History and traditions are important for many civil society organizations (CSOs). However, CSOs have to mediate between their original mission and modern-day realities. This article argues that understanding the concept of decoupling can enrich analyses of how organizations deal with path dependency. Hence, this article discusses cross-fertilization between historical and organizational institutionalism. This is illustrated through a study of Swedish CSOs using survey data, interviews and documents. The Swedish popular movement tradition is argued to be a path that is not easily abandoned, and the results of the surveys and interviews included here show how actors in CSOs find history to be both a resource and a constraint. Furthermore, different decoupling strategies, including both reversed and official decoupling, are used to balance between historical legacies and current challenges.
Policy institutes, or ''think tanks'', are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our societies. In this article, we conceptualize think tanks explicitly as a civil society phenomenon, linking the proliferation of this relatively new type of actor to the transformation of civil society structures and of systems of interest representation. Using the case of Sweden as an illustration, we argue that the recent decades' rise of think tanks in institutional settings outside of the USA can only be understood if we take into account the particular features and institutional policy access opportunities of the domestic civil society in each national case, and that think tanks should be analytically understood as the allies of, rather than competitors to, the older, established forces in civil society.
Think tanks, defined as organizations that produce policy research for political purposes (McGann, 2007; Medvetz, 2008), are an increasingly ubiquitous type of policy actor world-wide. In Sweden, the last 20 years’ sharp increase in think tank numbers (Åberg, Einarsson, & Reuter, 2019) has coincided with the decline of the traditional Swedish corporatist model based on the intimate involvement of the so-called ‘popular movements’ in policy-making (Lundberg, 2014; Micheletti, 1995). Contrary to the large, mass-membership based and democratically organized movement organizations, think tanks are small, professionalized, expert-based, and seldom represent any larger membership base. Their increasingly important role as the ideological greenhouses in Swedish civil society might, therefore, be interpreted as an indication of an increasingly elitist and professionalized character of the latter. But what is a think tank? The article explores how a shared understanding of what constitutes a think tank is constructed by think-tankers themselves. In the study, interviewed think tank executives and top-level staff reflect upon their own organizations’ missions and place in the Swedish policy system.
Based on data from a survey conducted in Saint Petersburg in 2013, this article sheds new light on attitudes towards fatherhood in contemporary Russia. We explore what norms are held concerning fatherhood, how these attitudes are related to age, sex, education and income as well as to ideal–typical models established in previous research on fatherhood from Western Europe and the US. Thus, the article also discusses what explanatory value established theoretical models have for the Russian context. Norms of the role of the father in the family are related to general norms of masculinity and, hence, are an important part of the study of politics and the political climate in a society. The results show that there are several fatherhood ideals present in contemporary Northwestern Russia: a traditional breadwinner model, an active fatherhood model as well as what we refer to as a marginalized fatherhood model. The latter has not been substantially identified in previous research, and may tentatively be identified as a legacy of the Soviet era.
This article deals with civil society organizations active in the field of family policy and demographic issues in contemporary Russia. This article uses Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality and later developments discussing technologies of citizenship. More specifically, using interviews, documents, and participant observations, socalled "daddy-schools" that have emerged in and around Saint Petersburg since 2008, are studied as a mode of governmentality. The analysis shows how the civic initiative studied attempted to empower fathers and how it has altered demographic discourses while approaching similar societal goals as the state does in its biopolitical strategies. Thus, the daddy-schools provide a complementary discourse concerning fatherhood while approaching the same perceived demographic crisis that the Russian state is challenged by.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.