Description
Managerialism has emerged as an important subject in research on Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). Little is known, however, about the process of managerialization. We investigate factors that drive the process of managerialization. We look for actors' explanations why CSOs are becoming more business-like. Thus our core research question is: How do CSO practitioners explain the process of managerialization?Our paper contributes to answering this question in four steps. First, we briefly introduce the concept of managerialism and prior research on the mechanisms of managerialization. Second, we describe two theories that, in combination, provide us with the categories for our empirical analysis: models of institutional change and attribution theory. Both theories distinguish between internal and external causes, as well as jolts and creeping changes, resulting in four different directions of attribution. Third, we apply these four directions to our empirical analysis to extract explanations from narratives of change. Five matching pairs of Austrian and Irish CSOs are analyzed to derive interviewees' subjective attributions. We thereby provide initial evidence whether managerialism enters CSOs either in a radical or in a subtle and convergent way. We conclude with a discussion of our findings, which turn out to be remarkably ambiguous and heterogeneous.
| Period | 17 Nov 2011 → 19 Nov 2011 |
|---|---|
| Event title | ARNOVA 40th Annual Conference |
| Event type | Unknown |
| Degree of Recognition | International |