Documents voluntary organization 26 results

"This article assesses the prospects for union membership growth in the UK voluntary sector. It examines the efforts of workplace activists to defend terms and conditions and recruit and retain members in two voluntary organisations in the context of the sector's close relationship with external state funding and regulatory bodies. The study confirms the importance of workplace activists in contributing to successful mobilisation. It also finds, however, that differences in inter-organisational relations between the two organisations and state funding bodies that are shaped by product markets and competition are pivotal in explaining the variability in outcomes for union mobilisation efforts. The article has wider significance in telling us more about why union campaigns in areas of the economy characterised by close supply chain relations succeed or fail."

"This article uses survey data to explore how far the terms and conditions of voluntary sector staff in Scotland are undergoing a process of reform against the backdrop of the sector's greater engagement in contracting for outsourced public services and a more challenging public expenditure environment. Its findings reveal that they have been undergoing a widespread process of diminution, which would appear to be becoming both deeper and broader. They further argue that this process has been intimately connected to a harsher funding environment and therefore raise the prospect of it intensifying further as the current British government's deficit reduction programme progresses."

"There are large gaps in associational involvement along education, income and gender lines and across different organizations. This paper examines the extent to which these gaps vary across countries. We argue that, next to the discussion about crowding out effects that is often found in the literature, it is important to look at conditioning effects of welfare states. Through welfare state policies, resources are redistributed in society. In turn, these resources enable participation in voluntary associations and organizations. Our analyses — based on multi-level models and data of the European Social Survey — indicate that extensive welfare state expenditures reduce participatory inequalities, with some variation according to the kind of organization under study. Our findings suggest that conditioning effects of welfare states deserve greater attention in research and that participatory inequalities may be reduced by social policy."