The social movement scene of health comprises another example which emerged due to the recent economic crisis and the conditions of austerity. Compared to the plurality of the repertoires analysed in the previous chapter, the health scene focuses on the advent of social clinics and the provision of primary healthcare services and medication free of charge. This chapter aims to investigate the social movement scene in the health sector, in order to unravel the development of the boundary enlargement process. By paying attention to the clinics’ organizational structure and decision-making systems, resources and identity, we explore the basic mechanisms and sub-mechanisms that shaped the rise of the clinics, their coordination and the construction of an unofficial solidarity network of drugs distribution, as well as their relationship with the state and municipal authorities.

Organizational Structure

Affinity Groups Modeling and the Coordination of Autonomy

As stated above, social clinics are voluntary organizations offering free of charge healthcare services and medicine to people in need, situated within the broader anti-austerity campaign. These two characteristics reveal the two axes on which the clinics lie, namely the operational and political. As in pretty much every organized collective belonging to the broader social movement community, these two aspects are inextricably linked. These are also central accounts of the pre-figurative politics approach, meaning that the organizational and operational aspects of an organization reflect its political ambitions for a future society. In the following text we try to mark the different tasks these axes contain, in order to reveal the clinics’ peculiar characteristics that take place due to the process of boundary enlargement.