Atlas: On Memberships, their Meaning and Construction in Large Swedish Federations by Filip Wijkström

Atlas home || Conferences | Abstracts | about Atlas

ISTR Sixth International Conference
Toronto, Canada / July 11-14, 2004
Contesting Citizenship and Civil Society in a Divided World

	Conference Homepage
	Abstracts

On Memberships, their Meaning and Construction in Large Swedish Federations
by
Filip Wijkström
Stockholm School of Economics
Coauthors: Johan Hvenmark

On Memberships, their Meaning and Construction in Large Swedish Federations Filip Wijkström, Associate Professor Johan Hvenmark, PhD Student Stockholm School of Economics Stockholm 2003-10-10 The existence and extent of formal members in a country have often been used as an indicator of the country’s degree of civility or engagement in the population (Almond and Verba 1963; Curtis, Grabb and Baer 1992; Curtis Baer and Grabb 2001; Putnam 2000). These studies have almost completely left the organisational level out of the analysis, thus ignoring the context in which these memberships exist. If this issue has been addressed at allk, it is normally the particular field of activity (i.e., sports, trade unions, religious congregations etc) that has been recognised.

At the same time, many of the larger nonprofit organisations existing in many countries as well as on the international level today are built as federative membership-based organisations. A number of primary associations (with individuals as members) form the base of the organization while later on regional, national and even international structures are established (Swartz 1996). At each level, a new association is created with the associations on the earlier level as the formal members (owners) of the new association. Only a limited number of studies have recognised the importance of these federated organisations and their members in the nonprofit or voluntary sector literature (see, i.e., Smith 2000; Young 1997).

In either type of the above discussed approaches or studies, the focus has always been on the members themselves; how many or active they are, what categories of people we will find in different types of organisations, or how these members are distributed in the relevant population. In this conceptual paper, we instead address the formal membership itself, here understood as the relation between the organization and the individual. Our primary interest lies in the way this relation is constructed, both when it comes to its content and structure. We study the features and character of these memberships, how they are built up and have developed, how they have been “negotiated” over time between the organisations and their members.

The paper is based on an on-going research project with a focus on the construction of the individual membership in large federations. The study involves a number of the largest and most important federative membership-based organisations in Sweden. The study was begun in 2001 and will be finished in 2005, and we will here report on some of our preliminary empirical findings as well as discuss some of our more conceptual work.

In this paper we also problematize some of the dominating features of the qualitative content of the individual membership. From the empirical material, it seems, for example, common to associate individual membership with democratic governance in the organisations. This is picture that lies well in line with the century-long history of the popular movement tradition in Scandinavia (see e.g. Heckscher, 1951; Lundkvist, 1977; Lundström and Wijkström, 1997; Thörnberg, 1943). A parallel, but to some extent contradictory, example of how the individual membership is constructed and given meaning bears resemblance more of a market- or business-oriented discourse, which e.g. promotes increased professionalization and managerial power (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996).

Date received: October 10, 2003