Stories of diversity
Christina Schwabenland, London Metropolitan University
Frances Tomlinson, London Metropolitan University
This paper draws on a current research project that my colleague, Frances Tomlinson and I are carrying out into diversity in the voluntary sector. The paper will use the stories that people working in voluntary organisations, whether as volunteers, trustees or paid staff, tell about their work in order to explore the ways in which they conceptualise the challenges of creating a more equal society, their practical responses to those challenges and the roles that stories play in creating meaning.
This paper builds on previous work I have done in the UK and in India researching the stories that were told about how and why voluntary organisations are founded (Schwabenland 2006). The stories tell of the passion to create a better society that motivates the founders of these organisations, many of whom undergo considerable hardship in so doing, One of the propositions I developed from that research was that the voluntary sector represents a space in which people come together to explore and articulate the ethical and moral dilemmas of their time and construct, in organisational form, provisional responses to those dilemmas. The founders’ notions of what constitutes social injustice and also about how the good society should be built vary over time and location; for example in the UK the residential ‘asylums’ for people with learning disabilities of the past have been largely replaced by community based support and in India there has been a shift in emphasis over the last twenty years from schemes based on importing the ‘expertise’ of international, and mostly western professionals to those that aim to build on local knowledge.
It therefore follows that voluntary organisations might fruitfully be regarded as providing a valuable source of information about what are perceived as current ethical concerns and how solutions to those concerns are being shaped. One of the most urgent issues, or set of issues, is surely represented by the notion of diversity; how people from different religions, races, cultures, classes, communities, with different histories and shaped by profoundly different social, cultural, economic and political circumstances, imagine a better society and create organisations to achieve it.
Moreover, the voluntary sector is itself constructed of organisations that were created to respond to the particular needs and aspirations of groups of people occupying marginalised positions within their societies. Therefore the complex dynamics of difference such as the tensions between assimilation and separation and the risk of the essentialising of difference are intrinsic to the processes of voluntary organising. Working with these dynamic processes is also one of the most significant challenges voluntary sector managers face. This paper explores some of their stories about responding to these challenges.
References
Schwabenland, C. (2006) Stories Visions and Values in Voluntary Organisations Aldershot: Ashgate
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