Thesis (MPhil (Sociology and Social Anthropology))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / The NGO sector is continuing to diversify, experiencing increasing competition from the for-profit
market and pressure from the state looking for support through service delivery. There are growing
internal 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’s
accountability, legitimacy, and credibility – the very politics of its image and identity. As a result many
NGOs 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 about
their business has become as important as what they do. Using an ethnographic approach and
participant observation, this study reveals the many constraints and opportunities one such NGO
faced as it employed strategies to professionalize, and the various forms of organising it exhibited in
its political, economic and social context. I explore the social interface between the organisation and
its environment, and again between the staff members and the organisation itself. The study explores
the connectedness between the broader context and the local experience, which in turn informs the
NGO’s shifting strategies. An ‘embedded’ understanding provides insight into the evolution of social
processes behind the production of everyday life within the professional NGO, exploring how it arrives
at a certain coherence in the face of multiple realities at the local level. Development literature is
used as a point of departure before applying anthropological theory as a lens through which to
interpret the research questions. I place the NGO in a historical context and depict the political nature
of the state-NGO relationship within a contract culture and competitive market. Discourses around
surviving the embedded contradictions within accountability and legitimacy are explored. I reveal the
pains of institutional and cultural evolution within the organisation under the push to professionalize as
staff search for meaning and agency in everyday practice. And finally, I describe how the
professional NGO negotiates an identity through both the external and internal politics of
representation. There is no simple trajectory for professional NGOs. I find instead a competitive fight
for survival and increasing dependence on political and economic savvy. The professional NGO has
to constantly re-define and re-affirm its mission, while staff members weather the effects of this
ongoing change and are forced to continually reconcile the very meaning of their work and identity to
make sense of this experience. As an organisational study this contributes to an understanding of
one professional NGO’s survival strategies in context, its organisational culture as an activity, and
individual sense-making and identity formulation in the local setting. This study hopes to reveal what
is gained and lost through employing the strategy to professionalize, and add to a growing body of
research narrating the evolution within the NGO sector, informing questions currently being asked by
state, business, and civil society groups.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:sun/oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/1856 |
| Date | 03 1900 |
| Creators | McCusker, Monique |
| Contributors | Van der Waal, C. S., Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology. |
| Publisher | Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Stellenbosch University |
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