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Abstract: Civil society organizations (CSOs) fulfil a large variety of functions in democratic societies, e.g. providing social services for disadvantaged groups or giving a voice to societal issues. Beyond these there further functions are mentioned and various approaches to categorize them are offered in literature. Accordingly CSOs do not only contribute to economic growth and welfare by compensating markets’ and public administrations’ failures (performance-failure-models), they also provide societies with social capital, enforce social inclusion of minorities, represent interests of those who are too weak to do this by themselves, and offer alternative ways of occupational and organizational socialisation. Theorizing about CSOs strongly implies their contribution to the main objectives of western societies: justice and progress. This paper investigates the role of CSOs in democratic welfare states, providing a few case-study-like examples of Austria and Czech CSOs. The aim is to identify the functions of CSOs, possibly to detect even new functions – no matter if they are intended or not intended by the organizations themselves – and to develop a general framework of CSOs functions. A further aim is to work out by which activities, processes and structures the individual functions are carried out and how they get manifest within the organization. The question arises how CSOs deal with (at least partly) conflicting goals, and how they allocate organizational resources. To answer these questions semi-structured interviews with top-executives of CSOs in Austria and the Czech Republic were conducted. CSOs under investigation participate in very different societal spheres (politics, sports & leisure, social services). The interviews were analysed by qualitative content analysis. Beyond its theoretical and empirical aims, the paper methodologically discusses different ways of operationalizing civic functions based on established organizational theory. Empirical findings will be used to support, refute or adopt existing models on CSOs functions, e.g. proving the assumption of hybridization of CSOs.

Keywords: Civil Society Organizations; functions; roles; social captial; social inclusion; case study

23 pages, July 17, 2007

Note: Paper submitted to EGOS-Colloquium 2007, Vienna, Austria, July 4-7, 2007

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