Alternative action organizations across different welfare and third sector regimes during hard economic times

ABSTRACT

Since 2008, the international economic and financial crisis has been affecting the living and working conditions of European citizens in different ways and scope. Yet, the pattern is of rising unemployment, social deprivation and poverty, cuts in health, education and social security budgets. These negative socio-economic conditions have led to major transformations in collective responses, which, among others, take place through Alternative Action Organisations (AAOs). The specific organizations carry out non-mainstream activities that primarily target the economic and the social well-being of citizens, including their basic needs, health and lifestyles. Using quantitative data from the LIVEWHAT project and drawing on social origins theory and resource mobilization theory, the article investigates AAOs’ main characteristics across four European countries that have been differently affected from the recent recession as well as belong to different welfare state and third sector regimes, including Germany, Greece, Sweden and Poland. The findings stress the importance of considering the particular combinations of the welfare state and third sector regimes as well as the severity of the experienced economic crisis in understating the variation in AAOs’ main features under a comparative perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternative action organizations
• welfare state
• third sector
• economic crisis
• social origins theory
• Europe
• resource mobilization theory

Acknowledgements

Results presented in this article have been obtained within the project ‘Living with Hard Times: How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences’ (LIVEWHAT). This project is/was funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 613237). The LIVEWHAT consortium is coordinated by the University of Geneva (Marco Giugni), and is formed, additionally, by the European University Institute (Lorenzo Bosi), the University of Uppsala (Katrin Uba), the University of Sheffield (Maria Grasso), the CEVIPOF-Sciences Po Paris (Manlio Cinalli), the University of Siegen (Christian Lahusen), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Eva Anduiza), the University of Crete (Maria Kousis) and the University of Warsaw (Maria Theiss).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 AAOs may include citizens’ initiatives, non-governmental Organizations, social movement organizations, barter clubs and networks, credit unions, ethical banks, time banks, alternative social currency, cooperatives, citizens’ self-help groups, solidarity networks and social enterprises.

2 These activities are related to urgent needs, the economy, alternative consumption, the environment, communications, food sovereignty, self-organized spaces, culture and others.

3 Although the concept of the ‘third sector’ is rather vague and inconsistently applied, Viterna et al. (2015, p. 175) define it as ‘a sector of organized human action composed of collective actors beyond the family and distinct from the state and the market’; hence, it shares some similarities with the definition of the AAOs. Additionally, similar to the AAOs, the third sector covers a range of different type of organisations (such as voluntary organizations, community-based organizations, non-profits and charities) that apply different repertoires of actions to accomplish their primary aims (Evers & Laville, 2004).

4 More information about the LIVEWHAT (Living with Hard Times: How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences) project can be found at: http://www.unige.ch/livewhat/.

5 Economic vulnerability is also high in the liberal welfare state model.

6 It should be noted that Salamon and Anheier’s (1998) third sector typology includes two more regimes, the statist and the liberal one. In the former, there is a low government social welfare spending and a small third sector, whereas in the liberal regime, there is a large third sector and a low state social welfare spending.

7 As a percentage of the total workforce of the third sector.

8 The taxonomy includes moral, material, informational and human resources.

9 The taxonomy includes moral, cultural, social-organisational, human and material resources. The most important difference of this typology with the one developed from Cress and Snow (1996) is that it eliminates the informational resource and treats social–organizational and cultural resources separately.

10 It primarily involves supportive statements by external organizations to the aims and actions of organizations.

11 More information on the method applied could be found in LIVEWHAT (2016).

12 The survey was conducted between the 2 May 2016 and 30 June 2016. The representative is defined as a person (e.g., a director, a leader, a spokesperson or any other person) who works closely with the group/organization/association and has a thorough knowledge of its main scope and activities. The active member is defined as a person who has a thorough knowledge of AAO’s main scope and activities (LIVEWHAT, 2016).

13 The criteria of selecting ‘hub/subhub’ nodal-websites included: (a) they should have nationwide coverage of AAOs, (b) the AAOs that they contain should be active in multiple action fields and (c) they should contain a significant number of websites (LIVEWHAT, 2016).

14 It should be noted that the LIVEWHAT project includes nine European countries, i.e., France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. The selection of Greece, Sweden, Poland and Germany is related to both methodological and theoretical issues. With respect to the former, the response rate in the specific countries is relatively higher than in the other countries participating to the project (see LIVEWHAT, 2016). Moreover, for the rationale of the article, it was decided to include countries that represent distinct models of the welfare state and third sector regimes and have been differently affected from the recent crisis. For instance, according to Archimbault (2009), Italy and Switzerland belong to the corporatist third sector regime; however, according to Anheier and Salamon (2006), Italy shares many features of the social democratic regime, whereas Switzerland is not classified to any regime type.