Governments and voluntary sector welfare: historians' perspectives.

• Author: Tennant, Margaret

Abstract

This paper examines recent themes in the history of welfare as they apply to the relationship between government and the voluntary or non-profit sector. These include a shift from a focus on the welfare state to a "mixed economy" or "moving frontier" of welfare, and the emergence of a long-term view that shows a centuries-old contestation between public and private provision for social need. The rehabilitation of past philanthropy has helped to reinforce the profile and legitimacy of the voluntary sector in the present, while recent attention to the actual encounters between providers and recipients of welfare has complicated earlier social control theories. Gender studies have illustrated the respective roles of men and women in the different welfare sectors, the voluntary sector providing a sympathetic space in which women, in particular, have attempted to exercise social power. Typologies derived from internationally comparative studies of the non-profit sector have tended to emphasise the complementary nature of its relationship with governments. This paper suggests some distinctive elements in New Zealand's history which shaped such interactions in the past, and which now impose constraints, as well as suggesting pathways for the future.

INTRODUCTION

In time of rapid administrative change, history and social policy may connect only fleetingly. "The past" tends to be seen as something to disown, critique or move on from. This may especially be the case where change takes on a dynamic of its own, individuals and groups having a vested interest in initiating a new order, but not in appraising and reflecting upon its long-term consequences. History in the form of reflection on the past may be seen as a distraction, an impediment to action in the face of immediate pressures. Alternatively, the past may take on the glow of a "golden age". Here myths about a more virtuous (and selectively chosen) past may be used to criticise or justify subsequent developments.

Despite its being ignored or misused, historians would argue that their discipline does have a place to play in the making of social policy. Many historical debates have abiding echoes and the solutions of the present may not be as original as we would like to think. A look at the historical record reminds us that discredited ideologies and practices were often implemented by people as well meaning, as convinced of their rightness, and as appalled by their predecessors' actions, as policy makers in the present. History provides, above all, a corrective to assumptions about the easy answer and a basis for better understanding of current dilemmas.

This paper reviews historical perspectives on one particular aspect of social policy: the relationship between government and voluntary sector welfare. This seems timely, given a plethora of recent publications about the so-called "contract culture" which became entrenched in the social services over the last decade and a half. The recent report of the Community and Voluntary Sector Working Party (2001:145) included in its "Phase Two work programme" a call for historical research in the area, and although my focus is the more structured side of such activity, it aims to provide a starting point for further, more empirical, research.

I use the term "voluntary sector" in recognition of its long, though mixed, historical provenance. There are other, more recent, contenders for the cluster of attributes evoked by the term; among them the "third sector", as opposed to the "first" and "second" sectors -- the market and the state. (A fourth, "household" sector, is sometimes identified as well.) In Britain, the "non-statutory" sector is the competing terminology, while "non-profit" is more favoured in the United States. None of these terms is unproblematic, and each carries an ideological imbalance of one or another kind (Kuhnle and Selle 1992:6). The further one goes back in history, the more problematic all these terms become, including the notion of "sectors", for they assume a demarcation of public and private domains, and an ideological, political and legal infrastructure which differs from that of Western societies in the past (Hall 1994:4-5) and from non-Western societies in the present. Internationally, as Lester Salamon and Helmut Anheier point out, notions of "voluntary" or "non-profit" activity are "culture-bound and dependent on different legal systems" and incorporate "a wild assortment of institutional types that varies greatly in basic composition from place to place" (Salamon and Anheier 1997:495).

Here the term "voluntary sector" will be used for national and local personal helping or relief organisations, which are non-profit-distributing (though they may make profits), and voluntary in the sense that involvement in their activity is not forced or mandatory. These may range from highly structured nationally organised bodies to loosely organised community associations, though mutual aid associations such as friendly societies have had a somewhat different historical trajectory.

FROM WELFARE STATE TO WELFARE SECTORS

A number of themes have emerged in welfare historiography in recent years. Until the 1970s, welfare history was very much about the "rise of the welfare state", with a focus on a growing collective humanitarianism and citizen entitlement to statutory benefits (Bruce 1968, Fraser 1973). Often written with overtones of inevitability and progress, this approach implicitly and explicitly constructed the welfare state as a response to voluntary sector failure. Where historians ventured into international comparisons, they drew on social science models by Wilensky and Lebeaux (1965), Titmuss (1974), Esping Anderson (1990) and others which paid relatively little attention to the role of voluntary welfare (Kuhnle and Selle 1992:12-19).

However, historians are not insulated from contemporary social and political shifts and, as the so-called "crisis of the welfare state" entered public discourse, their analyses either became less laudatory, or explicitly sought to defend the welfare state from a "New Right" attack (Thane 1982). At the very least they were forced to write about the welfare state in terms which questioned its inevitability. The term "classic welfare state" began to be used of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s in particular, and the welfare state was increasingly depicted as part of a distinctive period of history -- as an institution which was complex, contradictory and by no means as total in its reach as had previously been assumed. As a corollary of this, and mirroring its late 20th century expansion, the voluntary sector has acquired a new interest for historians. In place of analyses of the state, notions of a "mixed economy of welfare", "welfare pluralism" and welfare "sectors" have taken hold. The balance of the different sectors is seen as shifting over time, and not inevitably in the direction of state predominance. In one particularly influential article, British historian Roderick Findlayson wrote of a "moving frontier" of welfare between voluntarism and the state over the 20th century; an "ideological front" influenced by war and want, but constantly being reassessed and renegotiated (Findlayson 1990).

In New Zealand there have been some fine studies completed in recent years of social policy sections of government (McClure 1998, Dalley 1998, Bassett 1998, Dow 1995). For the most part these have touched only in passing on the relationship between government and the voluntary sector in different welfare environments, though they do give an indication of the government's expanding regulatory role. There are relatively few "lifecycle" studies of voluntary organisations. Those which do exist focus largely on national societies, are of varying quality and, understandably, do not foreground relations with government. Analyses of the relationship by social scientists sometimes contain a historical section as a kind of "introductory overture" to their real performance piece: the recent past and the emergence of the so-called "contract culture" (Social Advisory Council 1986, Ellis 1994, Nowland-Foreman 1995).

A LONGER-TERM VIEW

While Findlayson wrote about this "moving frontier" in relation to the 20th century, many historians urge an even longer-term view of welfare. Family...