Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/288531 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] Theory and Society [ISSN:] 1573-7853 [Volume:] 49 [Issue:] 3 [Publisher:] Springer Netherlands [Place:] Dordrecht [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 335-364
Publisher: 
Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
Africa
Development
Institutionalism
Institutional transfer
Missionary Protestantism
NGOs
Pentecostalism
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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