Abstract
The book concentrates on analysis of the modernisation processes profiling current events within the Czech civil sector. The authors stressed that the overall data about development of the number of organisations and their professionalization points towards continuous expansion of the civil sector, but data about volunteering rates, individual giving and membership points more towards its stagnation or decline.
The authors come to conclusion that these organizations are not so much weakened by the burden of a totalitarian past, as much as by the managerial attitude towards development of the civil sector preferred by public administration institutions and the European Union. This attitude is based on promoting employee professionalization and commercialisation of civil society organisations and their deeper immersion into the bureaucratic world of public policy institutions.
Professionalised civic organisations are at risk of being separated from the civic lives of ordinary citizens. Under the continual pressure from grant tyranny, the most important activity is the pursuit of grants and only then fulfilment of the organisation's mission.
In conclusion, the authors arrive at the opinion that continuing in the commenced trends of reinforcement of instrumental capacities, employee professionalization, transactional activism, institutional immersion and the technocratic perception of partnership between government and civil society organisations may mean development of the service function of these organisations, but also the threat that civil society organisations will lose an important reason for their existence, i.e. the ability to socialise citizens towards democracy.