Religious Institutionalisation and Organisational Autonomy: Social Openness, Resource Dependence, and Muhammadiyah in Indonesia

Religious civil society organisations may develop extensive institutional capacities while simultaneously confronting tensions concerning social accessibility, external dependence, and organisational autonomy. This article examines these tensions through Muhammadiyah, a major Indonesian Muslim civil society organisation with extensive educational, healthcare, welfare, philanthropic, humanitarian, and public-engagement infrastructures. Using an abductive conceptual-documentary analysis, the study brings scholarship on nonprofit professionalisation, practice drift, resource dependence, organisational autonomy, boundary spanning, and faith-based governance into dialogue with peer-reviewed research on Muhammadiyah, organisational documents, and independent institutional evidence. The analysis identifies four recurrent tensions: scale–proximity, quality–accessibility, external access–independence, and global visibility–local relevance. It develops two complementary heuristic concepts. Selective porosity explains differentiated boundary governance, while independence capital captures the resource and governance capacities that enable meaningful organisational discretion within consequential external relationships. Muhammadiyah's repertoires of da‘wah, Al-Ma‘un, tajdid, and Islam Berkemajuan provide the normative orientation through which institutional capacity can be evaluated. The article argues that religious institutionalisation becomes socially consequential not through organisational scale alone, but through the governance of accessibility, permeability, autonomy, and the conversion of institutional capacity into socially distributed consequences.