CivilSociety Resource / Reference Library
Entrepreneurship, personal development, life coaching, return migration, research on inter-communal stress, and the Middle East
Listed by author, with links to Amazon.com for more information (when possible)
See also: The WWW Virtual Library on Migration and Ethnic Relations
Dr. Couto says, "Mediating structures are a prerequisite to democracy. They preserve the liberty of citizens to act on public matters apart form government. They permit their members representation and participation in the sociopolitical arrangements of the neighborhood, community. nation, or state....The test for the democratic nature of mediating structures involves the stringent test of all three elements--liberty, equality, and political action--not only one of the three." Community social capital, in his view, are often adequate to meet local decision-making and problem-solving needs, but must be supplemented by outside resources to ensure adequate long-term solutions.
Couto, Richard 'Taking Stock: Almost Everyone's Guide to Social Capital and Civil Society', Unpublished Article, http://www.antioch.learningnetworks.net, viewed 10/12/2003.
Couto, Richard. To Give Their Gifts: Health, Community, and Democracy
Dr. Couto gives us great insights into how local cultures change through time, and how an individual with passion and wisdom can improve the quality and quantity of life of those involved. Favorite Quotes:
—I think there are leaders who are not good with detail but can be good with building some mechanism so that that detail is taken care of. If you don’t take care of the detail, the quality of leadership starts spiralling downhill and people start leaving.
—I think a leader is by nature sensitive to hearing and paying attention to the people he or she works with. I’d almost have to say a “good” leader because there are leaders who don’t pay any attention to that at all and just march forward. But a really good leader, who’s going to be effective, is certainly able to always take in new information. Part of that new information is listening to the people that you are involved with. Sensitivity to people is an area where I see an awful lot of failure in lots of leaders.
—Our job, I think, as a community-based organization, is to be a vehicle for other people to lean and self-discover what they have inside their hearts and to provide and opportunity for them to see their vision about what they would like to see happen in the community happen. And so we provide a place for them to meet. We provide technical support for them to carry out their vision, and we facilitate the process. We facilitate the process by which neighbours converse with each other. And that’s what we do.
Edwards, Michael. Civil Society
Edwards, Michael. 'Enthusiasts, Tacticians and Sceptics: The World Bank, Civil Society and Social Capital' http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/scapital/library/edwards.htm
Florini, Ann (Ed.) The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society
Forni, PM. Choosing civility : the twenty-five rules of considerate conduct (New York : St. Martin's Press, 2002)
Fukuyama, Francis. _Social Capital and Civil Society_ (Fairfax, Virginia: The Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University, 1999).
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Intensive analysis of connections between our rational, logical processes, and our subconscious-driven biases and prejudices.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Describing "the straw the broke the camel's back, and how little things add up to big things.
Hale, Edward E. Man Without a Country.
This classic story, from 1863, of Philip Nolan, condemned to sail the world without ever hearing again name or news of his home country.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. Civil Society : History and Possibilities
Lincoln, George A. Economics of National Security ( published 1954 by the Industrial College of the Armed Forces)
This is a revision of the 1950 edition. Considering security at the personal level is natural, and important. But security, both physical and financial, at the personal level is intertwined with security and stability at the national and international level as well. This book, in spite of its age, gives clear explanation of how the international economy affects personal security, even today. Favorite quotes:
--Perhaps the hardest thing to keep in mind is that one's own people has its ideology just as other peoples have theirs, for everyone is inclined to think that his own way of looking at things if just the "natural" way, or the way of right -thinking people.
--One of these is that it would somehow be dishonorable to use what we know about their social or psychological characteristics of people in friendly powers in order to influence their behavior.
--"Is it proper, in the course of our international relations, to show consideration for the feelings and the national pride of friendly peoples?"
This series of books was continually updated and expanded throughout the 1960s and gives rich insight into local-global integration as it was seen by the foremost scholars of the US think tanks in the pre-computer, pre-internet age.
Maybury, Richard Whatever Happened to Justice?
The two fundamental laws on which most major religions and philosphies agree are:
1. Do all you have agreed to do, and
2. Do not encroach on other persons or their property.
"These laws were the basis of the old common law. But only these two. Except for them we have little or no agreement about right and wrong."
Narayan, Deepa and Cassidy, Michael F. 'A Dimensional Approach to Measuring Social Capital: Development and Validation of a Social Capital Inventory' in Current Sociology, 49 (2), 59102, (London: Sage, 2001).
OECD. Role of Civil Society in Fighting Corruption
OECD. List of resources on the role civil society organizations in economic development.
Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Expanding the concept of mind-mapping from dealing with technology and information towards the future of dealing with right-brain communication & imagination concepts. This is helpful to me as I face growing floods of data, and need to remember that communication is transferring an image of something from my mind to that of others. Pink also wrote _Free Agent Nation_, defining how to work for your own future instead of the limits imposed by others.
Popper, Karl. The Open Society and its Enemies
To Popper, science is a process of "conjectures and refutations"-- advancing bold conjectures about the state of the world and then trying to refute them. "Even in the study of history, objectivity should be sought in the institutions and traditions of a discipline. It is only through the give and take of open criticism and the ongoing interplay of many different kinds of biases that anything approaching objectivity will emerge." Thus, "truth" is seen as a hypothesis--you can't prove truth, you can only prove untruth. This is because one cannot know everything, therefore, nothing can be proved to be true.
Open societies, in Popper's definition, with their ideals of freedom and reason, of men who may create their own future, are opposed to the regimes of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Hegel and Marx are the main focus of the book. Aristotle built his theory on Plato; Hegel on Aristotle; Marx on Hegel. Popper is concerned with their philosophies of history. A philosophy of history is an attempt to interpret systematically the historical process by a principle that unifies the results of research and points to an "ultimate meaning" behind the process. It involves systematic reflection on scientifically derived data about the past. All the parts are unified to form a whole with "ultimate meaning."
Redrockeater.org. (Excellent blog with content on civil society and related fields) Redrockeater blog
Recommended article on their site: "The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship". Phillip Agre.
Riedel, Manfred Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy.
Schwedler, Jilian, ed. Toward Civil Society in the Middle East?: A Primer
"Civil society represents two ideals: first, the rights of each member of a community or nation to interact with a representative government; and, second, the establishment of a set of rules of acceptable, tolerant behavior between civil society and the state as well as within civil society." Ms. Schwedler works through this definition in light of Middle Eastern history and tradition, and gives illustrations of when and where this works, could work, and can not work. Useful as a starting point to study the evolution (or not) of societies in the Muslim-dominated world.
Tester, Keith. Civil Society
Weisbrod, Burton. The Nonprofit Economy
CivilSoc.Org. Other books recommended. by the excellent resource and training group: CivilSoc.Org . They have direct order links on their web store.
Carothers, Thomas. Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve. 1999, 412 pp., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, $19.95.
Eberly, Don E., ed. The Essential Civil Society Reader. 2001, 480 pp., Rowman & Littlefield, $18.36.
Florini, Ann M., ed. The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society. 2000, 295 pp., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, $19.95.
Ottaway, Marina and Carothers, Thomas, eds. Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion. 2000, 339 pp., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, $21.95.
Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. 2000, Simon & Schuster, 2000. $20.80. 541 pp.
Skocpol, Theda and Fiorina, Morris P., eds. Civic Engagement and American Democracy. 1999. 529 pp., Brookings Institution Press and Russell Sage Foundation, $15.96.
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