Rediscovering Voluntary Action

The Beat of a Different Drum

C. Rochester

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137029447
• eBook ISBN: 9781137029461
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Volunteering and voluntary organizations have become increasingly important in British social and political life but at a cost. Greater prominence has led to a narrow and distorted view of what voluntary action involves and how it is undertaken. This book reasserts the case for a broader view of voluntarism as a unique set of autonomous activities.

1

Introduction: Why the Theory and Practice of Voluntary Action Need Rethinking

This book is rooted in my experience of working in and with volunteers and voluntary organisations over more than 40 years as a practitioner, manager, trustee, researcher and teacher of postgraduate students. It is an attempt to address my growing unease or anxiety about how the ways in which we understand and discuss the nature and purpose of voluntary action and the ways in which we go about it have changed over the past two or three decades. I have increasingly come to believe that these changes threaten the health and vitality of a kind of behaviour that has played a key part in shaping the kind of society we live in and has made an important contribution to the quality of our lives.

During the last 20 years or so, voluntary organisations have come to be seen as ever more significant actors on the stage of public and social policy, while successive governments have looked to volunteering as a means of addressing a variety of social issues. Urged on by ‘second tier’ or ‘infrastructure’ bodies such as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), those who manage and lead voluntary organisations have enthusiastically embraced the opportunities created by these developments (and the resources which go with them) with little, if any, reflection on the implications of their decisions. At the same time, the growth of academic interest in voluntary action has not led to a body of theory which could throw light on these changes by providing a persuasive explanation of why voluntary organisations are qualitatively different from their counterparts in the public and private or ‘for profit’ sectors, or an authoritative account of the distinctive kind of behaviour involved in volunteering. In the past few years concerns about the implications of recent developments for the autonomy of voluntary organisations have led to the establishment of the National Coalition for Independent Action (NCIA) in 2006 and the setting up of a Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector by the Baring Foundation in 2011. The need to rethink voluntary action, however, is driven not just by concerns about independence but, more fundamentally, by anxiety about the possible loss of the distinctive identity of voluntary organisations and volunteering.

This opening chapter will provide an introduction to the book by discussing in turn:

• my own experience of voluntary action and the ways in which it has shaped the perceptions and perspectives that inform the book;

• the need to challenge the narrow double-headed paradigm that sets the terms for much of the contemporary discussion of voluntary action. This provides the conceptual underpinning of much of the book’s argument; and

• the way in which the book is structured and why.

At this point, however, it might be helpful if I were to clarify the way in which some key terms will be used throughout the book. The term voluntary action is used to embrace both the activities of individuals (volunteering) and collective or organised action (by voluntary organisations). The voluntary and community sector is my preferred name for the heterogeneous collection of organisations that are not part of the state (or public sector) or part of the market (or private, for-profit sector). At times I may abbreviate this to voluntary sector. The terms used by other writers, including non-profit sector, third sector and civil society, are, broadly speaking, synonymous, although they may carry some ideological nuances. Voluntary organisation (or voluntary sector organisation or voluntary and community sector organisation) is used to mean any of the various organisational forms to be found in the voluntary sector. By contrast, the use of voluntary agencies is applied only to those voluntary organisations which employ paid staff. Other terms will be defined as and when they appear in the text.

My own experience and perspectives

I have decided to provide an account of my own ‘adventures’ in the world of voluntary action at this stage for two reasons. In the first place, it will provide the reader with an insight into the kind of experiences that have shaped my approach to the book; it is a part of the data on which I have based my arguments. In the second place, it is intended to highlight some of the possible limitations on my vision; it is my experience that people who work in the voluntary sector rarely have a clear view of the sector as a whole in all its variety, but tend instead to see it through the distorting lens of the kind of organisations with which they are most familiar. I have tried to transcend this kind of myopia, but have provided the means by which the reader can judge how successful my efforts have been. In a sense I am following a similar path to that taken by Marilyn Taylor, who described her book on Public Policy and the Community as ‘an odyssey – a journey through experience, discussion and reading’ (Taylor, 2011: xi), and, like her, I need to make that experience explicit.

My serious involvement with voluntary action began in 1968 when I joined the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) as a tutororganiser. The WEA’s work of organising adult education classes was carried out by a network of local branches entirely staffed by volunteers, and my responsibilities included nurturing and supporting the work of 15 such local units as well as teaching a number of evening and day-time classes. As a result my initial engagement was with the kind of ‘grassroots associations’ (as David Horton Smith (2000) has called them) that formed part of what was later to be known as the ‘community sector’. After three years in the field I joined the staff of the WEA’s national headquarters, where, as well as retaining responsibility for the well-being of the association’s local branches, I broadened my experience to include participation in a number of national voluntary organisations – including the forerunner of the NCVO, the National Council for Social Service, and liaison with the education department of the Trades Union Congress and individual trades unions. And I began to appreciate the dynamics of organisational change (although it was only with hindsight that I understood what was going on) as the WEA grappled with a slow but irreversible shift of power from the periphery to the centre and the emergence of its professional staff as an important feature of an organisation which had hitherto depended on the voluntary efforts of its members.

Following this extended introduction to the world of voluntary action, I spent nine years as the Head of Cambridge House and Talbot, the Cambridge University Settlement in Camberwell, South London. Cambridge House was the centre for a variety of forms of voluntary action, some directly managed by the settlement itself and others provided by the voluntary agencies, projects and community groups that shared the building. The spectrum of activities encompassed survivals of nineteenth-century philanthropy such as organising country holidays for children in need; the provision of more contemporary services such as legal advice and assistance, adult literacy tuition, work with children and young people, and activities for people with learning disabilities; community development work with local tenants’ associations and other bodies; self-help and mutual aid groups such as Gingerbread for one-parent families; a social club run by its members; and a miscellaneous collection of leisure-time activities including martial arts and spiritual healing. As well as managing Cambridge House’s own in-house activities and engaging with the dozens of paid staff and hundreds of volunteers associated with the settlement’s wider activities, the Head was expected to involve him or herself in the work of other organisations at both local and national levels. In my case this included participation in the work of the local Council for Voluntary Service as a trustee and with the Volunteer Bureau as chair, and involvement in the settlement’s national umbrella organisation – the British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres (BASSAC) – in a number of capacities. My period at Cambridge House, therefore, gave me not only the experience of directly managing a complex voluntary agency but also a much broader knowledge of different forms of voluntary action and insights into the ways in which voluntary organisations interacted with the local and national state.

In 1987, after almost 20 years as a practitioner, I left the settlement and embarked on a new career as an organisational consultant, researcher and lecturer, first at the London School of Economics’ (LSE) Centre for Voluntary Organisation (which became the Centre for Civil Society) and subsequently at Roehampton University, where I established the Centre for the Study of Voluntary and Community Activity. During this second half of my engagement with voluntary action, my portfolio of interests was varied: it included governance, religious and faith-based organisations, volunteering, relationships between government and the voluntary sector, and the work of ‘second-tier’ organisations. Within this range of interests, however, was a strong bias towards smaller and less formal organisational forms like community sector organisations (Rochester, 1992, 1997, 1998) and very small voluntary agencies (Rochester, 1999a, 1999b; Rochester et al., 1999). I have also been interested in the ways in which the work and aims of voluntary organisations have been shaped by their past and, with Rodney Hedley and Justin Davis Smith, founded the Voluntary Action History Society in 1991.

During the past ten years or so I have felt increasing disquiet or discomfort about the ways in which many voluntary organisations, individually and collectively, were going about their affairs. There was less evidence that they were fulfilling the crucial role of identifying need and developing ways of responding to it rather than providing the kinds of services for the kinds of user prescribed by the agencies of national and local government. Increasingly, moreover, they were adopting the managerial approaches developed in the world of business and introduced to the statutory sector in the guise of New Public Management; those who lead voluntary agencies became known as ‘chief executives’, their committees of management were increasingly referred to as boards, and, in an attempt to respond to calls for them to be more ‘business-like’, they increasingly saw themselves as businesses and their beneficiaries and funders as ‘customers’. The period also saw the emergence of volunteer management as a new profession, which increasingly saw itself as a branch of human resources management and adopted ‘off the shelf’ techniques based on managing paid staff rather than the ‘home-grown’ approaches to supporting volunteers and organising their work which had developed on the ground (Zimmeck, 2000). And, finally, the campaigning and advocacy edge which voluntary organisations had brought to the public and social policy arena was dulled by the engagement of many of them in a range of partnership arrangements based on the government’s view that the interests of the voluntary sector (and the corporate world) were more or less identical with their own and that apparently intractable social problems could only be tackled by a joint approach by all three sectors.

Alongside my growing dismay at the ways in which voluntary organisations were losing the ability to pursue new ways of addressing need, the confidence to manage their affairs in a distinctive way and the commitment to providing the people and the communities they served with a voice, I also felt more and more concerned about the direction being taken by the growing voluntary sector research community. David Billis in the UK (1993a, 2010a) and Roger Lohmann (1992) and David Mason in the USA (1995) have developed important theories to explain why and how voluntary organisations are qualitatively different from their counterparts in the for-profit and public sectors, while David Horton Smith (2000) has provided not only an incisive critique of the concentration of much scholarly attention on the minority of voluntary organisations which are led by professional staff but also a comprehensive account of the organisation and behaviour of the ‘grassroots associations’ which make up the majority of the sector’s population. These have, however, had remarkably little influence on the ways in which researchers have gone about their business, and there are few examples of the use of these theoretical frameworks to explore and explain how the distinctive characteristics of voluntary organisations influence and affect what they do and how they do it. And, as a result, the academic literature contains little to challenge or slow down the way in which the role and behaviour of voluntary organisations have been changing.

It was these concerns that led to the idea of a book on ‘rethinking voluntary action’. I began to develop this analysis in a lecture entitled A Decade of Civil Society under New Labour that was delivered at the British Academy in February 2009 (Rochester, 2009). The exploration of the dominant paradigm in volunteering formed an important strand in a book that I co-authored with Angela Ellis Paine and Steven Howlett (Rochester et al., 2010). And the ideas that underpin this proposal were presented and subjected to critical analysis at a series of seminars on Rethinking Voluntary Action that were jointly organised by the Centre for the Study of Voluntary and Community Activity at Roehampton University and NCIA and held at the University of Roehampton during 2010 and 2011. The seminar series provided an invaluable opportunity to present some of my emerging thoughts on the issues to an informed and critical audience and has enabled me to develop the argument that is put forward in this book and the confidence to offer it for publication.

Two paradigms

At the centre of the book’s argument is the contention that the theory and practice of voluntary action are constrained by two narrow paradigms which set the boundaries for the ways in which we look at voluntary organisations, on the one hand, and volunteering, on the other. In both cases they involve ‘taken-for-granted’ and implicit assumptions about the nature of the phenomena that are based on the features of just one part of the full spectrum of voluntary organisations and volunteering, respectively.

• The voluntary sector paradigm – which shapes the actions of voluntary organisations and those who promote and support their work – characterises organisational expressions of voluntary action as formally constituted and managed agencies with conventional hierarchical structures that are controlled and led by paid managers. They employ staff to carry out their operational activities, which take the form of the provision of services to one or more kinds of user. It also involves the assumption that voluntary agencies operate in the general arena of social welfare.

• The dominant paradigm in volunteering characterises it as a gift of time that is analogous to a gift of money – a philanthropic activity to help someone less fortunate than oneself. It sees volunteers as being active in the field of social welfare (broadly defined); taking up opportunities provided mainly by large, professionally staffed and formally structured organisations; and undertaking activities that have been pre-determined by the volunteer-involving agencies. Volunteering is thus seen essentially as unpaid work that needs to be managed.

Organised voluntary action, however, takes a variety of forms; performs a number of different roles or functions; and plays a part in the full gamut of human activities. The great majority of voluntary organisations are totally dependent on the voluntary efforts of their members and supporters, and only a small minority employ paid staff. They include a variety of organisational forms including membership associations, self-help groups and informal groupings around common concerns and interests. They may address their own needs rather than those of others and, rather than providing services, they may direct their energies to advocacy and campaigning, to mutual support and self-help, or to providing opportunities for creative activities or other forms of expressive behaviour. They are as likely to be found in the fields of sport, recreational and cultural activities and in concerns for the environment (and for the well-being of animals) as in the area of social welfare.

Similarly, the volunteering paradigm does not take account of the many different motivations that prompt people to become involved, the engagement of volunteers in a variety of fields beyond social welfare, the diversity of organisational contexts within which volunteering takes place, and the range of roles undertaken by volunteers. Reasons for involvement may be rooted in self-help and mutual aid rather than altruism, or may be driven by the intrinsic satisfaction of taking part in a cultural or recreational activity. Volunteers are active in a range of public policy areas such as transport, town planning and the environment, and, beyond that, play a key part in the full gamut of educational, cultural and recreational activities. Volunteering takes place in a variety of formal and less formal organisational contexts and involves a variety of roles beyond that of the unpaid helper. Volunteers lead and manage the work of associations and small agencies, and their contributions in the world of sport and the arts include coaching, teaching or tutoring others; acting as directors, conductors or managers; and officiating at matches and judging competitions.

The book will therefore seek to present a new paradigm – a more rounded, more adequate and more deeply rooted account of voluntary action – with which to replace the set of assumptions on which the current theory and practice of the voluntary sector and volunteering are based.

Structure of the book

The main body of the book is orga...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Why the Theory and Practice of Voluntary Action Need Rethinking
• Part I: The Context
• Part II: Pressures and Influences
• Part III: Alternative Perspectives
• Part IV: Conclusions and Implications
• References
• Index