The politics and micro-politics of professionalization : an ethnographic study of a professional NGO and its interface with the state

[摘要] The NGO sector is continuing to diversify, experiencing increasing competition from the for-profitmarket and pressure from the state looking for support through service delivery. There are growinginternal and external calls for the development of appropriate evaluation methods within NGOs,intended to provide a much needed transparency, and to monitor and evaluate the sector'saccountability, legitimacy, and credibility – the very politics of its image and identity. As a result manyNGOs are adapting their strategic behaviour to increase their efficacy to meet these new challenges.Professionalization or corporatization is said to be transforming NGOs into new regimes of efficiency,leading to their absorption of increasingly commercial practices. How professional NGOs go abouttheir business has become as important as what they do. Using an ethnographic approach andparticipant observation, this study reveals the many constraints and opportunities one such NGOfaced as it employed strategies to professionalize, and the various forms of organising it exhibited inits political, economic and social context. I explore the social interface between the organisation andits environment, and again between the staff members and the organisation itself. The study exploresthe connectedness between the broader context and the local experience, which in turn informs theNGO's shifting strategies. An 'embedded' understanding provides insight into the evolution of socialprocesses behind the production of everyday life within the professional NGO, exploring how it arrivesat a certain coherence in the face of multiple realities at the local level. Development literature isused as a point of departure before applying anthropological theory as a lens through which tointerpret the research questions. I place the NGO in a historical context and depict the political natureof the state-NGO relationship within a contract culture and competitive market. Discourses aroundsurviving the embedded contradictions within accountability and legitimacy are explored. I reveal thepains of institutional and cultural evolution within the organisation under the push to professionalize asstaff search for meaning and agency in everyday practice. And finally, I describe how theprofessional NGO negotiates an identity through both the external and internal politics ofrepresentation. There is no simple trajectory for professional NGOs. I find instead a competitive fightfor survival and increasing dependence on political and economic savvy. The professional NGO hasto constantly re-define and re-affirm its mission, while staff members weather the effects of thisongoing change and are forced to continually reconcile the very meaning of their work and identity tomake sense of this experience. As an organisational study this contributes to an understanding ofone professional NGO's survival strategies in context, its organisational culture as an activity, andindividual sense-making and identity formulation in the local setting. This study hopes to reveal whatis gained and lost through employing the strategy to professionalize, and add to a growing body ofresearch narrating the evolution within the NGO sector, informing questions currently being asked bystate, business, and civil society groups.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University