SWG 03: Organizing in and through Civil Society:
Perspectives, Issues, Challenges
Coordinators
Gemma Donnelly-Cox, Trinity College Business School, Dublin, Ireland
Liv Egholm, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark
Liesbet Heyse, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Michael Meyer, WU – Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Damien Mourey, Sorbonne – University Paris 1, France
Marta Reuter, Stockholm University & Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
Filip Wijkström, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
Civil society and its private, yet publicly oriented organizations (CSOs), are increasingly in focus of organization research.
In organizational terms this is an extremely diverse sphere, encompassing groups as different as mass membership federations,
professional NGOs, think tanks, religious congregations, foundations, informal networks, nonprofit welfare service providers,
secret societies, and many more. All display different types of missions, often non-traditional governance arrangements (Cornforth
& Brown, 2014), and intricate patterns of relationships to state and business actors. Complex layers of institutional logics
constrain these organizations’ behavior, workforce motivation differs substantially from other sectors with volunteers and
high dependence on intrinsic staff motivation complicating the picture (Valentinov, 2007), while consensus even on how to
operationalize organizational effectiveness remains elusive (Lecy et al., 2012). The sheer diversity makes civil society a
unique site of theoretically fertile organizational phenomena, calling for cross-disciplinary approaches and joint efforts.