Transplanting institutional innovation: comparing the success of NGOs and missionary Protestantism in sub-Saharan Africa

Viewing missionary Protestantism and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as carriers of transnational institutional innovation, this article compares their successes and failures at creating self-sustaining institutions in distant societies. Missionary Protestantism and NGOs are similar in that th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theory and society 2020-04, Vol.49 (3), p.335-364
Main Authors: Burchardt, Marian, Swidler, Ann
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Africa
Colonialism
Development
Ethnicity
Incentives
Innovations
Institutional transfer
Institutionalism
Kinship
Lineage
Missionaries
Missionary Protestantism
NGOs
Non-governmental organizations
Nongovernmental organizations
Organizational culture
Pentecostalism
Pentecostals
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Protestantism
Radicalism
Religion
Social life & customs
Social Sciences
Sociologists
Sociology
Theology, Protestant
Transformation
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Summary:Viewing missionary Protestantism and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as carriers of transnational institutional innovation, this article compares their successes and failures at creating self-sustaining institutions in distant societies. Missionary Protestantism and NGOs are similar in that they attempt to establish formal organizations outside kinship, lineage, and ethnic forms of solidarity. Focusing on institutions as ways to create collective capacities that organize social life, we trace the route whereby Protestant missionaries established congregational religion in Africa and identify social practices that made this enterprise successful but are comparatively absent in current NGO attempts to transform organizational life. Largely ignored by sociologists interested in institutional transformation, the history of congregational religion offers valuable sociological lessons about the conditions for radical institutional innovation. Its success was rooted first, in colonial missionaries’ ability to enforce new ways of life on small exemplary communities; second, in local adaptations (African prophetic movements, Pentecostalism) that deepened and widened the social reach of congregational principles; and third in the incentives Protestantism created for propagating the congregational form.
ISSN:1573-7853
0304-2421
1573-7853
DOI:10.1007/s11186-020-09380-7