Chasing Funding “To Eat Our Own Tail”: The Invisible Emotional Work of Making Social Change

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29173/cjnser.2019v10n2a307

Keywords:

Social innovation, Nonprofit, Canada, Homelessness, Feminist, Neoliberalism / Innovation sociale, Le secteur sans but lucrative, Itinérance, Féministe, Néolibéralisme

Abstract

This article presents findings from a multi-site study conducted in Montréal, QC, and Toronto, ON, Canada, on “social innovation” networks, focusing on the forms of emotional and relational work that many participants described. The article explores how these tasks related to how workers in the two nonprofit “backbone” organizations described their contributions to the impacts they hoped to make. The intersections of these forms of work and particular identities are framed within a feminist lens—when and how are these forms of relational work recognized or made invisible? This work is contextualized within neoliberal reforms, the restructuring of the state, and external funding requirements and how these determine what forms of work are deemed “impactful” in making significant social change around broad issues of homelessness and social exclusion.

Cet article présente les résultats d’une étude multi-sites sur les réseaux « d’innovation sociale » menée à Montréal, QC et Toronto, ON, Canada, et met l’accent sur des formes de travail émotionnel et relationnel décrites par de nombreux participants. Les auteurs explorent la relation entre ces tâches et la manière dont les travailleurs de deux organismes à but non lucratif centraux décrivent leurs contributions aux impacts qu’ils espéraient avoir. Les intersections de ces travaux et des identités particulières s’inscrivent dans une perspective féministe—quand et comment les formes de travail relationnelles sont-elles reconnues ou rendues invisible? Cet article s’inscrit dans le cadre des réformes néolibérales, de la restructuration de l’État et des besoins des bailleurs de fonds externes, et comment ceux-ci déterminent quelles formes de travail sont considérées comme ayant un impact « décisif » sur le changement social important autour des grandes questions de l’itinérance et d’exclusion sociale.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Baines, Donna. (2004). Caring for nothing: work organization and unwaged labour in social services. Employment and Society 17(2): 267-295.

Baines, Donna, Charlesworth, Sara, Cunningham, Ian, Dassinger, Janet. (2012). Self-monitoring, self-blaming, self-sacrificing workers: Gendered managerialism in the non-profit sector Women’s Studies International Forum 35: 362-371.

Baines, Donna, Charlesworth, Sara, Cunningham, Ian. (2014). Fragmented outcomes: International comparisons of gender, managerialism and union strategies in the nonprofit sector. Journal of industrial relations 56(1): 24-42.

Baines, Donna, Charlesworth, Sara, Cunningham, Ian. (2015). Changing care? Men

and managerialism in the nonprofit sector. Journal of social work 15(4) 459-478.

Côté, D., & Simard, É. (2012). Grassroots in Quebec: How the new public management and corporate culture are trickling down. Studies in Political Economy 89 (Spring 2012), 105-128.

Evans, Bryan, Richmond, Ted & Shields, John (2005) Structuring Neoliberal Governance: The Nonprofit Sector, Emerging New Modes of Control and the Marketisation of Service Delivery, Policy and Society, 24(1), 73-97

Fraser, Nancy. 2016. Contradictions of Capital and Care. New Left Review 100.

Griffith, Alison I. & Smith, D.E. 2014. Introduction. In Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Front-Line Work. Griffith, Alison I. & Smith, D.E. (Eds), 3-22.

Hasenfeld & Garrow. 2012. Non-profit Human Service Organizations, Social Rights and Advocacy in a Neoliberal Welfare State. Social Service Review.

Lamoureux, D. and Lamoureux, J. 2009. “Histoire et tensions d’un mouvement,” Revue Relations

, 15–17.

Lund, Rebecca. 2018. The social organization of boasting in the neoliberal university. Gender and Education.

Maier, Florentine, Meyer, Michael, Steinbereithner, Martin. (2016). Nonprofit Organizations

Becoming Business-Like: A Systematic Review Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 45(1), 64-86.

McPhail, B.A. 2004. Setting the record straight: Social work is not a female-dominated profession. Social Work 49(2), 323-326.

Nichols, N. 2008. Understanding the funding game: The textual coordination of civil sector work. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 33(1), 61-88.

Nikunen, M. 2014. “The ‘Entrepreneurial University’, Family and Gender: Changes and Demands Faced by Fixed-Term Workers.” Gender and Education 26 (2), 119–134.

Pain, Rachel. 2014. Impact: Striking a blow or working together? ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13(1), 19-23.

Peris-Ortiz, Marta, Teulon, Frédèric, and Bonet-Fernandez, Dominique. (2017). Social Entrepreneurship in Non-Profit and Profit Activities. Theoreticial and Empirical Landscape: An Overview. In. Peris-Ortiz M., Teulon F., Bonet-Fernandez D. (eds) Social Entrepreneurship in Non-Profit and Profit Sectors. International Studies in Entrepreneurship, vol 36. Springer, Cham.

Smith, Dorothy. (2005). Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Lanham: AltaMira Press.

Smith, D.E. (2004). Ideology, Science and Social Relations: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Epistemology. European Journal of Social Theory 7(4), p. 445-462.

Smith, D. E. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Smith, D. E. (1990). Texts, facts, and femininity: Exploring the relations of ruling. New York. NY: Routledge.

Smith, D.E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Smith, George W. (1990) Political Activist as Ethnographer. Social Problems 37 (4): 629-648.

Downloads

Published

2019-11-28