Transnational forms of activism partially involve practices and configurations in which the superposition between society and the state is even more problematic than it already is when action is considered "local". Their observation can therefore involve specific empirical and theoretical strategies. This articles aims to expose some of them, linked to the identification of "the field" and of internationalization processes. The article examines the ways to grasp the division of labor in those international organizations, and to track individual trajectories as a way of mapping the worlds of transnational activism. It then examines the opportunities offered by collective surveys in international activist events. Adapted from the source document.
This article studies the internationalization of four French NGOs (Medecins du Monde, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Action Contre la Faim & Handicap International). This study relativizes the somewhat idealistic hypothesis of the flourishing of a global civil society. Indeed, the reasons for NGOs to develop foreign sections are not only based on value diffusion. The growing competition between NGOs encourages them to turn 'global' in order to adapt themselves in order to expand their ability to obtain human & financial resources, both public & private, which seems analogous to the effect that the processes of internationalization has on transnational firms. However, the analogy between NGOs & transnational firms should be carefully handled. While this analogy is surely heuristic in that it focuses attention on an often-neglected aspect of NGOs' internationalization, this analogy nevertheless has limits. States continue to maintain a strong influence on these NGOs' identities & the reasons for their internationalization. Furthermore, analyzing the internationalization of these NGOs is a way of specifying what is meant by "globalization" as an environment constraining organizational strategies. Economic globalization certainly has an indirect role on NGOs' internationalization by the worldwide development of inequalities at the global level & the tendency for states & international organizations to subcontract social policies to the Third Sector. Yet there is a parallel, rather than a causal, relationship between the internationalization of NGOs & the growth of transnational firms. Therefore, other aspects of globalization are needed to understand the development of NGOs: these aspects include not only the growth & extension of means of communication, but also the increasingly intense competition for the comparative advantages resulting from state fragmentation. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.
Qualitative interviews with volunteers & salaried staff participating in humanitarian medical emergency nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) illustrate the costs of professional & militant commitment. The linear concept of a "career" of commitment permits individual dispositions to be tied to a commitment's time & duration, & in this way projects the participant's social identity. The concept of career also allows analysts to better understand why people seek commitment to militantism & how they view various life periods & situations as shaping, & being shaped by, this commitment. The various costs & benefits of commitment, especially professional costs, are discussed. Adapted from the source document.
Since the 1950s the United States and from the 1990s in the international aid sector, the term 'advocacy' (advocacy) was imposed in practice as in the associations of speech. Yet difficult to say precisely what it covers. Adapted from the source document.
What are researchers doing today when they study social movements? How to stir up sociological imagination in the light of a threefold threatening routinisation -- of research objects, of interpretation patterns and of methodologies? We are not bent here in promoting any kind of "methodologism", nor do we intend to advocate "one best methodological way" to study mobilizations, for this would be to disregard knowledge aims that are specific to each and every research. We do not promote any methodological hardening, nor do we engage in the promotion of any standard empirical approach to study social movements. Our paper and the special issue as a whole rather stick back to the principle of social science unity, this being for us the only way to open up new questions without neglecting current research endeavors. Studying and making sense of mobilizations anew is what researchers in this issue invite us to do, particularly by suggesting to better look at how mobilizations take place within time, space, and social order frameworks. Adapted from the source document.
