Managing a Civil Society Organization in Democratic Crisis

Abstract

This study investigated how civil society organizations (CSOs) adapted to shifts in their external environment that threatened their survival. Specifically, the study considered how CSOs in Turkey were responding to growing authoritarianism and citizens’ demands for a voice and openness. Moreover, the study sought to explain why organizational responses varied across organizations operating in the same field and the challenges CSO leaders confronted as they implemented changes in response to this environment. These pressures, both authoritarian regimes and citizens’ demands for a voice in these organizations, reflect the democratic crisis in many countries and the overall distrust in institutions. In this respect, considering the consequences of both of these pressures for the legitimacy of CSOs simultaneously is both timely and necessary. This study blended theoretical insights from neo-institutional theory and resource dependency theory as well as strategic management literature and civil society literature to fill this theoretical gap. I argue that competing external pressures created conflicting logics by providing different stipulations about how CSOs had to be managed and that CSOs developed differentiated strategies by adopting some features of each logic. I grouped these responses into two main categories: survival and mission-related responses. I demonstrated that competing institutional logics pass through the organizational field and then they are filtered by the following organizational attributes: organizational form, stance toward government, risk tolerance and organizational capacity. Tensions and paradoxical situations resulting from selected practices created various management challenges for CSO leaders. These findings offer new perspectives to the literature on civil society under authoritarian regimes by pointing out the link between outside threats confronting CSOs and significant organizational management issues, thus illustrating how political regimes constrain CSOs’ capacity to contribute to democratic processes and perform internal democracy through soft and hard repression tools.