Aligning the ‘cleft habitus’: Non-executive directors in Australian disability services organizations

• In Event: Embracing New Public Management at the organizational premises

Abstract

This paper seeks to clarify the roles and impacts of non-executive directors utilising their commercial strategic cognition in Australian disability services organizations. The paper focuses on a specific question: Why do non-executive directors continue to serve, mostly unremunerated, on disability services organizations in Australia? An interpretivist approach, drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, symbolic (social and cultural) capital, and habitus, is applied to understanding the trajectories of these non-executive directors (Bourdieu (1977, 1986, 2000). This approach explores, using storytelling, the social actor's reasons and the social context for action.
Australian disability service organisations are pursuing a business model that suits the commercially experienced director's capabilities. Experience on a not-for-profit board leads to the development of an individual director’s strategic cognition (Narayanan, Zane, & Kemmerer, 2011), transposing commercial principles into the governance of Australian disability service organisations. The social and cultural capital then available to these directors is more significant than any remuneration as it allows for an alignment and sensemaking of their life stories.
This cultural and social engagement on not-for-profit boards, therefore, allows these directors to align a `cleft' or 'divided' habitus (Bourdieu, 2000; Ingram & Abrahams, 2016). Previously, their dominant views of their personal histories were of lives spent in the competitive, commercial setting. Accepting a directorship enhanced these directors' identification with their overall life story, enabling a 'reconciled' habitus (Ingram & Abrahams, 2016, p.148). Hence, for the directors, the need to resolve personal tensions in their habitus in later life means they will undertake, without remuneration, duties that can often be onerous.
For the users of Australian disability services, though, the consequences may be less rewarding. Since they are increasingly required to deal with commercial forms of strategic cognition relating to their service provision, they may experience correspondingly detrimental outcomes (Coule, Dodge, & Eikenberry, 2020). The blurring of strategic distinctions between the third sector and commercial business models by disability service boards, with more competitive rather than cooperative strategic perspectives (DeWit, 2017), may lead to a broader and less inclusive mission-driven view of organizational strategy. In this context, Bourdieu's framework supports a view of the social structuring by elites that results in potential 'symbolic violence' against people with disabilities (Burawoy, 2019), through the façade of increasingly quasi-commercial business models.
Recommendations made in Australia by The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (Commonwealth of "Final Report: Disability services," 2023) do not take into consideration either the institutional isomorphism forces at play in the current context (Suykens, Maier, Meyer, & Verschuere, 2023) or the desire of Australian social and managerial elites to control disability service boards in the fulfilment of their various personal agendas (Nicholson & Newton, 2010).

References

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Authors

• Marion Cornish, Western Sydney University

• George Lafferty, Nil

• Alexandra McEwan, Central Queensland University