Civil Society -- a Definition and Defense of this Critical Aspect of Modern Life
What is a civil society? To answer this question, what is the nature and composition of a civil society, one must first answer the question -- what is a society? A society may be defined as a conglomeration or an association of individuals greater than and representing a wider and more diverse range of interests than 'the one.' In other words, a society is more than an individual. And, although a family or at least an extended family could be perceived as a kind of microcosm of society, technically a family is not equated with a society by sociologists because of its relative singularity of interests, emotional and social, and economic. In contrast, the nature and components of the civil societies such as trade unions, churches, and interest groups of various political colors are voluntary in their associations -- unlike a family -- yet have plural but relatively focused interests to achieve on the part of its membership, unlike political parties.
Unlike the society of the state or the government, however, the membership in such civil societal organization are conscious, willed, and voluntary -- one is not born into a trade union as one is born an American, for example. Nor is there the diversity inherent in civil societies comparable to that of political parties. However, although some of the structures may be similar to the voluntary membership in economic societies such as business firms, civil societies usually have ideological as well as economic goals of fulfillment to realize on behalf of its membership. Payment in civil societies usually voluntarily extracted by the membership itself of civil societies rather than payment given to its members, as in businesses, or involuntarily extracted through taxation as in government.
The media may be one last component of civil society, forming its own loose civil society in and of itself. The media helps give reign to the full and free discourse required to make civil societies fully possible in today's America, so that different opinions from different organizations with different goals can interact and debate in the most fertile...
Civil Society and the Rights of Individuals Through the years, civil society and the rights of man have come to know many things. Many philosophers have helped lay the groundwork for how we govern ourselves today. We have words like democracy, autocracy, dictatorship, and other ways of defining a society and rules that determine what the rights of individuals will be. It was in the hands of philosophers like Rousseau and
Civil society leader is a person who takes a role to engage a group of individual in pushing for a common agenda trying to improve or promote the quality of life within a society (Van Til, 2000). A civil society leader develops a combination of information into working knowledge to uplift the moral within a group in a bid to make a difference about a prevailing situation. The civil society
Civil Society Through "Legalize Marijuana" Organizations As microcosms of civil society, collective action groups operate with processes used by civil society but with uniquely tailored processes and results. The National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is one example of a collective action group that has used these processes to establish itself, grow, survive and currently flourish. Through intelligent framing, effective resource mobilization and wise use of political opportunity,
At the same time, as compared to Ukraine, in Poland "the hard budget constraint on state enterprises, together with sufficient standards of corporate governance" were the main governmental instruments to avoid a "large-scale asset stripping before privatization" . This was one of the key reasons for which the economic rebound started quite early for Poland, as compared to Ukraine. The privatization process did not take the chaotic characteristics it had in
What must however be noted is that globalization has sadly enough also had some negative impacts. Probably the most relevant example in this sense has been the emergence of a war on terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Such actions are indeed linked to international law, which did stir up controversy but did not prevent the emergence of the war. "Terror can be regarded as a direct
In these constructs, the nation-state is seen as the outgrowth of global political arrangements, as global desires for money and power shape the globalizing world (Meyer et al., 1999). But the primary weakness in this paradigm is the fact that a globalized world constructed through political means would be just that, a globalized world, but not necessarily a global civil society. Indeed, such an organization would fail to meet
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