ABSTRACT
There are two contrasting developments which serve as the data for this paper. On the one hand, we observe that all kinds of associations are professionalizing and becoming, in the process, less dependent on their members. Several years ago McCarthy and Zald (1987) challenged the usual assumptions about participation and social movements in America. They argued that the functions historically served by a social movement membership have been
increasingly taken over by paid functionaries, by the ‘bureaucratization of social discontent’, by mass promotion campaigns, by full-time employees whose professional careers are defined in terms of social movement participation, by philanthropic foundations and by government itself.
