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This article adds a much needed microlevel perspective to the literature on interactions between civil society organizations and governments. I argue that a microlevel perspective assists in making connections between two dominant streams in the literature on government–CSO relations: an empirical–analytical stream and a critical stream. It aims to better understand the interactions and relations, by analysing the institutional work done by CSOs' members. Adopting this approach puts CSO members in a more agentic position. Interactional processes are brought to the centre of analysis. The Dutch Community Sport Coach programme was used as a case to illustrate the usefulness of the approach. Through a one-year organizational ethnography, the article scrutinizes the way in which members of one CSO enact the organization's service delivery relationship with a municipality. Through a multidimensional perspective on agency, the analysis shows how individual CSO members act as embedded agents that assimilate a public logic into the dominant community logic. It further shows the CSO's members efforts and struggle to maintain their community logic. The article argues that an analysis of the microfoundations of government–civil society organization relations foregrounds the multivocality of the relationship as foundational.

It has long been established that voluntary sports clubs (VSCs) are ascribed a prominent social role by governments. Several scholars highlight the ascribed social values in sport policy to voluntary sports clubs and their possible implications for these voluntary organizations. Most of these studies focus on national sport policies. However, several studies signal a dominant role for local government in the public funding of sport. This discrepancy between local funding responsibility and scholarly attention to national sport policy legitimizes the following question: Which social roles do local governments ascribe to voluntary sports clubs? Further, the particularities of the social values of voluntary sports clubs have received only sparse attention. Using institutional theory as a theoretical lens, this paper addresses these lacunae through a systematic document analysis of the municipal sport policies of the twenty largest Dutch municipalities. These municipalities address four different social roles for voluntary sports clubs: (1) sports clubs as social infrastructure operators, (2) sports clubs as educational institutes, (3) sports clubs as service providers, and (4) sports clubs as project implementers. The article further elaborates on these four social roles and argues that these form a normative institutional framework for VSCs.

In a time of social liquefaction and a network approach to governance citizens and their organizations are increasingly expected to contribute to the revitalization of society. Civil society organizations are valued and used by governments for contributing to a diverse range of public issues. Sports is one of those domains in which voluntary organizations are expected to contribute to society. A range of governments increasingly use voluntary sport clubs (VSCs) as partners for contributing to public issues, like counteracting overweight among youth, improve social integration of immigrants, improving social cohesion in neighbourhoods and activating the elderly. In this dissertation this process is conceptualized as instrumentalization. In this dissertation the construction of the instrumental role of voluntary sport clubs in municipal sport policy and the way in which two VSCs in the Dutch municipality of Utrecht enact this instrumental role are studied in depth. The dissertation has three aims. First, it aims to describe and understand the process of instrumentalization of VSCs, showing tensions between instrumentalization by government and the relative autonomous position of VSCs. Second, the dissertation aims to conceptualize instrumentalization as such. The concept is used in a range of academic subdisciplines, but has not yet been extensively conceptualized. Therefore, this dissertation provides a foundational contribution for further use of this concept. Third, the dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing development of a more on agency oriented institutional approach, by combining two recent streams in this theory. It belongs to a very select number of studies that combine the institutional logics approach and the institutional work approach. The dissertation answers the follow research question: How do voluntary sport clubs enact the instrumentalization by governments and what does that mean for the dominant institutional logic(s) in voluntary sport clubs? The design of the study was inspired by ...