Capacity of Social Institutions: Towards Participation in Community-Centered Management Programs

Abstract

The new managerial approach demands the profound examination of capacities, resources, and facilities in social institutions and organizations and optimum and systemic utilization of capacities such as individuals’ abilities, expertise, and skills within the framework of social institutions. This approach will thus empower the community, which is the most appropriate platform for sustainable development, and improve systemic and integrated management. The study is designed systematically to identify the capacities of social institutions to empower the existing capacities and plan management and educational programs in a better manner to use these capacities within communities. This systematic review study is conducted until February 15, 2024. The PRISMA system was used to track the review process and findings. Databases were searched for relevant articles, and the STROBE checklist was used to evaluate the quality of the articles. The community-based social organizations will still face budgetary challenges and costs in their capacity-building efforts. As such, advanced management techniques such as teamwork, collaboration and coordination between departments, innovative thinking, brainstorming, or even the use of program evaluation and analytical actions can help reduce possible challenges. This calls for the availability of exact management models and planners in both government systems and people-centered systems to coordinate such capacities. This will seek to shed more light on the important role of social institutions and hence serve to give a clearer understanding of challenges, opportunities, and supportive actions for such institutions to contribute to better government system management.

Introduction

Currently, the exploitation of the capacities, expertise, and capabilities of individuals in the context of social institutions has further reified the new managerial method (bottom-up method) in community organization and management. Implementation of this method requires a comprehensive survey of the capacities, resources, and facilities extant in the social organizations and institutions and optimal and systemic exploitation of the capacities.[1] The overall purpose of this new concept is to enable the community as the most appropriate vehicle for achieving sustainable development, better achievement of systemic and integrated management, and reduction in a fragmented view of community management.

Expansion of public participation and delegation of responsibilities to the public are linked to growth, human development, and enhancement of the welfare status of the communities. This is one important strategy to implement reforms in society, ensure transparency of government organizations while addressing people’s issues, and strengthen government-citizen relationships. In this regard, the role of social institutions is very significant.[2,3,4] Social organizations have, therefore, become important tools in meeting the specific individual and professional needs of the residents, especially in the fields of health care and health services, public education, and cultural construction.[5]

Consequently, community-based education has been recognized as an effective approach to enhancing skills in response to community problems and needs within educational programs.[6] Thus, community-based planning guides the government to focus on guiding, supporting, and encouraging social institutions, away from a top-down approach, hence leading to increased efficiency of the social institutions.[7] Although citizen participation is seen as a critical avenue toward increasing the capacity to address problems and challenges in the community, many issues still need to be faced so that organizations’ and social institutions’ performance can be improved for individual development and systemic change. Among these is identifying and extracting capacities within social institutions.[8,9,10]

With the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of government-centered and prescriptive solutions coming to light, managers, policymakers, and planners have turned toward using the resources and capacities of community-centered institutions.[11] No society can achieve sustainable development without considering its capacities as capacity building and utilization of social institutions’ capacities besides reaping knowledge, talent, and skills of the people leading to recognition of values, social connections, and effective communications; hence, it can become a crucial tool for planning and community empowerment.[12] With the consideration of social institutions as holding equal importance to governmental systems and the rise of community-centered planning and management, capacity may be defined as the roadmap and all the tools needed to reach said goal. Capacity, therefore, does not only involve skills and lone efforts of an individual and engaging participation of communities also involves opportunities that characterize social well-being, striving for creativity, and infrastructures that could be established within the communities. Eventually, it empowers both policies and systems simultaneously.[13,14] The present study as a systematic review aims to identify capacities of social institutions from different aspects and dimensions to empower existing capacities and to facilitate better management and educational planning for using the capacities within communities as Community-Centered Management Programs (CCMP).

Methods

The present study is a systematic review for evaluating studies conducted about the capacity of social institutions for participation in management planning until February 15, 2023. To track the process of the review and report its results, the PRISMA system was used (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) [Figure 1].[15]

Figure 1.

PRISMA flow diagram showing article selection

Search strategy and article selection

Relevant articles were searched in Scopus, ISI (Web of Science), PubMed (Medline), Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect databases using specific MeSH and tailored-made keywords. Specific keywords used were “social institutions,” “capacity,” “capacity building,” “management planning,” “educational planning,” “social participation,” “community-based education,” and “community-centered planning” individually and in combinations using Boolean operators (AND OR).

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

All articles published in English and Persian, entitled “Capacity of Social Institutions” and “Participation in Management Planning”, were included in the study. High-quality quantitative research studies and articles were included. Review articles, meta-analyses, theses, case reports, articles published in congresses and posters, articles without access to the full text, and articles not related to the title “capacity of social institutions” were excluded from the assessment and analysis process.

Quality appraisal of articles

The quality of articles was assessed by using the STROBE checklist.[16,17] This checklist contains 22 sections including title, abstract, introduction, methodology, study type, data collection tools, statistical analysis, objectives, results, discussion, and conclusion. Scoring was in relation to the importance of each section in the present study. Studies that scored average and above were included. The minimum score considered for this checklist was 15, whereas the maximum was 30.

Screening, data extraction, and article selection

After screening the articles retrieved from the databases of repute and entering into the EndNote software, 63 articles that seemed relevant were extracted. After concealing details such as authors’ names, journals’ names, etc., full texts of the articles were provided to two trained and knowledgeable research reviewers. Each article was reviewed independently, and where an article was rejected by the reviewers, reasons were given. Where there were conflicting opinions between reviewers, the article would be reviewed by a third party. Based on the reviews carried out by the reviewers and the articles that met the inclusion and the exclusion criteria 7 relevant articles were chosen for the study.

Findings

We reviewed 7 papers on the capacity of social institutions for participation in community management planning [Table 1]. As follows, we will go through their analysis. Hataminejad and coauthors (2018) in Tehran examined the function of social institutions in urban neighborhood management. This research investigated citizens’ rights and responsibilities awareness, participation and engagement in decision making, quality of life, social trust, and social justice to assess citizens’ engagement in urban neighborhood management. Based on the evidence, citizens’ rights awareness lays the foundation for their interaction with officials. Social trust results in more participation and tightens the bond between the people in the community. Social justice allows people to acquire their entitlements, and the strengthening of social justice encourages people to be involved in matters concerning them and to achieve their entitlements. Participation and engagement give a heightened sense of responsibility and a higher quality of life. In this study, the social trust index was at a desirable level, the awareness index was at a moderate level, social participation and interactions were in an undesirable state, and social justice was in a highly undesirable state. Therefore, there is a need to improve urban management to improve these indices.[1] Piran et al.[7] (2016) in Shahriar examined the influential factors in forming social institutions in urban governance. According to the findings, from the perspective of citizens, trust, participation, efficiency, equity, and quality of life have a significant effect on the realization of community-based social institutions. Among these, participation and trust had the highest impact. Yang et al.[18] (2019) in China examined and discussed the participation of social organizations in rebalancing public services. The empirical results of this study have shown that the participation of social organizations has helped enhance the efficiency of the government in providing services to the community. However, the relationship between the government and social organizations should be further developed. In an article performed by Daviran[19] (2020) in Zanjan, the capacity of local social institution building in informal settlement areas was examined. Findings underlined that local capital, acceptance capacity, and geographical incentives were related to the establishment and enhancement of local social institutions. The desirability or undesirability of the construction of social institutions depended on trust, level of influence, and participation of the community. Ahmadniya and associates (2016), in Tehran, investigated social participation with a focus on grassroots institutions. Based on the outcomes, there was no positive interaction between the public and neighborhood institutions, such as councils, and interaction between these institutions and government organizations. The grassroots specialized organizations and councils, while being informed well and understanding issues pertaining to social and urban affairs, do not take serious engagement in relation to government organizations. This can be ascribed to a decreased sense of attachment to local spaces. Part of this problem is caused by the accumulation of social damages, a decline in local social capital, and long-time residents moving out to better neighborhoods. The lack of emotional attachment and reduction of local social capital result in a lack of participation.[20] Takahashi and colleagues[21] in 2001 studied the cooperation between small community-based organizations in the area of HIV health cooperatives. The study separated three categories of people, namely, people with HIV, AIDS patients, and people infected by HIV, into small informal organizations and administered. The research then addressed the informal conversation and cooperation among them. It was found that the community-based small organizations, due to their informal organizational structures and flexibility, were able to generate highly effective participation. However, such organizations are mainly inexperienced in the formal participation with other groups, which can lead to high levels of conflicts and confrontations. Yet, with high interorganizational conflict levels, it is the collaboration that can achieve highly effective program outcomes. Hu and colleagues[22] in 2014 conducted a study on the effect of strategic planning for small community-based nonprofit organizations through interviews with their managers. According to the results, interviewees evaluated strategic planning very positively and stated that strategic planning is a helpful tool to focus on organizational missions, goals, and priorities; hence, it strengthens relationships with stakeholders, improves management and decision making, enhances organizational effectiveness, and reinforces organizational development. Most respondents indicated that strategic planning could facilitate their organizations’ ability to understand stakeholder importance and to sustain supportive relationships with funding agencies. They also said that strategic planning could help organizations maintain public support, identify new collaborations, and increase the strength of relationships with current partners.

Table 1.

Characteristics of the articles included in the systematic review

Authors	Years	Country of the articles
Hataminejad and colleagues (Hataminejad et al., 2018)	2018	Tehran, Iran
Piran and Colleagues (Piran P, 2016)	2016	Shahryiar, Iran
Yang and Colleagues (Yang et al., 2019)	2019	China
Daviran (Daviran, 2020)	2020	Zanjan, Iran
Ahmadnyia and Colleagues (Ahmadniya and Kamel Ghalibaf, 2017)	2017	Tehran, Iran
Takahashi and Colleagues (Takahashi and Smutny, 2001)	2001	United States
Hu and Colleagues (Hu, 2014)	2014	United States

As Table 1 shown 7 articles related to the capacity of social institutions for participation in community management planning were studied

Discussion

One of the very important and useful tools for capacity building in social institutions is the use of strategic planning. Among the concerns of people-centered small organizations that seek to update themselves in line with new environmental changes is the lack of capacity and specialized knowledge, which should be addressed in the agenda of participatory and managerial planning.[23] Capacity-building activities and initiatives within organizations and social institutions may involve workshops, training activities, and even technical and practical assistance. Building community capacity will enable the communities to further their supportive programs and objectives with their few available resources through the recourse of the efforts of the governmental managers. This will help deepen participatory management and thus result in better and more appropriate planning in the societies.[24] With the consideration in mind that those community-based social organizations will have budgetary and cost problems when improving their capacity, advanced management techniques of teamwork, collaboration, cross-functional coordination, idea generation, and even the program evaluation and analytical actions can help them overcome most of the capacity-related problems. This makes it necessary that correct managerial and planning models exist in the government systems and people-centered systems to coordinate such capacities. Other aspects such as the size of social institutions, type of management, characteristics of their boards of directors, and the type of organizational goals they pursue should be taken into consideration in participatory planning to mobilize their capacities or initiate capacity-building efforts.[25] Leadership, particularly transformational leadership, helps enable people-centered social organizations to transcend resource limitations and find ways to the needed support for participatory planning.

In addition, appropriate leadership could accurately perceive the opportunities and challenges facing social institutions and organize the needed resources, thereby resulting in organizational growth.[26]

It has been found in several studies that social institutions receiving budgets from governmental and ruling systems and having committed managers and specialized members achieved their goals more effectively.[27,28] The role of social institutions in different participatory and managerial planning aspects, including economic, social, educational, and physical aspects, is traceable. Positive impacts of this stance are crime prevention, capacity-building among individuals, health provisions, vocational training, recreation activities, and even the promotion of small businesses. United States Federal Government has been devolving its tasks in urban and neighborhood planning and management to people-centered organizations for decades, making its actual and available capacity to further its goals.[29]

Conclusions

Social institutions are increasing rapidly in societies. Although there have been few studies focused on the capacity of social institutions and various aspects of their capacity and the ability of management systems and governments is not fully explained yet, the supportive role of these institutions in advancing development and enhancing organizations cannot be disregarded. This research has sought to shed more light on the important role of social institutions and elucidate the challenges, opportunities, and supportive actions of these institutions in helping the management of the government system. It is suggested that more extensive research be conducted on the capacity of social institutions, given the limited scope of studies in this field. This can be a good treatment for improved community management and, in addition to governmental structures, allow these establishments to play their supportive and participatory functions more proactively.

Limitations

We only included articles in English or Persian, potentially overlooking those published in other languages. This limitation may potentially impact the reliability of the results.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding Statement

Nil.