Change in the making: the dynamics of voluntary action

• In Event: Applying, Extending, and Refining Theoretical Approaches to Understand Voluntary Action

Abstract

Organisational life in the third sector can often seem highly dramatic, turbulent and charged, as practitioners attempt to cope with day-to-day contingencies and pressures, looming threats and opportunities, and the shifting sands of needs, funding and political priorities. And yet much in the third sector seems to endure, or only change over a longue durée. The missions and positions of many organisations stay much the same over long periods. The overall role of the third sector, and its position in relation to the state and the market, appears to shift so slowly or marginally that the idea of enduring civil society regimes (Salamon and Anheier, 1998) remains plausible.

Many academic and practitioner accounts of change in the third sector have a tendency to pitch individual ‘organisations’ as relatively stable, comprehensible entities, aggregated as a ‘sector’, and operating within an undifferentiated ‘environment’. Within this context organisations tend to be rendered as relatively passive products of their environments, or relatively fragile against change emanating from larger exogenous forces, such as political, policy and funding shifts and trends, disruptive innovations, or changing norms. Change is framed as response, wherein such forces are either embraced or resisted by actors in third sector organisations (Chapman et al, 2012). Actors are subjects rather than agents, with seemingly little room for understanding how change is actively co-created, contested, negotiated, and experienced by multiple interacting relational agents.

In this paper we develop a framework for analysing change in the making within third sector organisations drawing on different bodies of thinking from within what could broadly be considered processual sociology, highlighting organisation as a fluid set of processes, practices and struggles in perpetual motion (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Czarniawska, 2008; Abbott, 2016). The framework focuses our attention on three sets of processes: (1) sense-making, (2) temporal dispositions, and (3) translations. These are three sets of intertwined processes which combine to generate a discursive account - the interpretive space - of change in the making.

We apply this framework to understand the dynamic experiences of four organisations over time, drawn from a qualitative longitudinal study of third sector organisations in England. The research has involved interviews and observations with various actors in and around these organisations (trustees, chief executives, managers, frontline staff, volunteers, service users, funders, partners, competitors) over a ten-year period.

We find that in third sector organisations, change is made through interpretive work – by actors seeking collectively, although not necessarily consensually, to understand the changing internal and external contexts in which they are operating; by situating and ordering these understandings temporally; and by translating these understandings into more or less workable organisational reform projects. Through these processes, actors negotiate, contest and navigate their way through dynamic and uncertain landscapes. Change comes to be seen as a complex interplay of contexts, positions, interpretations, struggles and projects.

References

Abbott, A. (2016) Processual Sociology (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).

Chapman, T., Robinson, F., Bell, V., Dunkerley, E., Zass-Ogilvie, I. and van der Graaf, P. (2012) Journeys and Destinations: the impact of change on Third Sector Organisations (Newcastle upon Tyne, Northern Rock Foundation).

Czarniawska, B. (2008) A Theory of Organizing (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar).

Emirbayer, M. (1997) ‘Manifesto for a relational sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), 281–317.

Salamon, L. and Anheier, H. (1998) ‘Social Origins of Civil Society: Explaining the Nonprofit Sector Cross-Nationally’, Voluntas, 9(3), 213-48.

Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2002) ‘On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change’, Organization Science, 13(5), 567-582.

Authors

• Rob Macmillan, Sheffield Hallam University

• Angela Ellis Paine, City, University of London