I have been thinking about civil society structures as a heuristic tool for a while now. For a small workshop/conference in October last year, I even wrote a rather lengthy paper. There I tried to link ideal types of organisational structures of civil society organisations (CSOs) to their performance on five legitimacy criteria, which we use in our research at the University of Bremen. While the paper sounds good – at least to me and in parts – the hypotheses I developed are rather crude and unlikely to hold empirical scrutiny, as I have come to realise. Nonetheless, I have not given up on writing something on the organisational structure of CSOs and its effect on internal democratic consultation processes.
While this interest is usually found more in the realm of management and business studies, it holds special appeal for me coming from normative political science and theory. The notion that the way people organise should have an impact on certain characteristics of their collaboration seems obvious. So maybe I have just been looking in the wrong literature, but I have found relatively few analyses. Only Dennis R. Young seems to have written something on it in the early 1990s.
I have thus been wondering if there is more out there on the impact of organisational structures of civil society organisations on their internal democracy. Please let me know if you have come across articles, papers or books on the matter.
