Taking ‘‘globalization’’ as a lens puts us in a position to acknowledge two significant aspects of much of contemporary civil society activism. The first aspect which shapes a considerable amount of contemporary civil society activism is its genesis in a growing ‘‘global consciousness.’’ The second aspect is that much of contemporary civil society activism is in part the manifestation of a reaction to (the challenges of) ‘‘globalization’’ as well as that it is a sociopolitical phenomenon that is shaped by ‘‘globalization’’ processes (Anheier et al., 2001). Since the 1960s, a decade which saw the large-scale growth of the civil rights, women’s rights and the environmental and peace movements, there has been a consistent rise in nonparty political activism. Nonparty political activism accelerated in the 1990s and, today, involvement in social movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as opposed to political parties, is more popular than ever. The number of NGOs worldwide can hardly be measured anymore and the number of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) has risen from 32 INGOs in 1874, 1,083 in 1914 to around 18,000 in 2003 (Anheier et al., 2004: 302). Parallel summits, most prominently the annual World Social Forum which parallels the World Economic Forum, have become common place. (I) NGOs have become part of global governance structures to an extent hitherto unknown, e.g., through the consultancy status at the UN, and are involved in some hundred international regimes. At the same time they play a critical part in the reform and the development of these regimes and global governance institutions, as prominently seen
in the case of the establishment of the International Criminal Court (see Glasius, 2002). On the one side, the increase in nonparty political activism can be interpreted as a manifestation of the aforementioned growing ‘‘global consciousness.’’ As discussed above, ‘‘global consciousness’’ can be understood as a bipartite phenomenon, comprising the perception that there are ‘‘global problems,’’ threatening everyone, and the perception that there is an ‘‘imagined community of mankind,’’ which itself gives rise to a sense of global responsibility. The Green movement is a prominent example of the kind of activism which is self-evidently based on the belief that planetary environmental degradation is a problem fundamentally threatening the whole world. Human rights activism provides a good example of the kind of activism evolving out of the perception that there is an ‘‘imagined community of mankind’’ above and beyond the boundaries of single national legislations. On the other side, the striking increase in nonparty political activism can be seen as a reaction to the (perceived) deficits of traditional (statist) political mechanisms in the face of global challenges. New and alternative forms of political action seem to be perceived as more likely to be productive and more appropriately adapted to the task of shaping the future of the world than traditional party political engagement. In order to tackle contemporary problems a complex set of institutions and political actors need to be addressed which are not exclusively national governments anymore but include international institutions, such as the United Nation, the World Band and the WTO, as well as, increasingly, single powerful market players, such as Nike, BP, and Shell. In general, the ‘‘dark side’’ of globalization, that is the injustices caused by the liberalization of markets and the, in many respects, unregulated power of transnational corporations have become a major concern for a sizeable component of contemporary civil society activism. Under the banner of ‘‘a different world is possible’’ these aspects of ‘‘globalisation’’ are targeted by an increasing number of social movements and activist networks whose aim it is ‘‘to reconquer space lost by democracy to the sphere of finance’’ (attac URL). The pictures of the mass protests in Seattle in 1999, when a network of activists from various social movements and NGOs forced the cancellation of the opening ceremony of the WTO talks, have become iconic images of this struggle in particular and, indeed, are often associated with civil society activism in a globalized time in general. The targeting of market players through ‘‘political consumerism’’ is a particularly interesting form of contemporary civil society engagement with economic
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globalization. The term ‘‘political consumerism’’ refers to activism which uses the market as a sphere of politics; consumer choices go beyond classic economic calculations in that they take into consideration the ‘‘politics of a product’’ (Micheletti, 2004). ‘‘Political consumerism’’ is about boycotts, boycotts as well as forms of ‘‘discursive action,’’ such as culture jamming. Although boycotts and boycotts have always been repertoires of political struggles today they are embedded in an increasingly institutionalized environment of labeling schemes, such as Fair trade and ecolabels, and information sources provided by civil society organizations, such as ‘‘ethical shopping guides,’’ which make readily transparent the politics of a product. Political consumerism is a particularly interesting form of contemporary civil society activism because it illustrates a shifting perception of political responsibility in times of global integration and market domination. First of all, it is a telling example of the perception of an increasing individual responsibility for global developments which is often addressed with the metaphor of a ‘‘footprint’’ that everybody leaves on the earth; at the same time, while in the past boycotts and boycotts were about improving the conditions (of workers) at home, today it is more and more about ‘‘distant others.’’ In the face of the regulatory gaps that (are perceived to) exist between contemporary global governance structures/ regimes and the liberalized market, individuals themselves target corporations in attempts to regulate their actions. This, secondly, illustrates an increasing conviction that (transnational) market players too (should) have (social) responsibilities other than those they hold towards their shareholders. With that the boundaries between the political and the economic, the public and the private are blurred which triggers nothing less but questions about the very nature of politics in a globalized times. Another particularly crucial development of civil society activism in times of globalization is what can been called the ‘‘NGO-isation’’ of civil society in general and of development in particular. This refers to the increase in professionalized NGOs, which, especially in developing countries, step in for and provide services that traditionally fell into the realm of a legitimate authority, such as a (welfare) state. Following Kaldor (2003a: 9) this development can be seen as a manifestation of a ‘‘neoliberal’’ understanding of civil society which is promoted and nurtured by international donors. Looking through the globalization lens, this development can again be seen both as a reaction to and also as a consequence of ‘‘globalization’’ (with the latter arguably more significant than the former). On the one hand, it is a reaction to ‘‘globalization’’ and its ‘‘dark side’’ in that
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the growing perception of responsibility beyond borders motivates people to become active in NGOs. On the other hand, the ‘‘NGO-isation’’ (of development) is a consequence of ‘‘globalization’’ because the strategy by donors to proceed via NGOs (rather than governments) in turn has the potential to lead to greater liberalization and privatization. ‘‘In the absence of a global state, an army of NGOs [. . .] performs the functions necessary to smooth the path of economic globalization. Humanitarian NGOs provide the safety net to deal with the casualties of liberalization and privatization strategies in the economic field’’ (Kaldor, 2003a: 9). Besides general issues of legitimacy, accountability, and representation, this particular and increasingly institutionalized function of NGOs raises normative questions about the emancipatory role of civil society (activism) and its compliancy in supporting a (neoliberal) status-quo. A key example in regard to how globalization shapes contemporary civil society activism is the impact of new forms of communication in general and the internet in particular. The internet allows to link and mobilize at low cost. It also importantly provides the space for the provision of information independent of and alternative to mainstream media outlets. Although far from being accessible to everyone (due to censorship practices as well as technical and language barriers), the internet has at least the potential of being a platform for voices that provide perspectives that are otherwise unheard; particular prominent instances of exactly this are the blogs provided by dissidents in closed and/or oppressive regimes which have recently reached global attention (Kaldor & Kostovicova, 2008). The above sketched out developments and features of civil society activism in times of globalization have been addressed by academics and others under the rubric of several different terms. Some analysts set out to investigate what they call ‘‘transnational social movements’’; others approach the phenomenon via the concepts of ‘‘transnational advocacy networks,’’ ‘‘global citizen action’’ and ‘‘transnational civil society.’’ Yet others precisely use the concept of ‘‘global civil society.’’ Globalization as a Challenge for the Political Scientific Imagination
Concepts are general notions which serve to capture sociopolitical reality by simplifying complex phenomena. Through concepts, certain aspects of particular phenomena are highlighted while others are obscured. Concepts treat referents in empirical reality as if they had stable identities. Yet, of course, sociopolitical phenomena are
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never stable nor fixed but are inevitably subject to diachronic change. This is why concepts are often debated and challenged and why, at certain points in time, ‘‘the death’’ or ‘‘the end’’ of some concepts is announced, while at the same time, new concepts are developed and promoted as reflecting and capturing a ‘‘new’’ reality. Most of the concepts in the study of politics, such as ‘‘state,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘market,’’ ‘‘society,’’ ‘‘political community,’’ and, of course, ‘‘civil society,’’ were developed against the backdrop of the political imagination of an international system of contained sovereign nation-states. Yet, the above sketched out developments of global integration brought into question nothing short of the guiding category of this imagination. This guiding category was the idea of the ‘‘great divide,’’ which is the idea that there is a clear distinction between a peaceful inside and an ‘‘anarchic’’ outside, which has been the central point of reference in the political imagination since the birth of the idea of the nation-state (e.g., Clark, 1999: 15–33). There is a widely shared acknowledgement that contemporary ‘‘global’’ reality looks different in that it is shaped by a dispersion of competences and power as well as challenges besides and beyond the state, which affects not at least the idea of state sovereignty. In the 1990s, in an attempt to capture this new reality, a pattern of ‘‘global’’-izing concepts commenced among social and political scientists as well as in public and political discourses. This pattern entailed extending traditional concepts with the use of the attribute ‘‘global’’; scholars, political actors and the wider public started to speak of the ‘‘global economy,’’ ‘‘global governance,’’ ‘‘global market,’’ ‘‘global democracy,’’ and ‘‘global politics.’’ In this respect, ‘‘global civil society’’ is another example of such a ‘‘global’’-ized concept. Given that the conceptualizations of ‘‘civil society’’ over the centuries have been about capturing and explaining the relationship between the state and society, the concept of ‘‘global civil society’’ is about considering ‘‘a social sphere, a global civil society, above and beyond national, regional, or local societies’’ (Anheier et al., 2001: 3) and its relation to institutions acting in and above statist boundaries. As Mary Kaldor (2003: 78) puts it, the ‘‘global’’-ization of the concept of ‘‘civil society’’ signifies ‘‘the domestification of the international.’’
Future Directions The main area of prospective research on ‘‘global civil society’’ relates to the concept itself. In order to ensure analytical value of the concept the ‘‘global’’ dimension of ‘‘global civil society’’ must be taken seriously. In order to make ‘‘global civil society’’ a distinct and useful concept, the specific characteristics of contemporary global (e.g., in
contrast to ‘‘international’’) times must be further scrutinized and interwoven into theories of civil society. In the long run intuitive and imprecise applications of the attribute ‘‘global’’ need to be avoided. In the absence of a global state, the relationship between contemporary civil society and global rules as a framework (beyond the state) needs to be further conceptualized. At the same time, the critical engagement with the concept of ‘‘global civil society’’ will have to imply tackling the challenges posed by methodological nationalism (Beck, 2003). It asks, for instance, for the development of new ways of ‘‘measuring’’ ‘‘global civil society’’ which go beyond counting and cataloging international nongovernmental organizations or parallel summits. The chronology of global civil society events which is provided in Global Civil Society is one good starting point that asks for ongoing and systematic revision and thorough methodological scrutiny. As a ‘‘global’’ phenomena, the investigation of ‘‘global civil society’’ requires nothing less than an extension of the ‘‘rails on which standard academic sociological [and political scientific] inquiry runs into new regions’’ (Beck, 2006: 74). In general, given that the term ‘‘global’’ always already implies a notion of wholism, and, as Vandana Shiva (1998: 223) puts it, ‘‘a skewed view of a common future,’’ the discursive power behind the application of the attribute ‘‘global’’ asks for systematic and critical investigation and deconstruction by social and political scientists. This relates both to the application of the term in academic as well as in public and political discourses.
Cross-References
▶ Amnesty International ▶ Greenpeace ▶ INGOs ▶ Jubilee 2000 ▶ Make Poverty History ▶ Oxfam International ▶ Social Movements ▶ Transnational Forums and Summits
References/Further Readings Anheier, H., Glasius, M., & Kaldor, M. (2001). Introducing global civil society. In H. Anheier, M. Glasius, & M. Kaldoribid. (Eds.), Global civil society 2001 (pp. 3–22). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anheier, H., Glasius, M., & Kaldor, M. (2004). Global civil society 2004/5. London: Sage. attac (URL), Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens, from http://www.attac.org (last accessed 1 January 2009). Bartelson, J. (2000). Three concepts of globalization. International Sociology, 15(2), 180–196. Beck, U. (2003). The analysis of global inequality: From national to cosmopolitan perspective. In M. Kaldor, H. Anheier, & M. Glasius (Eds.), Global civil society 2003 (pp. 45–55). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Global Reporting Initiative Beck, U. (2006). Cosmopolitan vision. Cambridge: Polity. Berger, P. (2005). Religion and global civil society. In M. Juergensmeyer (Ed.), Religion in global civil society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, I. (1999). Globalization and international relations theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glasius, M. (2002). Expertise in the cause of justice: Global civil society influence on the statue for an international criminal court. In M. Glasius, M. Kaldor, & H. Anheier (Eds.), Global civil society 2002 (pp. 137–168). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Global Civil Society annual publication by the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science, from http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/researchgcspub.htm (last accessed 1 January 2009). Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., & Perraton, J. (2003). Global transformations: Politics, economics and culture. Cambridge: Polity. Kaldor, M. (2003a). Global civil society: An answer to war. Cambridge: Polity. Kaldor, M. (2003b). The idea of global civil society. International Affairs, 79(3), 583–593. Kaldor, M., & Kostovicova, D. (2008). Global civil society and illiberal regimes. In M. Albrow et al. (Eds.), Global civil society 2007/8: Communicative power and democracy (pp. 86–113). London: Sage. Keane, J. (2001). Global civil society? In H. Anheier, M. Glasius, & M. Kaldor (Eds.), Global civil society 2001 (pp. 23–47). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipschutz, R. D. (2000). Politics among people: Global civil society. In H. H. Hobbs (Ed.), Pondering postinternationalism: A paradigm for the twenty-first century. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lipschutz, R. D. (2005). Power, politics and global civil society. Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 33(3), 747–769. Micheletti, M. (2004). Political virtue and shopping: Individuals, consumerism, and collective action. London: Palgrave. Rosenau, J. N. (1990). Turbulence in world politics: A theory of change and continuity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scholte, J. A. (1999). Global civil society: Changing the world? (CSGR Working Paper No. 31/99). From http://www.unicef.org/sociapolicy/files/Global_Civil_Society_Changing_the World.pdf and http:// www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm Shiva, V. (1998). The greening of global reach. In G. Thuatail & S. Dalby (Eds.), The geopolitics reader. London: Routledge.
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Introduction and Brief History The Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is a partnership of governments, civil society and private businesses seeking a new approach to international health financing. In the decade of the 1990s, the global community began to acknowledge the increasing threat that HIV/ AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria pose, and how these epidemics are strongly connected to poverty and development issues. In 2000 this concern was placed on the table at the meeting of the G8 countries in Okinawa, Japan, and in 2001 at the United Nations’s special session on AIDS, where the creation of a global fund to channel more resources was proposed. The Global Fund’s Secretariat was established in June 2002, beginning the activity of this international financing institution.
Mission/Activities/Contribution The Global Fund seeks to mobilize resources to support programs that evolve from national plans and priorities, both in prevention and treatment strategies. The support plans follow the principle of performance-based funding, that is, a strong emphasis is placed on the policies’ results and the progressive scaling-up of their impact. By early December 2008, the Global Fund had signed grant agreements worth US$10.2 billion for 579 projects in 137 countries, and had disbursed so far US$6.8 billion to grant recipients. It is estimated that 2.5 million lives have been saved by the effect of those initiatives.
Cross-References ▶ United Nations ▶ World Bank
References/Further Readings Salinas, D. (2008). A Strategy for the Global Fund: Accelerating the Effort to Save Lives, Geneva.
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria FRANCISCO MARTINEZ
Global Reporting Initiative SARAH JASTRAM
Address of Organization Geneva Secretariat Chemin de Blandonnet 8 1214 Vernier Geneva Switzerland www.theglobalfund.org
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Address of Organization Keizersgracht 209 1016 DT, Amsterdam The Netherlands www.globalreporting.org
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Global Witness Ltd.
Introduction The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an independent, nonprofit, multi-stakeholder network, which aims to increase the accountability and transparency of organizations with regard to their economic, environmental, and social performance. The initiative developed reporting guidelines – including principles and performance indicators – which enable organizations to report to different interest groups (stakeholders) and increase the comparability of sustainability performance.
Brief History The Global Reporting Initiative was started in 1997 by CERES, a nonprofit network of investors, environmental organizations, and other stakeholders which works for the recognition and integration of sustainability principles into business activities and capital markets. In 1999, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) joined the initiative, and in 2000, the GRI released its first Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. In 2001, the GRI became an independent institution.
Mission The GRI’s vision is ‘‘that reporting on economic, environmental, and social performance by all organizations is as routine and comparable as financial reporting.’’ Its current priorities with regard to the establishment and improvement of sustainability reporting are the fields of human rights, supply chain management, the impact made by organizations on communities, climate change, and financial markets.
Activities The GRI concentrates most of its activity on the development, establishment, and improvement of its reporting guidelines. To help it achieve these goals, it involves multiple stakeholders drawn from business, civil society, labor organizations, and professional institutions, who deliberate on key strategic and policy issues. In 2006, following several feedback processes and stakeholder consultations, the current, third version of the Guidelines (G3) was released. In order to stimulate demand and create greater capacity for sustainable reporting, the GRI also develops learning materials, holds a biennial international conference, and accredits training partners.
Structure and Governance The GRI is governed by a Board of Directors. This has fiduciary, financial, legal, and overall strategic powers and responsibilities. The Board is advised by a Stakeholder Council (elected by the organizational members of the GRI) and a Technical Advisory Committee. The
International Secretariat, based in Amsterdam, is responsible for all administrative and coordinative work.
Funding Being a nonprofit initiative, the GRI relies on the funding of organizational and governmental donors and supporters (2/3) and on income generated through the provision of learning and other services (1/3).
Accomplishments Since its launch, 1,500 companies have used the GRI’s reporting standards. These include many of the world’s leading brands, e.g., Hewlett-Packard, BMW, and McDonald’s. The guidelines constitute the most prominent sustainability reporting framework in existence and are referenced by related and equally well-established initiatives such as the UN Global Compact.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Stakeholders ▶ Sustainability ▶ Transparency ▶ UN Global Compact
References/Further Readings Bennett, M., James, P., & Klinkers, L. (Eds.) (1999). Sustainable measures: Evaluation and reporting of environmental and social performance. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing. Enderle, G. (2004). The ethics of financial reporting, the global reporting initiative, and the balanced concept of the firm. In G. G. Brenkert (Ed.), Corporate integrity and accountability (pp. 87–99). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Global Witness Ltd. BASTIAN SPECHT
Address of Organization P.O. Box 6042 London N19 5WP UK www.globalwitness.org
Introduction Global Witness (GW) investigates and campaigns to prevent natural resource-related conflict and corruption. Exploitation and illegal trade in natural resources such as
Global Witness Ltd.
diamonds, oil, timber, and gas are often used to fund civil war or terrorist activity, hindering economic growth and contributing to continued instability which in turn has a direct correlation to human rights and environmental abuses.
Brief History GW was the first organization that sought to break the links between the exploitation of natural resources, conflict and corruption. It was established in 1993 by the three founding directors Charmian Gooch, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley and today numbers over 40 staff working in its offices in London and Washington, DC. Having different backgrounds such as history, biology, and industry, the three had worked before for an environmental organization called Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which since 1984 pioneered investigative conservation by exposing environmental crime. In 1995, GW’s very first campaign closed the Thai-Cambodia border to the $10–$20 million per month timber trade between the Khmer Rouge and Thai logging companies.
Mission GW campaigns to achieve real change by uncovering seemingly intractable global issues. The international nongovernmental organization works to highlight the links between the exploitation of natural resources and human rights abuses, particularly where resources are used to fund conflict. Local civil society groups are often acutely aware of predatory and destructive natural resource exploitation but unable to document and expose it because of intimidation and/or a lack of resources.
Activities GW gathers detailed, firsthand evidence in respective cases and comprehensive reports are used to brief governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society and the media. Major publications like ‘‘A Rough Trade: The Role of Governments and Companies in the Angolan Conflict’’ (1998) contributed to the establishment of the Kimberley Process and ‘‘A Crude Awakening’’ (1999) highlighted corruption in Angola. Activities of GW comprise investigating the role of financial institutions and ending impunity for all entities involved in facilitating natural resource wars and corruption and further campaign to change international thinking with regards to illegal logging and combating conflict diamonds.
Structure and Governance The organization is a nonprofit company limited by guarantee, incorporated in England on 15 November 1993.
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The company was established under a memorandum of association which established the objects and powers of the company. Because activities involve campaigning and political lobbying it is not eligible for charitable status. The Global Witness Trust is a UK registered charity and therefore able to receive tax efficient gifts, such as gift aid.
Funding The majority of Global Witness’ funding comes from grants made by foundations, governments and nongovernmental organizations and in 2006 comprised £2,582,508. Approximately 50% came in the form of grants from trusts and foundations, 16% from governments, 10% from nongovernmental organizations, 24% from individual donations. Grants are only accepted on a ‘‘free to use’’ basis to maintain independence of its campaigning voice. The Global Witness Trust is a UK registered charity and the Global Witness Foundation is an independent nonprofit public benefit corporation, both legally independent of Global Witness Limited and governed by a board of voluntary trustees.
Accomplishments GW was co-nominated for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for exposure of trade in conflict diamonds which led to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. In other campaigns GW uncovered illegal logging that was funding the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s arms-for-timber trade which led to United Nations sanctions on exports of Liberian timber during the civil war. Exposing corruption in oil, mining and gas industries contributed to the establishment of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and the Publish What You Pay coalition comprising around 300 NGOs. In 2005 GW was awarded the Gleitsman Foundation prize for its international activism.
Cross-References ▶ Human Rights ▶ INGOs ▶ Lobbying
References/Further Readings Braid, M., & Castle, S. (2000). How a little band of London activists forced the diamond trade to confront the blood on its hands. London: The Independent, 24 July 2000, from http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/africa/how-a-little-band-of-london-activists-forced-thediamond-trade-to-confront-the-blood-on-its-hands-707479.html; 25/11/2008. Global Witness (2002). Resources, conflict and corruption. The work of global witness. London: Global Witness Ltd.
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GMF ▶ German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF)
Goff, Frederick Harris ELEANOR W. SACKS
Basic Biographical Information Frederick Harris Goff created the first community foundation in 1914, The Cleveland Foundation, in Cleveland, Ohio. Goff was born in Blackbury, Illinois, December 15, 1858. His family moved to Cleveland when he was a child, and he attended the city’s public schools. He enrolled in the University of Michigan, receiving a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1881. After reading law, he was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1884. He did legal work for many wealthy residents of Cleveland, handling large and difficult estates. In doing so he became familiar with the difficulties surrounding the establishment of charitable trusts in perpetuity. Goff was also an expert on corporate structuring. His law firm represented Rockefeller interests in Ohio, where the Rockefeller oil empire had its start. Goff became widely known as a civic leader after devising a solution to a longstanding feud between two streetcar companies in Cleveland, one public and one private, which drove both into bankruptcy. In 1907 Goff devised a compromise plan that was good for both the companies and local citizens. This compromise secured his reputation as a leading citizen of Cleveland. In 1908, he became the head of The Cleveland Trust Company, where he instituted operating standards that were innovative for their time. The reforms established trust in his bank through implementation of open and transparent policies. His beliefs in how to organize and manage institutions affected the way he structured The Cleveland Foundation. He died on March 14, 1923 at age 68.
Major Contributions Fred Goff was perfectly placed to conceive of the community foundation idea. His experience as both a lawyer and a banker helped him develop a sound structure for a community foundation, which he devised and put into effect in less than two years. Goff studied the formation of the large private foundations set up by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and others. Like them, he believed that the wealthy had a responsibility to use their resources for charitable
purposes. He wanted to give wealthy individuals and those of more modest means a way to give back to their communities by creating a vehicle for philanthropy that was democratic – public, not private. Community foundations are grantmaking foundations that focus their activities in a geographical area. Goff’s community foundation idea consisted of combining multiple charitable funds established by donors, and administering them as a single trust within trust banks. The real innovation was the establishment of a Distribution Committee, in effect a board of trustees, to represent the public and make decisions on grants and grantmaking priorities. In the Cleveland Foundation model, the majority of Distribution Committee members were nominated by specified public officials and the remainder by the trust banks. Board members served limited terms and were not selfperpetuating, as were the boards of private foundations. Community foundations solved several troubling issues of the day, including how to deal with ill-conceived trusts that were frozen. Large amounts of money sat idle in banks, because their charitable purposes could not be carried out. Although it was possible to alter trusts, it had to be done through the courts and could take decades to resolve. Goff gave community foundations the power to alter trusts and freedom from the ‘‘dead hand of the law,’’ ensuring that assets for charitable purposes would be available in perpetuity. The community foundation idea proved to be a highly flexible form of community philanthropy, able to respond to the changing needs of vastly different communities over time. The concept spread quickly, in part because of the strength of the idea, but also, in the early days, due to the promotional efforts of the banking community and Goff himself.
Cross-References
▶ Cleveland Foundation ▶ Foundations, Community ▶ Foundations, Grantmaking ▶ Foundations, Definition and History ▶ Foundations, Functions of
References/Further Readings The Cleveland Trust Company (1923). Frederick Harris Goff: A brief sketch of his life and an account of the memorial meeting held by the directors of The Cleveland Trust Company in March 1923. Cleveland: The Cleveland Trust Company. Freiberger, I. F. (1951). Frederick Harris Goff (1858–1923): Lawyer, banker, civic leader. Princeton, NJ: The Newcomen Publications, Princeton University Press. Howard, N. R. (1963). Trust for all time: The story of The Cleveland Foundation and the community trust movement. Cleveland: The Cleveland Foundation.
GONGOs
GONGOs LAWRENCE S. CUMMING Independent Consultant in International Development and Civil Society, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Introduction With apologies to Shakespeare, some are born NGOs, some achieve NGO-ness, and some have NGO-ness thrust upon them! Not all NGOs enjoy the purest of conceptions. Some are brought into being as the result of official action or at least connivance, and there are often ulterior motives involved in their creation. The idea of governments, or at least interests close to governments creating entities outside of government and not of government may be inherently risible, rather like an animal giving birth to a fish or a bird. However, closer examination quickly reveals that the oxymoron is alive and well. GONGO formation is something that happens rather regularly, frequently, for a variety of reasons and in many places.
Definition The Government Organized Nongovernmental Organization (GONGO) might, in some ways of thinking, constitute one subcategory of the QUANGO or Quasi-Nongovernmental Organization. In fact, some GONGOs might be also be QUANGOs or at least be indistinguishable. Because of their provenance, however, this category known as ‘‘GONGO’’ merits consideration as a separate classification. The acronym GONGO is one of an apparently expanding assortment that includes MONGO (my own NGO), PONGO (parliamentary organized NGO or, sometimes, personal NGO), FINGO (financially interested NGO), GANGO (gap-filling NGO), BRINGO (brief case NGO), (DONGO (donor organized NGO), DINGO (donor international NGO), BONGO (business organized NGO), BINGO (business interest NGO), BENGO (bent, in the sense of crooked NGO), CHONGO (city hall NGO), GRINGO (government run or inspired run NGO), PANGO (party-affiliated NGO), RONGO (retired officials NGO), COMENGO (come and go, or here today and gone tomorrow NGO) as well as MANGO or MONGO (Mafia-affiliated or Mafia organized NGO). Though some of these give rise to a certain amount of mirth, they do attempt to describe what is a rather serious phenomenon, namely nongovernmental organizations being created by other parties to further their own interests. Sometimes the intent is to masquerade. It may be done to
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create a respectable front for a questionable purpose. Other times, it may be to fill what someone in an official position deems a gap because no one else is filling it. Although the creation of GONGOs often invites cynicism, if not contempt, the possibility that some are created for honest reasons should not be discounted. There are examples to be found in the literature and in personal experience of organizations which exhibit most of the characteristics of a genuine NGO but whose inspiration was official. Ian Smillie (1995: 32–33) describes one such case from Sri Lanka. The common thread of this discussion is provenance. If it is a GONGO, its origin which tends to limit, qualify, or diminish its nongovernmental character. A ‘‘GONGO’’ is, simply put, an organization that is created, either directly or indirectly, by action of a government or one of its agencies. Thus its roots are official, in other words, inspired, or created by state initiative. Normally, one of the essential characteristics of an authentic NGO is that it is the product of an initiative emerging from somewhere within civil society, as an attempt by a group of citizens to address a perceived social need, one which they deem important. There is, it must be noted, some inconsistency of definition as offered by leading authorities in the literature. John Clark (Hulme & Edwards, 1997: 50), for instance, refers to ‘‘government-oriented nongovernmental organizations,’’ though this seems a little weak in addressing the question of parentage. David Korten and others use the simpler term ‘‘government nongovernmental organizations’’ (1990: 104–105). In some documents the term ‘‘GONGO’’ means ‘‘government operated NGO,’’ even though direct operation by a government does not seem to be a necessary aspect of the operative dynamics of such an entity. Because of its more widespread usage over time, but more because formulations that do not include the word ‘‘organized’’ might too easily be confused with QUANGO, this paper uses the term ‘‘government organized nongovernmental organization’’ (GONGO).
Historical Background In spite of the significant qualification which the phrase ‘‘government organized’’ suggests, GONGOs are clearly a sub-category of ‘‘NGOs’’ as a broader category. Despite its provenance, and often because of that provenance, a GONGO normally enjoys whatever formal social and legal status applies to more authentic NGO in the jurisdiction where it is registered It is usually considered as a nonprofit organization (if that term has any ascribed significance where it resides), and it may enjoy a formal legal registration as such in that jurisdiction. Depending
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on the laws applicable, it may also enjoy the privileges of a registered charitable organization, though the latter is not a defining characteristic. As noted elsewhere, the term NGO arose originally as an attempt to ascribe some identity and status to entities that were not part of any state apparatus but were seen as having a functionally beneficial relationship with departments or agencies of the United Nations. Initially, NGOs were those defined as having consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). With the passage of time, the number, variety, and location of NGOs proliferated. In present times, there are many more NGOs that have no formal relations with agencies of the United Nations than those which do. Moreover, the term ‘‘NGO’’ has come to be widely used to describe organizations engaged purely within their own particular national jurisdictions and having little or no involvement beyond their territorial borders. An early initiative that might, in later times, have been termed a ‘‘GONGO’’ was the Eva Peron Foundation, established by the wife of the Argentine President, Juan Peron as ‘‘the paradigmatic form of social assistance in the 1940s’’ (Vliadrich & Andres, 1996). No one was closer to the President than Ms. Peron, and the example would almost certainly qualify as a GONGO. During the ‘‘Cold War’’ period beginning at the end of World War II and continuing for roughly the next four and a half decades, GONGOs from the Soviet Union and eastern European countries, ‘‘peace movement’’ organizations most notably, acquired a dubious reputation if not notoriety as fronts for extending Soviet influence throughout the world. Another well known and instructive national case example is Indonesia where GONGOs and QUANGOs proliferated during the long Soeharto regime. As one author has described: "
In QUANGOs and GONGOs wives and close relatives of famous politicians are often to be found. They do not only serve the public interest but also make sure that the government wishes are taken into account. Even military generals might be found on their committees. . . . Any successful self-help initiative or NGO will either be regulated or soon co-opted into the quasi administration directed by the government or even forced to abandon its activities. The result is a disguised bureaucracy which looks like donors want it to look without any comparative advantage such as flexibility, participation, innovation and responsiveness. (Vahlhans, 1994: 3).
The Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine cites a number of examples from around the world, including the
Myanmar Women’s Affairs Federation, Nashi (a Russian youth group), the Sudanese Human Rights Organization, the Kyrgystan Association of Noncommercial and Nongovernmental Organizations, Chonygryon (the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan) and the Venezuelan inspired Bolivarian Circles to be found throughout Latin America (Naim, April 21, 2007). In selecting this mix of geographies, he suggests that the practice of GONGO creation is quite widespread. Terms like ‘‘GONGO’’ and some of the others listed above have no official status. They have, however, found their way into common parlance and the lexicon of useful terms as descriptors of certain kinds of organization that anyone can easily recognize. These exist somewhere in the nether land between official state agencies and more ‘‘pure’’ NGOs initiated by public-spirited persons to address particular social needs in their own countries or in other parts of the world and feeling some compulsion to act. There is also a murkier development worthy of mention which takes things a step further. One authority has identified a type which she entitles the ‘‘flex organization,’’ ‘‘the defining feature (of which) is that they switch their status situationally – from state to private – back and forth, strategically manoeuvring their statuses so as to best access state, business and sometimes international resources’’ (Wedel, 2002: 3). These are found in the corrupt circumstances of postSoviet ‘‘situational states.’’ However, she goes on to say that: "
flex organizations are neither QUANGOs nor GONGOs (which) do not imply simultaneous overlap between government officials and NGO operatives . . . QUANGOs and GONGOs imply static relationships and thus cannot enable total deniability. . . . Whereas QUANGOs and GONGOs could come into conflict of interest with state organizations, flex organizations cannot because they obfuscate conflict of interest (p. 4).
This, then, forms the outer limit of the present discussion. The GONGO, along with other hybrid forms discussed elsewhere, clearly takes the legal and institutional shape of an NGO and has to be understood within these parameters.
Key Issues The key issues closely track those discussed under the QUANGO heading. Some may, however, bear repeating, while others are more particular to the GONGO phenomenon:
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Political and/or Geopolitical Control
The very idea of a GONGO suggests the exercise of a political interest in pursuit of a goal. Governments create mechanisms for the implementation of their policies. The sphere may be domestic, or it may be international and even global. If the latter, governments, particularly of the great powers will almost certainly have geopolitical interests which they will advance by a variety of means. One of these may be the GONGO which might well be established ostensibly to advance ideas and practices such as democracy promotion which are not, on the surface, politically contentious but, in fact, mask other economic and foreign policy objectives (see Chaulia, 2006).
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becomes particularly problematic if the other organizations are more honest, competent, and relevant to real social needs. Integrity and Credibility
An organization which was founded by civil society actors in response to a pressing need, as perceived by its founders, should, alteris paribus, be more likely to remain true to its vision and its mission than one which is created by a government. Likewise, if an organization is acting according to its best principles and values, and if it reflects honest and grounded experience when it speaks, it is likely to enjoy greater credibility than one which does not.
Authenticity
Sustainability
A genuine and honestly conceived NGO is normally an authentic social expression of interest in or concern about a certain social issue, usually one the founders deem to be pressing. Though a GONGOs might be a worthy response in particular circumstances, in the absence of any better, it tends to lack the authenticity of one organized by a group of citizens.
Government giveth, and government taketh away! An NGO with a broad base of support and recognized legitimacy is more likely to be sustainable through changing times, including shifting government funding policies and priorities. By contrast, it is usually very difficult for a GONGO, as a transplant, to put down roots in unfamiliar soil and flourish as a healthy and sustainable organization. An interesting sidebar to this discussion is to be found in efforts of agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development to assess sustainability of NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia (USAID, 2004). Given the amount of USAID sponsored effort directed towards developing NGOs in these regions, the attempt to measure sustainability would appear suggest some concern as to the efficacy of this approach.
Legitimacy
At a time when challenges to the legitimacy of selfappointing and self-perpetuating nongovernmental organizations are being given voice, GONGOs are particularly vulnerable to scrutiny. The burning question ‘‘who owns the agency’’ (Saxby, 1996), which is a valid and pressing one for any organization, assumes a particular poignancy in relation to GONGOs. Independence or Autonomy
As a general rule, the greater the degree of autonomy an organization enjoys, the greater is its scope for determining its own priorities and fields of action. A GONGO, like other organizations created by particular interests, especially if for ulterior motives, is most likely to continue to be beholden to those interests and inclined to do their bidding. Admittedly, it is not impossible to imagine a GONGO becoming more autonomous or even independent over time, assuming a willingness on the part of its founders to see it move in that direction, or perhaps a simple inability to generate and provide the necessary resources to continue controlling it. Privilege and Favouritism
If an NGO is created by the action of a government, or persons close to government and acting on its behalf, it has a privileged relationship. This probably means a less favored relationship for other organizations. This
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International Perspectives GONGOs are to be found around the world, in both the global south and the global north. Though some of the NGO literature suggests that the GONGO is a ‘‘southern’’ phenomenon, such entities are certainly not unknown in the global ‘‘north.’’ One of the best known, in fact, is the National Endowment for Democracy initiated by President Regan and created in 1983 by the United States Congress (Naim, April 21, 2007). Though the NDI has many defenders (as well as some detractors), whether or not it is a ‘‘good organization’’ is essentially beside the point in this discussion. Notwithstanding that it was created with an NGO form, it is an instrument of official United States foreign policy. Indeed it has been argued that the device is about how control and direction of interventions behind a facade of independence and nonpartisanship are maintained. (Chaulia, 2006). Another, albeit somewhat less controversial northern example would be Katimavik, created by Canadian Senator
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Jacques Hebert with encouragement and full funding by the Government of Canada. To this day, the official Katimavik website refers to its foundation in 1977 as being ‘‘from a vision of. . . . Mr. Jacques Hebert, with the help of his friend, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister at the time’’ (Katimavik). That youth service in remote and poor communities is a laudable aim, and that a great many young Canadians have gained extremely valuable life changing experiences and improved themselves as citizens is not in question. Sometimes in the literature, the term refers to organizations created in certain authoritarian contexts (frequently the former eastern bloc countries but not only these) to be mouthpieces in international fora, ostensibly representing ‘‘the people’’ but in fact speaking only for governments. Soviet era peace and friendship organizations were good examples. All this having been said, conditions in the global south may often be more conducive to the formation of GONGOs. In many instances, front organizations are created by relatives of government ministers or officials, members of national assemblies or local governments, business interests and so on to generate and channel money (usually foreign) into preferred community activities, thereby to enhancing their image and their positions and, generally, exercising forms of social influence and control. The diversion or siphoning of some of the money as it flows, it goes without saying, is not unknown.
Future Directions Notwithstanding the difficulty of being entirely sure as to what is likely to happen in each and every country of the world, there are some present trends which, if projected, give some indication of future directions. It is probably very unlikely that Governments will cease to create ‘‘NGOs’’ when they deem it in their interest to do so. Many will continue to see occasions when the ‘‘front organization’’ will operate with an apparent, if illusory independence that enhances the credibility of their work. Whether governments will prefer the route of establishing arm’s length or statutory bodies with a substantial degree of autonomy or GONGOs, depends on the history, the constitution, the political culture, the legal and social norms of the country in question as well as an assessment of advantages and disadvantages of each of the alternatives. Such decisions will, no doubt, also depend on the prevailing policy attitudes of donor governments and multilateral agencies from time to time. In a climate where NGOs are viewed instrumentally or as useful and credible channels, there remains a considerable likelihood of GONGOs being formed.
An interesting variant includes international NGOs established by nonsovereign governmental agencies. A very good example is the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) which is an international association of local governments hosted by the City of Toronto but with members drawn from around the world and concerned with what local authorities might do, in partnership with one another and with local civil society and even the private sector to enhance the quality of the living environment. Whether this model becomes a trend or an isolated case remains to be seen, but it does testify to the flexibility of the NGO form. The foregoing is not to be confused with the equally interesting international phenomenon of NGOs created by nonstate actors in the absence of intergovernmental agreement or action, a good example of which is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Another hybrid, perhaps an historic anomaly, is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which might be discussed under either this or the ‘‘QUANGO’’ heading. ‘‘The ISO is actually not purely an NGO, since its membership is by nation, and each nation is represented by what the ISO Council determines to be ‘the most broadly representative’ standardization body of a nation.’’ These include both nongovernmental and governmental agencies. (Political Dictionary, Answers.com.) Much depends on evolving understanding of the role of the state versus that of civil society organizations and the prevailing winds at the time. Likewise, trends are influenced by accumulated experience of the value and efficacy of NGOs, individually, and collectively. Perhaps most importantly, there is the question of what support can be garnered. If, in the case of countries dependent on foreign aid, donors are more prepared to support NGOs than state institutions, there is incentive to create GONGOs as ‘‘reliable’’ channels for receiving and disbursing that aid.
Cross-References
▶ Foundations, Public Law or Government ▶ Government – Nonprofit Sector Relations ▶ NGOs, Nongovernmental organizations ▶ QUANGOs, Quasi nongovernmental organizations
References/Further Readings Answers.com, www.answers.com/topic/non-governmental-organization Chaulia, S. (2006, January 19). ‘‘Democratization, NGOs’’ and ‘‘Colour Revolutions,’’ Open Democracy, from http:/www.opendemocracy. net/globalization-institutions_government/colour_revolutions Hulme, D., & Edwards, M. (Eds.) (1997). NGOs, states and donors: Too close for comfort? New York: St. Martin’s Press in association with Save the Children.
Good Governance and Civil Society Iriyama, A. (2005). Government-nonprofit relations: A Japanese case. Rikkyu Journal of Social Design Studies, Tokyo, from http://www. rikkyo.ne.jp/web/z2000368/journals/no4_thesis03.html Korten, D. (1990). Getting to the 21st century: Voluntary action and the global agenda. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Naim, M. (2007). Democracy’s Dangerous Imposters. Washington Post, April 21. NationMaster.com, Encyclopaedia: Non Governmental Organization. Saxby, J. (1996). Who owns the private aid agencies? In D. Sogge (Ed.), Compassion and calculation: The business of private foreign aid. London: Pluto Press. Smillie, I., (1995). The alms bazaar: Altruism under fire – non-profit organizations and international development. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre and Intermediate Technology Publications. Steen, O. I. (1996). Autonomy or dependency? Relations between non-governmental international organizations and government. Voluntas, 7(2), 147–159. Steinberg, N. (2001). Background paper on GONGOs and QUANGOs and Wild NGOs. New York: World Federalist Movement. United States Agency for International Development (USAID). (2005). The 2004 NGO sustainability index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia (8th ed.). Washington, DC. Vahlhans, M. (1994). The New Popularity of NGOs: Will the Enthusiasm Last? DþC Development and Co-operation, No. 3, pp. 20–22, Frankfurt. Viladrich, A., & Thomson, A. A. (1996). Women’s philanthropy in Argentina from the society of beneficence to Eva Peron. Voluntas, 7 (4), 336–349. Wedel, J. R. (2002, August). Blurring the boundaries of the state-private divide: Implications for corruption. Paper presented at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference in Copenhagen, from www.anthrobase.com/Txt/W/Wedel_J_01.htm Whiting, S. H. (1991). The politics of NGO development in China. Voluntas, 2(2), 16–48.
Good Governance and Civil Society CARMEN MALENA CIVICUS Participatory Governance Program, Stoneham, QC, Canada
Introduction Since its origins, the concept of civil society has been linked with the notion of governance. Throughout both ancient and modern history, ideas about civil society and governance have each followed their own complex and multifaceted trajectories but their relevance to one another has remained undeniable. Influenced by changing historic realities and varied sociopolitical contexts, different schools of thought have evolved regarding both the nature of the relationship between civil society and governance,
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as well as the level of importance placed on the link between the two. Since the 1980s, when governance failures began to be identified as a principal obstacle to the achievement of crucial world development goals, the link between civil society and governance has received renewed attention, at both the theoretical and operational levels. There is now broad consensus that good governance requires both a strong state and a strong civil society. Civil society institutions contribute to good governance through four principal means by: (i) nurturing civic virtues and behaviors; (ii) providing space for public debate and negotiation; (iii) checking the power of the state, and; (iv) contributing to or performing governance functions. Through these means, civil society actors contribute to each of the key elements of good governance: transparency, participation, responsiveness, rule of law, effectiveness, equity, and accountability.
Definition Governance refers broadly to the manner in which authority is exercised and decisions are made and implemented. The concept of governance can be applied to any form of authority or decision-making (at the global, societal, community, or organizational level) but it is most frequently applied to the governance of sovereign states. The World Bank, for example, defines governance as ‘‘the process and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised’’ (World Bank, 1994). According to the United Nations Development Program, governance refers to ‘‘the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority in the management of a country’s affairs’’ (UNDP, 1997). Since the dawn of the modern nation-state, governance has often been associated, and sometimes equated, with the actions of government. Since the late 1980s, however, the term has been reconceptualized to be more inclusive of all institutions and processes, both governmental and nongovernmental, that are relevant to societal decision-making. The World Bank states that, in addition to ‘‘the process by which governments are selected, monitored, and replaced and the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies,’’ governance includes ‘‘the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them’’ (World Bank, 1994). The United Nations includes in its perception of governance ‘‘those mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences’’ (UNDP, 1997: 2–3). Hyden et al. (2004: 16) assert that governance refers to ‘‘the formation and stewardship
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of the formal and informal rules that regulate the public realm, the arena in which the state as well as economic and societal actors interact to take decisions.’’ While there is broad consensus that governance is about more than governments, current definitions and schools of thought vary according to how much relative emphasis they place on state or nonstate actors and the relationship between them. Some definitions of governance go beyond the ‘‘state plus’’ formulation and identify shared responsibilities and relationships among state and nonstate actors as the core essence of governance. Stoker (1998: 38), for example, states that while the term government refers to the formal institutional structure and location of authoritative decision-making, governance refers to the ‘‘interactive relationship between and within government and non-governmental forces.’’ Tandon and Mohanty (2002: 10) define governance as ‘‘the joint responsibility of the state, market, and citizens to mobilize public resources and promote public decision-making towards the advancement of the common public good.’’ In recent years, a number of international organizations that support governance programs (such as the UNDP, World Bank and DfID) have begun to emphasize the ‘‘demand-side’’ of the governance equation and to adopt definitions of governance that emphasize the role of citizens and civil society. AusAid (2000: 3), for example, asserts that governance comprises ‘‘the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences.’’ In the late 1980s, the World Bank began to attribute the failure of its economic policies in Africa to ‘‘bad governance’’ (e.g., inefficiency, lack of transparency, corruption). As a result, the concept of ‘‘good governance’’ attracted growing attention and rapidly became a buzzword in international development discourse (World Bank, 1992, 1994). For the World Bank, good governance is epitomized by ‘‘predictable, open and enlightened policy making; a bureaucracy imbued with a professional ethos; an executive arm of government accountable for its actions; and a strong civil society participating in public affairs; and all behaving under the rule of law’’ (World Bank, 1992 1994). According to the UNDP, good governance is participatory, transparent, accountable, effective, and equitable. It promotes the rule of law and ensures that political, social, and economic priorities are based on broad consensus in society and that the voices of the poorest and the most vulnerable are heard in decisionmaking (UNDP, 1997). Definitions and descriptions of what constitutes good governance vary, but they tend to share a number of common elements. These include:
transparency, participation, responsiveness, rule of law, effectiveness, equity, and accountability.
Historical Background Current ideas about the role of civil society in good governance draw upon a long history of political philosophy dating back to ancient Greece. For classical philosophers, civil society was synonymous with good society (i.e., one in which social conflicts are governed by rules and civic virtues prevail). The state and civil society were indistinguishable. They held that state represented the civil form of society and ‘‘civility’’ represented the requirement of good citizenship. Late medieval thought continued this tradition by equating civil society with law-bound associations that governed the ‘‘public arena’’ under the protection of the state (Edwards, 2004: 6–7). In the late 1600s, half a century after the Treaty of Westphalia and the birth of the modern state system, John Locke acknowledging the dangers of unchecked state powers, forged a social contract whereby people submit themselves to the common public authority, but one which is bound by civil and natural laws to respect basic human rights (of life, liberty, and property) (Locke, 1689). During the Enlightenment period (of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth Century) thinkers began to articulate the idea of civil society as a defense against violations by the state of basic freedoms and rights. This notion of civil society as an independent sphere checking the power of the state was subsequently taken up by a range of thinkers. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, underlined the importance of an independent civil society sphere to counterbalance state power. More recently, the New Left has emphasized civil society as a site for organizing political resistance and Putnam (1993, 2000) has highlighted the value of voluntary associations in curbing the power of centralizing institutions. Tocqueville also famously underlined the importance of civil society as a ‘‘school of democracy,’’ teaching values of association, debate, and collective problem-solving, thus providing the building blocks for democracy. A range of thinkers have since theorized about the various ways in which civil society lays the societal foundations for good/ democratic governance, for example, by promoting political participation (Almond & Verba, 1989) and nurturing trust and social capital (Putnam, 1993, 2000). Another school of thought emphasizes the vital role of civil society as a public space – providing an arena for contestation (Gramsci), a public sphere for debate and deliberation (Arendt, 1958), a space for ‘‘communicative action’’ (Habermas, 1992) and for nonviolent engagement between different social groups (Keyne, 1998).
Good Governance and Civil Society
How Civil Society Contributes to Good Governance Drawing on each of these different historic perspectives and schools of thought, four principal ways in which civil society contributes to good governance can be identified. These include the following. Nurturing Civic Virtues and Behaviors
Civil society is seen to play a crucial role in building the social foundations for good governance by nurturing civic values, skills, and relationships. Classical philosophers, such as Plato, saw civil society as a place where people practiced virtues of wisdom, moderation, and justice and dedicated themselves to the common good. Following in this tradition of civil society as an incubator of civic culture and practices, political philosophers have argued that civil society contributes to democracy and good governance by: promoting association, democratic decisionmaking and collective action (Tocqueville, 1900); building an informed and active citizenry (Almond and Verba); nurturing trust, shared vales and a sense of interconnectedness (Putnam, 1993, 2000), and; protecting pluralism (Cohen & Arato, 1992). Others, however, have questioned how virtuous and democratic civil society actually is – pointing to the ‘‘uncivil’’ nature of some civil society actors and actions and the lack of democracy and accountability within the sphere (Agnew, 2002). Providing Space for Public Debate and Negotiation
Civil society is also seen as contributing to good governance by providing a critical public space where issues, ideas, and interests can be exchanged and negotiated. Again, the idea that public debate is imperative to ensure civility and good governance can be traced back to classical philosophers (e.g., Socrates ‘‘dialectic’’). As discussed above, a range of thinkers throughout history and up to contemporary times (e.g., Gramsci, Arendt, Habermas, Keane) have emphasized the importance of civil society as a public sphere or arena for contestation, debate, deliberation, negotiation, and collective action. Checking the Power of the State
The role of civil society as a ‘‘watchdog’’ and check on the power of the state is seen as another of its crucial contributions to good governance. Locke’s social compact, binding the state to abide by civil laws, and Enlightenment thinkers’ emphasis on protecting against state violations of individual rights, established an important tradition of civil society as a countervailing force to the state. The role of civil society in mobilizing opposition to authoritarian rule and supporting democratic reforms has been well
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documented (Harbeson et al., 1994; Hall, 1995; Keane, 1998; Escobar & Alvarez, 1992). Civil society has also acted as a monitor and constant watchdog of democratic regimes. Over the past decade, the notion of social accountability has gained importance (Ackerman, 2004; Malena et al., 2004) and a plethora of increasingly effective approaches and tools which with citizens and civil society actors can monitor, oversee, and hold to account the state have evolved. Contributing to or Performing Governance Functions
A final way in which civil society is seen as contributing directly to good governance is by either participating in governance processes (such as public agenda-setting, policy-making, planning, budgeting, and service delivery) or directly taking on certain governance functions (e.g., in the context of self-government or community-driven initiatives or public-private partnerships). In the case of the former, ‘‘participatory governance’’ approaches that allow for the active participation of citizens and civil society actors in governance processes (e.g., participatory planning and budgeting practices) have developed significantly over the past two decades. Here, civil society organizations play a particularly important role in facilitating and mediating relationships between citizens and the state. Civil society organizations and local associations themselves taking responsibility for the delivery of basic services has arisen especially in developing country contexts where governments have been incapable of meeting basic needs. The idea was also promoted by the ‘‘new public management’’ movement of the 1990s, which held that governments should ‘‘steer rather than row’’ and delegate service delivery to private sector or civil society organizations who could perform more efficiently or effectively than public agencies (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992).
Key Issues Key elements of good governance include: transparency, participation, responsiveness, rule of law, effectiveness, equity, and accountability. Civil society, in its various roles as a school of civic virtues, a public space, a government watchdog and an active participant in governance processes contributes to each of these crucial dimensions of good governance. Transparency
Transparency means that information about the process and content of public decision-making is available and accessible to those affected by it. Transparency in public affairs is considered crucial in order to: guard against corruption; ensure that rules and regulations are followed;
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and provide citizens with the information they need to understand, monitor, and evaluate government decisions and actions. Civil society organizations play an important role in educating citizens about their information rights and nurturing demand for public information. They also play a key role in: supporting reforms to make government more transparent (e.g., Transparency International); lobbying for the adoption of freedom of information legislation (e.g., the Right to Information movement in India); advocating for greater public financial transparency (e.g., the Open Budget Initiative and Publish What You Pay campaign); and demystifying and disseminating key public documents (such as laws, budgets, policies, regulations, and fee tables). Participation
Citizen and civil society participation is considered a cornerstone of good governance (Commonwealth Foundation, 1999; Gaventa, 2006). It takes on myriad forms including: participating in elections and referendums; voicing concerns in public consultations, meetings, and forums; lobbying for reforms or action on key issues; contributing to public needs assessment and planning processes; and serving on public boards and oversight committees. Processes of decentralization in many countries around the world aim to promote and facilitate citizen and community participation in governance processes (Cheema et al., 2007; Oxhorn et al., 2004). Over the past two decades, innovations in the areas of participatory policy-making, participatory budgeting and community-based monitoring and evaluation of public services, for example, have broadened and deepened opportunities for civic participation. In many countries, civil society organizations have played a key role in: advocating for freedoms of association, expression, and participation; opening up spaces and opportunities for civic engagement; helping citizen groups to organize and access information; strengthening links between citizens and elected officials; and facilitating citizen-state interactions. Responsiveness
Good governance requires that public authorities are responsive to the priority needs and interests of all members of society. This requires that authorities are: aware of the genuine needs and interests of different societal groups; able to manage processes of deliberation and consensusbuilding on actions that best serve the common good; and willing to act on this basis. Civil society significantly contributes to each of these elements of responsiveness by: helping different societal groups to publicly articulate their needs and viewpoints (e.g., though community organization, participatory needs assessment, community
radio); convening or supporting processes of public deliberation and negotiation (using methods like citizens’ juries and deliberative polling); and monitoring government actions to ensure they respond to identified needs and agreed priorities (using social accountability practices as described below). Rule of Law
Good governance requires the primacy of rule of law, maintained through fair legal frameworks that are impartially enforced. It also requires full protection of human rights, particularly those of minorities and marginalized social groups. While primary responsibility for ensuring rule of law clearly lies with public authorities, civil society actors contribute to this dimension of good governance by: speaking out against breaches of rule of law; drawing public attention to human rights violations and advocating for their redress (e.g., Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International); lobbying for legal reforms; monitoring the effectiveness and impartiality of justice services (Court Watch initiatives); and providing legal and paralegal aid services (especially to underprivileged groups). Effectiveness and Efficiency
Good governance means that public institutions make effective and efficient use of the resources at their disposal. Civil society contributes to effective and efficient public management and service delivery in several important ways. First, an important threat to the effective and efficient use of public resources is corruption. Civil society actions aimed at promoting transparency and fighting government corruption, therefore, contribute directly to effectiveness and efficiency. Secondly, around the world, hundreds of thousands of community-based organizations and other nonprofit groups are directly involved in the delivery of key basic services (such as health, education, water, sanitation). Whether through self-help initiatives or public-private partnerships, experience shows that civil society organizations can frequently meet needs more effectively and efficiently than public service providers, especially when they are involved in decisionmaking as well as service delivery (Krishna, 2003). Finally – through measures such as independent budget analysis, public expenditure tracking, procurement watch programs, citizen report cards and community-based monitoring and evaluation – citizens and civil society groups are playing an increasingly important role in helping to ensure effective allocation of public resources, efficient public procurement and spending; and quality public service delivery.
Good Governance and Civil Society
Equity and Inclusiveness
Equity and inclusiveness is another key dimension of good governance. Social stability and well-being is dependent on ensuring that all members of society have equality of opportunity and do not feel excluded from the mainstream. Systems of governance based on representation tend to be elite-dominated and are not always able to ensure that the interests and concerns of socially marginalized and vulnerable groups receive fair consideration and attention. Despite concerns that such groups also tend to be marginalized and underrepresented within civil society (Chandhoke, 2007), there are many examples of traditionally marginalized groups (such as women, youth, poor people, minorities, people living with disabilities) forming associations to make their voices heard and many examples of ‘‘intermediary’’ civil society organizations supporting their efforts and defending their rights. That said, socioeconomic inequities and exclusion are persistent problems for both governmental and nongovernmental institutions and further effort and action is required across all social spheres to fulfill this principle of good governance. Accountability
Accountability, or the obligation of power-holders to take responsibility for their actions, is a cornerstone of good governance. The limited effectiveness of governments’ own internal mechanisms of accountability has led to increased emphasis on the role of citizens and civil society organizations in holding public authorities to account. A number of these mechanisms of ‘‘social accountability’’ – including independent budget analysis, expenditure tracking, participatory monitoring and evaluation and citizen oversight bodies – have been described above. Other social accountability strategies used by civil society groups include: public revenue tracking; informing/initiating parliament investigations; filing complaints; forging alliances with public ombudsmen or anticorruption agencies; or undertaking public litigation. Effective social accountability also depends on transparency (in order to have access to relevant information and data) and rule of law (in order to ensure enforcement and redress). Principles of social accountability challenge civil society organizations to enhance their own transparency accountability (especially ‘‘downwards’’ accountability to their members and the constituents they serve).
Future Directions The subject of civil society contributions to good governance is timely and dynamic. The current period is marked by both theoretical evolutions and operational innovations. While there is growing consensus that civil
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society is an integral element of the governance equation, this principle has not yet been fully worked through in the conceptualization and implementation of good governance initiatives. For example, the most recent generation of donor-supported ‘‘demand for good governance’’ initiatives still tend to conceive of citizens/civil society groups as ‘‘demanders’’ of good governance, and not as active contributors or ‘‘suppliers’’ of good governance. An important future area of work is to determine under what circumstances and conditions citizen and civil society action and/or ‘‘participation’’ can effectively contribute to good governance (Roy, 2008). What types of empowerment measures, governance systems and mechanisms and, legal and regulatory frameworks are required to enable and facilitate meaningful participation and social accountability? Much innovation and experimentation is currently underway but much work remains to be done in terms of exploring how such approaches can be scaled-up and systematized, how to ensure that they reinforce and complement existing governance institutions; and what types of legal and/or institutional reforms are necessary. As has been discussed, civil society contributes to good governance in a variety of ways. Ideas about the different roles of civil society are sometimes understood as competing with one another and, in practice, there has frequently been a disconnect between service-oriented organizations and those involved in social mobilization, advocacy, or research. An important future challenge for civil society theorists and practitioners is to explore the underlying commonalities and complementarities of divergent civil society roles and to find ways to ensure that the sum of civil society is greater than its parts. At the theoretical, strategic, and practical levels, there is a need to build linkages across different agendas, interests, and approaches. With regard to good governance, it is particularly important to strategically chart and strengthen relationships between grassroots constituencies, service deliverers, advocacy-oriented groups, think tanks and media – seeking to formulate ways in which joint action, either in collaboration with or independently from state institutions, can best advance the good governance agenda and citizen well-being.
Cross-References
▶ Accountability ▶ Civic Culture ▶ Civic Participation ▶ Civil Society and Democracy ▶ Civility ▶ Effectiveness and Efficiency
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▶ Governance, Organizational ▶ Participation ▶ Public Sphere ▶ Theories of the Nonprofit Sector, Political ▶ Transparency ▶ World Bank
References/Further Readings Ackerman, J. (2004). Accountability and society. Washington, DC: World Bank. Agnew, J. (2002). Democracy and human rights. In R. J. Johnston, P. J. Taylor, & M. J. Watts (Eds.), Geographies of global change. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Almond, G., & Verba, S. (1989). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. London: Sage. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. AusAID. (2000). Good governance: Guiding principles for implementation. Canberra: AusAID. Chandhoke, N. (2007). Civil Society. Development in Practice: An Oxfam Journal, 17(4–5), 607–614. Cheema, G. S., & Rondinelli, D. A. (Eds.) (2007). Decentralising governance: Emerging concepts and practices. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press. Cohen, J. L., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil Society and political theory. Cambridge: MIT. Commonwealth Foundation. (1999). Citizens and governance: Civil society in the new millennium. London: Commonwealth Foundation. Edwards, M. (2004). Civil Society. Cambridge: Polity. Escobar, A., & Alvarez, S. (Eds.) (1992). The making of social movements in latin America: Identity, strategy and democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gaventa, J. (2006). Triumph, deficit or contestation: Deepening the ‘‘Deepening Democracy’’ debate (IDS Working Paper 264). Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Habermas. J. (1992). Further reflections on the public sphere. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hall, J. A. (1995). Civil Society: Theory, history, comparison. Cambridge: Polity. Harbeson, J. W., Rothschild, D., & Chazan, N. (Eds.) (1994). Civil society and the state in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Hyden, G., Court, J., & Mease, K. (2004). Making sense of governance: Empirical evidence from 16 developing countries. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner. Keane, J. (1998). Civil society: Old images, new visions. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Krishna, A. (2003). Partnerships between local governments and community-based organizations: Exploring the scope for synergy. Public Administration and Development, 23, 361–371. Locke, J. (1689). Two treatises of government. Thomas Hollis. (Ed.) London: A. Millar et al., 1764. Malena, C., Forster, R., & Singh, J. (2004). Social accountability: An introduction to the concept and emerging practice. Washington, DC: World Bank. Osborne, D., & Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing government. Boston: Addison-Wesley. Oxhorn, P., Tulchin, J. S., & Selee, A. D. (Eds.) (2004). Decentralization, democratic governance, and civil society in comparative perspective:
Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Putnam, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Roy, I. (2008). Civil society and good governance: (Re-) conceptualizing the interface. World Development, 36(4). Stoker, G. (1998). Public-private partnerships and urban governance. In P. J. Basingstoke (Ed.), Partnerships in urban governance: European and American experience (pp. 34–51). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Tandon, R., & Mohanty, R. (2002). Civil society and governance. New Delhi: Samskriti. Tocqueville, A. de. (1900). Democracy in America (H. Keene, Trans.). New York: The Colonial Press. United Nations Development Program. (1997). Governance for sustainable human development. A UNDP policy paper. World Bank. (1992). Governance and development. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. (1994). Governance: The World Bank’s experience. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Goods and Services, Types of BRAM VERSCHUERE University College Ghent and Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Introduction In the literature, conceptually one can distinguish between different types or kinds of goods and services. Anheier (2005: 117) makes the distinction between public (or collective) goods, quasi-public goods, and private goods. A certain good or service can be attributed to one of these types based on the criteria of ‘‘excludability’’ (preventing people to make use of that good or service) and ‘‘rivalry’’ (individual use reduces the amount of that good available for other consumers). Moreover, goods or services can be preferred or non-preferred (Anheier, 2005: 205; Weisbrod, 1998: 49). Whether a good or service is preferred or not will depend on the relationship of that good to the mission of the organization that produces or delivers the good. As is the case with most organizations, nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are also so-called multiproduct firms that deliver and produce different (types of) goods and services at the same time. According to Weisbrod (1998), NPOs typically can produce three types of goods: preferred public goods, preferred private goods, and non-preferred private goods. In the following sections, different types of goods and services are defined, and some key issues are discussed.
Goods and Services, Types of
Definition A pure public good is a good to which no property rights can be established and which is available to all, irrespective of contribution (taxpayers and non-taxpayers). A public good is therefore ‘‘collective’’ and freely accessible to all. An essential characteristic is that the use of a public good or service is non-excludable. It is very expensive to try to exclude non-taxpayers from using or enjoying that good (e.g., public parks, public safety, public art). A second characteristic of the public good is that it is nonrival. One individual’s use of that good does not diminish the chances for other individuals to enjoy the use of it. Anheier (2005: 117) gives the example of a concert: the presence of other people in the audience does not (under normal circumstances) prevent a person’s enjoyment of the music. On the other hand, a pure private good is characterized by both excludability and rivalry. A very simple example is food that is purchased in the supermarket. This is a private good, as it is excludable (only available to those people willing to pay the price) and rival (the box of chocolates I buy cannot be bought by anyone else). Of course, the concepts of excludability and rivalry are often a matter of degree. Some goods may be partly rival or excludable. In this case, one can talk about a quasipublic good. Quasi-public goods that are non-excludable and rival are ‘‘common pool goods.’’ Although such goods are characterized by rivalry, exclusion is only possible at a certain price. Anheier (2005: 118) gives the example of fish in the village pond, which are rival (one fish can only be caught and consumed once), but exclusion is only an issue in the case of overfishing (by issuing a limited number of fishing permits, e.g.). Quasi-public goods that are non-rival but excludable are ‘‘toll goods’’ or ‘‘club goods.’’ People not willing to pay can be excluded from consuming that good, but essentially the good does not exemplify rivalry. Typical examples of toll goods are museums, sport clubs with an admission fee (member fee), or toll roads (e.g., highways in France). As already indicated in the introduction, goods and services may be preferred or non-preferred. Preferred goods are those goods that are related to the mission or the purpose of (the management) of the organization. The basic assumption is that managers in nonprofit organizations have preferences regarding the products to be delivered by the organization (contrary to the profit sector where the product mix is determined by the profit-maximization motive; Toepler, 2004). For example, the preferred product of an NPO in development aid is related to its mission of helping the poor in the third world: building schools, for instance. Non-preferred goods are not related to the organizational mission. An example is the restaurant
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in a hospital or a museum. Non-preferred goods and services are provided in most cases to gain extra revenue for the NPO. In that case, one can often speak of cross-subsidization (using the resources obtained by selling the non-preferred good for supporting the production of preferred goods).
Key Issues Types of Goods and Services Delivered by the NPO
According to economic theory, markets best provide private goods, while the state best delivers collective or public goods (Anheier, 2005: 118). The justification for this task division lies in the fact that the state has the power to raise taxes, thereby counteracting free-rider problems that might occur when public goods are supplied via private markets (some people taking advantage of the service without paying for it). Next to that, market supply of pure private goods is more efficient (handling individual consumer preferences) and avoids high transaction costs that would occur if the state provides goods that are rival and excludable (regulation, control, etc.). In the case of NPOs, one could argue that these organizations are suited to deliver quasi-public goods or services. NPOs can, for example, deliberately choose to provide some services to certain target-groups, thereby (implicitly) excluding other groups from the service delivery (e.g., care for elderly people). Although such goods are more or less excludable, they are not rival for those people receiving the services (e.g., care for one person in the elderly care facility does not prevent other residents from receiving the same services). According to Weisbrod (1998: 49) the product-mix of NPOs may contain preferred collective goods, preferred private goods, and non-preferred private goods. A preferred collective good is the organization’s true output which is closely related to its mission. This good is difficult to sell in private markets because of free-rider problems and difficulties in setting the correct market price. Typical examples are treating environmental pollution, research, or helping the poor. A preferred private good is also missionrelated, but can be sold on the market. NPOs, however, wish to make this good or service accessible to some consumers independent of their ability to pay (e.g., health care, education, arts, and culture). Non-preferred private goods are less related to the mission of the organization, and are produced by the NPO to acquire revenue for the production of the NPO’s preferred goods (cf. supra). Failure in Delivering Goods and Services
Following the previous paragraph, one can argue that markets, governments, and NPOs are suited to provide
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certain types of goods and services, and that they are less suited to deliver other types of goods and services. This is referred to as respectively market failure, government failure, and voluntary failure (Steinberg, 2006; Anheier, 2005). Markets ‘‘fail’’ when the private market cannot efficiently allocate or provide the good or the service in case. This occurs when there is a lack of competition (monopolies, e.g.), when effects for third parties outside the transaction parties exist (‘‘externalities,’’ e.g., the pollution by the car that is sold on the market affects the whole society), or when there are informational asymmetries between the transaction parties (e.g., very specific or technical goods for which quality assessment by the client is very difficult). In all of these cases, the correct price for producing or buying the good is difficult to determine. The trust-theory (Nelson & Krashinsky, 1973; Hansmann, 1987) explains the presence of NPO service provision as a response to market failure. Lack of information on the side of the client about the quality of the good or service provided makes clients go purchasing these services in organizations they can trust. NPOs are especially trustworthy, as the nondistribution constraint (preventing NPOs from distributing eventual profits to owners) may be a strong signal for clients that service quality will not be reduced in favor of the organizational (monetary) profits. Government failure occurs when a problem cannot be addressed adequately by the state or the public sector. The most important source of government failure lies in the fact that some citizens will be dissatisfied by the level, amount, quality, or style of the collective good or service provided by the public sector. Because opinions in society about the amount and quality of public goods provision are so divergent, it is technically impossible for the state apparatus to adapt to this heterogeneous demand. This observation inspired Weisbrod (1977) to develop his public goods theory, in which the existence of NPO service provision is explained by unsatisfied demand for collective service delivery by the government. Voluntary failure refers to situations in which the voluntary or nonprofit sector cannot provide a service or address a social problem at the necessary scale. NPOs may be unable to marshal the resources needed over prolonged periods of time, as they rely on contributions and subsidies that in the end may be insufficient for the task at hand. Other possible sources of voluntary failure include the tendency of NPOs to focus on particular subgroups while ignoring others (philanthropic particularism), potential lack of accountability to wider social needs because of a stress on issues that are close to donor’s interests (philanthropic paternalism), and philanthropic amateurism or the lack of professionalism in organizations with scarce resources and a lot of volunteers (Anheier, 2005: 130).
Beyond the Ideal-Typical Classification of Goods and Services
Although the previous paragraphs might suggest that it is relatively easy to attribute a certain task (product, good, or service) to a certain type of organization, reality is often more complex. Quasi-public goods such as health care and social services can be offered (and are in reality offered) by markets (private clinics), NPOs (nonprofit clinics) and governments (e.g., city hospitals). Hence, as Anheier (2005: 120) correctly states, ‘‘the dividing line between quasi-public and private goods is ultimately political,’’ and thus prone to different interpretations in differing conditions and contexts. Education, for example, can be considered as a private good, as a quasi-public good, or as a public good. Depending on the consideration made, the institutional choice for providing that good or service will be made. If education is considered as a public good – assuming that it leads to positive effects for the society as a whole – one might go for policies that make entrance to education universal and fund the educational system through taxation. However, if education is considered as a private good – assuming that the benefits are mainly for the individual receiving the education – one might go for policies that favor private institutions financed by tuition fees (Anheier, 2005: 120).
Future Directions Besides the classical types of goods and services that have been discussed above, one interesting view for looking at the voluntary and NPO sectors is the concept of ‘‘relational goods.’’ An essential characteristic of a relational good is that it is the quality of the relationship between people that to a large extent determines the value of the good. As Ben-Ner and Gui (2003: 14) state: ‘‘[W]hat matters to a person with demand for a relational good is not only the objective behavior of others, but also their attitude, and even their perceived motivations.’’ Future work into the (assumed) comparative advantage of NPOs in delivering such goods might be an important research challenge. One could argue that NPOs are particularly well placed to satisfy the demand for such sustainable and high-quality relationships between service-provider and service-receiver. Especially in social care and education, services are characterized by the fact that people have an opinion about the service. Clients expect more than care or education, and they are also concerned about how the services are delivered to them. Some even go further and suggest that stressing the normative and relational qualities of NPOs – the ‘‘peculiar’’ relationship between NPO and client that is based on trust (see Hansmann, 1980), qualitative service delivery, and good relationships – might be part of voluntary and third sector strategies in order to
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increase their legitimacy (Van de Donk, 2008). In other words, the nondistribution constraint alone may not be a sufficient basis for trusting NPOs. Trust can be stronger in the case when participants to the transaction (service provider and receiver) have aligned motivations from which high-quality relationships may stem (Kendall et al., 2006: 425).
Cross-References
▶ Nonprofit Organization ▶ Public Benefit and Public Good ▶ Theories of Nonprofit Organization, Economic ▶ Weisbrod, Burton A.
References/Further Readings Anheier, H. (2005). Nonprofit organizations. Theory, management, policy. London/New York: Routledge. Anheier, H., & Ben-Ner, A. (2003). The study of the nonprofit entreprise. Theories and approaches. New York: Kluwer. Ben-Ner, A., & Gui, B. (2003). The theory of nonprofit organizations revisited. In A. Ben-Ner & H. Anheier (Eds.), The study of nonprofit enterprise: Theories and approaches (pp. 3–26). New York: Kluwer. Hansmann, H. (1980). The role of nonprofit enterprises. Yale Law Journal, 89(5), 835–898. Hansmann, H. (1987). Economic theories of nonprofit organizations. In W. Powell (Ed.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kendall, J., Knapp, M., & Forder, J. (2006). Social care and the nonprofit sector in the developed Western world. In W. Powell & R. Steinberg (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed., pp. 415–431). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nelson, R., & Krashinsky, M. (1973). Public control and organization of day care for young children. Public Policy, 22(1), 53–75. Steinberg, R. (2006). Economic theories of nonprofit organizations. In W. Powell & R. Steinberg (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed., pp. 117–139). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Toepler, S. (2004). Conceptualizing nonprofit commercialism: A case study. Public Administration & Management: An Interactive Journal, 9(4), 1–19. Van de Donk, W. (2008). Maatschappelijk Besturen: Sector of Idee? Cahierreeks School voor Social Profit Management, Gent, Nr. 1. Weisbrod, B. (1977). The voluntary nonprofit sector. Lexington: DC Heat. Weisbrod, B. (1998). Modeling the nonprofit organization as a multiproduct firm: A framework for choice. In B. Weisbrod (Ed.), To profit or not to profit: The commercial transformation of the nonprofit sector (pp. 47–64). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Governance, Organizational SARABAJAYA KUMAR1, JONATHAN ROBERTS2 1 University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 2 London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
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Introduction It is only in recent decades that organizational governance has been the subject of sustained academic interest. While the bulk of such interest has been applied to corporate governance in commercial firms, research and commentary have also increasingly begun to engage with governance within civil society organizations. Not only has this field emerged as a progression from studies in corporate governance, but it also has roots in studies of the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations, in discourses on power and control from disability and other social movements, in public scandals relating to nonprofit bodies, and in current emphasis on ethical standards in public life. Organizational governance is concerned with power and control within organizations. As such it can be conceived as a technical concern, an attempt to control an organization to achieve maximum effectiveness. Alternatively, and especially within civil society organizations, the process of governance can itself be value-laden and significant, invoking debates about power and empowerment, equity, and democracy. This separation between functional and substantive approaches roughly corresponds to distinct nonprofit and social economy approaches to organizational governance. Organizational governance is a fluid and dynamic field. Civil society organizations, as they increasingly interact with state and market, come into contact with external governance systems which may constrain or affect internal organizational governance. Moreover, the growing political legitimacy of hybrid organizations such as social enterprises implies fascinating new challenges in this field.
Definition The term ‘‘governance’’ derives from the Ancient Greek verb kυbernάo, meaning ‘‘to steer.’’ Drawing on the origins of the term, Anheier (2004) describes organizational governance as a steering function. Cornforth (2003: 17), perhaps more strongly, describes organizational governance as ‘‘systems by which organizations are directed, controlled and accountable.’’ For Tricker (2000), governance is the exercise of power. From these perspectives it is clear that governance is closely linked to the concepts of control, accountability, and power. More detailed understandings of organizational governance are contingent on commentators’ theoretical approaches. From a rational actor perspective, governance is an instrumental response to the problem of coordination of self-interested actors within an organization (for an example of this view see Foss and Klein, 2007). Other approaches emphasize notions of ethical stewardship, especially in organizations that have some kind of moral or value-expressive dimension. Governance can be
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perceived to extend beyond simply the structure of control, so that governance becomes both the facilitator and the symbol of an organization’s philosophy. From a sociological perspective, governance can embrace issues of power and control as they relate to class, gender, ethnicity, and disability. Boundaries of Governance
A distinction is generally made between governance and management. Governance is conceived as a higher-level strategic process of direction; management, undertaken by staff, enacts this direction on a daily basis. Such a clear distinction is an ideal-type: in real-world settings, and particularly in small civil society organizations, the boundaries between governance and management are likely to be fluid and ambiguous. Organizational governance is often regarded narrowly as the activity of the governing board of an organization, or as the formal procedures for organizational decision making: this is indeed the focus of much literature on organizational governance in civil society. Such an approach may ignore informal structures of decision making. Further, as Kumar and Nunan (2002) describe, governance can be perceived by actors not only as a structure, but also as a philosophy, a list of functions, an individual role, and a set of legal responsibilities. It should be noted that, from the perspective of transaction costs economics, market-based contracts with external suppliers (for instance, an outsourced payroll function) can also be perceived as a system of governance, since they are a means by which an organization exercises control. This perspective of governance may become more relevant as civil society organizations increasingly outsource administrative and other functions.
Historical Background Sustained interest in organizational governance in the corporate, public, and civil society spheres is a relatively new phenomenon. Yet of course what is now called ‘‘organizational governance’’ has a much longer history. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, noted challenges of governance: ‘‘[T]he directors of companies, being managers of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which partners in a private copartnery watch over their own’’ (Smith, 1776/1852: 311). Tricker (2000) identifies the origin of corporate governance as the moment, at least 1,000 years ago, when the ownership of an enterprise became separated from its management. But it is not implausible to suggest that issues of organizational governance stretch back even further in civil society.
Tricker (2000) provides a brief overview of the emergence of contemporary interest in governance within corporate organizations. Catalysts for this interest, in the late 1980s and 1990s, included awareness of a growing separation between shareholders and managers in large corporate firms and unease at increasing evidence of corporate corruption, such as in the Polly Peck, BCCI, and Maxwell cases, in which weak governance appeared to be a key factor. In Anglo-Saxon countries a number of significant reports on corporate governance were published, including in 1992 the Cadbury Report in the United Kingdom. There has been renewed interest and disquiet in the first decade of the twenty-first century following the Enron and WorldCom scandals, which threw into sharp relief the problems of control in complex modern firms. Policy interest in organizational governance within civil society organizations took shape in the 1990s, especially in the United Kingdom. Initial interest can be traced to Woodfield’s ‘‘Efficiency scrutiny of the supervision of charities’’ in 1987; growing momentum can be discerned through the subsequent decade within the 1992 and 1993 Charities Acts, within the ‘‘On Trust’’ report produced by a civil society umbrella group in partnership with the charity regulator (NCVO, 1992), and finally within guidance commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Ashby, 1997). The influential Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector also considered organizational governance in some depth (NCVO, 1996). Such policy interest has been accompanied by a significant growth in academic literature, particularly within North America and the United Kingdom. Such interest can be attributed to the convergence of multiple dynamics. First, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, civil society organizations suffered their own governance scandals. High-profile examples include the United Way, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and the Nature Conservancy. Second, there was generalized concern about standards of behavior in public life, which, in the United Kingdom, culminated in the establishment of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, originally chaired by Lord Nolan. The Nolan Committee established ‘‘seven principles of public life’’: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership (Committee on Standards in Public Life, 1995). The codes of practice which the Nolan Committee produced were subsequently recommended by the Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector. Third, as Cornforth (2003) describes, the growing involvement of civil society organizations in state contracting drew attention to organizations’ use of
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and accountability for public funds. Fourth, social movements within civil society (feminism, the disability movement, community development groups) offered a critique of the paternalist governance of traditional nonprofits and charities. Finally, growing focus on sociopolitical notions of ‘‘good governance’’ gained prominence in the international development field. Bilateral and multilateral development organizations, as Turner and Hulme (1997) note, sought, as a prerequisite for development, fundamental changes in political and administrative structures from recipient countries. Moreover, as its conditions for development assistance, the World Bank emphasized the need for improved public sector management, accountability, legal frameworks, and information and transparency. Such requirements inevitably placed focus on the organizational governance of civil society organizations themselves.
Key Issues This section examines the following: theoretical bases which underpin academic approaches toward organizational governance; governance challenges faced by civil society organizations; governance functions and structures; and different perspectives on organizational governance, including nonprofit approaches and social economy and social movement approaches. Finally, there is consideration of the relationship between governance and the external environment.
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have the requisite expertise to maximize performance. An alternative refinement of principal–agent theory is offered by stakeholder approaches, which expand the range of actors who might be awarded some measure of control. These approaches predominantly present organizational governance as an intraorganizational phenomenon. Pfeffer (1973), however, argues that a primary function of the governing board is linkage between the organization and the external environment to support the acquisition of essential resources. For Abzug and Galaskiewicz (2001) the governing body fulfills a symbolic function which supports the acquisition of legitimacy among key external actors. Finally, Cornforth (2003) describes the democratic approach to governance which is characteristic of cooperatives, mutual organizations, and other membership associations. Typical features are one vote per member (irrespective of the number of shares held) and a lay professional board which is able to represent member interests. Each of these theoretical approaches offers a particular insight and describes a particular problem to which organizational governance must respond. But there are obvious tensions between them. As a remedy Cornforth (2003) advocates a paradox perspective approach, which focuses explicitly on the ambiguities and challenges of governance of civil society organizations.
Theoretical Bases
Challenges of Organizational Governance in Civil Society Organizations
Theoretical approaches to governance in commercial organizations – particularly from Anglo-Saxon perspectives – are dominated by consideration of the principal–agent problem identified by Adam Smith. The dilemma is simple – how can owners of organizations (those who have property rights) control self-interested managers, so that they act in owners’ interests? The theory rests on an assumption about human nature – that managers or agents will exploit any informational or other advantage in their own interests. Responses to agency problems – such as stringent monitoring – can be costly. Principal–agent approaches, however, have been variously criticized. Stewardship theory, as set out by Muth and Donaldson (1998), presents a contrasting conception of human nature as trustworthy: a more complex set of managerial motivations are presented, such as duty, identification with the organization, or intrinsic satisfaction in achievement. According to this perspective, control of the organization is optimally placed with managers, who
Long-standing Anglo-Saxon approaches reduce discussion of corporate governance in firms to simple principal– agent problems based on equally simple definitions of the principals (owners with property rights) and organizational effectiveness (maximized return on capital investment). Governance within civil society organizations is, arguably, more complex and more challenging. First, the right to control is contestable. Who should have decision-making power? This tension is played out, for instance, within the contrasting approaches of traditional philanthropic organizations, characterized by elite or expert control through an appointed board of trustees, and empowerment perspectives from the disability and other social movements, which emphasize the importance of user/client control. Second, organizational effectiveness is also often contestable, and the goods produced unmeasurable. Therefore judgments about the effectiveness of governance are complicated. Third, internal governance within commercial firms is augmented by the external governance of the
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market, through competition or takeover which (in principle) reduces inefficiency: the absence of such structures places more emphasis on the internal governance of civil society organizations. Finally, civil society organizations can be still more vulnerable than commercial firms to principal–agent dilemmas – indeed, according to economic theories, civil society organizations exist precisely as a response to agency problems caused by third-party purchasing, the giving of charitable gifts, or the production of unmeasurable social goods. Furthermore, civil society is populated by a diverse range of organizations. Numerous authors emphasize that governance structures must be differentiated accordingly – there can be no ‘‘one size fits all’’ approach. Relevant organizational variables include organizational form (for instance, voluntary and nonprofit organizations, foundations, cooperatives, community associations, federations, and faith-based groups), size, income sources, stage in life cycle, field, and external environment. Both organizational form and governance structure may reflect some commitment to wider values or philosophies – whether charitable paternalism, empowerment, solidarity, democracy, or religion. Functions and Structures of Governance Functions of Governance
In consequence it is unsurprising that organizational governance in civil society can have multiple overarching functions. Some of these – for instance, ensuring managerial compliance or supporting organizational performance – parallel functions in commercial firms; others are more idiosyncratic to civil society organizations. Key overarching functions include: ● Interpretation of mission ● Representation of multiple stakeholder interests ● Ensuring fit between mission and organizational activities ● Ensuring accountability – in principal–agent terms, overseeing managerial compliance ● Monitoring organizational performance ● Overseeing financial management and legal responsibilities ● Links to the external environment: acquisition of resources and legitimacy. More specific discussions of organizational governance functions are presented by Kumar and Nunan (2002) and Ostrower and Stone (2006).
Structures of Governance
Much academic research has focused on the role of the trustee board. Such an approach is understandable, since responsibility for governance resides formally with the board. Other structures of organizational governance, however, should not be neglected – for instance, the governing instrument of an organization, voting rights in membership organizations, consultative committees of various kinds (expert advisory groups, user councils, regional committees), or more informal consultative procedures which involve users. Organizational structures, indeed, reflect wider organizational philosophies. Cooperatives and other democratic member organizations are characterized by participative structures in which each member, at least in principle, has an equal voice. Other nonprofit forms may have more hierarchical structures. Perspectives on Organizational Governance
Two distinctive approaches to corporate governance within the commercial sector can be identified. From an Anglo-Saxon perspective, governance has remained fundamentally a principal–agent difficulty between owners and managers. European perspectives have alternatively given more prominence to stakeholder approaches, in which workers are allocated some degree of representation or control within governance structures. Within commentaries on civil society organizations, it is plausible to propose a similar divide. A significant volume of research, particularly in North America, has focused on issues of managerial compliance and organizational effectiveness in nonprofit organizations. Commentaries from social economy perspectives and also within the discourses of new social movements focus, by contrast, on democracy and empowerment. Nonprofit Approaches
Academic exploration of the governance of nonprofit organizations, generally in North America, has often focused on the function and behavior of boards (for an insightful overview of the organizational governance literature see Ostrower and Stone, 2006). There are useful insights into the tensions and dilemmas that exist in the relationship between boards and management. Much commentary, however, has been normative and prescriptive. Ostrower and Stone (2006: 617) identify two overarching models – the ‘‘harmonious partnership’’ and the ‘‘hierarchical authority’’ relationship. These models have obvious resonances with stewardship theory and principal–agent theory respectively. Both are problematic. A partnership may be especially necessary where board members are lay
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people and lack appropriate expertise. But, as Cornforth (2003: 10) warns, such an approach risks ‘‘managerial hegemony’’ – a principal–agent dilemma in which boards uncritically approve managerial decisions. On the other hand, excessive emphases on managerial compliance may restrict organizational performance by depriving boards of expertise and information. As Ostrower and Stone (2006) describe, research increasingly suggests that the real-world dynamics of governance are more complex and nuanced. The nature of the relationship between board and managers, for instance, can be contingent on individual, organizational, and environmental factors. Power may shift over time between boards and staff. Effective authority may lie with both voluntary board members and professionals simultaneously. It may be too, as Heimovics et al. (1995) propose, that, in a complex technological and legal environment, it is the role of a chief executive officer to guide boards so that they understand and fulfill their responsibilities. A body of research has also sought to trace relationships between effective governance and effective organizations. Some findings suggest a relationship between organizational effectiveness and proactive board involvement in strategic planning and policy formation. There is also some suggestion that board composition – for instance, the diversity of occupations represented on the board – may improve aspects of organizational performance. However, as Ostrower and Stone (2006) argue in their overview of research, such inquiries can be fraught with difficulties. Organizational effectiveness is itself a disputed concept. The direction of causality, moreover, is often unclear: does effective governance create an effective organization, or vice versa? They identify the need for future longitudinal research to establish causality and in-depth case studies to explore contextual variables. Social Economy and New Social Movement Perspectives
The emphasis within nonprofit approaches is typically on the contribution of organizational governance to effective technical performance; a hierarchical and, perhaps, bureaucratic organization is assumed. In contrast, social economy and new social movement approaches conceptualize the process of governance to be as important as the technical aim to which it contributes. Such approaches draw on democratic theory and critiques of power to justify governance processes which might appear, from an instrumental viewpoint, to be inefficient or ineffective. Thus Rothschild-Whitt (1979) describes the democratic decision making of collectivist organizations which is seen
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to contain inherent egalitarian and ethical value. Locke et al. (2003) describe how user control of governance in disability organizations is seen to have similar inherent value, in this case through empowering users and challenging the very notion of ‘‘disability.’’ Furthermore, social economy approaches – such as those described by Borzaga and Defourny (2001) in their edited collection – argue that valuable public benefits accrue from participative and democratic governance structures. Such benefits include social capital, collective citizen action, strengthening of the democratic process, and equity. The External Environment
There is growing interest in the interaction between the external environment and organizational governance. The environment in which civil society organizations operate is itself increasingly described as an arena of multiple systems of governance to which civil society organizations may be exposed. External governance systems may potentially constrain the autonomy of internal organizational systems, or imply particular demands to which organizational governance must respond. There is, for instance, particular academic interest in the impact upon civil society organizations’ internal governance of government contracting, which can be conceptualized as both market governance, in the form of competitive welfare markets, and top-down state governance, in the form of targets, monitoring, and audit. Other external governance regimes of relevance include specific nonprofit regulation (IRS, nonprofit, or charity law), network governance and professional governance (for instance, medical codes). In addition civil society organizations, as part of political initiatives to devolve decision making, may face increasing demands to participate in public governance systems – for instance, in commissioning welfare services. This may in turn place focus on the effectiveness and representative legitimacy of organizational governance structures.
International Perspectives It has been noted in the previous section that there is, broadly, a divergence between Anglo-Saxon approaches to organizational governance, which tend to focus on principal–agent conflicts and organizational effectiveness, and the perspectives of European social economy, in which there is focus on stakeholder involvement, empowerment, and the intrinsic value of the process of governance. Governance within civil society organizations in developing countries presents particular challenges. The
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issues of power, control, and accountability are brought into stark relief within relationships between INGOs and local communities. Moreover, as discussed above, the internal governance of civil society organizations in developing countries must function within a demanding and fluid external governance environment.
Future Directions Research into organizational governance in civil society organizations remains a young field. Numerous gaps in the research literature can be identified. Ostrower and Stone (2006), for instance, suggest the need for more research into governance in small or grassroots organizations, and also for longitudinal studies, both to examine dynamics of board composition and to establish causality between governance and organizational effectiveness. Studies will also need to expand governance beyond a narrow focus on the board and on organizational effectiveness in order to engage more readily with the idea that the process of governance can have in
