Guardians of the Public Interest: Frame Delimiting of watchdog Activism in the Context of Social scientific Discourse and in the Perspective of its Representatives
Abstract
The work deals with the phenomenon of watchdog organizations. The increasing number and influence of these organizations indicates creation of new social movement.
The authoress defines them as nongovernmental organizations focused on the control of the public sphere or advocation and assertion of “public interest” in relation to the democratization of society. The authoress's target is to understand this type of action, so she asks herself a question: Which frameworks are used by watchdog activists for interpretation of their actions? At first there is briefly presented the concept of watchdog in context of wider reflections of contemporary society, mainly in the context of reflexive modernity, monitory democracy and information society.
Secondly there is introduced Goffman’s framework analysis and the related conceptualization of framework of social movements by Benford and Snow. The authoress highlights a definition of frames as principles of selection, emphasis and presentation about what happens, and what matters.
In the next part of this work, there are presented the methodology and results of the qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews with watchdog activists. The research is settled in the area of interpretative sociology and comes out from framework analysis, but also from the phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and social constructivism.
On the basis of the analysis of interviews the authoress concludes that watchdog activists share a framework of participatory democracy based on the largest civic engagement, and that they are building moral boundaries between themselves and other social groups, in the sense of emphasis their identification with the image of advocates, defenders or guiders. Finally she identifies two different master frames legitimizing actions of these actors.
One part of them understands the concept of watchdog mainly as a tool for problems solutions. The other part sees this as an indispensable segment of democracy.