Book Review: Politics and Partnerships
Brayden King, Northwestern University, published a review of “Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present,” a book by Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie, in the September 2011 issue of Administrative Science Quarterly. To view other OnlineFirst articles, please click here.
From the review:
Voluntary associations play a vital, although sometimes not very visible role in American society as engines of innovation in political and civic life. Associations create much of the fabric that weaves social life together, whether through generating social capital by linking people to others in their community or by constructing identities around which people organize and find meaning. Yet, for all their importance, voluntary associations often receive the short end of the stick in organization theory. Perhaps because they are seen as so different from firms as to need their own theories or because organizational scholars increasingly reside in business schools, where there is more interest in for-profit organizations, voluntary associations have taken a backseat to firms as the focal unit in organizational theory. A negative side effect of ignoring associations in organizational theory, of course, is that we fail to fully understand the integrative role they play in society, linking the domains of market and state and serving as key nodes in civil society. The editors of this volume, Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie, have gathered a diverse and interdisciplinary set of scholarly voices to provide a rich overview of the organized nature of American voluntarism. The contributors emphasize that voluntary associations have historically been central players in the U.S. business and political worlds, and although the nature of voluntary associations has changed in recent years, their centrality has not waned.
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