The Roots of Post-communist Nonprofit Organizations in Hungary: The Multiplicity of Institutional Logics

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 17. The Politics of Work

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations in Eastern Europe did not just appear with the fall of state socialist regimes. A historical case analysis shows that in Hungary nonprofits have their origins in multiple organizational forms that grew potent in the reform socialist period (1968-1989). What enabled institutional entrepreneurs to engage in proto-nonprofit activities in an institutional setting widely perceived to be hostile to civil society initiatives? It was not the importation of new organizational forms and other resources from the West; it was not the enactment of not-for-profit laws. An institutional logics approach reveals that new ways of organizing for public benefit were facilitated by the multiplicity of institutional logics competing with the bureaucratic control logic inherent to socialism.
The market logic emerging in the second economy permitted actors to pursue private action for public benefit under the mask of private market economic activities tolerated by the socialist state. When the party-state could no longer deter independent political activities and public debates on social issues such as poverty, the democracy logic of the second society allowed for advocacy, and the pooling and redistribution of private funds for public benefit. The associational logic within the changing party-state apparatus, in turn, allowed people more autonomy to organize around shared interests in social organizations, commonly structured into large mass organizations.

Author

• Erzsebet Fazekas, State University of New York-Albany