One Introducing the anthology

We know that through the organisations of civil society ordinary women have done extraordinary things to challenge oppression locally, nationally and across the globe. We know that they have achieved many successes, and have developed outstanding entrepreneurial activities. Yet this story remains largely untold until now. Women are at the heart of civil society organisations (CSOs). Women come together to run activities, provide services, establish local networks and raise funds; studies suggest that women are more philanthropic than men and make up the majority of volunteers (Themudo, 2009). Yet research into civil society organising has tended to ignore considerations of gender. The rich history of activist feminist organisations is rarely examined. It is time that changed.

We also know, however, that sometimes organisations find themselves drawn into colluding and reproducing the structures that maintain women in positions of marginality and systemic disadvantage. That is why we must also question our collective achievements. If we are to advance theory and to develop strategies into the future, we must also be concerned with critiques of organisational processes, dynamics and activities as well as success stories.

In this anthology, we identify some of the issues and lessons that arise from the various case studies presented, primarily from a grounded empirical analysis, exploring the multiple sites of domination and struggle and the respective challenges of working inside as well as attacking from outside oppressive institutions. We specifically focus on the role of CSOs and return to the challenging question posed by the title. To what extent are CSOs able to challenge the oppression and domination of women at a local, national and international level? To what extent do CSOs actually find themselves working in ways that are themselves discriminatory and therefore perpetuate the status quo? In order to examine these questions, this anthology brings together current research on CSOs and their involvement in the emancipation of women. The anthology contains contributions from researchers and activists working in many different parts of the world, and includes work on new and emerging issues as well as perennial ones. How do CSOs make use of social media? What is the effect of the growing significance of religion in many cultural contexts? How do they respond to the impact of environmental degradation on women’s lives?

Our anthology brings together two bodies of literature, which have generally been treated separately; that of research into civil society and its organisations, and that of feminist research into organisations. In this chapter we begin by setting out some of the key theoretical developments that have informed research in these areas and then discuss the overlapping and conflicting areas of interest. We conclude by presenting our conceptual schema for exploring this overlapping terrain and demonstrating how it is developed through the contributions of the individual chapters.

Research into civil society organising is a relatively new, albeit rapidly growing field. The Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) was founded in the US in 1971 (Horton Smith, 2003) and the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) in 1972 (www.istr.org). Horton Smith reflects that at the time of ARNOVA’s inception:

my reading of the literature on voluntary or common interest associations indicated two virtually opposite but complementary empirical conclusions: One was that such phenomena were also the direct topic of research by some scholars in many other scholarly disciplines and professions than sociology …the other was that there seemed to be no interdisciplinary or inter- professional efforts to integrate the study of associational and volunteer phenomena, which I began to term ‘Voluntary Action Research’ (VAR). There were no relevant interdisciplinary scholarly associations, no such conferences, nor scholarly journals, nor research institutes dedicated to VAR.

(Horton Smith, 2003, 459)

Early scholarly research into CSOs, not as yet constituting a discipline of its own, tended to draw primarily on political science, and to a lesser extent on sociology or management literature for inspiration and approaches. Not surprisingly, early concerns were with the nature of civil society itself, alongside debates about its function. Foley and Edwards distinguish two, somewhat conflicting streams: the first, drawing on de Tocqueville, ‘puts special emphasis on the ability of associational life in general and the habits of association in particular to foster patterns of civility in the actions of citizens in a democratic polity’ (Foley and Edwards, 1996, 1). The second, inspired by Gramsci, sees civil society as a space in which ‘social domination and power relations are contested’ (Sanger, cited by Hinterhuber, 2014, 9). These two contrasting conceptualisations of civil society constitute what Foley and Edwards describe as a ‘paradox’ or tension that is unresolved, and continues to influence both researchers and policy makers, and determines the problematic that runs throughout this anthology.

Out of these contrasting understandings have emerged a number of related research interests. A major concern of much CSO research is that of democratic engagement and the enacting of citizenship (Kenny et al, 2015). These studies investigate the extent to which involvement in associational activity, primarily through volunteering, helps to foster social capital (Onyx and Leonard, 2000; Rochester et al, 2010; Kenny et al, 2015) and promote ‘active citizenship’ through which local groups create bonds of neighbourliness and also hold democratic institutions to account. The ‘social capital’ strand of research received an injection of enthusiasm (and funding) following the success of Robert Putnam’s work on democracy in Italy (1993), in which he concluded that local government functioned more effectively in areas that had a strong tradition of associational activity – although the nature, or even direction of these causal links is still debated (Jochum, 2003).

The more conflictual understanding of civil society has inspired a contrasting body of work on social activism, social movements and community development. Bock (1988) suggests that social movements are caused by tensions or even crises in a given society; their role is not to support democratic institutions and to strengthen existing societal conditions but to challenge and even fight them. Thus, social movements arise out of a perceived need for social change while community development-based volunteering tends to be more concerned with building social cohesion and better meeting the needs of communities.

Not surprisingly, researchers looking at civil society organisations are also likely to focus their attention differently, depending on what they understand their purpose to be. So, for example, one strand of research on accountability focuses on accountability to funders and policy makers while others look at accountability to the community (Leat, 1990). Under the increasing influence of neoliberal ideologies, there is pressure for civil society organisations to become social enterprises and adopt internal management systems that are more ‘businesslike’. Thus, as Dart notes: ‘moral legitimacy of social enterprise can be understood because of the consonance between social enterprise and the pro-business ideology that has become dominant in the wider social environment’ (Dart, 2004, 419). In contrast, other researchers, particularly those concerned with community development, investigate mechanisms for participation and community control, seeing those as means of operationalising the organisations’ mission (Rawsthorne and Howard, 2011; Taylor, 2007).

Social movement theorising also seems to be distinguished by these two broad strands; Mayo (2006) identifies a ‘rational actor’ approach, that assumes that people mobilise around identified areas of self-interest (primarily economic and political, such as the union movement), and what she describes as the ‘new social movements’ approach which places greater emphasis on issues of identity, ideology and social and cultural reproduction. Mayo suggests that rational actor approaches are useful for providing insights into contextual pressures that threaten the survival of a movement and its responses while political processes involved in new social movements are helpful in addressing the ways in which movements mobilise within a particular context and how they ‘frame’ issues, and develop ‘repertoires of contention’ (Mayo, 2006, 72).

Of course representing a huge variety of work through such a binary schema is over-simplistic: the extraordinary diversity of the sector is a strength but also a source of conceptual challenges. This may, at least partially, account for the enormous amount of work devoted to definitions, boundaries and relationships (for example, a recent edition of Voluntary Sector Review, November 2013, had five articles on this topic). Some of this work focuses on the boundaries between and relationships with the other two sectors, public and private, or state and market. Other studies explore inter-sectoral relationships such as those between the voluntary and community sectors, advocacy and service providing organisations, member-led versus ‘top-down’ (Tanaka and Rego, Nine and Eleven, this volume). Some of these studies are concerned with a drive for purity; ‘real’ voluntary organisations as opposed to ‘hybrid’ (Evers, 2005; Billis et al, 2010; Rochester, 2013). The literature on social movements also reflects differing views about the boundary between social movements and social movement organisations, Della Porta and Diani (1999) holding that movements are distinct from formal organisations, while Mayo (2006) suggests that the boundaries between them are more fluid. Another key distinction between the two kinds of social movements (the ‘rational actor’ approach and the ‘new social movements’ approach) refers to their mode of operating, with new social movements such as the World Social Forum, and the feminist movement itself, preferring horizontal, networked forms of organising rather than vertical (hierarchical) structures (Kenny et al, 2015).

Much of feminist theorising until relatively recently arose out of second-wave feminism in OECD countries and the women’s liberation movement(s) of the 1960s and 1970s (Belsey and Moore, 1997; Lewis, 2014). Early concerns were focused on the material injustice, and the demand for equal rights for women, for example, the right to vote, the right for equal employment and wage opportunities, the right to equal access to education. An early concern was with problematising the division between public and private/domestic space, arguing that such divisions were not innate, but political constructions (‘the personal is political’) that perpetuated women’s segregation in the home, and restricted their access to the public sphere as ‘natural’ (Hinterhuber, 2014). Feminist theorising examined the underlying patriarchal structures of society and how these perpetuated unequal rights and access to resources. Of concern was the nature of paid and unpaid work inside and outside the home; the extent to which the family was to be understood as an institution, women’s role within it and whether it was itself a part of civil society.

Fraser (2013) traces the trajectory of western feminism through this initial focus on the redistribution of resources and labour, both economic and domestic, turning then to a shift in western feminist academic scholarship to deeper concerns with recognition which have concentrated more on the ways in which understandings of gender are constructed, reified and challenged. Much of this work takes its inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s famous interest in the processes of ‘becoming’ woman and has been developed by writers such as Kristeva, Irigaray and Butler. It is de Beauvoir’s proposition that the understanding of gender as socially constructed, fluid and mutable (as opposed to the more ‘essentialist’ view that gender is inherent, biologically determined and ‘natural’) that has shaped most current feminist research. It also explains why the focus of this research is on the processes through which such constructing occurs and can be disrupted and challenged; the ‘doing and un-doing’ of gender (Nentwich and Kelan, 2014). Two primary sources of investigation are, therefore, ‘discourse’ (because language constructs meaning) and ‘the body’ (through which gender is realised and inscribed). West and Zimmerman (1987; 2009) suggested that gender is achieved in interaction, and involves ‘being accountable to current cultural conceptions of conduct becoming to – or compatible with the “essential natures” of – a woman or a man’ (West and Zimmerman, 2009, 114). For West and Zimmerman social structures and hierarchies are critical in shaping these cultural conceptions, with pressures on women to conform to such external demands. However, the poststructuralist understanding subsequently developed by Butler places more emphasis on the notion of performativity by women themselves, summarised by Nentwich and Kelan as ‘the process through which gendered subjects are constituted by regulatory norms that are restrictive and heterosexual’ (Nentwich and Kelan, 2014, 123).

There are several commonly made criticisms of this body of work. One is that much of what is written is very inaccessible because of the level of abstraction and the complexity of the language used. Second, although it has become very sophisticated in philosophical terms it has moved a long way from engaging in women’s day-to-day experiences and practical concerns. While it may well provide some insights into why women continue to perform as gendered subjects to their own disadvantage, they give little practical guidance as to how to prevent violence against women, for example (and can even be seen as a justification for ‘blaming the victim’). The activist edge that was strong in the earlier phase of the women’s movement is blunted. A third criticism is that this western dominated ‘turn’ in feminist theorising has not adequately represented the experiences of women in the Global South, themselves also profoundly heterogeneous (Mernissi, 1991; Mohanty et al, 1991; Mohanty, 2003). Even more concerning, the dominance of western feminism may have acted to silence their voices from the on-going debates. Omvedt (2004), for example, identifies a number of significant differences in understandings about the nature of women’s oppression and by extension, different trajectories and imaginaries of emancipation. Spivak (1994) famously contends that the voice of the ‘subaltern’ (in Gramscian terms) can never be heard if mediated through western constructed frames of reference.

Turning to the field of organisation studies, early feminist theorising argued that bureaucratic organisational structure perpetuated institutional forms of dominance and subordination (Ferguson, 1984). According to Ferguson’s analysis it is both the case that feminist discourse is antithetical to the discourse of bureaucratic control, and that it is impossible for women within bureaucracies to resist the imperative of domination and control. Women in senior positions then come to reproduce the very structures of inequality that they struggle to overcome. The alternative feminist organisational structures developed during the 1960s and 1970s had the following characteristics in common, as summarised by Bordt:

These forms of feminist, collectivist organisations were subsequently critiqued as being impractical, ineffective and counterproductive. In particular, power inevitably becomes centralised into an informal elite, an oligarchy that is unaccountable to any wider or higher authority, thus producing ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’ (Freeman, 1975).

Gherardi’s (2003) review of feminist organisation theory identified three research agendas: women in organisations and management (more related to the focus on redistribution), organisation theory as gendered knowledge practice, and the study of the processes of gendering as they occur within organisations (recognising that organisations are not neutral but sites where gender dynamics, and even understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman are reproduced, sometimes resisted, sometimes transformed). Thus, much feminist organisation research is focused on deconstructing and problematising the internal dynamics of organising, rather than the external actions of the organisation.

One overlapping concern between CSO research and feminist research is the question of whether emancipation is achieved through making existing structures and institutions more accessible to women (the ‘redistributive’ approach) or whether emancipation can only be achieved through a radical deconstructing and remaking of those very structures. Hence, the nature of organisation and organising, and questions as to whether these processes reify existing oppressive practices and definitions, become centrally important. In the NGO literature this debate is reflected in the critiques of differing approaches to development and in particular, the ideological shift in policy from the ‘women in development’ (WID) agenda (characterised by policies aimed at integrating women into existing development programmes) to the ‘gender and development’ (GAD) approaches (ostensibly aiming to challenge the structures of male/female power relations, yet in practice working primarily at the level of the individual (Phillips, Chapter Two, this volume; Mayo, 2006)).

Another interesting area of overlap is the shared, albeit somewhat distinctive interest in Gramsci’s political theory. While the CSO literature has taken up his conceptualisation of civil society as a space which struggles for hegemony are contested, feminist writers, especially from the Global South, have been inspired by the postcolonialist ‘subaltern’ histories project, which aims to reclaim history from the perspectives of the most marginalised (Gramsci appropriated the word ‘subaltern’, originally used to refer to the most junior military personnel, the ‘cannon fodder’ and extended it to refer to any oppressed group) and Spivak’s contribution to it in her much quoted essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (1994). Spivak’s question carries a symbolic role, beyond the actual lines of her argument, representing the invisible and unvoiced, and the challenges of responding to their situation more broadly.

While the idea of an underlying tension between challenging or maintaining the status quo is clearly relevant to our concerns, it is striking how little civil society research regards either the civil society ‘space’ or the organisations themselves as gendered. There are, of course, exceptions such as Odendahl and O’Neill (1994), Parpart et al (2002), Howell and Mulligan (2005), Hagemann et al (2008). More recently, Hinterhuber’s recent literature review (2014) on gender and civil society makes an important contribution. However, it is also the case that women’s and gender studies in the field of political and social sciences have ‘addressed “civil society” as a research subject only to a very limited extent’ (Phillips cited in Hinterhuber, 2014, 2).

Where the literature on CSOs and women’s emancipation does overlap is in the work on social movements. Bock (1988), for example, focuses on the study of women’s movements in the context of theories on social movements.

Furthermore, some of these studies are interested in problematising not only the aims and aspirations of social movements but also their structures and forms of organisation with Jordan and Maloney (1997) noting that social movements are not all characterised by non-hierarchical and participatory styles of organising. However, in the literature on civil society organisations more generally ‘organisation’ is rarely deconstructed or critiqued in relation to gender. To the extent that the internal processes or organisations are examined it is primarily in light of their effects on the mission, or driving purpose (Hasan and Onyx, 2008).

Therefore, to briefly summarise: feminist organisation studies literature tends to focus on the core problematic of organisation itself, while CSO literature is more likely to concentrate on the ways in which organisations seek to influence the political, social and/or economic environment. However, within each of the two bodies of literature we have also identified several areas of shared concerns. The first is the ideological debate between the more liberal approaches that underpin calls for redistribution and for the inclusion of women versus the more radical approaches that seek to deconstruct the prevailing power relations that maintain women in marginalised positions, even when the numerical representation of women is increased. The second area of overlapping concern is the heavily western orientation of much of this literature and the importance of incorporating insights from the experiences of women’s organising beyond these narrow confines. A third concern regards the effects and consequences for women of the increasingly dominant and global phenomenon of neoliberalism.

Nancy Fraser’s collection of essays (2013) provides a useful analysis of the particular tensions and crises that have provided the context for more recent manifestations of women’s organising by presenting an analysis of the trajectories of western feminism situated within the context of the growth of neoliberal capitalism. Fraser approaches the topic from a feminist perspective but in her analysis she raises some relevant concerns about the role of CSOs that overlap with Mayo’s analysis of social movements. In particular, both Fraser and Mayo highlight what Fraser describes as a ‘disturbing coincidence’ that the shift in ideological emphasis (characterised by Fraser as the movement from redistribution to recognition, and by Mayo as the movement from the WID to the GAD stance) accompanies the international growth in neoliberal strategies that have had profoundly negative consequences for women. Particularly relevant to our concerns are their suggestions that CSOs have been, at least to some extent, complicit in these developments. This has happened primarily because CSOs have moved into the space vacated by the retreating state.

This move has been welcomed by some but heavily critiqued by others. In support of their arguments that CSOs have contributed to the growth of neoliberalism, Mayo points out that while there has been a significant increase in the role and influence of CSOs during this period, this has accompanied a growing dependence on women for providing social services, who previously might have been employed by the state (with long-term contracts and secure salaries) working in CSOs (on either a voluntary basis or on a steadily declining rate of pay and insecure working conditions). Fraser’s critique focuses on the role of micro-credit. She argues that ‘micro-credit has burgeoned just as states have abandoned macro-structural efforts to fight poverty, efforts that small scale lending cannot possibly replace’ (Fraser, 2013, 222). This has happened, in part at least, because ‘counter-posing feminist values of empowerment and participation from below to the passivity-inducing red tape of top-down etatism, the architects of these projects have crafted an innovative synthesis of individual self-help and community networking, NGO oversight and market mechanisms’ (Fraser, 2013, 221–2). This challenge, that CSOs have contributed to, or at least been complicit in, the growth of neoliberalism, and with consequences that have been deleterious for women, warns us against complacency, and requires us to ask, if neoliberalism is itself a source of oppression, how is it to be challenged and resisted?

Fraser’s (2009) thesis is that the second-wave feminist critique of an androcentric, state-organised capitalism wove together economic, cultural and political dimensions of gender injustice, although it also paved the way for post-Fordist capitalism: feminist cultural critique and identity politics prevailed over socio-economic critique. Fighting androcentrism with grassroots organising and anti-hierarchical rhetoric went well with the neoliberal ideas of horizontal team capitalism and the envisioned liberation of individual creativity and had the effect of further undercutting of the family wage ideals. These moves together unwittingly provided a key ingredient of neoliberalism, namely the dual earner model. A focus on labour market participation prevented the re-conceptualisation of care work. Finally, neoliberal anti-etatism dovetailed with feminist critique of the paternalist welfare state; progressive ideas of citizen’s empowerment in civil society legitimated retrenchment and marketisation. Accordingly, Fraser asks whether there is ‘a subterranean elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism’ (Fraser, 2009, 114).

Fraser’s response is to strengthen the notion and significance of emancipation. Emancipation is different from empowerment, though both are sometimes used interchangeably and both can have positive implications for women. Empowerment is about giving (or taking) power or authority to women, individually or collectively. But emancipation is broader; to emancipate is ‘to free from restraint of any kind, especially the inhibitions of tradition; to terminate paternal control’ (Macquarie dictionary). Emancipation as a focus is useful if one wants to develop an expanded and non-economistic understanding of capitalist society (Fraser, 2013, 226). She recalls Polanyi’s analysis of ‘The Great Transformation’ from the 1930s. Polanyi analysed the history of capitalism with a double movement, historical tendencies of marketisation on the one hand and social protection on the other. He distinguished two possible relationships of markets with society: markets can be embedded (historically the norm), that is, linked to non-economic institutions involving restraints and interventions, or they can be dis-embedded, that is, free from extra-economic controls (as in neoliberalism). Polanyi associated embedded markets with social protection and saw it as positive; however, the core of the feminist critique of the welfare state is that many institutions of social protection are oppressive, selective, sexist or outright racist. At the same time, marketisation can be liberating, yet also oppressive. Emancipation thus can line up with marketisation or with social protection. Radical feminists of the second wave leaned towards marketisation, not always intentionally, whereas socialist feminists tended to favour social protection and the transformation of the mode of protection.

These thoughts lead Fraser to the conclusion that Polanyi’s double movement has to be complemented with emancipation – a standpoint from which one fights domination from wherever it stems: ‘emancipation is to scrutinise all types of norms from the standpoint of justice’ (Fraser, 2013, 233). Emancipation is a third movement between marketisation and social protection and the relations between two movements are mediated by the third. In this sense, social protection fights against tendencies within emancipation, which are eroding solidarity; yet emancipation attacks ‘public hierarchy’ and oppressive forms of social protection, as well as oppressive forms of marketisation, as in the case of care work.

Fraser cautions against adopting over-simplistic analyses that swing between the two polarities of presenting the freedoms of the liberated market as the solution to over-weaning state dominance on the one hand, and the benevolent state as the guarantor of protection against the depredations of the uncontrolled market, on the other. She points out that neoliberal capitalism and state protectionism have both provided opportunities for women. However, they have also reified dominating and oppressive structures and traditions. She argues instead, for an analysis that ‘avoids reductive economism but also avoids romanticising “society”’ (Fraser, 2013, 230). Fraser’s suggestion is to position emancipation as a third, and equally incommensurable category and as a standpoint from which domination can be identified and challenged from wherever it is manifested, noting that ‘emancipation aims to expose relations of domination wherever they root, in society as well as in economy’ (Fraser, 2013, 233).

It is our intention to use this notion of emancipation, as an aspiration and a standpoint, as the underlying structuring principle of this book. Emancipation, in Fraser’s understanding is a positioning from which other systems/institutions/practices can be critiqued. Omvedt (2004) reminds us that emancipation means different things to different women and in different contexts and we recognise that the trajectories of feminism and neoliberalism Fraser maps and critiques are not manifested in the same way in different parts of the world, where feminist organising is not specifically against the state nor against the market but against the prevailing hegemony. Neoliberal forces (from the west) certainly have had an effect, but that is added to pre-existing cultural forces of domination. In most if not all societies the relationship between women and men is imbedded in traditions, habits, regulations shaping the role and position of women and men in these societies. Therefore, culture and traditions, including religion, are categories that also deserve serious examination as they can function as systems of oppression.

The idea for the book originated in a discussion between members of the Board of the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) and the Affinity Group for Gender (AGG), which has been convened on a voluntary basis on behalf of ISTR since 2002. The AGG brings together researchers who are specifically concerned with promoting, highlighting and supporting research into CSOs and women’s emancipation both within ISTR and beyond. A call for chapter proposals was circulated through the ISTR network as well as through gender studies/feminist and organisation research channels. Forty-four abstracts were submitted and the final selection was made taking into account geographic spread and the extent to which the proposed chapter would add either new understanding or greater nuance to already existing knowledge.

The breadth of activities discussed within these chapters is impressive and demonstrative of the scope and diversity of the field. We include chapters on emergent social movements, CSOs that are heavily reliant on the internet for organising, women’s groups and generic groups, campaigning and advocacy organisations, grassroots associations and service providers operating under government contracts. However, despite our good intentions, we are aware that there are some significant gaps. Several authors had to withdraw as other commitments competed for their time. Some important themes were identified by the editors, but no proposals were submitted to develop them. Efforts were made to commission chapters on important topics and these were partially successful, but not completely so. We are particularly aware of the lack of contributions from the Middle East, except for Morocco, despite women’s significant involvement in the ‘Arab Spring’ alongside their increasing vulnerability as these events have unfolded.² There is also nothing on China. However, we do have contributions focusing on Asia (Nepal), Russia, Africa (Nigeria and Kenya), South America (Uruguay) and Europe (the UK, France, Italy and Portugal) as well as two studies taking a global perspective.

We have chosen to include a wide range of issues in the anthology because gender relationships permeate all realms of life for individuals and sociological groups as well as providing the genesis and focus for many organisations. In order to attract the interest of innovative and unconventional contributors we have deliberately left the definitions open of what we acknowledge are very contested terms for feminists working within civil society. The field of CSO research is redolent with studies on definitions; of the sector (non-profit or non-government; community or voluntary or development) and of its organisational forms (social movements, associations, enterprises, networks, charities, charitable businesses, the list goes on). Similarly, feminist researchers debate the distinctions between empowerment and emancipation alongside the differing theoretical and political stances inherent in the use of the categories of ‘woman’ and/or ‘gender’. The authors presented here occupy a range of views about whether, for example, social movements are organisations, and whether voluntary and non-governmental; or whether empowerment and emancipation are interchangeable terms or represent important distinctions. We hope that within each chapter the particular stance of the author(s) is clear. While we have not imposed any framework of our own on our authors’ conceptual framework, we, as editors, do explore some of the theoretical implications of these terms in this and the final chapter.

Our anthology will therefore be focused around these different understandings of emancipation, how domination is to be resisted and how emancipation is to be achieved through organising. Therefore, although each of the chapters contains these dual emphases, in the first section we present chapters that are more outwardly focused and in the second section we include chapters that look inward, at organisations themselves. Drawing from the literature reviewed above we have identified three different understandings of organisation; organising as a means to an end, organising as the manifestation of alternative values and imaginaries and third, organisations as institutions that reify and maintain oppressive understanding of gender and role.

Phillips’ chapter complements ours, and is therefore included in the introductory section, because her research directly concerns these differing and competing understandings of emancipation and empowerment, underpinned by an international empirical study of women’s organisations. Her chapter is driven by concerns about the failure to achieve gender equality on a global scale and leads her to explore how women’s NGOs identify (or don’t) with these different paradigms of emancipation. Her findings highlight important limitations of the ‘empowerment’ paradigm, arguing that it has lost much of its transformational potential.

This section contains contributions that focus primarily on women’s activism, how it is to be achieved and how domination is to be resisted through organised collective action. The first two chapters, by Elia and Keyhan, written from a practitioner standpoint, describe the emergence of two new networked movements, one in Italy with very open-ended concerns and aspirations, the other worldwide and focused primarily on street violence/harassment. As described by the authors, these movements manifest very contemporary attributes including sophisticated use of the internet and reflecting concerns of representation and multiple interpretations of experience. The second two chapters provide case studies of two radical activist groups, both of which appropriate cultural symbolic resources and deploy them in highly sophisticated ways. Hinterhuber and Fuchs analyse the Russian activist group Pussy Riot, which aims to challenge, disrupt and widen the space for public expression while La Barbe’s activities, discussed by Hildwein, are more focused on the absence of women in the world of work. The technologies employed by each of these groups rely on the disruptive power of parody.

These chapters are followed by Pousadela’s discussion of the campaign to legalise abortion in Uruguay from a political perspective with emphasis on women’s participation in political processes. The section concludes with a chapter that exemplifies Fraser’s appeal for analyses that take emancipation as a position from which to identify and critique domination in whatever institutional structures it manifests itself: Acey explores women’s activism within the Niger Delta region and employs an ecological perspective to highlight the inter-relationships of the many agencies involved and their implications for women’s increased participation and choice.

The second section focuses on organisations: CSOs whose primary purpose is women’s emancipation, CSOs run by women and women working in mixed CSOs. The chapters are arranged so as to bring out some of the underlying problematics.

The first two chapters explore the potential for intermediary organisations, conceptualised as ‘incubators’ by Tanaka and ‘meso’-level organisations by Tavanti et al. Tanaka’s ‘incubators’ draw on feminist imaginaries and construct the role of the organisation as that of nurturer, while the risks and possibilities of cultural domination are also noted in Tavanti et al’s analysis.

Difficulties faced by organisations working with competing understandings of feminism are taken up by Rego and Lounasmaa. Rego studies women’s leadership in emergent Roma associations in Portugal, exploring the ways in which women fashion models of leadership that are rooted in cultural norms and values which, while problematic in certain ways, provide contrasting models to the more elitist approaches of infrastructure organisations. Lounasmaa, however, focuses on tensions between ‘faith-based’ and ‘rights-based’ organisations in Morocco, highlighting the importance of each place in maintaining a sense of difference even when sharing many concerns and aspirations.

The next two chapters look inwardly, interrogating processes of gendered organising within CSOs. The approaches these authors take have most affinity with the body of work of western European feminist organisation studies, exploring how the undoing and re-doing of gender is reified within patterns of organising. Their specific interests are in the kinds of jobs available to women in CSOs (Dussuet and Flahault) and more specifically in flexible working (East and Morgan).

The section concludes with a case study of Maendeleo ya Wanawake, the longest standing women’s organisation in Kenya. Lutomia et al are highly critical of Maendeleo ya Wanawake’s operating processes and achievements but their critique is wide ranging and brings together many of the themes addressed earlier on. This chapter, like the one by Acey that concludes the previous section, draws on alternative models of feminism to provide a critique that encompasses multiple standpoints.

Finally, in the concluding chapter, the editors draw out and summarise the insights into the key problematics afforded by the contributions in this book. We believe that this is the first anthology to attempt such an overview of the part played by civil society organisations in the ongoing battle against the oppression of women. We highlight the wonderful diversity of events and perspectives and strategies across the globe, yet all expressing an amazing energy and common concern to reject domination. We know that the work is not finished, and we hope that the lessons learned from these cases can help activists and researchers alike to focus on future strategies. But above all, we wish to honour what has been achieved.