新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

Top-down civic projects are not grassroots associations: how the differences matter in everyday life

摘要：

Issue Title: Special Issue: Civicness and the Third Sector Guest Editors: Paul Dekker and Adalbert Evers Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which participants and researchers alike often called "volunteer" or "civic" groups, operate very differently from traditional civic groups. The ethnography systematically details prevalent tensions that actors face when they try to cultivate the civic spirit in these increasingly typical organizations.