The “great transformation” of Anthropocene is resultant of controversial processes. Their multidimensional feedbacks may generate sustainable societies, but also may strengthen inequality, technology push and environmental degradation. Which of these trends prevail in longer run may depend on civil society, its organizations’ transformational dynamism enabling social agency by “going after the small picture” (Giddens, 1984). In order to enhance social sustainability, the institutional dominance of fault dichotomy “market versus state” has to be replaced by the civil society’s transformational dynamism.
The analysis of Finnish and Hungarian communities provides examples of the civil society organizations’ broad array indicating changes affecting value creation, work, competition, and resourcing, institutional and relational dynamism. They bring about the volunteers’ empowering individuation and the communities’ self-transformation affecting broader environment. The commons enable and presuppose resource sharing and multiplication of soft resources improving effectiveness of collective resourcing, extending and upgrading societal resource base. Voluntary work unfolds as empowering co-creation, fulfils multiple, mostly higher level needs and improves life quality while socializing. Cooperative efforts enable to belong, share team spirit, and make a difference - by generating empowering individuation. Volunteers act as ‘person in community’ and as Homo economicus that follows self-interest through rational choices while fulfils its needs. However their choices don’t have to follow ‘single-minded rationality’ aiming to ‘maximize utility’ and optimize profit in order to survive in market competition.
The self-organizing communities are constitutive of current global associational revolution (Salamon et al., 2003) increasing mass-engagement in public action. It may provide political dimension of solidarity economy offering new perspectives of mass emancipation through self-empowerment of civil society. The commons provide - at least temporary and partial - shelter against robust alienation pressures of mass-societies and potential to facilitate social change, carry out social agency and act as social entrepreneur through voluntary cooperation.
Commons indicate emerging tendencies often in early phase of their nascence. The literature frequently argues that cooperation may trump competition (Benkler, 2011) and it generates social capital and trust which is indispensable for functioning of society, including market and public sectors. However cooperation often is limited within boundaries of particular organizations, groups, social entities and is oriented against ‘others’, non-members. The volunteers capitalize on and catalyse institutional twin-primacy of non-zero-sum approach and interdependence, co-create abundance of social capital that generates trust and expands its radius. Extension of the radius of trust across and beyond boundaries of particular entities catalyses cooperation among members of diverse communities i.e. it enables to overcome and prevent cooperation paradox. The more frequent and stronger is collaboration among members of various organizations the more inclusive and un-fragmented it becomes.
The enhanced collaborative tendencies interplay with the communities’ networking transformation into project (Castells, 1996) social entities and with emergence of their webs or quasi-fields. The broader and stronger are the cooperative fields the stronger may become the inclusive and un-fragmented cooperation. I.e. the communities’ transformational dynamism generates and capitalizes on new dialectics of cooperation interplaying with altered, participative competition that feeds back with increasingly association-prone character of social fields. This new dialectics of cooperation may generate changed, association-prone patterns of institutional isomorphic pressures (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) and catalyse their scale-free, fractal-like extension (Plowman et al., 2007) through strength of weak ties (Granovetter, 1973).
The volunteers’ social entrepreneurship enables innovation and agency and catalyses a new civil economy, which facilitates broadening re-engagement of creativity that new technologies - including digitalization and robotization - ‘liberate from wage-work’ with accelerating speed. It offers genuine alternative for “jobless growth”, accelerating climate change and environmental degradation and is constitutive of an association-prone sustainable societal kinetics.
References:
Bauwens, M. &Kostakis V. (2016) Towards a new reconfiguration among the state, civil society and the market.
Benkler, Y. (2011) The Penguin and the Leviathan The Triumph of Cooperation over Self-Interest.
Bollier, D. (2016) Commoning as a transformative social paradigm
Defourny, J. & Nyssens, M. (2016) ‘Fundamentals for an International Typology of Social Enterprise Models’, ICSEM Working Papers
Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,
DiMaggio, P.J. & Powell W.W. (1983) ‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields’ American Sociological Review
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society Outline of the Theory of Structuration.
Granovetter, M. (1973) ‘The strength of weak ties’ American Journal of Sociology
Hess, C. & Ostrom, E. (eds.) (2007) Understanding knowledge as Commons From theory to practice.
Nicholls A. (ed.) (2006) Social Entrepreneurship – New models of sustainable social change.
Plowman, D. A; Baker, T. L., Beck, T.E., Kulkarni, M.,Solansky S.T. & Travis, D. V. (2007a) ‘Radical Change Accidentally: The emergence and amplification of small change’ Academy of Management Journal
Salamon, L.M, Sokolowsky, W.S., & List R. (2003) Global Civil Society An Overview
Veress, J. (2016) Transformational Outcomes of Civil Society Organizations
9. Social and solidarity economy, civil society and social movements
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