Paradoxes of Professionalization

Abstract

During the past two decades, opportunities for women's social movement organizations to expand their scope of engagement have often been accompanied by greater vulnerability to donor discipline and scrutiny. Efforts by activists to accommodate the demands for accountability and institutional sustainability by professionalizing their organizations have been instrumental in moving feminist concerns into the political mainstream. However, such institutionalization has frequently contributed to the persistence or creation of social hierarchies within and between women's organizations, as well as to shifts in their social change agendas and action strategies. This article examines the common dilemmas of activists in Latin America and the United States, bringing together two usually separate domains of scholarship to analyze the course, costs, and possibilities of organizational transformation.During the past two decades, spaces for feminist interventions and actions have proliferated within the state, international development arenas, and global policy networks. As women's movements have moved off the street into political institutions across the Americas, questions of how best, in Basu's (1995, 16) words, to "work the state" are far from resolved. Indeed, as Sassen (1998) observed, globalization, privatization, and the proliferation of organized efforts by nonstate actors, especially women, in new human rights regimes are changing the very nature of the state itself. At the same time that this expanding arena for feminist politics offers

An Integrative Feminist Model

“…Staff would be responsible for developing and delivering more multifaceted interventions. Necessarily, such a shift would require an even greater level of service professionalization, an already occurring trend that has drawn criticism for depoliticizing the violence against women movement (Kanuha, 1998;Markowitz & Tice, 2002). However, as the work of Whalen (1996) points out, the potential exists for professionalism and activism to coexist productively.…”

“Managing” Corporate Community Involvement

“…Markowitz and Tice (2002) refer to this risk of goal transformation as the paradox of professionalization. Their empirical work shows how professionalization 1 may attract institutional support (i.e., ''the monetary and infrastructural resources from established institutions.''…”

Collective Renewable Energy Prosumers and the Promises of the Energy Union: Taking Stock

“…As a reaction, non-profits have taken different paths [60]. However, research into not-for-profit organisations also documents some flipsides of professionalisation: the danger of 'mission drift', less engagement by volunteers, or diminishing capacity of social capital production [61][62][63]. In part, these negative effects seem to rest on whether members or external staff are employed [59][60][61].…”

“…However, research into not-for-profit organisations also documents some flipsides of professionalisation: the danger of 'mission drift', less engagement by volunteers, or diminishing capacity of social capital production [61][62][63]. In part, these negative effects seem to rest on whether members or external staff are employed [59][60][61]. Against this background, current EU policy and transposition of directives into national law may create space for the professionalisation of some collective prosumer initiatives, but will most probably also lead to hybridisation and organisational differentiation in this subsector.…”