The non-profit sector, the state and the market

In this article, we explore some impacts of the relationships between the third sector, the state and the market on the non-profit sector workforce in the town of Reading, England. We start with a discussion of current conceptualisations of the relationships between the non-profit sector, state and market and their implications for volunteering. This is followed by a description of our data and methods and next a discussion of some findings. We end by discussing the challenges now facing the sector in Britain. We have chosen to use the term ‘non-profit sector’ (henceforth NPS) as our interest is in the ‘workforce’ (i.e. both paid and unpaid workers) of formally structured organisations that provide goods and services on a non-profit basis. We are not discussing the services provided to help others by neighbours and friends.

Since the 1980s, in most western countries state services have been transferred either to the NPS (typically welfare services) or to the private sector (typically utilities and justice and control services). The state has developed a closer relationship with the NPS through direct funding and subcontracting services (Evers and Laville, Reference Evers and Laville2004). These moves are argued to have pressured NPS organisations to adopt business management techniques leading to increased professionalisation, bureaucratisation and the standardisation of services (for example, see Wolch, Reference Wolch1990; Fyfe, Reference Fyfe2005; Jenkins, Reference Jenkins2005). There has also been encouragement of social enterprises – businesses who operate for social objectives and who reinvest their profits in the enterprise or the community (Hunter, Reference Hunter2009; Social Enterprise Coalition, 2009) – thus blurring the boundaries between the private and the not-for-profit sectors.

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, politicians and academics began to promote the role of volunteers as a means of involving people in their community, encouraging social inclusion, promoting the development of social capital, self help and self reliance while providing volunteers with useful skills for the paid labour market. In Britain these ideas, already adopted to some extent by the Conservative Party, were taken up enthusiastically by New Labour as part of Third Way politics and they launched the start of a new era of state support for charities and volunteerism in the UK (Kendall, Reference Kendall2009).

In 1998, ‘The Compact’ between the voluntary sector and government was developed. It provided a set of core principles for facilitating and supporting the relationship between the state and the NPS. Local Compact agreements resourced new intermediary bodies designed to develop, liaise and represent the NPS, and the ChangeUp programme (Home Office, 2004) simultaneously attempted to improve the sector's skills base. The UK's charity sector grew both in terms of income and size during the noughties (Backus and Clifford, Reference Backus and Clifford2010b) producing funding increases for large service delivery NPS organisations. Commentators have raised concerns over what they see as the ‘Tescoisation of the third sector’ and its negative impacts on smaller community-based organisations (Backus and Clifford, Reference Backus and Clifford2010a; Phillimore et al., Reference Phillimore, McCabe, Soteri-Proctor and Taylor2010). Statutory funding has been accompanied by a rise in public support for the voluntary sector through organisations such as the Big Lottery Fund. The third sector has become mainstreamed into government policy with volunteerism firmly placed on the national policy stage (Kendall, Reference Kendall2009; Alcock, Reference Alcock2010a), a trend that seems likely to continue under the Coalition government, but with one key difference.

David Cameron's concept of the ‘Big Society’ advocates a move away from Labour's ‘Big State’. It champions community empowerment and local collective action and also seeks to encourage further a shift to market-based public service delivery (Alcock, Reference Alcock2010b). In May 2010, David Cameron pledged his continued support for the Third Sector and The Compact but stated that they would ‘refresh and renew’ the partnership between the NPS and the state to produce a more market driven, less bureaucratic, decentralised and independent NPS delivery framework that is more responsive to the needs of local communities. Volunteer workers remain central to the new government's notion of finding more productive ways of ‘doing business’ with the NPS.

Starting with Wolch's seminal text on the shadow state (1990), academics have sought to understand the changing relationships between the state and the NPS (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2001; Fyfe and Milligan, Reference Fyfe and Milligan2003; Hodgson, Reference Hodgson2004; Fyfe, Reference Fyfe2005). Recently Trudeau (Reference Trudeau2008) has argued that NPS organisations should be conceptualised as operating from a ‘location between state and civil society’ (Trudeau, Reference Trudeau2008: 673, original emphasis). He suggests that such organisations must be thought of as responding to or resisting pressures not only from the state, but also from civil society social groups. The variety of contexts in which these relationships arise will result in varied responses. In particular, NPS organisations will operate at different points along an axis measuring the degree of state influence – ranging from extensive, limited, to marginal. We find this approach helpful but suggest that the liminal space which NPS organisations occupy is located not only between state organisations and civil society groups but also between these and market organisations. Market organisations may be alternative purveyors of services offered by the state or third sector, and the social valuation of market relationships also affects the ways in which private sector practices and attitudes are adopted or resisted by state and NPS organisations.

The importance of the market is further emphasised in Glucksmann's influential set of ideas summarised as the Total Social Organisation of Labour (TSOL). The TSOL framework highlights that the organisation, social meaning and amount of work in any given socio-economic mode must be understood in relation to work in other socio-economic modes. Glucksmann (Reference Glucksmann, Pettinger, Parry, Taylor and Glucksmann2005:19) suggests that the TSOL should direct our attention, amongst other things, to the interconnections between ‘paid and unpaid work, market and non-market, formal and informal sectors’ and between ‘work activities and relations with non work activities and relations’. For example, she argues that changes in particular forms of both unpaid and paid child and elder care work in the NPS are linked to the subcontracting of the provision of welfare services by the state to the NPS and to moves by private sector businesses into (and out of) particular aspects of such care and to family provision of care. She shows that the roles of the state, NPS, private sector and family vary strikingly between different countries (Lyon and Glucksmann, Reference Lyon and Glucksmann2008).

The combination of NPS, state and private sector provision occurs in several areas, not only care provision. Sports and fitness training is provided by public, private and NPS organisations, and the same is true for transport which is supplied by the private sector, by the state and by the NPS. Similar mixtures of services are found in after-school care and holiday activities. In these areas, the NPS is often filling in the gaps left by the absence of (adequate) state services for those who cannot afford to pay for privately provided services.

The TSOL framework suggests that how and why voluntary work is done must be examined in relations to the influence of both market and state on the definitions, understandings and content of this work as well as to the relations between paid and unpaid work within the NPS. The TSOL also emphasises the importance of examining the degree to which such work is ‘fused’ with other roles, relationships and emotions (Taylor, Reference Taylor2004 and Reference Taylor, Pettinger, Parry, Taylor and Glucksmann2005). Taylor (Reference Taylor, Pettinger, Parry, Taylor and Glucksmann2005) has argued that attitudes to working in the NPS relate to both its two, rather different, social roots – of working-class self-help organisations and middleclass philanthropy – and to individuals’ class position and habitus. She suggests that it becomes taken for granted in different sub-cultural groups that volunteering is either ‘something you do’ or ‘something you don't do’.

Much of the academic literature has focussed on the influence of the state on the aims, services and political role of the NPS. Rather less attention has been focused on how state influence affects the NPS workforce in general and volunteering in particular, apart from the important discussions of professionalisation referenced earlier. There has also been relatively little attention given to the effect of private sector provision on the NPS services and workforce. In the following sections, we use data from a study of volunteering in Reading to examine the ways in which relationships with the state and the private sector and the demands of family influence the nature of the work done and the organisation and rewards of both paid and unpaid work.

Data and methodology

In this article, we draw on data from a consultancy study carried out in Reading in 2006,Footnote ¹ which focused on assessing the ‘value’ of volunteering in the town. We also draw on interviews we have carried out in 2010 with NPS organisations in Reading: a service delivery organisation which receives about half of its funding through grants from the local authority and a central state funded organisation that is intended to work with local community groups. In Reading, this has been achieved through involvement with our third organisation which provides services to local VSC groups.

The NPS and volunteering in Reading

Doing the work of the NPS

Our survey illustrated the variety of combinations of unpaid and paid work that were used to provide services within the NPS in Reading. Despite national growth in paid employment in the NPS (Moro and McKay, Reference Moro and McKay2010), most organisations we interviewed had more volunteers than paid staff. About a quarter of our sample had no paid staff at all – the majority of these were small organisations with fewer than twelve volunteers; however five of them had over thirty volunteers. Ten organisations had fewer than five paid staff but more than twenty-five volunteers, while fourteen others had more than five paid staff and fewer than twenty-five volunteers.

The roles of volunteer workers within organisations were varied. Direct service delivery was the largest single type of labour carried out by volunteers, but in total more were engaged in management, administration or fundraising (see Table 1). We identified four distinct types of organisation in terms of the role of volunteers and paid workers.

1. (i) Organisations which exist to promote volunteering in other workplaces. We interviewed three organisations in this category who hoped that volunteering would help young people's personal development and employability. They also hoped to instil favourable attitudes to future volunteering.

2. (ii) Organisations where volunteers were primarily a means to the end of providing services. Examples are a group providing occasional transport for elderly people and an ethnic minority social welfare organisation. Where paid workers existed, they were used to recruit and organise volunteers and to do administration but did not provide services themselves. In some of these, such as a family support organisation, the fact that workers were unpaid was seen as intrinsic to the quality of the service. These organisations claimed their clients felt that unpaid workers had more empathy and commitment than paid workers.

3. (iii) Organisations where volunteers delivered services but where part of the service was to provide opportunities for volunteering. Paid workers were used primarily to organise volunteers and manage the organisation. Examples are community groups, one youth group and an organisation operating charity shops.

4. (iv) Organisations which had few volunteers in relation to paid workers. These used paid staff to provide their main service because they needed trained workers available from eight to twenty-four hours every day. For example, one provided full-time live-in help for people with a mental impairment.

Table 1

Proportion of time spent by volunteers on 5 activities*

* Note: Based on replies from 80 NPS organisations in Reading.

Twelve out of the twenty-two organisations had paid staff who worked on recruiting and managing volunteers whilst the remainder relied solely on part-time volunteers; however, some of these ‘part-timers’ seemed to be working over thirty hours a week. The claim that ‘volunteering is always at a critical point’ (Sports Organisation) summed up the majority view of the organisations we interviewed. Some organisations faced specific skill shortages: ‘there are a lot of people who can help at the lower end but it is difficult to find people with strong skills’ (Counselling Organisation with a focus on ethnic minority groups). Organisations that needed volunteers with knowledge of the language or culture of ethnic minority groups and/or who needed professional skills found recruitment particularly difficult.

Recruitment practices varied from informal, word of mouth and ‘previous client’ strategies to more formalised application and interview processes. There was evidence of a move towards the increased professionalisation referred to in the literature – this seemed to stem partly from attempts to manage recruitment effectively and partly from state requirements, such as CRB checks. This increased formalisation was felt to improve the quality of recruitment, but added to the work pressures on staff.

The training and retention of volunteers also generated many work demands. ‘We provide three sessions of formal training plus a period of shadow training. Training gives confidence to volunteers and helps retention. You need to constantly support your volunteers and mentor them’ (Community Group A). Some organisations ‘bought-in’ training, although funding could be a difficulty and one of the ethnic minority group organisations faced problems in finding trainers with appropriate cultural knowledge. Other on-going support for volunteers, such as social events and buddying, also loom large in organisations’ everyday activities. Furthermore, some volunteers were themselves vulnerable people who needed considerable support, ‘we can only manage one or two people like that’ (Community Group B).

Many interviewees considered that recruitment, training and retention of volunteers could best be organised by paid workers who provide long-term consistency of input. Some of this work entailed administration, but much involved emotional labour. An important element of recruitment and retention was to provide a ‘family-like’ environment in which friendships and a sense of mutual obligation between volunteers could flourish and promote what interviewees described as a sense of ‘attachment’, ‘belonging’ or ‘loyalty’. Similarly, NPS organisations in Reading employing paid workers find it hard to compete with private sector pay. They said the non-monetary rewards of working for a ‘good cause’ and favourable conditions of service were one way of recruiting and retaining these workers.

Paid work and unpaid work are closely related in NPS organisations. For the majority, paid workers exist to create the conditions for unpaid work to take place. For a minority, the opposite is true. Engagement in volunteering was felt by many organisations to be a good in itself in addition to the provision of services. Managers felt that emotions of altruism and the desire to belong to an organisation that ‘cares’ for staff as well as clients were important to both paid and unpaid workers and could compensate workers for lack of money or for lower wages than in the private or state sectors.

Who were the volunteers?

Sixty-six per cent of the volunteers were women, with the majority aged between forty and sixty four, and they outnumbered men in all activities, but especially in direct service provision. With the exception of sports and youth-related organisations, women tend to work in the more ‘hands on’ roles, such as care work, shop work, ‘front of house’ service delivery and practical fundraising, whilst male volunteers are more likely to be involved in management and committee work.

The discussion with the organisers of the twenty-two NPS organisations suggested to us that in terms of recruitment and retention there is a significant distinction between what we term ‘lifelong’ and ‘lifestage’ volunteers. We suggest that volunteering always plays a significant part in the lives of some people, for others volunteering is something that they do as part of a specific lifestage.

Some volunteers have lifelong motivations for volunteering that are associated with altruism and feeling that volunteering is ‘something you do’ (Taylor, Reference Taylor, Pettinger, Parry, Taylor and Glucksmann2005; Cloke et al., Reference Cloke, Johnsen and May2007). Some lifelong volunteers are involved with groups with few connections to the local state–NPS initiatives, but many work within widely recognised groups and are embedded in the Reading Compact networks. They sometimes move between paid and unpaid work for the NPS and bring essential skills and time to the sector. In a recent interview with a state-sponsored organisation, the manager argued that this group of volunteers tend to be of middle or retirement age and often white and middle-class:

Lifestage volunteers are more socially differentiated and less networked than lifelong volunteers. Some are retired people who seek to replace the friendships and structure of paid work or widow(er)s who seek friendships and activities outside the house. Others are fulfilling social expectations and obligations based on a particular role as a parent, or group participant: ‘Many of our volunteers are women, aged twenty-five to forty, with small children, who've given up work but want to keep themselves busy and do something outside the home that's valued . . . they miss the reward that work brings’ (Disability Organisation).

Lifestage volunteers are drawn into volunteering in a specific context and this volunteering is quite likely to be the only volunteering they will do.

Between a rock and a hard place: lifestage volunteering, the state and market

Lifestage volunteering tends to be localised and is essential to the running of everyday activities, such as sports clubs, youth centres and community-based associations. Many such organisations are located in ‘socially excluded’ communities where they play a key role in fostering local social cohesion and facilitating community engagement. Some of these grass-roots organisations have been overlooked by the state–NPS partnerships in the town. Recent national research also concludes that much of the new state funding has by-passed these ‘below-the-radar’ (BTR) groups in favour of larger public service delivery NPS organisations with strong partnerships to local and national government (Phillimore et al., Reference Phillimore, McCabe, Soteri-Proctor and Taylor2010).

Approximately 40 per cent of our twenty-two organisations could be called BTR organisations – they felt their everyday existence was a battle against poor funding, health and safety regulations like CRB checks, escalating operating costs, dilapidated premises and stressed volunteers. Despite several of them having a long history in the town, some groups had never heard of NPS umbrella organisations such as RVA or the Reading Compact and felt excluded from local state–NPS initiatives. Having worked in one of Reading's most deprived neighbourhoods for twenty years, one passionate but disillusioned lifelong volunteer commented that: ‘We want people in power in the Borough to recognise what we do . . . they don't know we exist! We're here to do basic things for the community . . . we never turn anyone away even if they can't pay the weekly subs. I would like the council to recognise what we do and that we're not just here for the sport but helping this community . . . it's somewhere to come in off the street, talk to people, share their troubles’ (Sports Organisation 2).

Whilst large NPS organisations may continue to attract lifelong and lifestage volunteers, the more local types of lifestage volunteering are being squeezed by time and money pressures. ‘Having the time’ to help out at the local youth club is increasingly set in opposition to prevailing economic pressures for people to engage fully with the labour market for longer. We were told that with the demise of full-time semi-skilled manufacturing work in Reading, some local people who had previously volunteered after their nine-to-five jobs have moved to shift-work in the service economy, which reduces their time for volunteering. Some organisations commented that, between them, family members were increasingly involved in twenty-four hour working in poorly paid, contract jobs which curtailed their involvement in community activities:

Our survey, carried out before the start of the economic crisis of 2008, suggested that pre-retirement lifestage volunteers, particularly men from all classes, were withdrawing from volunteering in order to cope with the everyday pressures of work and family life. Several organisations said that some trained male volunteers were inactive largely because they were ‘too busy [with paid work] to do anything anymore’ (Sports Organisation 3). The demands of child or elder care and travel costs were further obstacles, particularly for women who tend to spend more time on care than men (Sullivan, Reference Sullivan2006; Commission for the Compact, 2010).

In addition to funding and volunteer pressures, some organisations increasingly need to ‘compete’ with the market. Local sports and youth organisations find themselves competing with private sector providers that offer good facilities for those who can afford to pay. One organisation that provided activities for disadvantaged youth felt they were often treated by parents as unsatisfactory ‘paid employees’. The same organisation reported a 10 per cent ‘drop out rate’ of volunteers who leave because they find dealing with abusive parents too stressful. The availability of private sector provision creams off more affluent participants, thus reducing the potential pool of volunteers.

In the current economic downturn, individuals with a disposition towards lifestage volunteering may increasingly find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, families must negotiate their household livelihood strategies within a society which increasingly expects both men and women to engage in full-time paid work. On the other hand, the economic crisis appears to be leading to a withdrawal of public support mechanisms and secure jobs that freed up time for community work.

The NPS workforce: between state and market

In an earlier section, we suggested that the NPS should be seen as occupying a position between the market, the state and civil society. Using the TSOL as a lens, we have sought to show how labour performed within the NPS is influenced by the demands of the state, competition from the private sector for labour and ‘clients’, as well as workers’ family commitments.

The increased importance of state funding and influence has led to the creation of a cadre of paid and unpaid workers dedicated to representing the interests of the NPS to the local state and partnership bodies. However, some ‘Below the Radar’ organisations are not well connected to this potential support. The increased demands for men and women to do full-time paid work in the market as well as the existence of private sector services for those who can afford to pay has made it increasingly difficult for these organisations to recruit and retain volunteers, and they lack the funding to employ paid workers.

The growth of state influence has increased bureaucratic demands on organisations who get state funding (such as for financial accounting and reporting) and the need for professionally skilled labour (for example, to write funding bids and prepare accounts). Other demands, such as CRB checks and insurance, created particular organisational problems for smaller organisations. The NPS also relies on the emotional skills of workers – both in delivering services and retaining its workforce in the face of competition from private sector waged work and family commitments. One of the perceived advantages of volunteering is that it can offer positive ‘work-like’ rewards and a sense of belonging without the long hours, inflexibility and stress of some paid work. In some organisations, lack of funding, pressures to meet bureaucratic demands and competition from private sector firms were eroding these advantages.

Recruiting, training and retaining volunteers are three activities that all organisations found very labour-intensive and many desired to have paid workers for these tasks. Difficulties in recruitment are linked to the role of the private sector as a source of both paid employment for potential volunteers and of competing service provision. We suggest that volunteering by what we term ‘lifestage’ volunteers is most likely to be reduced by the demands of paid work, family commitments and the attractions of services provided by the private sector.

It seems probable that in the immediate future far less funding will be available to the non-profit sector. The chances of organisations gaining funding for paid workers to support volunteers will decrease. Some non-profit organisations that are highly dependent on state funding may cease to exist. More private sector organisations may start to provide welfare services and this again may lead to the closure of some NPS organisations. There will be further pressure on NPS providers of welfare services to adopt ‘market disciplines’ and reduce costs. The reduction of state funding will have little direct impact on organisations who have only a marginal relationship with the state; however, the demands of paid work and the loss of other state support services aimed at poorer groups, such as after-school clubs and family welfare support, are likely to make it harder to find volunteers. At the same time, such organisations will continue to find themselves in ‘competition’ with services provided by the private sector and their services judged in relation to such services.

We have emphasised the importance of direct competition from private sector businesses to some NPS organisations. It is also important to recognise that the marketisation of state procurement and employment influences the demands made by the state on the NPS. Marketisation stresses ideas of efficiency – of lowering costs, improving services and reducing unproductive work time. This language comes from a different world to ideas of attracting paid or unpaid workers into NPS organisations by enlisting emotions concerned with morality and belonging. These ideas link to the arenas of the family and community. It is not clear that the two worlds can be comfortably reconciled.