Search results

Civil society-based institutions have had a significant historical impact in Europe on the one hand in formation of modern notions of the nation and on the creation of national identity and on the other hand in definition of citizenship rights and understanding of the democratic culture. If support for citizenship rights through civil society organizations – at the workplace and in public institutions – is weakly articulated, it creates a fragile democratic culture and, consequently, less comprehensive social protection. The possibility of civil society becoming a locus for democratic learning, political reflexivity and governance depends, firstly, on its specific institutional mechanisms and, secondly, on the broader institutional configuration, which civil society forms part of.

There has been much research focusing on contracting and its effect on individual voluntary sector organisation, and some mapping of the extent of voluntary sector participation in joint community care planning. Each of these is a new and formal relationship with the statutory sector, and in many cases the tasks are fulfilled by the same voluntary sector worker (usually the senior paid officer of the agency). But the impact that these two new relationships have on the voluntary organisation’s perception of its dependence and inter‐dependence has received less attention. The paper will draw on structured interviews in three local authorities, with voluntary sector participants in contracts for social care, and with participants in joint community care planning groups, as well as on documentary research. It will explore the impact of the evolving roles for those seeking to operate effectively in the pluralist provision of public services. It will analyse experiences within joint community care planning structures, and will analyse experiences of contractual relationships. The paper will seek to identify the elements present in each research site which influence the culture of joint working within the two statutory/ voluntary relationships.

Intermediate care services generally focus on health and social care organisations as the key commissioning and providing agencies. The private sector is an important contributor to residential intermediate care, and the voluntary sector is also involved in a variety of activities. However, volunteers' contribution is little discussed, and its potential unknown. This article outlines features of intermediate care that may or may not be attractive to volunteers. A survey of volunteer perceptions of their role in one voluntary sector intermediate care service is reported. Recommendations are made for voluntary groups, intermediate care workers and their managers, and policy makers.

The author is interested in variations by age in women's attitudes to the military and defence and support for women's participation in the military. Analysis of public opinion data suggests that women in Switzerland have substantial and consistently non‐militaristic leanings which the author seeks to explain.

Voluntary sector information, presents particular challenges to information providers, in terms of networking across a diverse body of organisations. Opportunities offered by WWW community networks include information sharing through online databases, more efficiently updated than printed sources, and electronic networking, potentially easing communication between organisations and between sectors. This paper presents the results of both quantitative and qualitative surveys of the local voluntary sector in the Borough of Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire. The IT capabilities and information needs were measured and examined. The opinions of local practitioners in voluntary sector information were also sought. A range of different levels of IT skills and facilities was found amongst local voluntary sector organisations, and a reticence amongst some organisations to get involved in recent IT developments was also detected. Facilitation, in the form of training, IT support and facilities, was therefore identified as important to effective voluntary sector information provision. It was recommended that research should be carried out with regard to local information needs, and that an editorial board be established.

This study aims to analyse how top-level policymakers across the political left-right spectrum in a social-democratic welfare state understand social enterprise (SE), its relation to existing welfare institutions and their intentions of policymaking towards SE.

This study conducted in-depth interviews explicitly focused on SE with policymakers at the national level in Norway. The informants collectively represented most political parties in Norway’s Parliament in 2017–2021. Data were analysed using a historical institutional perspective.

Centre-right wing policymakers predominantly consider SE as commercial enterprises not requiring specific policies. Left wing policymakers prefer that SEs operate like voluntary organizations and advocate policies preventing extraction of profit and competition with public service providers. Hence, policymakers positioned SE within an overarching political debate on the privatization of welfare services. They expressed little interest in developing policies aimed at strengthening SE opportunity structures.

Policy inaction impedes recognition of SEs as different from commercial and voluntary organizations, as well as their ability to compete for tenders. Thus, SE will likely remain a rather marginal phenomenon in Norway. Further research is needed to establish whether and how Norway’s universal welfare state inhibits social entrepreneurship on the society-wide level.

This article details how SE is understood within a social democratic welfare regime and the likely consequences thereof for SEs. It contributes with new knowledge of why policymakers may be reluctant to develop policy dedicated to further SE, across different political party affiliations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in Norway to analyse how existing institutions and political controversies influence how policymakers at the national level approach SE.

Distributed leadership has been reported in the literature as an effective management approach for educational organizations such as institutions of higher education. This study aims to investigate the role of distributed leadership in the promotion of sustainability in an Israeli college of teacher education.

Based on the Multi-Level Model of Leadership Practice in higher education, taken from Bolden et al. (2008a) and from Woods et al. (2004), the authors investigated how the characteristics of distributed leadership are expressed in three central organization-wide structures in the college (a student group, the green council and a professional development program). They also explored in what ways aspects of distributed leadership promote sustainability-oriented activities on campus. They used a deductive and inductive interpretive approach in this case study.

The authors found three organization-level processes that are based on the principles of distributed leadership and that promote sustainability on campus: distributed leadership enables change in the organization’s internal culture with respect to mainstreaming sustainability; distributed leadership encourages collaboration between the entire campus population and between different departments and distributed leadership on campus enables the development of diverse “bottom-up” and “top-down” structures in the organization.

While the study’s findings indicated several challenges regarding the implementation of distributed leadership in the organization, they ultimately support the idea that distributed leadership may contribute to the long-term, organization-wide implementation of sustainability in higher education institutes. Therefore, the authors recommend that institutions that are willing to promote sustainability adopt distributed leadership as their major management approach.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether individuals who prefer different volunteering organisations have different self‐concepts, whether individuals perceive their preferred volunteering organisation as more similar to their self‐concept than other volunteering organisations, and whether self‐congruity theory correctly predicts consumer (volunteer) behaviour differences across organisations and organisational missions.

Data were collected on people's preferred volunteering organisation, their self‐concept and their perceived image from eight volunteering organisations using an online self‐completion survey. Chi‐square tests and paired‐sample t‐tests were then used to identify significant differences between groups.

Individuals who prefer different volunteering organisations differ significantly in their self‐concept. For the three volunteering organisations with high levels of awareness and distinct images, self‐congruity theory held; that is, people who volunteer for them perceive those organisations as being more similar to their self‐concept than other volunteering organisations. For the four organisations with lower awareness and less distinct images, the authors found a tendency towards self‐congruity, but results were not significant. In one case, self‐congruity theory did not hold, possibly due to the more “obligatory” nature of the volunteering task.

This research extends the application of self‐congruity theory to the volunteering context. It identifies three key dimensions that affect the extent to which self‐congruity holds for volunteering organisations: brand awareness; image distinctiveness; and whether the involvement is actually “voluntary”.

Self‐congruity theory has the potential to be a valuable tool in helping volunteering organisations increase their productivity through better targeted marketing strategies.

This study is the first to apply self‐congruity theory to the volunteering sector at the organisation brand level, and gives practitioners an additional tool to improve the effectiveness of their marketing.

Tourism destinations are facing intense and increasing competition worldwide, while consumers are ever more demanding, requiring not only service quality but also socially responsible and sustainable destinations. In this context, developing accessible tourism at a destination may help gain competitiveness in an underserved, typically most loyal market. Developing accessible tourism may also create a culture of social responsibility. This would enhance a shared, human and involving vision of the destination amongst stakeholders, including tourists who increasingly value socially responsible positions of economic actors in the tourism industry. The development of this approach is shown for Lousã, a small tourism destination focusing on accessible tourism as a core of its development strategy, a strategy developed through a stakeholder participatory approach. In this chapter, we present a study that helped develop the strategic positioning of Lousã, combining qualitative and quantitative methods and integrating visions of several relevant stakeholders.