Published in late 2016 and drawing on evidence from more than 30 countries, Challenging the third sector perfectly anticipated the renewed global interest in active citizenship marked in the UK by the publication in August 2018 of the government’s Civil society strategy (HM Government, 2018) as well as the more recent final report of the Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society led by Julia Unwin OBE, published in November of the same year (Civil Society Futures, The Independent Inquiry, 2018).
With four prestigious authors at the helm (two from each antipode), the reader can expect a tour de force presentation and will not come away disappointed. The book opens with a brief history of civil society and the third sector, including the (contested) concepts of ‘citizenship’ developed by Marshall after the Second World War and the twin interpretations of ‘active citizenship’ as both civil obligation and political right. Chapter 3 moves on to the work of Gramsci and Habermas, and explores the differences between civil society in general and the third sector in particular. The authors define civil society as the sphere in which people come together to discuss, debate and negotiate issues freely and independently.
The analysis in Part 1 draws heavily on the five characteristics of the third sector identified by Salamon et al (1999) in their landmark research project on the issue, that it is populated by:
- organisations (that is, they have an institutional presence and structure),
- that are private (that is, they are institutionally separate from the state),
- non-profit-distributing (that is, they do not return profits to their managers or to a set of ‘owners’),
- self-governing (that is, they are fundamentally in control of their own affairs), and
- voluntary (that is, membership of them is not legally required and they attract some level of voluntary contribution of time or money).
In each case, the authors seek to push these criteria just a little bit further, for example by allowing profit-distributing cooperatives or including organisations without a formal legal structure. This is critical for their later exploration of active citizenship and the way it is (or is not) nurtured by third sector organisations.
Chapter 4 draws all this together to explore four features of third sector organisations that the authors consider necessary to nurture active citizenship: agency, association, democracy and ‘cosmopolitanism’. This last category (best understood in the UK through Theresa May’s comments as Prime Minister about citizens of the world being citizens of nowhere (May, 2016) is contentious but essential to any attempt to construct a global narrative of active citizenship. Having thus set the stage, Part 1 concludes with a review of the different types of relationship that exist between the state and the third sector. The section closes with a fascinating project comparing England and Wales with Bulgaria and Nicaragua, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Part 2 returns to the dichotomy of citizenship as civil commitment versus citizenship as activism, and is evenly split between theory (Chapters 6 and 8) and practice (Chapters 7 and 9). In Chapter 6, the reader is introduced to Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘capital’ and their interaction, and to the particular relationship between volunteering and social capital. Chapter 7 addresses the thorny question of whether ‘romantic’ Western notions of citizenship are truly universal (especially when dressed in the language of ‘bringing democracy’ to benighted nations). Two case studies, in Indonesia and Russia, drive the point home with justifiable suspicions about the role of non-governmental organisations as potential ‘proselytisers’ and ‘foreign agents’.
Chapters 8 and 9 bring the reader back to the UK and the United States, with examples of civil renewal and community organising from both countries. The potential for digital activism is traced out (with the usual caveats about inauthentic ‘clicktivism’), but this is a fast-developing field and the text would surely look quite different in a second or third edition of the book. A key concern in both chapters is the balance between activism and service delivery, and the ever-present risk of cooption by the state.
The final chapters of the book strike a more exploratory tone, moving from the macro to the micro, from grand unified theories of social action to more inductive hypotheses of complexity, non-linearity and emergence. This is new academic territory, only partially mapped out, and the authors – normally excellent at defining terms – allow themselves occasional lapses into jargon (‘rhizomic movements’ being the most extreme) that will leave many readers scratching their heads. Thankfully, Chapter 10 balances this disconcerting tendency with four well-grounded case studies from Australia, Peru, Sweden and Uruguay.
It is only in Chapter 11 that the authors finally confront an issue that has clearly being nagging at them from the outset: the spectre of ‘neoliberalism’. Presented throughout as a malign force, a brutal imposition on an unsuspecting world, there is little recognition of the challenges faced by charities in the post-war decades when the Keynesian consensus dominated, nor the proposition that successive electorates across the world might have seen advantages in the neoclassical liberal economics of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the authors seem genuinely torn between ‘resistance to the hegemony of this economistic regime’ and the agency that is created when communities come together in new cooperative and business-like ways that are ‘both socially and financially successful’.
Finally, a small gripe: the text contains a surprising number of typographical errors, including two badly mangled but critically important bullet-point lists – the first on Salamon’s (1999) five defining characteristics of the third sector, and the second on Neck’s (2009) fourfold typology of social enterprise. For a book that deserves a global audience, this will certainly make the job of non-native English readers more challenging than need be and will leave many wondering what other errors may have crept in. This is a pity in what is otherwise an excellent and well-timed publication.
In the UK and elsewhere, local communities are finding new ways to take back control of the things that matter to them, often in ways that appear to undermine longstanding political settlements. As the authors conclude, what is required is ‘a revitalisation of the notion of the democratic state and the public sphere, based on a shared understanding that an effectively democratic and generally accountable state is the responsibility of us all’.
Shifting power, bridging divides, transforming society, Civil Society Futures, https://
civilsocietyfutures.org
HM Government (2018) Civil society strategy: Building a future that works for everyone,
London: Cabinet Office.
May, T. (2016) 2016 Speech at Conservative Party Conference http://www.ukpol.co.uk/theresa-may-2016-speech-at-conservative-party-conference
Neck, H., Brush, C. and Allen, E. (2009) ‘The landscape of social entrepreneurship’, Business Horizons, 52: 13-19.
Salamon, L., Anheier, H., List, R., Toepler, S., Sokolowski, W. and Associates (1999) Global civil society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies.
This review first appeared in the July 2019 issue of Voluntary Sector Review (Volume 10, Number 2, p. 245).