CIVIL SOCIETY & the ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIETY

1. CIVIL SOCIETY & the ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIETY At the macro-global level of analysis, daily social, political, and economic activities are probably more structured by organizations than in any prior historical period. A vast web of public, private and nonprofit orgs weave together local communities, nation-states, and transnational entities. A major scholarly task is to explain the growth, forms, and consequences of these systems for individuals and societies. Some useful perspectives for analyzing macro-level organizational systems include the organizational society, policy domain, and civil society “theories.”

2. The Organizational Society Among org’l sociologists, Charles Perrow was a persistent critic of large corporations’ negative impacts on societal life. “... The appearance of large organizations in the United States makes [them] the key phenomenon of our time, and thus politics, social class, economics, technology, religion, the family, and even social psychology take on the character of dependent variables.” (1991) Org theorists, especially in business schools, over-emphasize internal org practices & market efficiencies, neglect adverse effects. He saw two likely sources for revitalizing organizational theory: “I would expect any invigoration of OT to come from … an agency-aware neoinstitutional theory … and economic sociology, including network analysis. … [B]eing concerned with the economy as a whole, [economic sociology] would have to deal with the social impact of organizations.” (2000:475)

3. Policy Domains • Policy network analysts seek to explain the formation of state-interest organization networks, their persistence & change over time, and the consequences of network structures for public policy-making outcomes. • Developers include British (Rhodes, Marsh), German (Pappi, Schneider, Mayntz), American (Laumann, Knoke) political scientists & sociologists. POLICY DOMAIN:“a set of interest group organizations, legislative institutions, and governmental executive agencies that engage in setting agendas, formulating policies, gaining access, advocating positions, organizing collective influence actions, and selecting among proposals to solve delimited substantive policy problems, such as national defense, education, agriculture, or welfare.” (Laumann and Knoke. 1987. The Organizational State) “A policy network is described by its actors, their linkages and its boundary. It includes a relatively stable set of mainly public and private corporate actors. The linkages between the actors serve as channels for communication and for the exchange of information, expertise, trust and other policy resources. The boundary of a given policy network is not in the first place determined by formal institutions but results from a process of mutual recognition dependent on functional relevance and structural embeddedness.”(Kenis and Schneider 1991)

4. The Organizational State The Organizational State (Laumann & Knoke 1987) conceptualized national policy domain’s power structures as multiplex networks among formal organizations, not elite persons. These connections enable opposing coalitions to mobilize political resources in collective fights for influence over specific public policy decisions. Power structure is revealed in patterns of multiplex networks of information, resource, reputational, and political support among organizations with partially overlapping and opposing policy interests. Action setis a subset of policy domain orgs that share common policy preferences, pool political resources, and pressure governmental decisionmakers to choose a policy outcome favorable to their interests. After a policy decision, the opposing action sets typically break apart as new events give rise to other constellations of interest orgs.

5. Collective Action Systems Collective action systems – such as legislatures, courts, regulatory agencies – make policy decisions about numerous proposed laws and regulations. Organized interest groups hold varying pro/con preferences across multiple policy decisions. Action sets lobby officials to choose outcomes favorable to coalitional interests. Decision makers may also hold policy preferences, and may change their votes on some events to gain support for preferred decisions. An actor’s structural interest is “a revealed preference, for a particular outcome, resulting from identifiable social constraints or influence,” which may differ from an unconstrained preference (Mizruchi & Potts 2000:231). Models of socially embedded policymaking explore how network ties shape collective decisions through information exchanges, political resource, persuasion, vote-trading (log-rolling), and other dynamic processes.

6. PoliticalCleavages Memberships in action sets for 3 U.S. labor policy domain events revealed overlapping patterns of organizational interests in influencing these policy decisions. The labor and business coalitions comprise a core set of advocates (AFL vs. Chamber of Commerce) plus event-specific interest organizations, particularly nonlabor allies of unions. SOURCE: p. 354 in Knoke. 2001. Changing Organizations.

7. Civil Society Numerous conceptions of civil society – encompassing voluntary, nonprofit, social movement organizations & networks – range across local, national & transnational levels. Most CSO definitions exclude for-profit business organizations and the state/government. • “[T]he realm of organized social life that is voluntary, self-generating, (largely) self-supporting, autonomous from the state, and bound by a legal order or set of shared rules. It is distinct from ‘society’ in general in that it involves citizens acting collectively in a public sphere to express their interests, passions and ideas, exchange information, achieve mutual goals, make demands on the state, and hold state officials accountable...it excludes...political efforts to take control of the state…” • Larry Diamond. 1994. “Towards Democratic Consolidation.” Journal of Democracy 3:5. Does CS include interest group orgs created by states and businesses? Communities? Extended families? Criminal cartels?

8. International, Transnational & NGOs Globalization generates numerous international, transnational & nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): United Nations, European Union, International Labor Org, World Bank, IMF, WTO, NATO … They contend with sovereign national states for autonomy, resources, and political legitimacy. UN resolutions on Iraqi sanctions & US unilateral decision to invade Bush rescinded steel tariffs under threat of WTO & EU trade retaliation • Ottaway (2001): tripartite governance councils are creating a global corporatism – participation not by individuals but “by a limited number of corporate groups to which they supposedly belong.” • NGOs can diffuse tensions, forge political compromises • Danger of authoritarianism is very limited under nation-state system • Unrepresentative NGOs can morph into self-interested bureaucracies QUEX: Are international & transnational NGOs the seedbeds of a world governance system?

9. Toward a Global Civil Society? United Nations Development Programme’s Civil Society Division works with a differentiated conceptual framework. “The new task of UNDP … is to identify and work with all parts of the private sphere that can contribute effectively to [social & human development].” • Dynamic fuzzy boundaries of CSOs reached at the interfaces with: • Regime in power • Public institutions & gov bureaucracy • Governance system (the way politics & government interact) • Market and its actors • Affinities & obligations of (extended) families

10. Fuzzy Boundaries

11. Nation-States in the World-Society Meyer et al. (1997) analyzed the worldwide institutionalization of the modern nation-state form (“equal, autonomous, expansive”). Arising in the West, the nation-state was constructed & diffused by rationalistic cultural and associational processes that transcend national borders. • Three drivers toward the isomorphic nation-state: • World societal “statelessness” • Multiple levels of legitimated associational actors • Internal contradictions & inconsistencies Scholte (2002) noted democratic deficits in current global governance. “Positive interventions from … civil society groups can infuse global governance with greater democracy.” CSOs should complement other political processes. QUEX: What are the prospects for replacing nation-states with “supra-state” forms of world-society sovereignty & governance? Are states still too powerful to allow any serious erosions in their legitimate authority and control over force within their territories?

12. References Kenis, Patrick and Volker Schneider. 1991. “Policy Networks and Policy Analysis: Scrutinizing a New Analytical Toolbox.” Pp. 25-62 in Policy Networks: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Considerations, edited by Bernd Marin and Renate Mayntz. Boulder/Frankfurt: Campus/Westview Press. Knoke, David, Franz Urban Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent and Yutaka Tsujinaka. 1996. Comparing Policy Networks: Labor Politics in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press. Laumann, Edward O. and David Knoke. 1987. The Organizational State: Social Choice in National Policy Domains. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Mizruchi, Mark S. and Blyden B. Potts. 2000. “Social Networks and Interorganizational Relations: An Illustration and Adaptation of a Micro-Level Model of Political Decision Making.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 17:225-265. Perrow, Charles. 1991. “A Society of Organizations.” Theory and Society 20:725-762. Perrow, Charles. 2000. “An Organizational Analysis of Organizational Theory.” Contemporary Sociology 29:469-476. United Nations Development Programme. 2003. <http://www.undp.org/csopp/CSO/NewFiles /programmesglobalfmwrk2.htm#framewrk2>