Conference Paper/Proceeding/Abstract 110 views
The power of resistance in unwaged settings
Leanne Greening
Work, Employment and Society
Swansea University Author: Leanne Greening
Abstract
In recent decades, under pressures of a neoliberal, New Public Management (NPM) agenda, successive UK governments have ceaselessly outsourced public service delivery to the Non-Profit and Voluntary (NPV) sector. The sector’s increased involvement in service provision coincided with the emergence of...
| Published in: | Work, Employment and Society |
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa68764 |
| Abstract: |
In recent decades, under pressures of a neoliberal, New Public Management (NPM) agenda, successive UK governments have ceaselessly outsourced public service delivery to the Non-Profit and Voluntary (NPV) sector. The sector’s increased involvement in service provision coincided with the emergence of the ‘contract culture’ which saw the replacement of unspecified and indeterminate government grants with binding and prescriptive service contracts (Cunningham et al., 2014). As a result of the changing funding landscape, NPV organisations are now obliged to adhere to compliance requirements such as the reporting of outputs, outcomes and social impact against rendered funding (Baines and Cunningham, 2011). Such NPM-inspired changes require these organisations to monitor, coordinate and evaluate their activities which is indicative of the sector’s shifting relations of control and power. Namely, the sector has moved from being characterised by relative autonomy, light regulation and relations based on altruism and commitment to one that is subject to increased external control, audit cultures and tightly regulated work. There is growing evidence that in the UK, funders’ demands are often in tension with these organisations’ missions, values and social goals (Venter et al., 2017). However, the effect of these changes on those delivering services has received considerably little attention. This is particularlyconcerning when we acknowledge that many of the workers within these organisations perform labour for free and can therefore, curtail their involvement with relative ease and without financial penalty. Whilst interest in voluntary labour is slowly growing, extant literature focuses almost exclusively on ‘volunteer management’, a distinctive branch of expertise that seeks to maximise the productivity and efficiency of volunteers’ activities by adapting Human Resource Management approaches to voluntary work settings. Recent work has highlighted that volunteer management strategies engage volunteers at the level of affect in order to align their attitudes, feelings and behaviours with the achievement of organisational targets (Read, 2021). This points to the way that volunteers’ efforts are mobilised and coordinated to support the burgeoning obligations that these organisations face to demonstrate their impact. This reimagined environment has brought issues of control and power into sharp focus and has given rise to questions about how power is enacted and reinforced in organisations that lack the formal reward and power structures to influence behaviour (Alfes et al., 2016). Reflecting on 40 semi-structured interviews, this paper examines how unpaid workers respond to and resist the changing context within which their efforts and labour are situated. Moreover, this paper sheds light on the largely unexplored power dynamics at the volunteer–organisation interface and analyses the motivators for resistance and how they influence the strength and intensity of workers’ resistance strategies. From this vantage point, this paper takes a critical perspective and examines the complex and nuanced ways that resistance might be expressed beyond those found in traditional wage-labour relationships. Examining resistance in the context of voluntary work provides a fruitful site to rethink resistance and encourages us to consider it in new and broader ways. |
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Stream: Public sector, small business and third sector experiences of resistanceLocation: Glasgow Caledonian University |
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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |