 |
 |
hi, all. As Mark rightly says, there's a wealth of good material on this topic as it affects voluntary organisations in general particularly in the UK with some earlier material about the US. Two good starting points (Mark's book aside which I am happy to thoroughly recommend) might be: Jane Lewis, 1999 Reviewing the Relationship between the Voluntary Sector and the State in Britain in the 1990s, Voluntas 10 (3) pp255 - 270. Marilyn Taylor, 1996. What are the Key Influences on the Work of Voluntary Agencies? in Billis, D and Harris, M. (eds) Voluntary Agencies: Challenges of Organisation and Management, Macmillan Press. Both these sources have their own bibliographies, of course, to follow up. My own research in Northern Ireland tends to confirm a picture of isomorphism in a context where there is a high dependency on funding from (in this case) Health & Social Services with the result that there is a group of insider organisations that share cultural values and approaches with state provided services and a penumbra of much smaller organisations, a lot of them run by disabled people, that are effectively left out in the cold and whose contribution is largely unacknowleded in official welfare discourse. I could go on, but I won't. Get in touch if anybody wants to know more. best wishes, Nick Acheson, Centre for Voluntary Action Studies, University of Ulster Date sent: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 11:09:58 -0000 Send reply to: Mark Priestley <[log in to unmask]> From: Mark Priestley <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Commercialisation of services To: [log in to unmask] Hi Paul wrote... > Does anyone know of any research looking at the short and long term effects > on an organisation providing services for disabled people which moves from > guaranteed funding to having to compete for funding?. In particular is there > any evidence that the core values that motivated the organisation to provide > the service are abandoned or compromised? There has been quite a lot of work done on the impact of marketisation, and 'quasi markets' on voluntary sector or 'not for profit' organisations (especially in UK and USA). At the risk of self-promotion, you might want to look at Chapter 5 of... Priestley, M. (1999) Disability Politics and Community Care, Jessica Kingsley This includes quite a few references to published studies that deal with such exciting topics as... monopoly/monopsony, 'mission drift' and 'institutional isopmorphism'. :-( More simply, there is some evidence that in a quasi-market for social care, there is a tendency for providers to become more and more like one another. There is a particular danger for organisations with a strong sense of mission, who may experience a dilution or distortion of their activities towards more market-oriented goals. My own thoughts would be that while the market has sometimes favoured claims to 'independent living' (in terms of individualised, self-managed direct payment schemes) it has also tended to undermine organisational attempts to pursue more collective, social model responses to disabling barriers. My concern would be that aggregate market pressures, over time, will pull providers towards more individual and fragmented 'services', and away from more holistic, social responses. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong... :-) Best Wishes Mark Priestley Centre for Disability Studies University of Leeds LEEDS LS2 9JT UK tel: +44 113 233 4417 fax: +44 113 233 4415 e-mail: [log in to unmask] http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies ________________End of message______________________ Archives and tools for the Disability-Research Discussion List are now located at: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html You can JOIN or LEAVE the list from this web page. ________________End of message______________________ Archives and tools for the Disability-Research Discussion List are now located at: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html You can JOIN or LEAVE the list from this web page.