Narrating and Naming the Voluntary Sector in the UK and US: Stories Across Time

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The three presentations that we bring together in this panel share a concern with how we have talked and thought about the voluntary sector and how that conversation has taken shape over the past eighty-odd years. Where has that conversation taken place? What has driven it? Who has been engaged in it? What issues appear to be new and which ones persist? In the end, where are these conversations leading us?
Our point of departure is the 1940s when both the US and UK were assessing the prospects for their respective sectors, albeit under very different circumstances. In the UK postwar austerity and the emergence of the welfare state prompted William Beveridge’s report on voluntary action. In the US several foundation study groups, most notably the Ford Foundation’s Gaither committee, explored the new and challenging global role for America as the lines of the Cold War were being fixed. Subsequent committees and commissions – one of our abstracts identifies some three dozen in the US and UK -- were prompted by social and economic crises and public policy challenges.
In pairing these presentations and looking at our sibling societies, our aim is to assess the changing ways we have thought about the roles of the sector. Looking back, perhaps we can begin to imagine its future directions. Each paper brings a different focus and chronological frame to a discussion of how we name, narrate, and understand the sector, across time and space.

References

Beveridge, W. (1948) Voluntary action: A report on methods of social advance, London: Allan and Unwin.
Beveridge, W. (1949) House of Lords debate on voluntary action, 1949 (HL Deb 22 June 1949 vol 163 cc75-136)
Brindle, D., Kelly,L., and O’Neill, S. (2014) The Beveridge Report revisited: where now for the welfare state? The Guardian, 07.07.14
Clotfelter, C. and Ehrlic, T. eds. (1999) Philanthropy and the nonprofit sector in a changing America. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Finlayson, G. (1990) ‘A moving frontier: Voluntarism and the state in British social welfare 1911-1949’ Twentieth Century British History 1(2) pp.183-206.
Douglas, J. (1983) Why charity? The case for third sector (Beverly Hills: Sage.
Hall, P.D. (1992) Inventing the nonprofit sector and other essays on philanthropy, voluntarism and nonprofit organizations. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lawton, K., Cooke, G., and Pearce, N. (2014) The condition of Britain: strategies for social renewal. London: IPPR
Lewis, J. (1999) 'Reviewing the relationship between the voluntary sector and the state in Britain in the 1990s' Voluntas 10(3): 255-70
Reich, R. (2018) Just giving: why philanthropy is failing democracy and how it can do better. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Salamon, l. (1997) Holding the center: America’s nonprofit sector at a crossroads. New York: Nathan Cummings Foundation.
Saunders-Hastings, E. (2022) Private virtues, public vices: Philanthropy and democratic equality. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Taylor-Gooby, P. (2013) The double crisis of the welfare state and what we can do about it, London: Palgrave

Sub Unit

• The role and position of the Third Sector during crises and conflicts

Moderator

• Diana Leat, Independent social researcher

Individual Presentations

• If only… imagining the voluntary sector otherwise - Rob Macmillan, Sheffield Hallam University

• Narratives of voluntary action as discursive interventions across moving frontiers - Georgina Brewis, University College London; Angela Ellis Paine, City, University of London; Rob Macmillan, Sheffield Hallam University; Rose Lindsey, University of Southampton; Irene Hardill, Northumbria University

• Enduring Conversations in an (Un)Common Language - Diana Leat, Independent social researcher; JAMES Allen SMITH, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation