Solidarity in Strategy by Lyn Spillman

Author:Lyn Spillman [Spillman, Lyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Business & Economics, Industries
ISBN: 9780226769554
Google: CBI3k-1sz5sC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-07-27T04:00:22+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

“A Tense and Permeable Boundary”

Business Associations in the Civil Sphere

Scholars concerned with democratic governance are interested in civic engagement, civil society, and the public sphere as well as conventional political institutions. Citizens’ orientations to the broader public—and the organizations, networks, and institutions that generate and articulate such orientations—are often at issue in studies of political culture, of nonprofit organizations, and of “social capital.” They are not often associated with economic life; indeed, they are usually defined in contrast to work, business, and industry. Because business associations are so closely associated with economic interests, no one has thought to ask whether their discourses and strategies of action ever situate their members in broader public concerns beyond their own profit and market stability. But we have already begun to see that even where they engage in conventional interest group politics, they often speak in terms of the public good. Some associations also orient themselves to the wider public sphere, beyond conventional political institutions. “Just a concern for their fellow citizens” (as one association director put it), sometimes seems to blur what Jeffrey Alexander has labeled “a tense and permeable boundary” between capitalist economic action and the civil sphere. This chapter investigates the surprisingly neglected question of how some associations participate in the public sphere, examining their attempts to influence public opinion and their engagement in civic concerns.1

After reviewing some scholarly assumptions about associations’ interest in public opinion, I assess population evidence about their public relations work, and then narrow the focus to analyze strategies of action and discursive claims about public relations evident in the focal sample, concluding with an extended illustration from the Firestop Contractors International Association. More associations are interested in influencing public opinion than are oriented to conventional political action, and they tend to differ in major organizational features from interest-group associations. In practice, an orientation to influencing public opinion often means collective marketing of the sort discussed in chapter six. But some associations do implement programs to influence public opinion beyond the market; usually, they are concerned with opinion in small, specialist publics more than the general public. Like associations oriented to conventional politics, these associations talk in a language invoking broad-based collective identities, technical reason, and the public good.

I then sketch social scientific views of voluntary groups in the American civil sphere, especially those that emphasize substantive cultural orientations rather than formal organizational features. After analyzing orientations to “civic” goals in the business association population, I examine strategies of action and vocabularies of motive adopted by those associations in the focal sample that seem to challenge the distinction between economy and civil society, and conclude with an extended illustration from the National Association of Real Estate Brokers. Some business association discourse and action looks more like that of social movements or philanthropic groups than what one might expect of business. While we should not exaggerate the extent of this civic orientation, I argue that the blurring of boundaries between “industry” interest and broader social concerns sometimes

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