Introduction

This chapter traces key changes and continuities in public policy and political ideology, mapping influences on voluntary sector (VS) change in the United Kingdom (UK) over a century. It concentrates on more recent developments and inevitably can only do limited justice to the complexity of factors involved. The chapter also introduces theoretical frameworks through which issues raised here and in later chapters can be better understood.

Some changes, for example, modernisation and public service re-engineering, the rolling back of the state, managerialism, localism and partnership work, have been widely debated (Newman, 2000; Huxham and Vangen, 2004; Ellison and Ellison, 2006) but their impacts on the VS have seen limited discussion. Although research on voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) is growing, changes, including ways in which the state has extended its reach by greater intervention in the arrangements of apparently autonomous organisations and individuals – governmentality (Foucault, 1977) – have been little applied to understanding VS transitions. New institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991) also sheds light on the power and influential roles of large funding agencies in determining cultures and arrangements encompassing the operating environment of VSOs. This chapter considers insights offered through these and other conceptual frameworks, alongside a historical analysis of policy transitions affecting changing VS autonomy.

Over some 25 years, the organisation of welfare has increasingly depended on a mixed economy and a plurality of forms of delivery (Harris, M., 2010), and three broad features characterise the transformation of public policy and services following the demise of the post-1948 welfare settlement, which are discussed in this and successive chapters. The first, on which Chapter Four concentrates, is an ideological commitment to the superiority of the market as a model for improving efficiency and effectiveness in public services.

The second, discussed in Chapter Five, is the establishment of New Public Management cultures (Clarke and Newman, 1997), involving increasingly centralised strategy and policy objectives and associated ‘command and control’ mechanisms of accountability (Brown and Calnan, 2010). Third, the subject of Chapter Six, are network models of governance (Barnes and Prior, 2009) involving partnerships and localism: planning, managing and delivering public services through local coordinating bodies, cross-sector and collaborative forms of working. These three parallel sets of arrangements have been significant features of the previous Labour administration, and are also evident among current government strategies.