‘You Can’t Win’: The Non-Profit Double-Bind and Experiences of Organisational Contradictions in the Non-Profit and Voluntary Sector

Katharine Venter, Denise Currie and Martin McCracken
Additional contact information
Katharine Venter: University of Leicester, UK
Denise Currie: Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Martin McCracken: Ulster University, UK

Work, Employment & Society, 2019, vol. 33, issue 2, 244-261

Abstract: There is growing evidence that in the UK demands for non-profit and voluntary sector organisations to comply with funders’ target driven priorities are often in tension with organisations’ social goals. The implications of this for employees are not yet sufficiently understood. The present article builds on Bateson et al.’s theory of double-bind to develop a socially contextualised model to understand employees’ experiences of workplace contradictions in the sector. Drawing from data provided by 49 individuals working in three case study organisations, our conceptualisation of a ‘non-profit double-bind’ provides a new and novel way of understanding how social meta-communicative processes serve to embed or reframe contradictions within intense employment relationships.

Keywords: contradictions; double-bind; non-profit organisations; voluntary sector (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017017713949 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:33:y:2019:i:2:p:244-261

DOI: 10.1177/0950017017713949

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().