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Abstracts Network A Communitarian Ideals and Civil Society
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Frank Adloff (University of Goettingen, Germany)
E-Mail address: fadloff@gwdg.de
Beyond Interests and Norms: Gift-Giving and Reciprocity in Modern Society
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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the meaning of gift-giving and reciprocity in modern society. The thesis is that the "paradigm of the gift" is still relevant for the social integration of modern societies and, furthermore, is especially realized in civic associations. Anthropologists like Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, and Sahlins pointed out that archaic societies were organized around the principles of giving, taking, and giving back. According to Mauss, archaic societies reproduce themselves through reciprocal gifts. Most contemporary authors think that with the transition to modernity a separation has evolved between a private sphere of personal gifts and an impersonal sphere of economic markets. With this development goes the dichotomy of utilitarian individualistic action on the one hand and patterns of action that can be described as oriented towards values and norms on the other. In contrast to this perspective, I will focus on the hypothesis that the development of market societies did not erode non-economic motives and exchange relations, and that interaction patterns of reciprocity are still ubiquitous. Further, it will be maintained that gift-giving and reciprocity transcend the usual distinction of rational, selfish behavior and altruistic motives. Patterns of reciprocity are grounded in voluntary giving and - at the same time - the social duty to give back. The societal realm where this type of action can be regularly found is civil society. Thus, it is maintained that most contemporary authors who want to foster a "third" principle that is able to keep markets and state action within limits rely too much on moral and normativistic theoretical approaches and overlook the "power of the gift".
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Claudia Andreoli Galvao (Universidade de Brasília, Brazil)
Violeta de Faria Periera (Universidade de Brasília, Brazil)
Luiz Fernando de Mattos Pimenta (Universidade de Brasília, Brazil)
Mariângela da Silva Duarte. (Universidade de Brasília, Brazil)
E-Mail address: andreoli@unb.br; violeta@unb.br; fernandopimenta@unb.br; maryvox@hotmail.com
Poverty Reduction in Poor Territories in Brazil: Comparative Analysis of Measurements of Social Capital
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Despite its vast natural resources and economic wealth, Brazil has an overwhelmingly poor population and a staggering level of inequality, with a 1998 Gini Index of 0,607.
Increasing evidence shows that social capital is critical for societies to prosper economically and for development to be sustainable. Led by a growing body of evidence, which shows social capital as a potential contributor to poverty reduction, identifying methods, tools, and useful proxies for social capital, and using different types and combinations of qualitative, comparative and quantitative research methodologies is urgent. Social capital is important to foster development, nevertheless there is no agreement on how the concept is operationalized and empirically studied. In this sense it is important to develop indicators and methodologies for monitoring and measuring social capital and its impact. Although social capital can seem mysterious and therefore immeasurable, it is in fact rooted in human relationships, which are very real, tangible, and measurable. When we translate these methodologies for an area of poverty in a developing country such as Brazil, the difficulties are increased. In this sense, this paper provides an overview of the available measurements of social capital and the discussion of its validity in poor territories.
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Clifford Bob (Duquesne University, USA)
E-Mail address: bob@duq.edu
Who Counts? Market Dynamics in Human Rights Protection
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Over the last 15 years, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focusing on human rights issues have multiplied in number, resources, and impact. Yet serious human rights violations persist. My paper seeks to explain this paradox by critically assessing the "market" for rights activism. Worldwide, numerous victims "demand" NGO action, while a small number of NGOs "supply" it in the form of report-writing, press releases, governmental lobbying, and direct provision of aid. Applying economic principles, I argue that human rights activism, although a source of protection for some, has not lived up to its potential. While activism clearly includes an important ethical dimension, thinking about the relationship between local victims and NGO supporters in economic terms helps explain striking unevenness in support for equally-needy victims. The paper examines how such concepts as value, exchange, and price work in this market; analyzes both typical buyers' markets, where NGOs are highly selective in choosing client groups, and rarer sellers' markets, where victims have the upper hand; explores forms of market failure; and suggests possible remedies. In doing so, I directly address this year's conference theme, analyzing "calculations within the civic and the problem of making associations in [transnational] politics."
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Richard Boyd (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
E-Mail address: rboyd@polisci.wisc.edu
Imagining Civil Society: Classical Liberal Insights into Contemporary Debates
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Recent scholarship on civil society has been focused on measuring group memberships or the lack thereof. Even political theorists not engaged in empirical research into the quantity of voluntary associations have tended to frame their normative arguments in terms of more or fewer groups. What has been less explicitly theorized is the basic taxonomical question of what counts as "civil society." This should be an obvious concern for normative political theorists because of civil society's moral ambivalence. The demise of many group militias, religious cults, racist or xenophobic groups would be considered a boon by almost any criteria. But the question remains: which criteria? Political theorists have been slow to develop a rigorous moral taxonomy of civil society, despite the fact that the question of what ought to count as civil society was debated vigorously and explicitly by key thinkers (the Scottish Moralists, Burke, and Tocqueville) often cited as civil society's intellectual progenitors. Drawing upon these thinkers, I argue that the early modern virtue of "civility" can help clarify what counts as part of a truly "civil" society, leading beyond ideas of civil society as the structural antithesis of the state and toward the moral distinction between civil and uncivil groups.
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Severyn Bruyn (Boston College, USA)
E-Mail address: bruyn@rcn.com
A Republic of Federations: A Frontier for Civil Society
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The idea of a "republic" was conceived from notions of civic virtue and popular sovereignty in ancient times. Many types of republics have developed since those early periods but none like the one emerging for the 21st century. The attributes of this new republic are developing in the private sector with democracy as its theme. In countries like the United States this new republic is building in the nongovernmental sector where corporations are chartered as democratic organizations. Altogether these corporations represent a system of governance that works in tandem -- and in tension -- with the state. When this set of self-governing federations is defined more clearly by social scientists, public planners should be able to advance societal development not just business development. Public awareness about this governing system ought to invoke a battle of ideas about societal development. This paper describes societal development and the formation of federations in the private sector of society, which includes business and the Third Sector with uncounted numbers of civil federations now governing modern society.
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Dalton Conley (New York University, USA)
E-Mail address: dalton.conley@nyu.edu
Gender, Obesity and Social Stratification
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The 50+% of variance in SES not explained by family background is often assumed to reflect individual-specific factors such as non-shared genes, non-shared environment, differential treatment by parents and even luck. A common assumption is that the non-shared component of SES reflects more meritocratic dynamics than does the shared component. Furthermore, it is generally seen as a sign of meritocracy when the impact of ascriptive characteristics, as captured by family background, wanes and within-family differences widen.
However, it is possible that within-family differences in attainment themselves are the result of ascriptive characteristics that have little relation to meritocratic criteria. For example, same-sex sibling correlations in adult height, weight & BMI fall between .25 and .50. Such within-family differences on physical indicators might help explain who is upwardly mobile. I address this by comparing sibling differences in socioeconomic outcomes to those in anthropometric ones, testing whether within-family variation in biological growth measures explains SES differences. I also use sibling's BMI as an instrument to further test this relationship. I find that BMI is negatively associated with socioeconomic attainment in the marriage market for women and that this relationship varies by class background.
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Victor P. Corona (Columbia University, USA)
E-Mail address: vc2118@columbia.edu
Voices and Visions of Lower Manhattan: Protocols of Participation in Post-9/11 Public Hearings
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In order to investigate the structures and processes of public participation in contentious civic arenas, I describe the protocols - formal rules, applied devices, and informal mechanisms - used to organize post-9/11 public hearings regarding the future of the Ground Zero site. I develop visual representations of sequences of comments made during the hearings to analyze how the sociotechnology of participation interacted with locational factors (citywide orientation versus community orientation) to yield distinct deliberative processes. My discussion of protocols of participation draws from other scholars' work describing sociotechnical networks of individuals and artifacts. My data are comprised of digital video recordings of public hearings held at Pace University and at Bedford-Stuyvesant High School in New York City. The proposed deployment of this theoretical framework and analytical approach are expected to offer new insights into the effects of structure (sociotechnical networks) on civic processes (sequences of comments). Through a comparison of the two post-9/11 hearings, I offer an account of how the organized diversity of voices and visions in public hearings contributed to the collective search for solutions in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.
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Mansueto F. de Almeida Junior (Institute of Applied Economic Research - IPEA, Brazil)
E-Mail address: mansueto@ipea.gov.br
Lessons of Upgrading and Development in Northeast Brazil: Understanding Incentives to Upgrade and To Bring Firms From The Informal To The Formal Market
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There was a strong turn in the Brazilian government at the end of the 1990s toward promoting small and medium enterprises (SME) located in clusters, which are named by the generic name "Arranjos Produtivos Locais (APLs)". In Brazil, policymakers, politicians and academics alike seem to believe that promoting small firms in clusters will necessarily trigger a development process with positive outcomes for poor regions and for local workers. But does any policy toward promoting small firms in clusters necessarily lead to economic development? The answer is no. Sometimes, the way policymakers choose to promote SME might harm, instead of help, the economic development. This seems to be the case of garment firms in Sulanca at the state of Pernambuco in Brazil, where for years the government avoided the enforcement of labor, environmental and tax legislation. This situation has changed recently, when laundries in Toritama, one of the cities in Sulanca, decided to innovate and use recycled water to do the laundering of jeans. This paper shows how this case of upgrading occurred and how it was made possible by the direct involvement of the government in subsidizing the adoption of the new technology, enforcing the environmental law and the labor legislation.
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Georgi Dimitrov ("St. Kl. Ohridski" University of Sofia, Bulgaria)
E-Mail address: gd@sclg.uni-sofia.bg
The Civil Society's Role In Structural Transformation of a Post-Communist Society
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In late 1990's the Bulgarian Government, supported by the WB, launched Education Modernization Project. It aimed at helping the country in its fight against poverty through improvement of human capital. The fault of the national education system was drastic distortions of the links between labor market and the education provided at all levels. The modernization of education had to lead to substantial productivity gains. The project was brought to a failure although no overt resistance against it had been performed. A sociological study identified the reasons why and the mechanisms through which the institutional sabotage had been successful. The main conclusion is: due to the weak incentives provided by the labor market in regulating education system the modernization project design was heavily dependant on involvement of the civil society (dialogue with the addressees of the reform; institutionalization of collegial ruling body by the stake-holders; PR campaign for the broader public, etc.). Those measures were naturally omitted because in an etatistically run society there has been no sensitivity for the supreme role of the civic infrastructure in social reforms. This is a lesson to be learned from that particular local reform disaster with some broader cultural relevance for all post-communist societies.
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Michel Dion (Université de Sherbrooke, Canada)
Email address: Michel.dion@USherbrooke.ca
The Qu'ranic Concept of Economic Justice and Rawls' Theory of Justice : Similarities in Asymmetry?
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In the Islamic society, the production of the necessities of life has the priority over that of luxuries (cf. the main Islamic economists: Kahf, Mannan, Naqvi). Necessities of life must then be in sufficient quantity before there could be any real demand for luxuries (luxuries being those goods that are beyond the average standards of consumption in a given society). In this article, we will discuss the concept of economic justice as it is conveyed in the Qu'ran. The concept involves three basic issues as it is discussed in the Qu'ran : (1) material goods (earthly life) and spiritual needs (the hereafter life); (2) the duty to give alms to the poor ; (3) honesty in business transactions. On the other hand, Rawls' theory of justice is important in many ways, but mainly because it is a theory that keeps good insights from Kantianism and Utilitarianism, while safeguarding a deep concern for classical virtues (Aristotelian virtues). We will analyse to what extent Rawls' concept of justice shares ideas with the Qu'ranic concept of economic justice.
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Neide Esterci (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
E-Mail address: esterci@uol.com.br
Community, Territory and the Struggle for Natural Resources in The Amazon
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The paper discusses the social effects of the implementation of a biodiversity conservation program in a legally protected area, which at the same time was intended to maintain the livelihoods of the local residents. The analysis develops from a situation of great tension that occurred in the flooded forest called "várzea", along side of the Solimões River, in the Amazon state, in Brazil. In the years of 1998 and 1999, fishermen coming from outside the protected area invaded the lakes of the conservation unit (Project for Sustainable Development) which were only kept for the use of the local residents. This big conflict has also involved local groups of the Catholic Church, government agencies, local politicians, and scientists in charge of the management of the conservation aspects of the Reserve. From the accounts of those different actors, my intention is to analyze the different meanings attributed to the creation of this conservation unit and the different views of the dispute between the local residents, organized in their communities inside the Reserve and the fishermen, organized in a trade union, who claimed the right to explore those same fishery areas kept by the communities.
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Erzsebet Fazekas (Columbia University, USA)
E-Mail address: ef305@columbia.edu
Building Civil Society: US Private Aid to Hungary and Central Europe
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In 1972 the Ford Foundation was the first US private foundation to support Eastern European affairs by funding research on Eastern Europe (EE). In the 1980s its grants promoted international cultural and scholarly exchanges between the US and EE; and helped the publication of samizdat writings. By 1989 Ford's grants gained more definite direction and it was joined in its mission by the Soros, Rockefeller, MacArthur and Mott foundations. Many other foundations appeared in this philanthropic scene for a few short years, disappearing quickly, but a core group stayed on assisting East European governments, nonprofits and enterprises in their transition to democratic, capitalist and civil societies. Deeming their mission fairly complete, in 2000 these foundations drew up their ten-year exit strategy from the region. This paper will analyze the grant-making priorities and mission of US foundations in Hungary and in general EE between 1972 and 2004. How was civil society assistance embedded in other funding areas? What shape did it take in grant programs, and who were the grantees to further these foundations' mission? I will argue against those that claim models of civil society and the nonprofit sector were diffused from the US and adopted in EE. I will argue that such claims flatten the sociological understanding of civil society, nonprofit organizing, and the diffusion of practices and organizational models.
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Robert M. Fishman (University of Notre Dame, USA)
E-Mail address: fishman.2@nd.edu
Conceptualizing Social Connections: Critiquing Social Capital; Distinguishing Between Ties as Conversations and Ties as Brokerage
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The paper argues that existing conceptualizations of social connections fall into two broad groupings: those understandings --best exemplified by the social capital approach -- that assume it possible to ascertain the overall amount and impact of connections enjoyed by an individual or collectivity through on metric; and the alternative understandings that instead search for meaningful differences among types of ties and their distinctive causal consequences. The paper critiques the social capital approach partly on the basis of recognized contributions by scholars who do differentiate in causal analysis among types of connections. The paper then presents, and argues for the importance of, a distinction between two fundamentally different types of ties each of which may cross important social barriers: ties as brokerage and ties as conversation. Drawing on the author's recent book, Democracy's Voices, the paper concludes by arguing that ties as conversation play an especially important role in shaping the discursive horizons of participants in democratic public life.
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Richard Giordano (University of London, United Kingdom)
E-Mail address: r.giordano@bbk.ac.uk
Customer/ Citizen Relationship Management: A Complexity Evaluation Framework for e-Government in the United Kingdom
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The literature on e-government outlines the potential to enhance local democracy, policy-making, and facilitating multi-agency and service access and delivery 24/7delivery. Against this literature is a strong criticism of the underlying design assumptions of e-Government sites that argue that e-Government, particularly in the UK, are focused almost exclusively on the provision of government services, such as tax and garbage collection. Government accountability, thus, is less about representative democracy and transparency, and more about value for taxpayer money. The citizen is therefore viewed as a customer; the relationship between customer and government parallels that of the relationship between customer and enterprise. Activity theory suggests that both views have merit that users of e-Government sites may be at once citizens and consumers. How then does a designer or policy analyst evaluate e-Government given that citizens are at once civic agents as well as commercial agents? This paper proposes an extension of activity theory that focuses on the complex relationships within and among individual and group identities and fluid political and cultural contexts in which they reside as an evaluative framework. The full paper develops this theory in detail, outlines the framework, and applies it to the UK e-Citizen/Consumer.
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Valerie F. Hunt (Southern Methodist University, USA)
E-Mail address: vhunt@smu.edu
The Questionable Place of Rights in U.S. Immigration Policy After September 11: Past Policy and Present Public Attitudes
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The U.S. has long wrestled with twin thorny questions: how do we define "strangers" in our midst and what do we do with these strangers? Much attention is given to the role of economic forces and geopolitical considerations in shaping U.S. immigration policy in the postwar era. However, immigration policy, like most policy arenas, is influenced by the power of political ideas that frame the political discourse in ways that highlight particular considerations and focus on particular policy alternatives. I argue that moral dimensions or frames have influenced U.S. immigration by shaping the way the public understands and differentiates between rights for citizens and noncitizens. Using historical institutional approach, I analyze key U.S. public laws involving immigration, media sources, and analysis of public opinion polls draws within six months of September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. I analyze how morality frames shaped public preferences for different categories of rights for citizens and immigrants. The findings and analysis contribute to our understanding of how public attitudes about rights influence U.S. immigration policy. The study also contributes to the literature on the intersection of framing effects in public opinion and democracy.
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Tatiana Ignatova (North-Caucasus Academy of Public Administration, Russia)
E-Mail address: tignatova@aaanet.ru
Administrative Reform in Russia and Its Impact on Civil Society
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Stages of administrative reform in Russia are characterized by transit from administrative to managerial paradigms of public administration following the global trend. In 1990s deconcentration and decentralization of public administration were used by the Eltsin team to undermine the political and economic power of previous rulers. New government management ideas were included by the Indem Foundation into 1997 Concept of administrative reform. These processes led to fast development of civil society institutions and democratic conscience, self-organization of groups of people. Starting in 2000, goals and means of the new stage of administrative reform do not consider enough impact of and on civil society. Discourse of president and government decisions and empirics of their implementation show inconsistency between democratic declarations and authoritarian tendencies. Three main features of new government management: business management techniques, service and client orientation and market- type mechanisms like competition could be seen declared in 2003 by PF President measures for implementation of administrative reform, but government does not develop dialogue with civil society institutions as client-citizen representatives and does not support transparency and competition in social sector reform. Civil society as public good is threatened by and authoritarian tendencies as other public goods (environment, health care, children care etc.).
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JoEllen Lind (Valparaiso University, USA)
E-Mail address: joellenlind@att.net
Actual Representation/Virtual Representation
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"Calculation," "representation," and "association" are all phenomena related to political processes that aspire to democratic legitimacy. But, their different meanings signal the ambiguity in conceptions of democracy where large-scale institutions are involved and divisions within the policy-based on geography, wealth, race, gender, religion or other factors-is a fact of life. This paper claims that whenever political arrangements shift from direct to representative government, there is a suppressed premise underlying that government's claim to legitimacy; namely that virtual representation is justifiable in moral and/or prudential terms. The purpose of the paper is to explore this thesis and to probe more deeply what "virtual representation" means, not only to understand the concept better, but to determine whether there are substantive requirements on virtual representation, given the norms, practices, statuses, and distributive claims of the sub-communities within a larger, more institutionalized political whole. Philosophical and legal conceptions of agency will be utilized to develop these themes, to connect them to controversies regarding voting, and to explore whether non-governmental means for determining the people's will, such as the Internet, make virtual representation increasingly unnecessary.
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Michael Minch (Utah Valley State College, USA)
E-Mail address: minchmi@uvsc.edu
Democratic Civil Society Under the Burdens of Empire: What Counts?
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I will argue that democracy is a function and result of civil society before it is a function and result of the state. The state, therefore, cannot be relied upon to protect or promote democracy when it is not in the state's interest to do so- thus the need of a democratically-charged civil society. An empire, as is the US at present (even administration insiders use this language about themselves), has little need for deep and discursive democracy (but shallow and sham democracy will be valuable). US citizens need to revitalize what is now a moribund democratic culture. Democracy in the US is on life-support, and through civil society, it must be "worked up" to the state. I will make this argument with the aid of Michael Oakeshott's theory of civil society- "civil association," and his critique of what he called "rationalism" and "enterprise association."
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Cristiana Olcese (University of Reading, United Kingdom)
E-Mail address: c.olcese@reading.ac.uk
Contemporary Social Movements: Multi-levels, Multi-cultures, Negotiated Discourses on a Common Frame
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This paper, based on an empirical investigation of a national protest that occurred in London on March 20th, 2004 against the Iraq war, suggests that contemporary social movements interpret social conditions as an expression of political processes which take place at different levels. Local, national, international and global events are connected one to another in ways that never happened in the past. The analysis of this protest is the first in a broad comparison of demonstrations, but it is meaningful by itself for the findings associated with a national case. In contrast to the shift in claim making from local to national arenas that occurred in Western Europe and North America during a previous era, my working hypothesis is that contemporary globalization processes have not produced only a unidirectional movement from national to transnational claim making. What is happening is more a multi-level, negotiated discourse among actors from different political arenas. In addition, I argue that contemporary social movements draw on multiple narratives to make their interpretations of reality and claims. These narratives differ in the presence of "new" and "old" ideological (or non-ideological) roots, backgrounds, cultures of members of movement organizations, but they seem to share a common frame. The "collective action frame on global terror", identified in the majority of the speeches and leaflets produced for the anti-war protest analyzed here, I suggest could constitute the basis of a new wave of contention connected with the hot political issue of terrorism.
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Nathalia Rogers (Dowling College, USA)
E-Mail address: rogersn@dowling.edu
Comparative Analysis of Civic Participation in Suburban Long Island, USA
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The debate continues about the factors that influence civic participation in the American community. Most recently, some authors have focused on community development and community participation in the suburbs. These authors are Suzanne Keller (Community: Pursuing the Dream, Leaving the Reality, Princeton U. Press, 2003); David L. Kirp (Almost Home: America's Love-Hate Relationship with Community, Princeton U. Press, 2000); J. Eric Oliver (Democracy in Suburbia, Princeton U. Press, 2001) among others.
My paper will deal with the comparative analysis of patterns of civic participation in two different communities on Long Island, New York. Both of the communities were responding to the initiatives of a non-profit organization called "Vision Long Island", but the dynamics of social interaction differed in each location despite the similarity of the issues discussed and the types of social actors involved. In my paper I will analyze factors that contribute to the different dynamics and outcomes of civic participation in suburban Long Island.
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Celina Souza (Federal University of Brazil, Brazil)
E-Mail address: celina@ufba.br
Brazilian Local Governance and The Management of Universal Social Policies
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The year 1988 marked a profound change for Brazil's political institutions. A new constitution was passed, after more than 20 years under the aegis of a military regime. Restoring democracy meant, among other things, changing the balance of power within the federal system and a commitment to improving the role of local government and financial resources, together with the empowerment of local communities. The paper describes the Brazilian system of local government after the 1988 Constitution. It first analyses the structure of local finance, in particular the functioning of federal-state-local relations regarding the distribution of financial resources. It then analyzes new policies introduced by the federal government in the 1990s that have created incentives or constraints for local governments in the provision of basic social services. Finally, the paper discusses new policies adopted by several local governments designed to empower local communities in the decision-making process.
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Jean-Baptiste Suquet (Ecole Polytechnique, France)
E-Mail address: Suquet.Jean-Baptiste@wanadoo.fr
Moral Standards: Underpinning or (Re)constructing Social Order? The Case of Fraud in a French Collective Transportation Service
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Morality is often said to be the point when dealing with a specific social issue: fraud. Economists as well as social scientists sometimes explain social order by moral standards and social disorder by their desertion. We would like to suggest another view on morality. By referring to the case of an urban transporter in a Parisian suburb and to our own work experience of control, we will focus on the interactions that occur between controllers and passengers in the case of fraud in buses. In doing so, we want to shed another light on the role of moral standards: in our understanding, they would not be a matrix for social order structuring civil encounters; but rather tools for actors to try to communicate, manage to find a communal representation of the situation, and finally elaborate a solution to repair the punctual trouble. The use of a micro-sociological perspective seems to enable reflection on the place and specificity of moral standards among other tools making a civil society possible.
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Stefania Vicari (University of Reading, United Kingdom)
E-Mail address: s.vicari@reading.ac.uk
Cyberspace and Transnational Contention: The Continuing Significance of Culture and Place
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This paper explores the interplay between the representational power of new ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies) and the configuration of twenty-first century social movements. The question is the structural equality among the actors of contemporary transnational activism developed on the pathways of the Internet. Tackling the World Social Forum as the affiliation of on/off-line networks of global mobilization, the present study shows how its representational forms on the Web reproduce hierarchical stratifications. The relational structures within a network of 221 social forum websites display how contemporary transnational activism is characterized by internal divides in organizational and mobilizing power. The paper directly questions claims of horizontality in digital communication and of global participatory forms in contemporary activism.
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Ann Vogel (University of Exeter, United Kingdom)
E-Mail address: a.vogel@ex.ac.uk
Accounting For the Gift
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This paper traces the historical evolution of accountability in fundraising techniques in Western philanthropy from the early origins of fundraising drives to the professional fundraising practices of the contemporary nonprofit worlds. The paper works on
five levels of analysis to cohere a picture of this understudied aspect of the modern gift economy: (1) it traces gift accounting at the intersection of normative everyday evaluation of gifts and the gifts' insertion into finance mechanisms as rational objects; (2) it analyzes the path gifts take in the process of fundraising from a social object that is not quantifiable to a final status as an actual quantified object; (3) it discusses the normalization of the gift and the various mechanisms (specifically the Tax Code) in the development of rational organizational forms of fundraising that made philanthropy a contemporary middle-class phenomenon; (4) it compares and contrasts gift-producing and gift-accounting technologies across different national philanthropies; (5) it charts the course gift accounting has taken as to its integration into modern scientific knowledge (specifically in form of fundraising formula and in economists' recent works on wealth-transfer estimates and charitable giving predictions).
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Barbara Wejnert (University at Buffalo, USA)
E-Mail address: bwejnert@buffalo.edu
Globalization, Democracy and Gender
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Although world--scale analyses show that on average women benefit from globalization and democratization, the regional analyses attest that this is true only for the most economically-developed and highly-democratized countries and to some degree for semi-developed democracies. In contrast, in transitional democracies of which many are underdeveloped countries, democratization and inclusion into global market less likely improves societal well-being while the level of women's well-being initially declines. Separate categories constitute low economically-developed, transitional democracies of the former communist bloc where the decline of women's as compared to the overall societal well-being is particularly visible and no visible improvement is expected over time.
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Csata Zsombor (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania)
Kiss Dénes (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania)
E-Mail address: csatazsombor@yahoo.com; kissdenes2000@yahoo.com
New Religious Movements and The Spread of Entrepreneurship in Rural Transylvania
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In this paper we attempt to find sociological arguments regarding the development of entrepreneurial performance after the change of regime in neo-protestant Adventist communities in rural Central-Transylvania. Our first presumption concerning the socialist period is that the sectarian character of these communities and the circumstances of planned socialist economy have stimulated a specific way of modernization. Because of the typical "no-work on Saturdays" commandment of these groups, they excluded themselves from the mainstream movement of socialist modernization and succeeded within the framework of consumers' co-operatives by establishing quasi-small ventures of secondary economy. The geographically extended, religious network of the small church became the main channel of the flow of economic information. A good way to describe the success of the Adventist small businesses after the change of regime can be the conceptual framework used by Sombart and Granovetter with reference to the emergence and development of ethnic enterprises. It seems that the religious minority of Adventists had achieved in finding the balance between the "coupling to and decoupling from" the norms and moral values of economic conduct of the majority. The solidarity, group cohesion and the intensity of the interactions among the Adventists considerably reduced the transaction and information costs of the ventures.
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