This chapter details the unique institutional local context in which the everyday association-making practices analysed in the author’s research take shape. In the first section, this local context is approached from a historical perspective, highlighting associations’ function as social antenna in order to specify their institutional conditions of possibility and, in so doing, note their distance from the contemporary context. In the second section, the general framework of ‘government through civil society’ is used to specify how the contextualisation proposed by the civic action approach manages to open up space for empirical investigation within a critical vision that is otherwise so compact as to allow little room for ‘field’ investigation. The third section briefly outlines the research results of an earlier study the author conducted on associations in Milan, highlighting the relevance in this context of three general transformation processes in the local third sector. Finally, the methodology adopted in the conducted ethnographic research is introduced, specifying its cognitive objectives, case selection criteria and the type of generalisation pursued in the various case studies.