ISTR Fifth International Conference Cape Town, South Africa / July 7-10, 2002 Transforming Civil Society, Citizenship and Governance: The Third Sector in an Era of Global (Dis)Order

Nicholas Acheson email

This poster display reports on recent research designed to explore the impact of social movements on more traditional voluntary agencies in an area of human need where the latter have a particularly important role in many jurisdictions. The question conc erns the dividing line between forms of voluntary action that are subversive of standard explanations of social need and other forms of voluntary action whose very existence depends on sustaining traditional views.

The research draws on views of civil society that see it as a locus of contesting interpretations of social reality. The analysis rests on a view that focuses on the role of social movements as generators of renewal within civil society (Cohen and Arato, 1994). It will draw on a tradition in social movement theory that emphasises the role of such movements in producing change through reframing the ways in which social issues are understood and spoken about (Touraine, 1981; Melucci, 1989,1994; Snow and B enford, 1992).

The question has particular resonance in the disability field where there has been a remarkable surge in self-organisation among disabled people as part of a social movement that defined the problem as one of discrimination and human rights, rather than w elfare. In many developed economies, welfare agencies, included those in the voluntary sector have been attacked by movement activists as perpetuating discrimination and dependency.

The evidence of this detailed study of a sample of voluntary agencies specialising in disability in the developed mixed economy welfare state in Northern Ireland, shows how these organisations' values tend to draw on concepts derived from the disability movement, while at the same time they are heavily structured by the view that disability is primarily a problem of care.

The poster presentation suggests that this apparent dissonance derives from the way voluntary agencies are structured into the welfare state of the local jurisdictions (Salamon and Anheier, 1998). The welfare state is in turn embedded in political struc tures that favour certain kinds of social explanation over others. In consequence, welfare agencies tend to embody and reinforce these dominant discourses, whether they be voluntary, statutory or private. While motivation and the claim to moral authorit y may be influenced by discourse realignment, organisational imperatives will keep most welfare voluntaries in line. One result is that nonprofit agencies embedded in an important welfare industry like disability services have an ambivalent position in tr ansformative processes in civil society. They are both amplifiers of change and sources of stability. Discourses that refer to the reasons for an organisation's existence and their continuing value will show how tricky it can be to walk this tightrope.

Back to Cape Town Conference Abstracts.