Abstract
What is the nature of the political agency of civil society organizations? As the research community concerned with civil society is a multidisciplinary and diverse one, it is not surprising that there is a lack of a common understanding of the concept of civil society, as well as of a common theoretical framework that would allow us to understand the place and role of civil society organisations in wider society. In mainstream political science, in particular, this situation has led to an analytical confusion, where the concept of civil society is infused with all kinds of normative meanings, while at the same time being altogether rejected as irrelevant by those scholars who are put off by that very normativity. So how can we understand the relationship between civil society and norms, values and ideas, and what does this relationship tell us about the role of this sphere in the society as such? In this conceptual chapter, we explore what we see as a useful way of understanding the political agency of civil society organizations. Inspired by the new institutionalism in organization theory, we suggest that such understanding needs to take into account the institutional logic of civil society, and to recognize this sphere as the institutional habitat of those actors who provide politics with normative and ideational content.
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Notes
- 1.
In this context, the problem is that many terms used to denote different kinds of CSOs in different academic disciplines and subdisciplines actually describe the same or related types of organizations (cf. the ambiguous term “NGO” and the difference between it and “third-sector organization”), further adding to the analytical confusion in the field.
- 2.
It is important to stress here that these spheres are ideal types, and that the analytical four-sphere model that we use is just that: an analytical and theoretical model, rather than an empirical description of reality.
- 3.
For example, the particular family of social movements that have struggled against racial and ethnic exclusion from the political realm and from society in general in different parts of the world, e.g., the American civil rights movement in the 1960s or the movement against apartheid in South Africa.
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Reuter, M., Wijkström, F., Meyer, M. (2014). Who Calls the Shots? The Real Normative Power of Civil Society. In: Freise, M., Hallmann, T. (eds) Modernizing Democracy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0485-3_6
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