Senior CATS Search the Senior CATS
Add a paper to the Senior CATS

No 2008:143:
The Decoupling of Organizational Society: The Case of Norwegian Voluntary Organizations

Dag Wollebæk
Additional contact information
Dag Wollebæk: University of Bergen, Postal: Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Abstract: The means, motives, and opportunity of cooperation must be present if organizations are to establish mutual ties. Public benefit and conflict oriented organizations are hypothesized to have stronger motives for cooperation than member benefit and consensus oriented groups, and organizations with broad activity scope are likely to face more opportunities of cooperation than specialized organizations. These hypotheses are strengthened by results from regression analyses. The article further shows a historical decline in both the motives and opportunities for such cooperation in the case of Norway through processes of depoliticization, individualization, and specialization. Thus, here, the preconditions for cooperation within organizational society are gradually deteriorating. Such developments are likely to weaken the interconnectedness of voluntary organizations and the potential micro, meso, and macro benefits of such ties.

Keywords: Interorganizational ties; Decoupling; Voluntary associations; Social capital; Communitarianism; Pluralism; Historical institutionalism; Norway

Language: English

20 pages, 2009

Download statistics

Report problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ()
Questions about the papers in this series should be directed to Stefan Einarsson ()

RePEc:hhh:senior:2008_143 This page was generated 2009-11-02 09:56:58