CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Kuslits, Béla |
|---|---|
| Title | PUBLIC SPHERE AS SOCIAL NETWORK AND THE ADAPTATION STRATEGIES OF GREEN NGOS |
| Summary | In the last 25 years green NGOs played an important role in Hungarian politics, however recently they gradually lost their influence. They struggle to access the public discourse and their relationship with the government is more and more contentious especially since 2010. In my research my goal was to describe the factors influencing access to the public sphere and to understand strategies developed to do so in practice. Jürgen Habermas developed the concept of public sphere which is the main focus of my work, but many other scholars also contributed to the literature. I introduce my own definition of this concept based on relational sociology where I transform its notion from an abstract space into a process. In my theory the emphasis is on how actors access public discourse and how they keep up their position. In my empirical work I describe the resource acquisition strategies of the Hungarian green NGOs and their struggle for being accepted as legitimate public actors. Their strategies determine the internal dynamics of these organizations and also have an influence on their success on the long run. An eminent aspect of their strategies is how they engage in cooperation within and outside of the green movement. My thesis is based on sixteen interviews with Budapest based green NGOs. Besides the interpretation of the content of these conversations, I analyse a social network constructed from their cooperation patterns. I conclude that the public sphere is a process, a resource-sharing network, realized in a relational space. |
| Supervisor | Balazs, Vedres; Fabiani, Jean-Louis |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/kuslits_bela.pdf |
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