Community Development Journal Advance Access originally published online on August 19, 2009
Community Development Journal 2009 44(4):525-528; doi:10.1093/cdj/bsp045
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2009 All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Civil Societies and Social Movements. Potentials and Problems
University of Siegen, Germany
email: lahusen@fb1.uni-siegen.de
Derrick Purdue (ed), Routledge, Abingdon, Oxford, UK, 2007, 256 pp, ISBN 978-0-415-39933-3, Hardback, £70 stg.
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Civil society has become a widely-used concept that represents what is considered to be an indispensable element of a good society and polity. Indeed, civil societies are venerated for contributing to democratization and good governance, to active citizenship and community development, to social relations and societal integration. The success of this concept can be attributed also to its ability to embrace previously distinct research strands and debates, which focussed, e.g., on non-governmental, non-profit and/or voluntary organizations, on the Third Sector, on social movements and on social capital, amongst others. However, as a conceptual umbrella, it risks to lack empirical and analytic precision. Moreover, most debates on civil society tend to blur analytic and normative questions. In fact, civil society has not only been a scientific category for analyzing societies, but also a programmatic tool for policy-making.
The collective volume edited by Derrick Purdue contributes to a