UK welfare reform: changing the role of nonprofits?

What is it about?

Change is conventionally seen as the prerogative of high-status institutions such as the state. In contrast, this paper examines the limitations of a political administration's power to impose change on a relatively less powerful grouping - nonprofit organisations (NPOs). While governments are in a position to manipulate material resources (financial resources, markets, (de)regulation) they cannot necessarily monopolize symbolic resources (identities/cultural features). We find that nonprofit actors contest pressures to reconfigure how their organisations are categorised and judged if such pressures are at odds with their own sense of who and what they are.

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Why is it important?

The categories organisations are assigned to are important because they influence regulator's, employee's, client's and user's expectations and judgements about services and products, social approval and access to material resources. The Coalition’s intensified neoliberal approach and associated withdrawal of the state brings its treatment of NPOs in line with that of commercial entities and cues the expectation that NPOs should embody the ideal categorical type – that of a professional and enterprising entity. This categorisation, is not entirely consistent with NPO actors’ self-categorisation and marks a dramatic change in the relationship of the state with welfare providers and citizens.