Joris De Corte

The Impact of Public Resource Dependence on the Autonomy of NPOs in Their Strategic Decision Making

Private nonprofit organizations (NPO) involved in publically funded welfare programs face the challenge of maintaining autonomy in their strategic decision-making processes. In this article we study the extent to which NPO managers perceive this autonomy vis-à-vis government in defining the NPO’s mission, their working procedures, the target groups to be served and the results to be achieved. Empirical evidence is taken from a large-N sample of 255 NPOs engaged in social welfare provision in Belgium. Our findings suggest that public resource dependence does have a negative impact on the perception of NPOs about the level of organizational autonomy. Still, we will argue that, when looking at the relative share of public income in the NPO’s total budget, the nature and intensity of the consultation process between government and NPO and some measures of organizational capacity, this picture is less black and white than presumed.

Organisational Hybridity in a Post-Corporatist Welfare Mix: The Case of the Third Sector in Belgium

Although mixed public-private provisions of welfare have always been a typical characteristic of continental welfare states, recent international scholarship has pointed to a historically new process of institutional hybridisation, with a more systematic intermingling of rationalities of the state, market and third sector within one and the same organisation. In this article, we address two limitations in the current knowledge: first, the absence of an indicator-model for exploring organisational hybridity empirically; second, the lack of sensitivity to cross-national variation depending on the welfare regime. We develop a multidimensional analytical framework that takes regime differences into account and empirically assess organisational hybridity in a (post-) corporatist welfare regime. Based on a survey of 255 third-sector organisations (TSOs) in Flanders (Belgium) and using latent class analysis, we find three clusters of TSOs that reflect different types of organisational hybridity. Contextualising our results further shows that the positioning of TSOs in our cluster model to a large extent results from the institutional context in which TSOs operate.

A Typology for the Relationship Between Local Governments and NPOs in Welfare State Regimes: The Belgian case revisited

We test a typology of public–private partnerships by using survey data on the relationship between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and Flemish local governments. We found that quite strong relations occur, but this is not a uniform picture: although most NPOs are not financially dependent on local government, there is a variation in NPO–local government contacts. We observe that NPOs active in poverty fighting, or in integration of ethnic minorities, build stronger relations, compared to NPOs in elderly care or youth care. Our analysis allows to refine the original typology by adding intermediate positions on the initial dichotomous scales of ‘dependence’ and ‘nearness’.

The Political Role of Social Work: Grasping the Momentum of Working Through Interorganizational Networks in Belgium

ABSTRACT This article explores how social workers deal with the ambiguity that arises from their ability to transform the private needs of individuals into issues of public concern. It is argued that the current shift towards joined-up working, which is epitomized by the creation of interorganizational networks, could encourage new opportunities for social work. These horizontal and nonhierarchical forms of cooperation serve as platforms for debate to ensure regular discussions about the causes of and potential solutions to complex societal problems. This article relies on a case-study of bottom-up networks in two Belgian cities where social workers from various policy fields voluntarily joined forces to look after hard-to-reach groups of homeless people. The primary data were obtained from document analysis, semi-structured interviews with network participants, and direct observations of network meetings. These data were analyzed by conducting a directed content analysis. The examination shows that the joint creation of welfare services leads to substantial debates among social workers about the criteria which homeless people must meet in order to be provided with welfare services and primary care. The paper shows that despite being aware of differing viewpoints by their engagement in such debates, social workers are reluctant to challenge the dominant conceptualizations underlying their own day-to-day practices, and that this impacts on the potential to induce local policymakers to take further action with regard to reducing homelessness.

The Autonomy of Organised Civil Society in Strategic Policy Decision-Making: A Resource-Dependence Perspective

In contemporary welfare states, governments increasingly rely on private actors for delivering public welfare services to citizens (Snavely & Desai, 2001; Salamon, Sokolowski et al., 2004; Anheier, 2005).1 Due to their grass-roots bottom-up nature and rather small scale of operation, non-profit organisations (NPOs) have become appealing partners for public policymakers who wish to involve the organised civil society in the policy process. The argument is that NPOs, by their nature of being exponents of organised civil society, have greater opportunities for tailoring services to clients’ needs and are better able to influence local social behaviour as well (Salamon, 1995; Boris & Steuerle, 1999). For governments that engage with the organised civil society, the key challenge then becomes one of ensuring that NPOs remain publicly accountable for the deployment of sometimes very substantial public funds. Still, this may not reap some of the indisputable benefits attributed to NPOs’ activities that to a large extent derive from their flexibility and autonomy of not just being another arm of government (Huxham, 1995; Boyle & Butler, 2003). This chapter approaches the above issues of NPOs’ accountability and autonomy from the perspective of NPOs involved in publicly funded welfare programs. A large of amount of scholarship has already focused on the impact of governmental interference on the NPOs’ functioning and autonomy, but this discussion remains far from being settled (Toepler, 2010)

Social work as a policy actor : understanding social policy as an open-ended democratic practice

ABSTRACT A long-standing critique on social work is that it is ‘a dog that doesn’t bark’ meaning that social work doesn’t live up to the challenge of changing unjust policies, and as such is merely an affirmative practice of the status quo. This article builds upon the premise that social workers still lack the conceptual frames and knowledge to enable them to fully understand what social policy is about and how social policy measures are formulated, shaped and evolve over time. Starting from an interdisciplinary perspective in which we incorporate knowledge from the field of political sciences and public administration literature, we identify the differing tools, strategies and allies that might assist social workers to deploy their political role when making their way through each phase of the policy cycle: agenda setting or policy initiation, policy development, policy implementation and policy evaluation. We conclude by stating that social work should consider the entire policy process as an open-ended and democratic practice in which they might intervene in several ways to realize their social justice mission.

Strategic management in the welfare state: practice and consequences: the case of Flanders

For governments within many modern welfare states it has become a key challenge to guarantee the quality and accessibility of social service provision to citizens. Under the third-party government in Belgium, this implied that far from producing the lion’s share of these services themselves, governments increasingly involved private nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to implement those policies (Salamon et al., 1999). These NPOs have become appealing partners due to their bottom-up nature, a position close to clients and their rather small scale of operation. Hence, it is expected that NPOs have greater opportunities for tailoring services to citizens’ needs and are better able to perform a radar function by signalling new or rather ‘unconventional’ needs as well (Boris and Steuerle, 1999; Salamon, 1995). As a result, the focus of government shifted from ‘rowing’ to ‘steering’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). This implies a separation of the process of planning social policies from the actual implementation of those policies by NPOs (OECD, 2012). In essence, we argue that governments hereby develop a set of strategic management practices in order to steer and control the NPOs that carry out policies, while equally granting them a meaningful voice in the development of new policies as well.