Voluntary sector leadership in the context of cross-sector collaborations

Dr Daniel Haslam is now a Lecturer in the Department for Public Leadership and Social Enterprise and associated with The Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership. In this blog, written when he was conducting his PhD in the centre, he talks about how he analysed his data.

I’m now halfway through my PhD studies in The Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership at the Open University. I’ve recently finished collecting my data, which involved twelve months based with a voluntary sector organization working in a multispeciality community partnership (MCP) project in Derbyshire, England. I found the fieldwork very enjoyable in that it allowed me the flexibility to look at various aspects of the MCP, to see what was happening in practice, and to talk to the people delivering the project. Now that my fieldwork is complete I’m embarking on the process of analysing the data, which in qualitative (particularly ethnographic) studies like this can be quite a complex task!

Analysis

In order to bring some order to the process I’m broadly following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phase approach to thematic analysis:

• Phase 1 – Familiarizing yourself with your data

• Phase 2 – Generating initial codes

• Phase 3 – Searching for themes

• Phase 4 – Reviewing themes

• Phase 5 – Defining and naming themes

• Phase 6 – Producing the report

I’m currently progressing through Phase 2 and hope to have that complete by the start of June 2018. As my approach is inductive (i.e. I’m generating findings from the data itself, rather than trying to find specific things based on my prior expectations), it’s difficult to pre-empt what I’m going to find, but, as I have carried out some analysis and ‘lived’ with the data for more than a year, there are some things that I can say about the position of the voluntary sector in this project. These are of course initial impressions; what Miles and Huberman (1994) suggest are what has ‘jumped out’ of the data and are subject to change as I progress along the journey of analysis.

Personal Relationships

Firstly, personal relationships have been very important in this project, both in order to deliver the project initiatives and services but also to negotiate what the meaning of the project was as applied to practice – converting policy into action. The importance of personal relationships can be seen across organizations but in this particular project, the relationship between two key individuals in the voluntary sector and NHS was particularly important.

Voluntary Sector Presence

The presence of the voluntary sector in this project had a definite limit. It only extended so far in terms of decision making and control over the essential elements of the work. This suggests that, despite what the policy would encourage, and what people in context would say, the MCP was not a true partnership between the two sectors at all levels.

Engagement

Engagement with ‘the community’ or with ‘citizens’ is very difficult. In this particular project it was acknowledged at various times that this could have been done better. However, there was a definite element of engagement by volunteers throughout the time that I was collecting data, and some of it had a very high profile. Despite that level of profile, when those individuals took a step back from the project very few efforts were made to replace them. Several potential explanations for this exist, including that there wasn’t the time or capacity to engage others. However, the idea of the citizen or community voice (see below) is present throughout the project and merits critical examination.

The idea of community

The idea of engagement is tied up in the idea of community. Community is a very broad concept and within this project the emphasis was often on working with citizens directly. For the voluntary sector this presents a quandary in how they present themselves. At times they are positioned as a route to engage with ‘the community’ or as a repository of community opinion through their (presumed) strong links with individuals, either service users or volunteers. However, they can only ever offer an aggregate position on a subject or issue, which is problematic when the emphasis of engagement as suggested above is on individual contributions. Voluntary sector organizations cannot privilege one voice over another within their services but were expected to offer some sort of ‘community voice’. This also begs the question of whether the voluntary sector is seen as a valuable ‘thing’ in itself or whether it is only valuable as a link in to service users/citizens/the community.

Voluntary Sector Infrastructure

The organization I was based with for the duration of my fieldwork - Erewash Voluntary Action (EVA) – is a voluntary sector infrastructure organization (a CVS and Volunteer Centre) and was the key voluntary sector presence in the MCP. Traditionally, infrastructure organizations have offered support to other voluntary sector organizations in the form of advice about policies, funding, training, etc. and through advocating in relation to sector-wide issues. EVA certainly did that throughout this project. In addition, EVA were expected to be the route to engagement with communities. These two positions potentially conflict with each other in several senses. Firstly the community is wider than those people using services at any one point in time and so the remit of the voluntary sector is expanded; secondly, individual engagement can have a disproportionate impact on practice if it is taken in isolation as the ‘voice of the people’; often the role of infrastructure organizations is to point out the diversity and/or complexity of the voluntary sector and as a result they can find themselves in conflict with the people they have actively encouraged to engage – the individual versus the sector.

Conclusion

These are only very brief, initial findings and they will change and develop over the next several months as I continue my analysis. Other areas of interest include the role of gender (75% female in my analysis so far), the battle for the moral high ground between the public and voluntary sectors, and the role of ‘Big P ‘Place’ in policy versus ‘small p place’ in practice. I also fully expect to find new things as I progress!

18th May 2018