Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in Civic American Life.

Dutil, Patrice

By THEDA SKOCPOL. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. 2003. Pp. 384. $29.95. ISBN 0-8061-3532-8.

Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations By BARRY DYM and HARRY HUTSON. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing. Pp. 248. Bibliography and index. $34.95 (paper) $69.95 (cloth)

The role and significance of associations has changed in North American society over the past quarter-century. Their numbers have multiplied, their influence has grown, and yet some scholars have mourned a loss. Robert Putnam, a pioneering thinker in the development of concepts around "social capital," struck a chord with his book Bowling Alone (2000). Putnam's book argued, grosso modo, that Americans were abandoning the various associations they had once been drawn to, and that younger generations either rejected them outright, or chose to join and support groups with whom they could intimately identify. What one eminent historian had called a "nation of joiners" had become a nation of loners.

Theda Skocpol focuses on a particular dimension of this transformation by examining the decline of national associations: those groups which, in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, patterned their "org-charts" along federal lines. She notes that many of the associations identified by Putnam and his associates in earlier work were indeed local manifestations of national associations. She sees in this growth of trans-local and trans-regional groups a strong identification with national objectives, indeed even patriotic ones. Her argument is that the need to affect national decisions through local influence--to act democratically--has changed dramatically. The groups that drew their strengths from numbers drawn across class and regions have been replaced by a new type of association that is less concerned with legitimizing its claims by pointing to numbers. The new legitimacy comes from advocacy and the money required to pay for it. In the modern state, associations now exist to change public administration, legislation, and indeed, court decisions.

The result, she argues, has had a serious impact in diminishing American democracy. Skocpol, who at the time of writing was director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, observes that the new associations are intrinsically more focused on "managing" their own narrow patch of American civic life: they manage agendas, representations, political action groups. More likely funded by tax-exempt foundations and some affluent members and less dependent on the small fees garnered by selling memberships, the new associations are less concerned with connecting with the masses and much more concerned with hiring expert professional staff and connecting with legislators, their innumerable assistants, and the media. In a word, they have become lobbies and have abandoned the idea that an affiliation with them is, in fact, identification with an idea of America. "The very model of civic effectiveness has, in short, been upended since the 1960s," she says. "No longer do civic entrepreneurs think of constructing vast federation and recruiting of interactive citizen-members. When a new cause (or tactic) arises, activists envisage opening a national office and managing association building as well as national projects from the centre" (p. 210). Groups who profess to speak for large numbers of Americans, Skocpol ob-serves, don't really need "members." Of course, many do have members, but Skocpol mourns the acts of meeting, of debating, of learning. Direct mail campaigns have replaced policy discussions. Adherents, she writes, "are likely to be seen not as fellow citizens but as consumers with policy preferences" (p. 211).

The first half of her book is more historical in nature, documenting the reasons behind the formation and growth of groups such as the Knights of Pythas. The second half examines the reasons for the decline, and the usual suspects are invoked: many of the old organizations were elitist, racist, misogynist, or tied to ideological frameworks that simply did not resonate in latter-twentieth century America. The book is not entirely nostalgic and Skocpol does see a ray of hope for the idea of community. Some associations, such as the Audubon, survived and transformed themselves from earnest and benign amateur naturalist groups into lively combatants on the environmental defence fronts. Other associations have moved aggressively to stay relevant by delivering public services. Skocpol also points, for example, to the transformation of the role of women and observes that, based on government surveys, college-educated women are more likely to affiliate with professional societies but less likely to claim memberships in school-service groups, church-related groups, or fraternal societies.

Skocpol argues that civil society was transformed by the trend of moving from membership federations to professionally managed groups and that a vital aspect of democracy was lost in the process. She also recognizes that she is swimming against the common view that the new groups do a better job of helping those who need assistance and therefore improving the stock of democracy. Her essential point is that "classic membership organizations built two-way bridges across classes and places and between local and trans-local affairs" (p. 226). The new organizations, she argues, are eroding the pillars of those bridges.

The book is compelling in its scope and ambition, but it bears a significant burden of proof. While Skocpol's premise that democracy is strengthened by associations is appealing, the argument that democracy has been diminished by this decline remains instinctive rather than proven. Evidence would suggest that all sorts of groups, associations, and leagues are just as important as they have been in the past. That they have been transformed by the new mass media and the pressures of influencing debate in Washington is hardly revealing, nor is the observation that they must adopt modern business practices to survive. All the same, Skocpol synthesizes these arguments in a compelling way and provides a framework of analysis that students of politics and public administration should want to study.

Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations, by Barry Dym and Harry Hutson, reflects Skcopol's conclusions. Focusing on modern notions of leadership, organizational readiness, strategic planning, and especially "alignment," their aim is to bring to light how non-profit organizations can improve their business practices in order to raise their level of performance. The authors focus on a number of modern-day non-profits and, based on case studies, build interesting narratives that combine insights on leadership and organizational effectiveness.

In their anatomy of non-profit efficiency, the authors focus especially on topics that will interest students of management. An interesting chapter on the "Alignment Map" discusses the relationships between leaders, followers and, tellingly, the duality of "community/market." In this regard, Dym and Hutson confirm the insight marshalled by Skocpol. There are lessons in both these books for Canadians interested in public administration issues as well as the health of non-profits. Indeed, both books point to real weaknesses in our understanding of how community organizations in the past may have strengthened Canadian democracy as well as how our best non-profits manage their successes. Both books make a compelling case that these issues should be of great concern.

Patrice Dutil, Institute of Public Administration of Canada