Merging Identities, Reinventing Boundaries: The Survival Strategy of Catholic Development Aid in the Netherlands

This chapter presents a detailed study of a merging process of three Dutch Catholic organizations providing development aid. It is a story of how the deconstruction of boundaries between organizations provokes the reinvention of boundaries between different groups of people within the new organization. This story is put in the context of a society in which ideological boundaries between population groups gradually become less visible, but nevertheless continue to be a pervasive organizing principle. I therefore put Cordaid - the name of the new merger organization - in the context of the peculiarities of this Dutch “pillar-ization” model of civil society. Private development aid was shaped by various ideologies that also shaped any other sector outside the market and government sector. Ideology, most often religious ideology, was the dominant source of corporate identity. The discussion in this chapter presents the Cordaid merger as a management effort to keep up with the triumph of the market ideology, popular in the last quarter of the twentieth century, while simultaneously keeping up with the tradition of pillarization.