Changing Engagement of a Changing Society — Symptoms and Causes
The Future of Associations in Today’s Society (Part 1 of 3)
Current surveys show that Germans are more engaged than ever before in Civil Society. But in order to understand how the character of their engagement is changing, one has to read between the lines.
TLDR: While the share of engaged citizens in German Civil Society grows, ideal associations (voluntary & democratic) seem to experience a decrease of quality in engagement. The mobility of society and growing individualism and expectations towards free-time activities and services hit associations hard: Their role-rigid and hardly formalized structures are in continious danger of oligarchization and have lost touch to young peoples’ lifes.
This is the first part of a mini-series, I am writing alongside my research in organizational innovation within German Civil Society at the Technical University of Munich. In this first part, I’ll have a look into what has changed with our society and how people engage within it. Also, I’ll have a look on why ideal associations and their values of voluntariness and democracy might be the biggest losers of this developement.
Part 1: Changing Engagement of a Changing Society (this post)
Part 2: Cannibalism and Competition in Civil Society Organizations (read here)
Part 3: The Community Canvas — How to build Community in today’s Society
Associations have been the core legal framework of German Civil Society since mid-19. century. And today, 150 years after the oldest German associations have formed entities still valid today, the eingetragener Verein (registered association) is the flagship of civil participation in Germany. Their core values are democratic decision making and the reliance on voluntary contribution. Now, there are more engaged citizen (43.6% of residents) and associations (over 600k) than ever before here. Good times for associations, eh?
What these numbers cover, is a change of character of engagement in Germany. Associations struggle with adapting to these changes and either lose their core values of voluntariness and democracy or are stuck in irrelevance.
What is happening?
Let’s have a look at the symptoms of change, associations are experiencing:
1. Overall civil engagement in Germany may have rised from 34% of residents in 1999 to 43,6% in 2014, but so has the share of the people being active, but not really engaged in this crowd and the one of the people that won’t take over functional roles within organizations of civil society.
2. 61% of all Organizations in civil society find it very hard to staff leadership positions like boards. The growing number of associations in combination with less engaged willing to take ober those paosition led to a drop of the member/engaged member rate of -20% from 2005 to 2014.
3. Those who are engaged spend less time on their engagement, which matches the other symptoms of a lesser quality of engagement in Germany over the last years.
So what happened to our society that caused this change?
1. In 1999, 46% of 30-year-olds in Germany were living in their place of birth; in 2009 it fell to 34%. Especially younger people do not tend to spend long periods at one place of residence. Mobility in Work and Education have increased drastically. People move for their college, their first job and multiple times in the course of their professional life. This makes it hard for them to enter long term, localized commitments in their free-time, like board positions in associations. Additionally, the increasing mobility makes civil engagement even more important since it can serve as a substitute for social networks in locations of long residence like neighborly cohesion.
2. Especially young people are no longer concerned about membership, searching rather for individual ways to engage. A hint is the shift of newly registered associations’ purpose: New Associations get more specific, differentiated, subjective and individual. Accordingly, recent surveys found out that less people are engaged in registered associations and more choose to engage in individually organized groups. The rapid growth of booster clubs and grassroots initiatives fall into this category. This is not necessarily a negative development since the most researchers treat small self-organized groups who engage civilly just as registered associations, but it is a significant sign regarding the differentiation of the purpose of organizations. It also explains the complaints of the large associations in Germany about less younger members and staffing problems. With their extensive and more abstract purposes, they lose touch to the individual, personal motives of their members.
The growth of associations has led to great competition among them. New areas of interest displace traditional fields of civil engagement. Researchers found out that in traditional areas of interest membership is dropping while newer environmental associations are gaining more and more members.
The digitalization of services and individualized media and news consumption of the Web 2.0 have caused growing expectations that younger Germans see themselves as not being met by many associations. Some parts of social life get transformed to professional managed events, which additionally raises expectations upon members in associations to the board.
Why is it hard for associations to adapt?
What are the organizational roots that caused the alarming development in associations?
1. Rigid Role Centralization and increasing Commitment Expectation for Board Members
Responsibilities of board members include any important executive, managerial, financial and communication tasks that may come up. In addition, they represent the association to members, umbrella organizations and external parties. The greatest share of board members is entrusted with operational discretion as in most corporations but also with (and this is characteristic for voluntary, ideal associations) the operations themselves. This takes great engagement and commitment but also a high level of knowledge and experience in the association. Even with greater membership boards tend to be small − most are not larger than six members. This rigid concentration of responsibilities and expectations makes board members indispensable for associations. Huge commitments of time and energy are straining board members and thus, make it hard to find new members willing to take over. The gap between commitment expectations of board members and the compensation of these members via the satisfaction of their intrinsic motivation is growing. The problems associations have finding new board members is no longer a crisis but a systematic problem of a structure that has lost its fit to society.
2. Sustainment of Democracy in Growth
With the continuing professionalization of an association, the probability of oligarchization (=concentration of power with a small group of engaged members) grows systematically as well., especially when paid or professionalized members take over more control and create a gap of knowledge and expertise to voluntary members. Apart from managing the association, they start to change policies in favor of their own interest and power conservation. With growth, democracy’s decision costs also increase as the organizational overhead of getting a majority of members together and democratically reaching a decision can cause enlarged UNO-style debates with a low outcome and high expense. Hence, a major organizational challenge for making democratic decision-making sustainable for associations with more members is to facilitate democracy without driving decision-making costs to high.
3. Dangers of Low Formalization
Most ideal associations exist in the “nicheness of functional amateurism”, for what low formalization is the most widespread cause. Many associations are not aware of the associated dangers which include drastic knowledge loss with board turnover. Many associations grow old with one single board president. Problems lie ahead when they are not available anymore and leave. One of the reasons for why it is so problematic to find new board members is that the exact content of their engagement is similar to a “black box”: Any functional knowledge is with the board members and the few formalized processes of the association’s statutes are trumped by best practices only present in the minds of the boards members. This absence of documentation is causing knowledge gaps and again forces the association to depend on single members.
In the end, there seems to be only one way to sustain the values of democracy and voluntariness in Civil Society: Associations must change and adapt strategies to match changing needs of the Germans that are willing to engage.
In Part 2 of this mini-series, I’ll look into grassroots initiatives (differentiating purpose) and NGOs (professionalized management) as two alternatives to ideal associations. In Part 3, we’ll talk about how associations can harness the power of growing engagement and which organizational measures must be employed to match our changing society. My goal is to find a distinct way for traditional ideal associations to be successful, which will result in an organizational model I will present in the last part: The Community Framework.
Written by Fabian Ahrens, responsible for Operations at Unaty. This post first appeared on Unaty’s Homepage, where we regularly share our thoughts on civic society, our community, software startups and how they can interact. Unaty’s Platform helps communities around the globe to reach and engage members.
Sources:
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I am happy to share all my sources and research with interested readers, simply contact me via ahrens@unaty.de .
