The Rise of Participatory Society: Challenges for the Nonprofit Sector

There has been increasing interest paid to the extent to which individuals have input into and control over the decision-making processes that most affect them. Over the past several decades, a web of technological, economic and socio-demographic forces of social change have been busy laying the groundwork upon which such participatory structures and processes can feasibly thrive. I argue that the confluence of these forces is triggering a structural adjustment that will wipe away the incongruity between the organizational decisionmaking structures that are currently predominant and the new underlying structural conditions— thus ushering in the era of Participatory Society. Both the growing demand for participation and the ever-increasing amount of actual participatory processes will transform predominant social, political, and organizational structures. The challenges for anyone in a position of power in public, private, and nonprofit organizations will be significant. A necessary consequence will be the devolution of power to a broader and broader group of stakeholders, thus widening and deepening the “organizational selectorate.” In this paper I outline the origins, evidence and key implications of this transformation for nonprofit organizations and the broader civil society sector. I find that the emergence of a participatory age has significant ramifications for organizational structures, for organizational governance and decision-making, and for nonprofit leadership. I also discover both considerable challenges and sizeable opportunities for the nonprofit community as a whole. Overall, though the sector will be improved through this broadening and deepening of the selectorate, a critical challenge for nonprofit management programs will be to prepare graduates to lead and succeed in the emerging participatory environment. Draft: Comments Welcome Paper prepared for presentation at the 33rd annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, November 18-20, 2004, Los Angeles, CA. Links to all organizations and web sites listed in this paper, in addition to a hyperlinked glossary with additional information on key concepts, are available at http://www.itss.brockport.edu/~gsaxton/participatorysociety_research.htm