*Usual apologies for cross-posting*

Dear all,

In conjunction with the Sociology and Social Policy Seminar Series, the Third Sector Research Centre, at the University of Southampton is hosting two seminars this month and next:

Anticipating American-Style Welfarism in the UK?
Dr Geoff DeVerteuil, School of Geography, University of Southampton
Date: Thursday 19 May 2011
Time: 12.00 – 13.00
Place: 58/1065, Murray Building, Highfield Campus

So special? ‘Distinction’ claims in the third sector
Dr Rob Macmillan, TSRC, University of Birmingham
Date: Thursday 2nd June 2011
Time: 12.00 – 13.00
Place: Room TBC, Murray Building, Highfield Campus

Please see full details below and do forward this e-mail on to any colleagues that might be interested.

There is no need to register, but if you do require any further information, please contact Becca Edwards on [log in to unmask] or Nicki Elvins on [log in to unmask] / 023 8059 6674

All the best,

Becca
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Anticipating American-Style Welfarism in the UK?
Dr Geoff DeVerteuil, School of Geography, University of Southampton
Date: Thursday 19 May 2011
Time: 12.00 – 13.00
Place: 58/1065, Murray Building, Highfield Campus

The unprecedented October 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review threatens to shift the UK welfare state towards a more American model of residual welfarism, voluntarism, individualization and blaming the poor for their predicament.
In order to anticipate the impacts of this potential Americanization of the UK welfare state, I rely on two retrospective, comparative case studies of London and Los Angeles non-profit voluntary sectors, the first focusing on whether gentrification was displacing facilities in inner-city areas (n=81), and second on how facilities within the London Bangladeshi and Los Angeles Central-American community related to the local and national welfare states (n=17).
Results suggested that relatively minor differences for the first study on gentrification and displacement, with Los Angeles featuring more client displacement and overt revanchism.
Differences were larger for the second study; while each community experienced similar grassroots beginnings that absorbed an unaccommodating welfare state, since the 1980s the trajectories have diverged considerably. For London Bangladeshis, the non-profit sector is smaller because of much stronger national and local welfare state settlements, while for Central-Americans, the sector has been forced, due to a residualized and punitive welfare state, to shoulder much greater burdens.
The case study results serve not only to inform comparative welfare studies, exploring the myth of US-UK welfare state convergence within what Esping-Andersen called 'liberal welfare state regimes', but also to clarify the potential disadvantages and distortions upon vulnerable groups if the UK were to adopt American-style welfarism in the near future.

Geoff DeVerteuil (PhD, University of Southern California) is a Lecturer of Human Geography at the University of Southampton. Following doctoral work on service provision for maginalized individuals in Los Angeles, he has written on welfare reform, poverty, inequality and homelessness. His research has been published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning A, Urban Geography, Social Science and Medicine, Health and Place, Housing Studies, and Social and Cultural Geography. His current research is examining the contours of the ethnic welfare state in London and Los Angeles, and the displacement of human services in global cities as a result of gentrification. He is originally from Canada.

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So special? ‘Distinction’ claims in the third sector
Dr Rob Macmillan, TSRC, University of Birmingham
Date: Thursday 2nd June 2011
Time: 12.00 – 13.00
Place: Room TBC, Murray Building, Highfield Campus

Practitioners and academics appear to have put a lot of effort into the task of identifying and articulating the distinctive character and contribution made by third sector organisations. Rather than add to this enterprise, this paper asks not so much what the special or distinguishing features of the third sector are, but what is the strategic purpose behind distinctiveness. It seeks to examine the idea of distinctiveness as a prized characteristic of the sector, and asks what it may tell us about how the sector works in practice. It is argued that this question has been overlooked in recent debates on the sector, and as a result we miss an important dimension in understanding the political dynamics and positioning of the third sector.
Strategies of distinction also operate within the third sector. Parts of the sector, types of activity, and even individual third sector organisations, may also use similar strategies to highlight their role, position and contribution as against and distinct from other parts of the sector. Specific kinds of third sector activities, for example ‘social enterprise’ or small grassroots organisations, are typically grouped together in club-like alliances of similar organisations and activities, and these alliances form the basis of strategic organisation and institution within the sector.
Informed theoretically by Bourdieu’s classic analysis of ‘distinction’ and of the sector as a contested relational ‘field’, this paper suggests that claims of distinctiveness say more about the strategic purpose of claim-making in the third sector than about the essential character of the third sector per se. By highlighting fractions and fragments within the sector, this analysis seeks to embellish and extend the idea of a third sector as a ‘strategic unity’.

Rob Macmillan is a Research Fellow at the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC), where he is responsible for co-ordinating ‘Real Times’, TSRC’s qualitative longitudinal research study. This involves in-depth research following the fortunes, strategies, challenges and performance of a diverse group of case study third sector organisations over time. His main research interests are around the challenges of sustainable funding, competition and collaboration between third sector organisations and the role of third sector capacity-building and infrastructure support.