About the series:

The concept of civil society and its organizations is widely prevalent in Europe and can be found meanwhile in many academic disciplines: Policy experts and politicians alike are searching for new approaches of democratic governance with the involvement of civil society actors. Economists are interested in an advancement of welfare provision in the complex world of post-modernity and its effects on the organizational structure of nonprofit organizations rooted in the sphere of civil society. And sociologists ask for the contribution of civil society to generate social capital as a key resource of modern societies. Although concepts of civil society are broadly absorbed in European social sciences the scientific community is still small and oftentimes constricted by interdisciplinary boundaries.

The new series "European Civil Society" is dedicated to overcome these boundaries by providing an interdisciplinary forum for discussing the theory and practice of civil society, with a special focus on pan-European issues. The series invites contributions from the various disciplines of the social sciences, particularly from business and public administration, economics, history, political science, sociology, and law. It is comparative and its key concern is the investigation of participatory governance within the multi-level structure of European polities, policies and politics. Against this background, the series will cover a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from civic engagement, volunteering, protest movements and corporate citizenship to public private partnerships between state, market and civil society. At the organizational level, the series addresses the subject of the "hybridization" of management procedures as well as the different modes of embeddedness of civil society organizations in the European environments, determined by the legacy of history and by common or civil law traditions.

The core target group of the series is academia as well as a wider public of journalists and policy experts, as well as civil society activists.