Unsettling the Voluntary Sector: the Emerging Market Framework

Abstract

As the critiques of the welfare state gained momentum in the late 1970s, the welfare state industry framework began to be overlaid by a whole new set of operating principles. These principles had no truck with Left concerns about redistribution and equality and other unfulfilled promises of the welfare state because they were articulated in a com­pletely different frame of reference. This frame of reference is known as neo-liberal economics, or in Australia, economic rationalism (Pusey, 1991). From the perspective of neo-liberal economics, the operating rationale that is appropriate to the provision of welfare, and particularly the provision of welfare by voluntary associations, is the capitalist mar­ket. In this chapter we consider the various applications of the market framework to voluntary associations. It is important to acknowledge at the outset that market principles have only recently been applied to the operation of voluntary associations and we are still in the process of mapping the dimensions of the market framework. However, we devote a whole chapter to the discussion of the market framework and its com­plex effects upon the voluntary sector because, as we will argue in the following chapters, the evidence suggests that the relation between the market and the community will be increasingly significant for under­standing the operational principles and organizational forms of volun­tary associations as they develop in the early twenty-first century.