Birmingham Seminar Series

Garden Room, Park House

Third Sector research remains skewed towards the (1) formal, and often most structured organisations, and (2) their interactions with the formal organisations of the other two sectors. This paper analyses the "other", largely under-researched boundary, where third sector formal organisations interact with the groups emerging from the personal world of individuals, families and friends. It argues that hybridity theory has much to offer to both theory and practice in understanding the nature of the groups found in this important intermediate territory.

David is Emeritus Reader at the LSE. In 1978 he founded the first university voluntary sector centre, in 1990 he co-founded the journal Nonprofit Management and Leadership. In 1995 he became the first non-American to be awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from ARNOVA. His books include Organisational Design, Welfare Bureaucracies, and Organising Public and Voluntary Agencies. His most recent book is Hybrid Organizations and the Third Sector (ed.) Palgrave 2010.

Courtyard Room, Park House

Social enterprises are widely claimed to be a solution, simultaneously, to both economic and social problems: they do good while sustaining themselves, or, put the other way round, they contribute to economic activity while achieving social purposes; thus their distinctiveness lies in their double (or triple, or multiple) bottom line, or in their ‘hybrid’ status.

Of course, there have been other hybrids in the past, before the emergence of the current wave of social enterprises, and there are hybrids beyond the boundaries (if there are any…) of the present social enterprise field.

Hezbollah, the Provisional IRA and FARC have all shown characteristics of a similar hybridity in their policies and operations; in this seminar I suggest that hybridity may in itself be a problem, or the cause of a problem, rather than a solution, and that this perspective has implications for social enterprises generally.

Jon Griffith is a principal lecturer in the School of Law and Social Sciences at the University of East London, and a research associate at the University’s Centre for Institutional Studies; he helped develop, taught on, and eventually led the postgraduate programme in Social Enterprise: Development and Management at UEL (2001-2007), and is still scheming to replace it with something more useful…

Courtyard Room, Park House

It is tempting to view the third sector agencies rather like fragile ‘black boxes’ adrift on a turbulent sea and at the mercy of powerful social, economic and political pressures. The direction of their journey and their very survival is determined by critical success factors. Although the spate of studies have undoubtedly advanced the state of knowledge about third sector organisations, we still know very little about the internal composition and operation of the black boxes and even less about the way in which internal factors interact within the external world. The point of St Helens CVS ‘Nuts’ and ‘Bolts’ Big Lottery (BASIS) (498,000) project was to assess the factors that impinge upon opening and understanding the ‘black box’ such as governance and quality, leadership, workforce, performance, working with others and finance and funding. These different nuts and bolts are part of the inter-locking infrastructure tools of voluntary, community, faith based and social enterprise organisations to perpetuate what works; and what the implications are if some do not work.

Professor Jason L. Powell, Ph.D. is Research Chair on Community Leadership and Active Citizenship and Executive Director of Sustainable Communities Knowledge Exchange Unit in the School of Education and Social Science (ESS) at the University of Central Lancashire. He is also Academic Lead for Knowledge Exchange, Academic Lead for Employability and Academic Lead for Internationalisation for ESS.