Nonprofit Human Service Organizations and the Work of Citizenship

• In Event: Impact of Volunteering, Leadership and Empowerment

Abstract

How does participating in nonprofit organizations—the programs they run, the services they provide or the initiatives they undertake—affect the citizenship capacity of those who are the intended beneficiaries of such efforts? Citizenship denotes membership in a political community with all the attending rights and responsibilities. But citizenship also has been described as a capacity that is developed (See Dryzek 2000; Lister 2003). Research suggests that third sector can play an important role in the development of this capacity by providing opportunities for individuals to develop civic skills and dispositions (see Clemens 2006 for a good summary; Verba 1995; Skopol 1995; Putnam 1995). These civic skills include public speaking, facilitating meetings, and engaging respectfully in debate. Dispositions include openness to different views and a sense of a common purpose (Dekker 2009). This work suggests that it is through participating in the third sector—where people come together to work on a common problem—that such capacities are developed.
But romantic notions of the third sector in cultivating citizenship capacities have given way to a more skeptical view. At least four major criticisms are evident in the literature. First, scholars point out that the formalization and bureaucratic tendencies of organizations reduce opportunity for participation and compromise the potential for these organizations to cultivate these capacities (Edwards and Hulme 1996; Smith and Lipsky 1993). Second, even when these organizations provide opportunities to participate this does not necessarily lead to the development of civic capacity: it can lead to narrow thinking and exclusionary practices (Berman 1996; Dekker 2009). Third, even when individuals develop civic skills and dispositions, this does not necessarily translate into greater participation in public life: it can lead to apathy, conflict avoidance and so on (Eliasoph 1998; Dodge and Ospina 2015). Finally, third sector organizations do not have a magic claim on citizenship development, that in fact individuals can develop civic skills and dispositions in many settings, including work and family.
This paper contributes to these efforts to develop a more nuanced understanding of this relationship between third sector and citizenship capacity by considering how participating in nonprofit human service organizations shapes the citizenship capacity of clients. Our focus on human service nonprofits and clients stands in contrast to the majority of the literature cited above, which by and large has examined member based voluntary organizations or volunteers in more formalized nonprofits (for exceptions see Majic 2011, Barnes 2014). Taking our cue from the policy feedback literature which suggests that policies produce two kinds of outcomes—policy outcomes and citizenship outcomes (Mettler and Soss 2004), we consider how the designs of nonprofit services and programs impact citizenship capacity of those who are intended to benefit, positively or negatively, intentionally or unintentionally. The paper reviews a wide body of research to offer a conceptual framework and a set of propositions to guide future research in this area.

Authors

• Lehn Benjamin, Indiana University-Indianapolis

• Abdulrazak Karriem, University of the Western Cape