Conceptualizing the Third Sector in Ireland,North and South

While there is a long established and deeply embedded tradition of voluntary action and nonprofit organizing in Ireland, there has been very limited debate on a philosophy of voluntary action or on the place of the third sector in a modern democratic state. It is against this background that practitioners and academics are beginning to articulate their individual understandings of the role of the third sector in Irish society. This paper presents a framework developed from three questions to consider the place of the third sector in a modern democratic state. The questions are: What are the roles of the third sector in a society? What relationships exist between the third and other sectors? How are third sector organizations resourced within that societal context? Answering these questions contributes to a conceptualization of the third sector in Ireland, North and South.

     

The strategic challenges of cooperation and competition in British Voluntary Organizations: Toward the next century

The interrelationships between public, private, and voluntary sectors in Britain have witnessed increasing levels of change in recent years. This article argues that there have recently been identifiable trends within the voluntary sector, namely, increased levels of competition between sectors, increased competition between voluntary organizations, and increased pressures toward professionalization in voluntary sector management and organization. Predominantly competitive strategies and modes of professionalization have often been borrowed uncritically from commercial “best practice” by voluntary organizations. Thompson's (1967) typology of strategies is used as a basis for proposing cooperation as an alternative to competition in the British voluntary sector.     

“I want to move once I have got things straight”: Voluntary sector chief executives' career accounts

This article reports investigation into chief executives' career perceptions, experiences, and aspirations in small and mediumsized organizations in England, using career history and biographical narrative techniques. Career accounts from sixty chief executives—twenty‐seven women and thirty‐three men—were gathered and analyzed, drawing on career theory and typologies of career characterization. A typology for voluntary sector chief executives' career stances was developed: the Paid Philanthropists, the Careerists, and the Nonaligned. Within this typology, women chief executives appeared as predominantly Careerists, outnumbering male chief executives by two to one. Implications for developing career theory in voluntary sector contexts is discussed and directions for future research suggested.     

Organization and Management in the Third Sector: Toward a Cross‐Cultural Research Agenda

Third sector organizations in the industrialized and the developing world—and particularly the subset of third sector organizations known as development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—are becoming more culturally diverse in internal staff composition, management styles, and working environments. Although cultural issues have been largely absent from the nonprofit and the NGO research literatures, the organizational implications of societal culture and organizational culture are widely debated within other research fields. This article proposes a closer engagement between third sector management research and the wider study of cross‐cultural organizational issues within anthropology, development studies, and management theory. It argues that such an exchange is necessary if third sector organizational research agendas are to include changing organizational landscapes effectively, and the article concludes with some ideas for future research.     

Planning responses to voluntary sector crises

Planning in voluntary organizations is examined as a response to external crises that jeopardize organizational survival. The voluntary sector in London was investigated in order to understand the extent, nature, and rationale of planning in response to an extreme change in the political and funding context of voluntary action during the mid 1980s. Planning and the ability to plan may be the benchmark of organizational survival in the future, as pressure to plan increases from many arenas and statutory penetration of voluntary organizations deepens. The dilemma this poses for voluntary organizations is discussed, and alternative planning approaches are proposed.     

The Role of the Nonprofit Sector in Hong Kong's Development

The recent handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China (PRC) brought Hong Kong worldwide attention and scrutiny. In the run up to the handover, the international media prominently featured stories about Hong Kong's freewheeling capitalism and the stability created by its administrative institutions. Lost in the media attention was the role of nonprofit organizations and the voluntary sector in Hong Kong's political and economic development. Although Hong Kong has a vibrant civil society, it has received little attention from scholars. This paper reviews the role of the third sector in Hong Kong's development. Among the issues the paper addresses are the legal codes that govern the creation and operation of nonprofit organizations in Hong Kong, the evidence regarding the role of the nonprofit sector in Hong Kong's development, particularly its relationship to the government and market sectors, and the implications of the 1997 transition for the nonprofit sector's role.     

Legitimacy and the Role of UK Third Sector Organizations in the Policy Process

This paper explores the legitimacy of third sector organizations in the policy process in the United Kingdom. It draws on empirical research to examine how legitimacy is defined, both by third sector organizations and by those they target within government. The paper argues that while many third sector organizations give high priority to political forms of legitimacy—in the sense of participatory structures and accountability to members and beneficiaries—government is generally more likely to give priority to technical forms of legitimacy, e.g., the quality of research and the ability to implement policy. Nonetheless, political legitimacy is still important, first because this is the form of legitimacy that third sector organizations claim for themselves and second because, as government gives way to governance with an increase in partnerships and collaboration, the dilemmas faced by third sector organizations in achieving political legitimacy are being faced on a broader canvas.     

Negotiating Interactions in State�CVoluntary Sector Relationships: Competitive and Collaborative Agency in an Experiential Workshop

This article examines an experiential student workshop focused on state?Cvoluntary sector relationships in the UK, which formed part of a postgraduate voluntary sector studies programme. The different group behaviours observed were instructive in illustrating how students, all working in third sector or related public agencies, perceive and have assimilated demands and practices of the external environment. These insights also highlight the value of experiential learning in higher education both for student reflection and research. The article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine some consequences of ideologies and behaviours associated with managerial culture permeating actions in this interactive setting. It combines critical discussion of non-profit organizations with group relations and learning theories, offering a different perspective through which to explore patterns embedded in inter-agency relationships. Consideration of ways that these patterns might be changed to improve the service environment in the voluntary sector has wider implications for research in this field.     

Promoting Philanthropy? News Publicity and Voluntary Organizations in Canada

This paper reports exploratory data from a broader study that examines media representations of the voluntary sector in Canada. It specifically identifies the resources and organizational attributes of Canadian voluntary groups that appear to be important for receiving mainstream news coverage. The data identifies four sets of characteristics of more than 500 voluntary organizations: demographic variables, association type, noneconomic resources, and economic expenditures. These characteristics are examined in terms of their relationship to news coverage. The data suggest that area of activity is significantly related to the amount of media attention that organizations receive. However, the amount of media attention that an organization receives is most strongly influenced by its yearly budget. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to both current debates about advocacy in the voluntary sector and important contextual developments that are transforming the communication environment in which charities and nonprofit organizations in Canada operate. We also draw comparisons to news coverage of the voluntary sector in other liberal democratic countries.     

Sexualizing the Organization,Lesbianizing the Women: Gender,Sexuality and ‘Flat’ Organizations

This article draws upon research with men and women workers in ‘flat’ organizations, namely mixed-sex and all-women's worker co-operatives and collectives in the voluntary sector. It argues that the denial of sales, contracts and grants to women's co-operatives and collectives in particular, can be connected to discourses of sexuality generally and to the assumptions surrounding lesbianism and separatism in particular. Such discourses are often used to marginalize women workers and their co-operatives and collectives, irrespective of whether the women in such organizations are lesbians or not. It is argued that when women workers organize in ways which challenge male-dominated hierarchy, their marginalization necessarily takes a sexualized form because organizations, whether hierarchical or less/non-hierarchical, are not only gendered but are also sexualized. This analysis thus offers an important additional dimension to the view that the marginalization of co-operatives and collectives is due to their small size, lack of capital, location in certain sectors of the economy, or assumptions concerning the ‘alternative’ or ‘fringe’ nature of employment in such settings. This article also argues that sexuality can attach at the level of the organization, and not simply at the level of individual bodies or life-styles, an argument often unacknowledged both in the literature on lesbians in the workplace, and in the literature on co-operative businesses and less or non-hierarchical voluntary sector organizations generally.     

Quantifying the Third Sector in Portugal: An Overview and Evolution from 1997 to 2007

This article presents a global overview of the third sector in Portugal drawing on data from a linked employer–employee database—“Quadros de Pessoal,” which is based on a compulsory annual inquiry to organizations, making it a better source of information than those based on sample surveys and estimates. This study advances on previous overviews by providing more updated numbers for organization size, age, gross revenue and employment levels, as well as their distribution across the ICNPO third sector activity classification. The evolution of these variables from the period 1997 to 2007 is also analyzed. The Portuguese third sector has been fast growing, with revenues amounting to 5.64% of Portugal’s GDP and employment representing 4% of the country’s employment in 2007. It is mainly composed of very small organizations, with diminutive revenues. Perhaps its most striking features are the uneven distribution of employment and revenue and the strong concentration on social services.     

Organized Environmentalists: Democracy as a Key Value?

This article, taking as its point of departure that voluntary organizations are of crucial importance in a democracy, views the transformation of the Norwegian voluntary sector through the lenses of what happens within the environmental field. Seeing changes within this field as prototypical for the transformation of the voluntary sector more generally, we start with the organizational level and contrast old versus new environmental organizations. The aim is to ascertain to what extent the newly built organizations are leaving the historically important democratic organizational model. Second, we compare attitudes toward democracy of members of the democratically and nondemocratically built organizations: attitudes both toward democracy within a voluntary organization (internal) and democracy in society (external). Furthermore, we compare these findings with what we find for the population at large. The last section analyzes demographic characteristics of organized environmentalists to see whether a new type of elite, more distanced from the population at large, is emerging in the new and nondemocratically built organizations. The study finds that new organizations are definitely breaking with the democratic organizational model. The support for democracy (internal and external) is comprehensive but not always overwhelming, and there is a tendency in the direction of congruence between organizational structure and individual attitudes. That is, members of democratically built organizations especially value internal but also to some extent external democracy more than members of nondemocratically built organizations. However, even if formal democratic structure and democracy as an absolute and generalized value seems to be under pressure, it does not follow that a new type of elitism is emerging.     

Diversifying revenue sources in Canada: Are women's voluntary organizations different?

Government policies in Canada have taken a hard right turn, and tax cuts now have priority over investing in social programming. Both federal and provincial governments have been withdrawing from direct service provision, with the expectation that the voluntary sector will fill the gap. At the same time, traditional government support for the voluntary sector has declined, which limits the ability of organizations to meet their current service demands. Using a sample of 645 organizations from across Canada, this article explores the use of revenue diversification as a response to policy changes. The findings indicate that the factors related to voluntary organizations' in Canada embracing revenue diversification to support program delivery differ for organizations run by women and nongendered organizations.     

Contextual Factors and Negotiating Spaces: Exploring the Emergence of Nonprofit and Hybrid Voluntary Organizations

The emergence of nonprofit organizations has largely been explained by the prevalent “three failures” theory. However, evidence suggests that such theories fail to capture a variety of contextual nuances that may influence nonprofit formation. In particular, these theories have remained relatively silent about the emergence of hybrid voluntary organizations. This article posits the notion that some nonprofit organizations (for example, hybrid voluntary organizations) emerge through cross‐sector negotiations, amid a number of social, policy, and political contextual complexities. We contend that any theory purporting to explain the emergence of nonprofit organizations should not neglect to account for the role contextual factors play in defining their emergence and their subsequent character and function.     

Heading South: Time to Abandon the ‘Parallel Worlds’ of International Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and Domestic Third Sector Scholarship?

Since third sector research emerged as a full-fledged interdisciplinary academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained—in common with many other social science disciplines—between communities of researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich Western countries and those who work on the third sector in the so-called developing world. Whilst internationally focused researchers tend to use the language of ‘non-governmental organizations’, those in domestic settings usually prefer the terms ‘non-profit organization’ or ‘voluntary organization’, even though both subsectors share common principles and are equally internally diverse in terms of organisations and activities. Whilst there has long been common-sense logic to distinguishing between wealthier and poorer regions of the world based on differences in the scale of human need, the ‘developed’ versus ‘developing’ category can also be criticised as being rather simplistic and unhelpfully ideological. As the categories of ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries become less clear-cut, and global interconnectedness between third sectors and their ideas grows, this paper argues that we need to reconsider the value of maintaining these parallel worlds of research, and instead develop a more unified approach.     

Service Delivery and Civic Engagement: Disability Organizations in Northern Ireland

In the United Kingdom, the New Labour administration that came to power in 1997 has promoted two models of partnership between the state and the voluntary sector. The civic engagement model is based on the renewed interest among governments in the potential of voluntary organizations to contribute to the civic engagement of citizens. In the service delivery model, voluntary organizations are recruited to the task of delivering core social services. Drawing on data from disability-related voluntary organizations in Northern Ireland, this paper illustrates the impact of the service delivery partnership model on the development of voluntary action in the welfare field, and the relative paucity of resources allocated to participatory voluntary action and civic engagement. The consequent impact on the development of partnerships between the state and the voluntary sector is discussed.     

Qualified Employment in the Third Sector in Portugal

Departing from regulation theories and varieties of capitalism school this article focuses on employment in the third sector. We start by discussing the emergence of the new third sector in the western world. In the second part of the article, we provide an overview of the third sector in Portugal today. The ideal values of the organizations of the third sector, namely the principles of democratic and participative management, the primacy of people and work over capital, and the centrality of social capital, frame the discussion of empirical data regarding the wage relation that characterizes the University of Porto (UP) graduates currently working in the third sector. We end with a critical discussion of the optimistic expectations and projections that loom over the third sector regarding the construction of an alternative model of social and economic development based on justice and equity.     

Factors Holding Back Small Third Sector Organizations’ Engagement with the Local Public Sector

In many developed countries there has been a shift from grants to contracts as a source of local public sector funding of the third sector. Smaller third sector organizations may struggle to compete for this funding due to the complex process of accessing and maintaining this funding and conveying their capabilities to funding providers. This study utilizes data from the United Kingdom to determine what factors increase these administrative and communication barriers for smaller organizations. Resources in income and volunteers affect perceptions of the process of obtaining funding. A solution may be standardization of evaluation and monitoring, but this may lead to isomorphism and loss of variety of provision. Better two‐way communication may allow local authorities to retain variety in public service provision through improved knowledge of their partners.     

British Statutory Sector Partnerships with the Voluntary Sector

Abstract

The boundaries of the welfare state in Britain have shifted considerably since the early 1980s. In the context of a desire to see an expanded mixed economyof welfare, the voluntary and community sectors have been expected to take on, in partnership with the statutory sector, a more active role in the delivery of a range of welfare services. Governmental speeches and policy initiatives in the UK have reasoned that the voluntary sector is cost-effective, offers “added value” to users and statutory sector purchasers, provides high quality services, is adaptable to changing needs and promotes greater user involvement. This article takes a critical look at some of the claims that are often made for service-providing voluntary organizations in the field of community (social) care.