Over the course of two months in America I was privileged enough to visit and chat with about 27 nonprofits across three states, all doing great work in the human services field, all with strengths and challenges, and all with a view on what it means to be a nonprofit in America today. I want to do a couple of blogs rounding up some of what I learnt – the first one was about some of the issues I encountered; this one will be about some theoretical questions I’ve been exploring.
Readers with long memories will remember I’m exploring a theory called strategic action fields – in brief, a kind of social order created when actors come together with shared aims, understandings of ‘what’s at stake’, and agree to the same rules of the game. I like it because it’s flexible, it recognises the agency of players in the field, and it is very compatible with a historical approach. I look at the voluntary sector as a field of strategic action, one where the settlement, rules and understandings change over time according to the context, who’s in charge, what represents ‘profitable’ behaviour, drivers from the proximate state field and many more things (probably). It’s a constructed thing with a constructed identity that the actors within it (as well as some actors outside) have a strong role in building and reinforcing.
One of the questions I asked nonprofits, not always very well, was do they feel a part of a coherent, identifiable nonprofit sector. The answers varied. One organisation said no, straightforwardly; they were part of a federated model and felt in the same community of organisations with their federated partners, because they took a joint and ‘unique’ approach to serving their neighbourhoods. This set them apart from other nonprofits. Another said they felt part of three communities; the strongest tie was to the geographical community, which involved organisations across sectors, then the sub-sector they were in, and then, for sure, the nonprofit sector. This had also changed over time; previously they would have placed the geographical field much further down. One more told me they only built partnerships where there was a ‘point’ to doing so – they would pop into fields where relevant but broadly focused on their own work. Lots of organisations tended to identify with their sub-sector more strongly, which is perhaps to be expected; their networks were other homelessness or social services or employment organisations, so these were the fields they spoke about. They also recognised these as nonprofit fields, however, as it was usually other nonprofits (rather than for-profits) in those fields. For infrastructure organisations trying to bring together or convene cross-issue nonprofit fields at a state, federal or other geographical level was an enduring challenge, but one which interviewees spoke with passion about doing. Associations talked about the difficulties of representing and convening fields of groups with competing and consuming sub-sector issues more demanding of their time, but of the importance of doing so given the impact of changes to nonprofit (mostly tax) law on all these organisations. This could be compounded by the lack of government field interest in nonprofits (high profile stories about certain Presidents’ foundations aside). There are some city-level initiatives around volunteering, and plenty of points of contact in terms of funding – both giving it out to and trying to generate it from – but I would argue the public sector levers, tools or messages about the sector as a whole aren’t quite so obvious as in the UK. I would obviously love to go back and spend more time on this and the history of it. One day…
For me this reinforces an idea I’ve written about before, sparked off by one field level analysis of the Work Programme by Taylor, Rees and Damm, and drawing on a concept from David Billis’ work on ‘hybridity’. While I tend to be quite critical of Billis’ work, he does talk about the pull of a ‘prime’ sector, whereby a hybrid organisation will identify more strongly with the sector – whether public, private or voluntary – that it feels is like its origin. Taylor, Rees and Damm talk about the different constraints experienced by voluntary compared to private providers within the Employment sub-field, because of their inherent institutional identities, like being not-for-profit or accountable to members on values-terms, rather to shareholders on income ones. It seems common-sense that organisations would, for the most part, inhabit multiple fields at once, and that these will interact at different levels to constrain and govern behaviour. So a human services nonprofit in a city might identify most strongly in a human services field, while also being in a geographical field, while also part of a nonprofit field, all of which will interact in complex ways. They might be an incumbent, or powerful actor, in the human services field, but actually not all that engaged or aware of dynamics that still affect them in the nonprofit field, beyond being constrained by its rules and norms. This brings me back to another extension of the theory; if organisations are part of a field, and agree to its rules, norms and so on, but don’t actively fulfil the role of incumbent (the powerful ones) or challenger (the ones trying to ‘improve’ their position – I also think this is a bit too mercinarily phrased but that’s another problem for another day), then they’re pretty much unclassified. I think a new category of ‘passenger’ is helpful both to just give them a role, and to start thinking about some additional challenges for those trying to represent or convene the field. This all sounds super complex but I actually find it quite useful for understanding the complexity of existing across these institutional boundaries, rather than being put into a single box. I think it can help to understand motivations, behaviours and decision-making for organisations – how they position themselves, why, how this changes over time and what the impact on the bigger picture can be.
One way organisations positioned themselves was through describing their essential characteristics. A lot of interviewees used the word ‘unique’, in terms of their approach or methods, their history, their funding profile, their independence and so on. Macmillan has written about narratives of ‘distinction’ before, and I think this taps in pretty well to this. In practice, and this is no criticism or surprise, there was a lot of congruity in how organisations talked about tackling poverty, ‘shifting the dial’, using particular approaches to social work, and recognising historic, and ongoing, failures. There were unifying ‘problems’ at hand around which fields came together. However the disparity in practice and positioning taps into another narrative; that of competition. High ratios of government funding and crowded fields for fundraising from other fields both bring high levels of competition, so uniqueness and distinction is important on an individual actor level. So too, arguably, is conformity with prevailing ideas about how to solve problems.
Which brings me to another idea on this theory. Within it there is a role called the ‘internal governance unit’, which I, along with lots of smarter people, have some trouble with. They’re not exactly neutral organisations, indeed they act to reinforce the status quo, but they are responsible for ensuring that rules are played by and field members on the whole acquiesce to the settlement once it’s in place (until a new one is established). It’s never been super clear, however, exactly who can have this role, and who can play it effectively. The Charity Commission in England is one potential, but the theory’s authors state that this is not meant to be a legal or regulatory body. I think a more useful category of member might be a ‘convener’ or ‘shaper’. This could be incumbent organisations within the field, like high profile, high resource nonprofits. It could be infrastructure organisations. It could also be funders, and this last option really interested me in America. Foundations and major philanthropic bodies can have a significant role in convening and shaping a field, with vested interests, while inhabiting a slightly different space within it, and within other fields, with different constraints. Funders can promote those certain social work practices, or can write in partnership working as a condition of grant awards, or can otherwise narrow or widen a field of practice according to their own interests, ideologies and resources. Government funders can do this too, but I think their role is different, given the additional powers they wield, as is their positioning explicitly outside of the nonprofit field. I spoke to a handful of non-governmental funders, as well as grantees, in the course of my visit and they had all taken an explicit role in shaping sub-fields around problems or issues, establishing agreements and rules of the game with other field members, while also providing resources to those members. This doesn’t mean there was no challenge within those fields or that these funders wielded absolute power, they didn’t, and fields can be collaborative rather than strictly hierarchical anyway, but they did perform a slightly distinct role to other incumbent or challenger members of the field. Given one of my sources for my PhD research is the archives of a philanthropic funder, I am going to consider this role, and whether it plays out in my case study further, although I suspect it may be more pronounced in the States.
I will no doubt return to these ideas in future blogs, but that’s it for 2k18 (with not much time to spare. New Year’s Resolution: be better at time). As ever, comments, challenges, corrections welcome.
Voluntary Action and Other Animals 