Mellan civilsamhälle och folkrörelse: Ett aktörsperspektiv på rekrytering och organisering av medborgerligt engagemang

Civic engagement, commonly seen as concerning people's actions and activities,is generally studied at the individual level. In this doctoral thesis the term is used to examine and analyse how recruitment and organisation of civic engagement has developed since the mid-1990s at the organisational level in a Swedish context, as well as the conditions that have influenced and shaped this development. Three forms of civic engagement are examined: associational membership, volunteering and giving. In this thesis, interviews and text analyses are used. The analysis of archived webpages and annual reports demonstrates a more diversified range of forms of civic engagement available at the organisational level. It is expressed as an increased demand for different types of volunteering and giving, in addition to the more traditional form of civic engagement that associational membership constitutes in a Swedish context. The diversified range of civic engagement is accompanied by various recruitment practices such as marketing and fundraising, characterised by different institutional logics that guide the actual recruitment work within organisations. Interviews were conducted with elected representatives and employees at a senior level within non-profit human service organisations. The interviewees reasoning about the changing conditions for recruiting and organising civic engagement is understood as actions through which they reproduce or change logics. The study concludes that in practice, the recruitment and organisation of civic engagement can be seen as an expression of institutional complexity. It is argued that the collectively shared view of how civic engagement can and should be organised in a Swedish context is characterized by a complex composition of logics that prescribe different patterns of action for participants and organisations.