Stories, Visions and Values in Voluntary Organisations

Christina Schwabenland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754644620
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317049777
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Christina Schwabenland's book is based on extensive research into stories told by people working in voluntary organizations in the UK and in India. With a view to social change, the author employs hermeneutic methods to explore how stories create and sustain meaning and how storytelling contributes to the making and remaking of our social world. Specific topics addressed in the book include the role of storytelling in starting a new organization, managing hope and despair, empowering participatory leadership, and stimulating creativity and innovation. The book will be of interest to theorists and practitioners interested in the role of storytelling in organizational analysis, the role of organizations in achieving social change, the growing centrality of the voluntary sector in public policy, and the intersection between the corporate, public and voluntary sectors.

Chapter 1
A Genuine Voluntary Organisation … Setting the Scene

This is the federation of primary fish marketing societies of fishermen, in this district. The primary societies were organised throughout the 70s and early 80s by another voluntary organisation, a genuine voluntary organisation of a group of social workers who were working with fishermen. So they had organised these fish marketing societies to help fishermen get out of the clutches of middlemen and money lenders, to control their own marketing and credit.¹

Introduction

This is a story about the founding of a voluntary organisation in Southern India. It encompasses, in three fairly brief sentences, the key themes of this book: the contribution of voluntary organisations to social change, the use of stories told by participants to explore their different visions of the good society, and the ways people create organisations to achieve these visions.

This book is about voluntary organisations and social change, and in particular the work they do to empower people marginalised by the structures and institutions of society. The book uses stories, the stories that are told by people who create organisations, work in them and use their services to shed light not only on what they think about organisations but how they think about them. The stories come from people working and living in two countries, the UK and India, that each have a long tradition of voluntary organisational activity but also very interesting differences in the ways in which this contribution is understood. The stories reveal the ways in which people imagine a more just society, how those images inspire people working within voluntary organisations and the values they bring to management and leadership.

For the purposes of this book I am using the term ‘voluntary organisation’ to refer to organisations that are formally constituted, independent of government, governed by a voluntary board, not profit making – with any surpluses re-invested in the organisation rather than distributed to shareholders – and established for the fulfilment of some social or community good.²

I have organised this book into two sections. The first section explores social change in the wider society that voluntary organisations seek to influence. It explores the ways in which their visions of a better society are manifested and concentrates on the themes of why and how organisations are founded, their role in empowering people on the margins of society and how their work affects the social landscape. The second section looks at how organisations develop value based management practices that pose alternatives to the hegemonic discourse about good management, particularly in the areas of creativity and innovation, participatory leadership and governance and organisational change. The chapters in the two sections complement each other, in the manner of a dialogue, and can be seen as a conversation between the outer and inner experiences of organising and between the organisation and its environment. My proposition is that leading and managing vision(s) requires attending to the values that are inherent in their chosen ways of working.

In this chapter I introduce these key themes and their importance to managers, researchers, policy makers, users and members – in short, to anyone who aspires to creatie a more just society.

Firstly, I want to provide some personal background in order to explain how I have chosen to position the book in terms of its theoretical orientation towards a social constructionist perspective. My reasons for pursuing the research that led to this book were initially self interested. I have worked in voluntary organisations for over 30 years, occupying a number of roles including volunteer, paid volunteer organiser, development worker, manager, chief executive and currently, researcher and trustee.

When I began to venture into the academic world, initially as a postgraduate student, I was looking for ways of making sense of the some of the experiences I had had in those roles and particularly those that hadn’t been addressed by the various management training courses I had attended. These courses did very little to explain, to me anyway, how things really happen in organisations. They didn’t provide ways of understanding some things that are commonly encountered in voluntary organisations such as the potential for people to reinvent themselves through volunteering, the passionate belief in social justice that motivates so many people working in the sector, the conflicting expectations of managers, the importance of organisational culture. Neither did all of they relate to my own perceptions of organisational life as messy, complicated and confusing, but also full of passion and excitement.

I began pursuing a literature about organisations from a very different paradigm from either the functional orientation that underpins most traditional courses for managers, or the primarily political focus of all lot of writing about voluntary organisations. The books and articles that interested me were (and still are) a fairly eclectic mix but all were written from a different perspective than that of the rational, functional and scientific paradigm. These alternative approaches were variously described by such names as hermeneutics, social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, critical theory or postmodernism.

The debates about whether these approaches are overlapping or distinct are interesting but beyond my current remit.³ For the readers of this book I am only going to sketch some of the shared underlying assumptions and explain why I think they are particularly relevant to voluntary organisations.

Firstly, these approaches all share a belief that reality, or anything that we can know as reality, is constructed rather than given and that our understanding of it is created not discovered. Therefore, methods appropriated from scientific research are inadequate for the world of human affairs. The search for different methods has drawn organisation theorists into alternative theoretical worlds such as hermeneutics (originally a methodology of religious exegesis; the study of the interpretation of sacred texts) and anthropology (as applied to the study of organisational culture) to name but a few.

Interest in the interpretive, or hermeneutic tradition in particular owes much to the growth of Romanticism (expressed by philosophers such as Hegel, Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Husserl) as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the material world (Burrell and Morgan 1979). The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has suggested that hermeneutics can be seen as a metaphor for the social sciences (Ricoeur 1992b). The application of postmodern theory to organisation studies can similarly be understood as a response to the limitations of the scientific and ‘modernist’ approach to management (Linstead 2004, Usher 1996).

All share a belief in the centrality of language. Gadamer, another hermeneutic philosopher states that ‘the role of language assumes ontological status…language is more than a system of symbols for labelling the external world, it becomes an expression of the human mode of “being in the world” ’(Gadamer cited by Burrell and Morgan, 1979). Social constructionists are particularly interested in the social, or relational aspect of reality creation; critical theorists are more interested in the role of power and ask questions about whose interpretations matter and whose voices are heard.

The task of interpretation involves looking at the means by which reality is created through such mediatory devices as story, metaphor and symbol and to:

…reconstruct the ways in which human beings go about this interpreting…a task which involves direct intuition as the source and final test of all knowledge and insight into essential structures derived from such intuition. (Speigelberg cited in Morris 1977, 10 italics in the original)

Throughout this book I draw heavily on these and similar theorists. I have been particularly influenced by the work of Paul Ricoeur, the French hermeneutic philosopher. In each chapter there is a brief discussion of particular writers that I have found helpful to the topic under discussion; for examples the debate between Scott and Stone-Mediatore (2003) on the reliability of the stories that people tell about their own experiences, the ideas of Ricoeur and Nandy on utopian thinking and the visions of a better society that inspire founders of voluntary organisations and Burrell and Morgan’s paradigms of social change. These emphases on imagination and creativity and the rejection of the certainties of the scientific approach to management were what attracted me. They offered a way of understanding those aspects of organisational experience that are not so amenable to functional or rational explanations. These theoretical approaches also seemed to me to be particularly relevant to understanding voluntary organisations.

Firstly, the suggestion that reality is created rather than discovered implies that there are many realities rather than one. This belief resonates with the plurality of beliefs and perspectives that are inherent in the voluntary sector,⁴ the collectivity of voluntary organisations, comprising as it does, organisations founded by people from all walks of life and possessing all manner of competing and contradictory beliefs. The ‘rejection of the grand narrative’ (of an absolute and universal knowledge (Usher 1996)), that underpins these various schools of thought, is therefore particularly apposite.

Secondly, the search for non-rational explanations of organisational phenomena makes particular sense in organisations that are populated by people motivated by a passion for social justice (however they may define it).

Thirdly, the emphasis of the critical school on issues of power and emancipation is enormously relevant to organisations that work amongst the most marginalised people in society. Similarly relevant are writers from feminist and postcolonial perspectives because their interest is in the uses and abuses of power as experienced by people who are historically located in disadvantaged positions.

Yet despite the obvious relevance of these schools to voluntary organisations I have found very little research that utilises their overlapping theoretical approaches.⁵The majority of theorising of voluntary organisations seems to be primarily developed from a modernist perspective and to be mainly concerned with their role in the political environment.

Meanwhile, although there is a substantial literature that applies constructionist perspectives to organisations generally very little has focussed on voluntary organisations. This is also surprising given the significance of voluntary organisations to our notions of the good society and the emancipatory interests of the critical school (Perriton and Reynolds 2004).

Voluntary organisations make concrete our changing views about moral and ethical behaviour. They have been a significant part of our social landscape for a very long time. They are amongst the oldest existing institutions, predating the establishment of the public sector.⁶ As fashions and ideas change so new forms of organisations come into existence whether they be philanthropic, charitable, mutual aid or self help organisations, user or member controlled – these all represent different ways of coming to terms with the questions of suffering and inequality and with different ideas about the most ethical answers. These organisations can be seen as occupying a social space in which societies and cultures construct questions about the good society and test out new and evolving responses. This space is contested and fought over and its boundaries are endlessly debated. Issues about which organisations, or families of organisations are included in the sector (sports clubs? trade unions? hospitals? pressure groups?) have always been a feature of voluntary organisation research and are inherently incapable of resolution.

Interest in voluntary organisations is growing, and arguably, so are their importance.⁷ Voluntary organisations occupy an increasingly prominent role in policy discourse in the US and the UK and a significant place in international economic and trade policy.⁸ They are being courted and their expertise enlisted in the service of the private sector (in pursuit of its corporate social responsibility agenda), the public sector (in search of organisations to take up the role of service provider) and policy makers (in search of solutions to such perceived social ills as urban decay, decline of civic responsibility and neighbourliness).

The expectations of voluntary organisations are, therefore, tremendously high. The phenomenon of people coming together voluntarily to create institutional arrangements to alleviate some social ill is immensely potent. This phenomenon is variously seen as the guarantor of democratic society, the means to include the excluded by increasing participation from marginalised groups, the way to restore or preserve our sense of communality with others, the best hope for the regeneration of deprived and despairing neighbourhoods and the enemy of corrupt and self serving government.⁹

For all these reasons voluntary organisations should be of great interest to people working within the social constructionist paradigm. Similarly, managers and researchers of voluntary organisations may find that exploring the role of organisations in the ongoing processes of reality creation may offer important insights into some of the critical issues they are currently facing.

One such critical issue is that with the increasing attention come increased risks and challenges including the risk of co-option by the state. People working in voluntary organisations are not immune to flattery. Many believe that change can be more effectively, if less dramatically achieved by working alongside policy makers, and through persuasion rather than opposition. Furthermore, the sense of involvement that comes from trying to change from ‘within’ rather than from ‘without’ is immensely seductive. Many organisations are engaged in a walking a tightrope between collusion and challenge. Where to position itself along this continuum is a decision for each organisation – and many find it very difficult to get that balance right. In a recent survey of UK organisations ‘the proportion that wish to achieve an even balance between the roles (of campaigning and service providing) is twice the number that say they have already achieved this balance’.¹⁰ However, as a prominent voluntary sector activist has commented, ‘I never mistake access for influence’.¹¹

For all of these reasons it is increasingly important that we are able to address the critical question of how voluntary organisations contribute to social change. We also need to ask whether their role is intrinsically distinct to that of public or private organisations. I refer back to the quote that opened this chapter:

The primary societies were organised… by another voluntary organisation, a genuine voluntary organisation….

This reference to a ‘genuine’ voluntary organisation does imply some notion of distinctiveness but if there are defining features that distinguish voluntary organisations from other kinds of organisations what are they? And does it matter? All organisations contribute to social change in some way or another. Do we need the voluntary organisations to play a distinct role?

Many who do regard their role as distinctive also see that distinctiveness as under threat (Rosenman 2000). As voluntary organisations take on more of the roles and responsibilities of the state do they lose their distinctiveness? As social enterprises in the UK and micro-credit and self help initiatives in India create new forms of income generation are they in effect simply small businesses?

…they had organised these fish marketing societies to help fishermen get out of the clutches of middlemen and money lenders…

Pursuing these questions about social change also requires us to engage with the issues of power and resistance. How are the relative states of power and powerlessness experienced by people in marginalised positions? How do people want to take up power and how do they resist its imposition by others?

… to control their own marketing and credit.

Furthermore, when increasing global connections (in the corporate, the public and the voluntary sectors) seem to be fuelling a drive towards conformity to some hegemonic notion of one best way of managing does the plurality and diversity represented by the voluntary sector hold intrinsic worth?

A further question that lies at the heart of any discussion about social change is that although voluntary organisations are set up to improve some situation or social condition, the increasing awareness that results from its work, perhaps even simply from its creation can lead to a sense that the original problem is actually getting worse rather than going away. If we live in societies where inequality is growing then what implications does that have for the judgements we make about the effectiveness of voluntary organisations?

The increasing centrality of voluntary organisations has brought increasing attention to this question of effectiveness. Funders want to know that their money is being well spent, that organisations can deliver what they promise. These demands seem wholly reasonable, after all ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A Genuine Voluntary Organisation … Setting the Scene
• Part I Stories and Visions
• Part II Stories and Values
• Bibliography
• Index