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Are young people blindly self-interested? How does university shape students’ political participation? Can busy parents and grandparents find time to volunteer? Challenging conventional thinking, leading academics explore how individuals’ relationships with civil society change over time as different lifecourse events and stages trigger and hinder civic engagement. Drawing on personal narratives, longitudinal cohort studies and national surveys, this unprecedented study considers rarely examined aspects of civic engagement including school students’ sense of social responsibility and the charitable legacy bequests of elderly people and highlights significant implications for those promoting greater civic and political participation.
Challenging conventional thinking, leading academics explore how individuals’ relationships with civil society change over time as different lifecourse events and stages trigger and hinder civic engagement and political participation, and highlight the implications for those promoting greater civic and political engagement.
Using a life history approach, looks at what influences citizens to participate in the voluntary associations that comprise and promote civil society.
Civil Society has become a standard work of reference for those who seek to understand the role of voluntary citizen action. Recent global unrest has shown the importance of social movements and street protests in world politics. However, as this lucid book shows, the power that people have to shape their societies is usually channeled through day-to-day participation in voluntary associations and communities: expressions of “normal” civic life beyond the headlines. This is the underlying story of civil society. This new edition explores issues that have developed rapidly in recent years, including the overlaps between civil society and the market in the form of social enterprises and “venture philanthropy,” and the increasing role of social media and information and communication technologies in civic interaction. Different varieties of civil society in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere are investigated in more detail, and case studies, data, and references have been updated throughout. Colleges, foundations and NGOs, policy-makers, journalists and commissions of inquiry Ð all have used Edwards’s book to understand and strengthen the vital role that civil society can play in deepening democracy, re-building community, and addressing inequality and injustice. This new edition will be required reading for anyone who is interested in creating a better world through voluntary citizen action.
This enlightening book challenges conventional distinctions between the family and civil society as it uncovers how civic values and practices are inherited and fostered within the home.
"Ray has written a book that should be read by anyone interested in the current debates about the general health of civil society in the United States.--American Journal of Sociology The formation, maintenance, and well being of American civil society is a topic of intense debate in the social sciences. Until now, this debate has lacked rigor, with the term ""civil society"" commonly used interchangeably and imprecisely with other terms such as civic engagement. Today's discourse also lacks methodological discipline and relies too heavily on narrowly selected evidence in support of a particular argument. In this invaluable contribution to the debate, Marcella Ridlen Ray supplies an empirical study based on a theoretical model of democratic civil society, one that posits high levels of communication, diversity, autonomy, mediation, and voluntary association. In Ray's account, the emergent story of U.S. civil society is that of a dynamic institution, not necessarily one that is linear in its progression. It is a tale of flux, resilience, and stability over the long term that is consistent with subtexts on political equilibrium she notes in the work of early political analysts such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Burke, and, later, Tocqueville. Ray dispels the widely accepted myth that Americans are increasingly apathetic and withdrawn from common interests. The evidence reveals a persistence of long-standing public spiritedness, despite the fact that individuals use wider discretion in deciding if and how to attach to community and despite a historical lack of enthusiasm for performing civic duties in lieu of more pleasurable leisure activity. This public-spiritedness continues to reflect embedded religious-cultural values that disproportionately influence how and when people dedicate time and money to associational life. U. S. civil society has grown more inclusive and democratic as Americans venture, at growing rates, across differences in perspective, "
Around the world politicians and intellectuals seek to restore civil society by cultivating stronger public ethics and social institutions. This text presents classic writings of leading scholars and organizers who have brought the civil society debate to the forefront.
Broadly speaking, The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society views the topic of civil society through three prisms: as a part of society (voluntary associations), as a kind of society (marked out by certain social norms), and as a space for citizen action and engagement (the public square or sphere).
How historically rooted power dynamics have shaped the evolution of civil society globally. The civil society sector—made up of millions of nonprofit organizations, associations, charitable institutions, and the volunteers and resources they mobilize—has long been the invisible subcontinent on the landscape of contemporary society. For the past twenty years, however, scholars under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project have worked with statisticians to assemble the first comprehensive, empirical picture of the size, structure, financing, and role of this increasingly important part of modern life. What accounts for the enormous cross-national variations in the size and contours of the civil society sector around the world? Drawing on the project’s data, Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and their colleagues raise serious questions about the ability of the field’s currently dominant preference and sentiment theories to account for these variations in civil society development. Instead, using statistical and comparative historical materials, the authors posit a novel social origins theory that roots the variations in civil society strength and composition in the relative power of different social groupings and institutions during the transition to modernity. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and others, Explaining Civil Society Development provides insight into the nonprofit sector’s ability to thrive and perform its distinctive roles. Combining solid data and analytical clarity, this pioneering volume offers a critically needed lens for viewing the evolution of civil society and the nonprofit sector throughout the world.
Civil society is one of the most used - and abused - concepts in current political thinking. In this important collection of essays, the concept is subjected to rigorous analysis by an international team of contributors, all of whom seek to encourage the historical and comparative understanding of political thought. The volume is divided into two parts: the first section analyses the meaning of civil society in different theoretical traditions of Western philosophy. In the second section, contributors consider the theoretical and practical contexts in which the notion of civil society has been invoked in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These essays demonstrate how an influential Western idea like civil society is itself altered and innovatively modified by the specific contexts of intellectual and practical life in the societies of the South.