ten - Active citizenship and the emergence of networks

Summary

Introduction

As we have argued throughout this book, active citizenship involves agency. Turner (1992), among others, emphasises the importance of people shaping rights and obligations through their participation in society, as active rather than passive citizens. Humans are viewed as autonomous self-determining beings, as agents who shape and change society (Touraine, 2000). This approach places agency at the centre of societal development. Crucially, the focus on agency has opened up citizenship research to questions about different ways in which subjects enact themselves as citizens. To explore some of these questions, it is necessary to adopt a micro analysis, one that examines the formation of active citizenship from below. Such an analysis may complement the more usual sociopolitical analysis, which examines the macro factors that also shape and at times limit the formation of particular kinds of citizenship.

We are here dealing with the question of how change happens. How do new organisational forms emerge? How do new products, new systems of production and new ideas of any sort materialise? Organisational theory tends to assume that new organisational forms are created by good managers, perhaps entrepreneurs, within an organisational context and drawing on organisational resources. In other words, citizens assume power from above. Someone with power and resources makes something happen. However, by focusing on collective agency, this chapter turns this assumption on its head, and focuses instead on the ways that creative new forms may emerge from below.

As Chapter Four discussed, there is now a substantial body of literature that identifies the importance of the third sector in the development and support of active citizenship (for example, Onyx et al, 2011) and the creation of social capital (Putnam, 2000; Onyx and Bullen, 2000). But there is another story to be told about the formation of third sector organisations. What kinds of actions lie behind the formation of these organisations or indeed of larger social movements? And what of the ordinary, everyday lived reality of active citizenship? What are the actual processes and structures that underpin social capital, community capacity and active citizenship?

This chapter argues that, while third sector organisations are crucial in the maintenance of civil society, in order to understand active citizenship and the formation of third sector organisations, it is necessary to look beneath the surface manifestations of these organisations and understand their emergent nature.