Contemporary policy shifts: realigned roles for voluntary organisations

The UK voluntary sector has a long history of providing social and humanitarian welfare, adapting to the demands and funding vagaries of governments and addressing gaps in state provision (Lewis, Reference Lewis2005). The continually shifting boundaries around the sector's status prompt questions about the extent to which we are witnessing a fundamental shift rather than further incremental changes.

New Labour's collaboration with the VS depended increasingly on its adoption of managerial behaviours copied from the corporate sector and competitive practices (Harris and Rochester, Reference Harris and Rochester2001; Harris, Reference Harris and Billis2010) and, later, a willingness by VOs to build capacity, collaborate or merge in order to be able to undertake larger service contracts (Milbourne, Reference Milbourne2013). However, a continuing service delivery role under the Coalition may depend less on adaption and more on compliance with the inflexible and harsh terms of service sub-contracting. Engagement with this ‘public’ services agenda also implies complicity in the shift towards the longer-term privatisation of welfare services, prompting questions about whether this signals a demise of the approaches and values for which, hitherto, VOs have been sought as service contributors (Buckingham, Reference Buckingham2011).

As service contracts are scaled up and rolled out, excluding many VOs as principal contractors, the Coalition commitment to a crucial, continuing role in funded service delivery is proving hollow for most VOs (Marsden, Reference Marsden2011). It is also clear that financial and other risks are increasingly being shifted to small sub-contractors lacking adequate financial reserves to manage these (Horton, Reference Horton2013), belying the rationale for the scale and financial criteria characterising recent contracts. Paradoxically, the failures and poor practices of corporate contractors (Rees et al., Reference Rees, Taylor and Damm2013; Wright, Reference Wright2013) emphasise other risks in new arrangements, such as delivering inadequate services, but have done little to curb government enthusiasm for privatisation. However, as Murray (Reference Murray and Manson2012: 63) indicates, the rhetorical inclusion of VOs as providers, ‘confuses the public and leaves the VS compromised as a “Trojan horse”’, while corporates include VOs as ‘bid candy’, subsequently to be discarded. This discussion problematises VOs’ involvement, illustrating how more than a decade of dependence on government resources has exacerbated their current vulnerability, potentially compromising independent purposes and activities, notably those concerned with social change and justice.

Service providers comprise one segment of a diverse non-profit sector: effectively a loose alliance of differing interest groups. Large charities delivering services have been among the most visible and prominent actors, while many small community-based VOs that still remain under the radar (McCabe and Phillimore, Reference McCabe and Phillimore2010), receive little or no state funding. Open Public Services, Localism and Big Society rhetoric proposes other roles for the VS, including in community organising (Taylor, Reference Taylor2012), supporting voluntary activities (Rochester, Reference Rochester2013) and, increasingly, providing a volunteer-led welfare safety-net where funded services are inadequate. These roles are historically familiar but also illustrate a re-shaping of community action alongside welfare provision (Milbourne, Reference Milbourne2013). While some VOs have engaged enthusiastically in local community action plans, criticism has emerged about top-down rhetoric stifling local empowerment (Padley, Reference Padley2013) and around the burdens and growing geographic inequalities arising from over-stretched voluntary resources in poorer areas (Lindsey, Reference Lindsey2013).

Government policy has effectively blurred the lines between funded services and unfunded community activities, promoting ‘people doing things for themselves’ as a virtue, integral to repairing a broken, state-dependent British society (Blond, Reference Blond2010). However, the increasing restrictions on community voice and advocacy activities since 2010 (Baring Foundation, 2014) tell a different story, with the recent ‘Lobbying Act’ further constraining how VOs can engage independently. Further contradictions are also visible: dispersed service arrangements, and a decoupling of the state and VOs, offer apparently increased freedoms for civil society organisations; yet VOs are further restricted, both in service delivery and community activities. Despite inherent contradictions, these changes illustrate a recasting of state−voluntary sector relationships signalling that, alongside transformation in perceptions of welfare, new understandings of the VS are needed.

Framing the debates: isomorphism and governmentality

Discussing the history of the UK voluntary sector, Kendall and Knapp (Reference Kendall and Knapp1996) underline the complex balance between state and VS welfare over the last two centuries, illustrating the state's influence on arrangements in voluntary services. However, with the progressive promotion of outsourcing during the 1990s, the visible VS domain increased, as did the state's influence in shaping its activities. By 2010, this domain encompassed diverse organisations, from small community service providers and campaigning organisations to large charities with trading arms and social enterprises, drawing a wider range of organisations within the state's governable terrain (Carmel and Harlock, Reference Carmel and Harlock2008). The Coalition's rebranding of the Office of the Third Sector as the Office for Civil Society (OCS) signals this extension of its remit and policy influence to wider civil society – to informal community groups and citizens – alongside explicit policy to direct individual welfare behaviours (Brown, Reference Brown2012). As Alcock and Kendall (Reference Alcock and Kendall2011) argue, the process of mainstreaming under New Labour encouraged decontested spaces within which many VOs concurred with hegemonic discourse and behaviours, anticipating gains in legitimacy and resources. Many VOs assumed these new cultures apparently by choice (Harris, Reference Harris and Billis2010), or in an isomorphic process of imitating, or conforming to, the norms of surrounding organisational arrangements. There were, conversely, spaces which remained contested (Milbourne, Reference Milbourne2013), and, as resources become scarcer and requirements more stringent, these may become more widespread. It is to explore the extension of supposedly consensual spaces and coerced arrangements, and their scope and effects, that the paper draws on the two aspects of theory below.

The effects of isomorphism

The process of organisations conforming to dominant arrangements in the surrounding organisational environment has been analysed as isomorphism (Di Maggio and Powell, Reference Di Maggio and Powell1983), with legitimacy granted to those displaying approved characteristics. While pressures towards homogeneity among VOs have been largely state driven, they often operate most powerfully through expectations within similar service fields (Aberg, Reference Aberg2013), and are also advanced through resource dependency (Pfeffer, Reference Pfeffer2003) and competitive funding arrangements. Thus, the growth of competitive markets, as more public services are outsourced, alongside the effect on VOs of the loss of grants and special projects intensifies coercive isomorphic pressures. The consequence of isomorphism is a gradual homogenisation of organisations working within similar fields, producing contexts where the rational outcome of efforts to deal with both uncertainties and performance controls constructs overall similarities in organisational cultures and arrangements.

These arguments are familiar to scholars of organisational and VS research, and we discuss only briefly how these pressures become operationalised through funding and monitoring mechanisms; inter-agency relationships; professional standards; resource dependency; and, especially, dominant understandings of what counts as legitimate action and arrangements.

In summary, the spread of the outsourcing of public services since the 1990s, with the associated managerial and monitoring cultures (Baines et al., Reference Baines, Hardill and Wilson2011), prompted needs among VOs for professional management skills, which became integral to their changing practices (Harris, Reference Harris and Billis2010). Resource dependency and contract requirements produce enforced modifications to activities (coercive isomorphism), which, in the longer term, limit alternative practices and aspirations and slowly transform self-definition. These trends of professionalisation and commercialisation are also mirrored in processes re-shaping civil society organisations internationally (Eikenberry, Reference Eikenberry2009).

Not all isomorphic pressures are coercive. As Aberg (Reference Aberg2013) argues, there may be significant incentives for choosing closer co-operation with the state or private sector; for adopting what appear as normative mainstream arrangements; and for becoming more market-oriented. Tensions arise when disparate meanings collide internally and at organisational boundaries, producing questions about the consensual or contested nature of changes. If VOs internalise discourses and operational practices which bestow external legitimacy, while continuing to claim cultural credibility through former goals, conflicting narratives may emerge around how purposes are understood, with some organisational actors adhering to the former mission and others focusing on activities determined by the new arrangements.

The dangers are that, in striving for greater external legitimacy, a VO decouples from its civil society origins and from the meanings and purposes that ground it with members, service users or community stakeholders; and ensuing tensions and ambiguities weaken organisational identity. For example, Hucklesby and Corcoran's (Reference Hucklesby and Corcoran2013) study shows that, as VOs have engaged in large-scale criminal justice contracts involving prison services, they have increasingly been drawn into administering sanctions. The extended scope of their service delivery roles has thus undermined previous roles in supporting prisoners and advocating reforms, deterring former sponsors.

Research also illustrates that VOs have resisted external pressures to conform; managing to retain core missions and sustain grassroots connections (Harris and Young, Reference Harris and Young2009; Milbourne, Reference Milbourne2013). This may result from recognising internal tensions or contesting unwanted external pressures to change. Such contested spaces may be sustained to some degree through mimetic isomorphism where clusters of similar VOs exist within an organisational field or locality, and peer behaviours exert greater influence than hierarchical pressures. Organisations may also choose to imitate apparently successful local models, especially if these appear to confer increased status within their fields or to enhance growth or survival related to their goals. However, within such clusters, larger organisations and those with longer established practices often dominate arrangements, effectively suppressing alternative approaches. This can be construed as normative isomorphic pressure: adopting what is widely considered as ‘the way things are done’ Hoggett (Reference Hoggett, Snape and Taylor2004: 196).

With austerity and public sector budget reductions, pressures towards mergers and entrepreneurial activities became integral to New Labour's stage directions for VOs (Rochester, Reference Rochester2013), and were echoed in the Coalition's exhortations to seize entrepreneurial opportunities (OCS, 2010). The emphasis on business links and entrepreneurialism has now pervaded sections of the VS to the extent that some VOs have rebranded as ‘social enterprises’; and many acknowledge choosing to adopt particular models, language or behaviours, which enable them to gain a competitive edge. However, as the adoption of behaviours spreads, there is also a reflexive process which constructs a culture of expectation that these changes are necessary to underpin legitimacy and success. While useful in understanding how powerful cultures of arrangements induce shifts in organisational models more widely, isomorphic tendencies are insufficient, by themselves, to explain the fundamental recasting of the VS roles discussed above, or the contested spaces − we examine governmentality to explore these questions further.

Governmentality and the integral role of the state

With increased outsourcing of public services over some twenty-five years, VS relationships with the state have significantly re-shaped the nature of its activities, remodelling its contributions to welfare and society through marketisation, managerialism and associated monitoring regimes (Milbourne, Reference Milbourne2013). Arguably, as VOs delivered more state services and projects, their influence and mainstream legitimacy grew, while independent activities and criticism of government agencies became more inhibited. However, until recently, VOs have maintained their ability to operate within public agencies and also to criticise them: both in and against the state (Holloway, Reference Holloway2005).

Managerialism (Clarke et al., Reference Clarke, Gewirtz and McLaughlin2000), criticised for importing excessive command and control structures into public service management (Brown and Calnan, Reference Brown and Calnan2010), subsequently pervaded the VS. Equally, the spread of marketisation has distorted service goals and approaches through imposing contract criteria and performance targets (Milbourne and Cushman, Reference Milbourne and Cushman2013). However, the recent scaling-up of contracts and intensification of competition, justified as a means to deliver more efficient and effective services, has constructed a fundamental realignment of publicly funded activities and ideas about welfare purposes and beneficiaries (Hoggett et al., Reference Hoggett, Wilkinson and Beedell2013).

Miller and Rose (Reference Miller and Rose1990: 3–4) examine the expansion of governed spaces achieved through policy (and associated cultures of arrangements), applying Foucault's concept of governmentality. They explain that, ‘policies always appear surrounded by more or less systematised attempts to adjudicate on their vices and virtues’ and may be superseded by others promising improvements or by ‘advocating something different’. Therefore policies, and the mechanisms for their implementation, appear as harmless programmatic means to achieving desired outcomes but are ways of implanting and ensuring changes of a highly political nature. Similarly, arrangements for monitoring and evaluation, while seeming to assess effective implementation, are integral to the powers of change embedded in policy systems and to understanding how processes of governmentality operate.

It is therefore not simply overt technologies or financial threats which enforce policy compliance in managerial and contractual arrangements, but also the related implementation mechanisms – schemas, templates and associated discourse – which together institute the necessary discipline through knowable, calculable and administrable objects. Within the VS, these schemas manifest themselves through contract criteria; increasingly detailed specifications and targets; required performance data; and the language and means through which they are communicated – ultimately, the cultures of arrangements and behaviours through which organisational actors conform (Milbourne and Cushman, Reference Milbourne and Cushman2013). Such requirements demand forms of professionalisation, and standardisation and homogenisation of approaches, denominating activities in the currency of those governing rather than the governed. However, they also have the effect of significantly changing the focus of activities and ultimately purposes, gradually transforming organisational meanings and perceptions of successful work. Effectively, governmentality ensures receptivity to policy instruments and their underlying logics.

Rational choice theory and critiques of state bureaucracies opened the way for market-denominated reforms and, subsequently, a quest for more flexible forms of governance in public services (Bevir, Reference Bevir2011), visible in partnership working and the Coalition's localism strategies. Such models are purportedly better suited to modern and consensual forms of governance than hierarchical management (Davies, Reference Davies2011). However, new public management cultures persistently dominate collaborative community projects and associated arrangements (Lever, Reference Lever2011), showing how hierarchical power habitually reasserts itself, defining the rules of play (Clegg, Reference Clegg1989). Moreover, as Davies (Reference Davies2011) argues, masking these persistent hierarchies and the hegemonic powers of the state and allied agencies within apparently more open governance forms serves dominant neo-liberal political interests, deceptively communicating norms and consensus.

VOs have had limited discussion in debates around governmentality. Carmel and Harlock (Reference Carmel and Harlock2008) illustrate ways that New Labour established and extended its influence through outsourcing public services and use of cross-sector partnerships and planning fora. Many VOs were complicit in extending the reach of this governable terrain through participation in these arrangements, conveying government priorities into previously more autonomous community-based work. By positioning themselves within these spaces, VOs have facilitated compliance with governmentally driven projects and reduced the room for independent challenges, seeking legitimacy and influence through insider tactics while contributing to marginalising those pursuing alternatives. As Hoggett (Reference Hoggett, Snape and Taylor2004) argues, an assumed culture of consensus invariably prevails in such settings, suppressing alternative arrangements. Consequently, the creative welfare solutions, to which VOs have often contributed, become excluded, belying any purported aims of openness to service innovation.

As the Coalition restricts the powers and scope of local government, and corporations increase their share of ‘public’ service delivery, power over shaping service conditions and activities is shifting, with VOs increasingly excluded. Many VOs lack the financial credentials to be eligible as contractors; have insufficient reserves to survive under the terms of sub-contracts; and have suffered significant financial losses, as corporations maximise profits at the expense of effective frontline delivery (Rees et al., Reference Rees, Taylor and Damm2013). While this describes the effects of changes, it also speaks to a supposed consensus that finds the exclusion and potential demise of many community providers acceptable, and that believes new, scaled-up contracts and the associated costs of procurement and supply-chain transactions generate better services.

Power appears to have shifted towards corporate contractors. However, it would be erroneous to disregard the integral role of the state in engineering the environment encompassing the different sectors. To make sense of these changes requires examining the hegemonic processes underpinning and sustaining beliefs in the state's apparent withdrawal and the appropriateness of markets and neo-liberal economic prescriptions to deliver effective services. The growing gaps in services demonstrate that these changes flow from political ideas rather than being rationally justified, as do the poor service reputations and misreporting of profit-led contractors (Wright, Reference Wright2013) and the evident failures of corporations heavily engaged in provision of what they have little experience (Long, Reference Long2012). To mask these defects, the focus has shifted instead to expecting individuals and communities to fill the welfare gaps created. Residual welfare, passed to voluntary activity, is heralded positively as a means to promote a more responsible, less welfare-dependent citizenship (Brown, Reference Brown2012).

Thus, the Coalition government has promoted attitudinal shifts, alongside rationing and conditionality in welfare, and a massive upheaval in delivery mechanisms; and these address moral judgements about what is fair or who is deserving of public support. Tackling presumed welfare dependency forcefully, and representing it as substantially responsible for public debts, has allowed the Coalition to exploit existing social fractures (Hogget et al., Reference Hoggett, Wilkinson and Beedell2013) and advance and justify a stronger rhetoric around dismantling the public sector.

Thus, within this new service framework, VOs are somewhat incidental, encouraged both to participate in the supply chain and to concentrate on local associational (voluntary) activities. Campaigning charities are criticised (DCLG, 2012) and the most entrepreneurial VOs are lauded (OCS, 2010). The re-engineering of the public sphere might be slowed if alternative altruistic approaches or potentially subversive VOs were more welcome, but new frameworks have been constructed largely to restrict or exclude them and to silence dissenting voices. However, the decline in state funding to VOs for outsourced services and community projects suggests an unintended opportunity to reclaim independence: a freeing up from the influence and power of the state. However, this space is debatable, not least because of the recent dispersal of governable terrain through Localism and Open Public Services, and much depends on how VOs confront the dilemmas of changing arrangements.

The consensual assumptions embedded in political messages around norms and expectations are integral to strategies aimed to shift both individual and organisational behaviours in desired directions.The creation of a unit drawing on nudge theory (Thaler and Sunstein, Reference Thaler and Sunstein2008) is a concrete sign of the Coalition government extending its reach to the behaviours of welfare users. Nudge theory, based on behavioural economics and cognitive psychology, has informed both US and UK government strategies intended to re-shape behaviours and deter those deemed discordant with dominant views and economic needs. Agents of local communities, VOs and civil society actors become crucial components in a ‘civilising’ role – constructed rhetorically as Big Society or Localism – intended to reinforce consensually driven processes of civilising welfare (Lever, Reference Lever2011) that are instituted as norms − but there are alternatives. There are also punitive measures for dissenters, enforced through harsher controls. Thus, nudging behaviour can be construed as disciplining groups and individuals, and punishments as the outcome of failures to adapt. However, as controls and disciplines become more exacting, there is greater potential for triggering resistance and reassertion of alternative meanings (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Gordon1977). The government's attitude to food banks offers a striking example. As largely faith-based groups, independent of public funds, they seem to encapsulate the Big Society, but are censured for their powerful, if implicit, critique of austerity policies, defying hegemonic discourse.

Isomorphism and governmentality can both be interpreted over-deterministically. Conceptualising the power of governmentality as the temporal resolution of a relational network of forces in society, embedded in predominant values, rituals, assumed beliefs and institutional practices (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Gordon1977), is helpful in understanding the intersection of agency with these influences. In other words, while the discussion above has considered macro-level trends, everyday practical examples also demonstrate ways that VOs, their staff and user groups, adopt and also resist influences. For example, the pressures to survive, which may mean entering an underfunded supply-chain and complicity with poor services, are already leading to demise for some VOs (Bawden, Reference Bawden2013), prompting reflection on other options. There is therefore the potential to withdraw from the state's projects in realigning public services, to decouple from state funding dependency and strengthen alternatives. The next part of the paper explores dilemmas being played out through examples from different contexts.

Study of everyday experiences

Empirical research on changes among voluntary organisations, since Coalition policies began to take effect, is limited but examples are emerging. Below we discuss findings from several recent studies. Our examples are drawn from three area-based case studies in relatively deprived inner-city areas of England, focused on experiences and outcomes of recent changes. Most VOs in these studies were small service providers, many working with young people, some also involved in campaigning and advocacy. Case studies have the advantage of enabling detailed study (Stake, Reference Stake, Denzin and Lincoln2000), which can examine situated experiences of changing social policies. In parallel, wider social forces influence the actors involved, and our analysis also reconnects examples with wider contexts and meanings, recognising the interlinked nature of institutions, governmental strategies and agency in accounting for local experiences and outcomes (Barnes and Prior, Reference Barnes and Prior2009).

Our research also includes data from a further qualitative study (2011–13) in which participants from larger charities discussed recent experiences related to the Work Programme. Most data were gathered between 2010 and 2013, but, in one case, Horizons, the organisation formed part of an ongoing study commenced in 1999, supplemented by follow-up interviews. Further detail on these studies is available in (Milbourne, Reference Milbourne2013). All names of people, organisations and places are pseudonyms.

In what follows, we have organised our examples thematically, initially considering the effects on VOs of scaled-up and progressively more restrictive contracts in an increasingly competitive environment. We then examine examples of constraints on independent expression and, thirdly, the space for resistance. Our examples demonstrate isomorphic pressures, often visible through more concrete phenomena, while illustrating governmentality at work in the broader re-shaping processes and restrictions on independent activities and voice over time.