Cement without heat

Abstract

The Cement of Civil Society represents the summa of Mario Diani’s ambitious efforts of shaping the research agenda and orientation of social movement and civil society scholarship. In this book, Diani systematically presents the empirical findings of his research project conducted between 2000 and 2003 on local urban politics in the United Kingdom (“Networks of Citizens’ Organizations in Britain”), while also espousing the value of a relational approach to the study of civil societies at the city level. The added value of the research design - a paired comparison of Bristol and Glasgow - lies in its ability to untangle how different local, social and political milieus may affect the structure of civil society and the development of contentious politics in contemporary Western cities. It also allows for a detailed comparison of actors that share similar structural positions across cities and of different structural positions within each city. The epistemological and methodological thrust of the book is to present a relational approach to analyze and understand social structures, through the use of an extensive set of network analytic techniques. The conceptual move from studying static structures and their components to tracing the system of interactions among actors requires a methodological shift: from the collection of attribute data on actors’ properties and traits for variable analysis, to the collection of relational data. This latter type of data requires the collection of information about the “contacts, ties and connections, the group attachments and meetings, which relate one agent to another and so cannot be