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Instituting the third sector as a governable terrain: partnership, procurement and performance in the UK
Emma Carmel and Jenny Harlock
In this article we argue that governance of the dispersed state is being extended into the quasi-private realm of voluntary and community organisations and their activities. Focusing on public service delivery, we distinguish the formal and operational dimensions of governance, and argue that the goal of partnership carves out a newly governable terrain the third sector which is to be organised through the operational governance mechanisms of procurement and performance. The result is the attempted normalisation of VCOs as market-responsive, generic service providers, disembedded from their social and political contexts and denuded of ethical or moral content and purpose.
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Introduction
Across Europe and elsewhere there has been an increasing use of voluntary and community sector organisations (VCOs)1 to deliver public or human services over the last decade (Ascoli and Ranci, 2002; Evers and Laville, 2004). Evidence from the US and increasingly from Europe seems to show that the precise role that VCOs play in public service delivery varies according to the existing arrangements and social politics in individual countries, but also that some markedly similar trends can be noted, with significance for both states and VCOs. The agenda justifying these developments is that public service delivery, especially in welfare services, is supposed to be assessed on the basis of what works, irrespective of the sector, ownership or form of organisation delivering the service (Kramer, 2000). Yet at the same time VCOs are being lauded as generators of competition and contestability in public service provision, and especially as sources of public service modernisation, and thus in delivering government agendas for welfare reform, in the UK and elsewhere (Home Office, 2004a; Barnes, 2006; Cabinet Office, 2006a). Across a range of countries in Europe, this approach has led to the emergence of disorganised welfare mixes, with a wide and highly variable range of organisations being involved in public and welfare service delivery via a variety of arrangements, at local, regional and national levels (Bode, 2006). More widely, the emergence of fragmented and complex service provision has been observed to result in a blurring of organisational boundaries between state and non-state actors (for a summary, see Kramer, 2000: 46; also Evers, 1995). There has even been an international transfer of policy instruments (Compacts) that can manage these increasingly dense and complex relationships between VCOs and states. At the same time,VCOs can find themselves under pressure to change their organisational forms and even goals in response their involvement in public service delivery (Barnes, 2006).

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In this context, we examine recent developments in UK government policy in relation to the role played by VCOs in the delivery of public services.We address the way in which these policy developments attempt to institute a specific relationship between VCOs and state authorities while promoting the use of VCOs in public service delivery. We explain this relationship as an attempt to institute VCOs as a single, governable terrain, that of the third sector, through discourses, strategies, and administrative and policy changes, broadly conceptualised as governance. This governance strategy is designed to demarcate and impose an institutional and normative order as a whole onto an otherwise privately organised and variably regulated group of organisations.2 In the process of instituting this governable terrain, we identify a clear instance of the dispersed state (Clarke, 2004) developing a range of strategies and techniques across new sites of action (Newman, 2001).Yet VCOs comprise a myriad of contrasting organisations: this range and diversity of organisational origins, purpose, structure and form presents problems for governing VCOs as a new site of action, and our article is concerned with how the governance strategy adopted to respond to these problems attempts to institute a particular, limited, set of relationships between VCOs and the state in public service delivery. In particular, we identify since 2005 a key shift in the governance of VCOs in service delivery. The use of VCOs to deliver public services and the expectation that this role should increase has led to the development of a strategy to institute a particular mode of governing VCOs as the third sector, and of VCOs providing public services as social enterprises. We argue that the discursive construction of VCOs as the third sector is embedded in a system of governance that tends to institute them as technocratic and generic service providers. In doing so, it renders their specific social origins, ethos and goals absent, as if these are politically and socially irrelevant to their activities and role in relation to the state. We argue that the partnership with VCOs, promoted since the late 1990s, has changed its meaning, since procurement has been adopted as the key mode of organising service delivery. Further, we argue that the governance of the third sector not only privileges marketlike behaviour and market-style organisational forms, but assumes their necessity. This governance thus tends to normalise VCOs roles and actions as occurring on and through an apparently depoliticised and desocialised, governable terrain. We further argue that a central concomitant feature of the attempted institution of the third sector as a governable terrain is the depoliticisation of the very act of governing VCO activity and stateVCO relations. The next section of the article outlines our perspective on governance, and conceptualises the idea of a governable terrain. The subsequent sections address how the policy goal of partnership represented a first attempt at instituting the sector as deliverer of public services, positioned both as a special kind of service provider, and increasingly as a generic service provider. We then go on to explain the simultaneous emergence of third sector discourse with the promotion of procurement, and the links with accompanying measures designed to enhance third sector performance.3

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Instituting a governable terrain

We treat governance as ensembles of practices and procedures that make some forms of activity thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and those upon who it is practised (Gordon, 1991: 3). These ensembles involve an attempt to regulate and steer social subjects (Gordon, 1991: 3) or, rather, categories of social subject. Policy discourses about specific social groups, organisations and relationships, as well as policy instruments and administrative changes, interact to produce modes of regulation which institute categories of social subject, and the relationships between them. We adopt the idea that any mode of governance depends on the interaction of two mutually constitutive but analytically distinct dimensions: the formal, or substantive, dimension, which defines what is to be governed and by whom, and the operational dimension, which defines how governing is to be done (Carmel and Papadopoulos, 2003: 323). Each of these dimensions therefore involves both discourse establishing conditions of possibility for seeing and acting on the world and technologies of government procedures and processes that facilitate ways of governing (see Fenger, 2006). We explain how these two dimensions of UK governance jointly institute VCOs as the social subject category of the third sector with a specific relation to the state and the market, creating a governable terrain via the mechanisms of procurement and performance. By governable, we mean that categories of social subject are brought into the orbit of regulation, management and coordination by state actors. According to our conceptual reference point, then, instituting an area of social, political or economic life as a governable terrain involves making the governance of this area of life thinkable and practicable.We are therefore concerned with how recent UK governance directed towards VCOs makes thinkable and practicable certain forms of activity by state and non-state actors. So what would it mean to institute an area of social, economic or political activity as governable (ie both thinkable and practicable)? In our view, making it thinkable requires that it is discursively and institutionally constituted in four ways: as single, recognisable, limited and knowable: Single: that which is to be governed must be conceptualised as comprising a single group of institutions, actors or processes with enough commonality to be able to demarcate them as a specific object of governing.Thus the terrain could comprise a state, a locality, or a policy target group. Recognisable: the terrain must be recognisable as such to the actors and institutions which form its subject categories and those with whom they interact. Exclusive: the terrain must be exclusive; it cannot include everyone, and we can also expect attempts to exclude actors and institutions who are not recognised as subject categories. Knowable: the complexity of subject categories instituted through the governance of the terrain must be limited, facilitating data collection and analysis. To make governing practicable, it is necessary to ensure that the sphere of life or activity to be governed is not considered private; that it is available for governing. In ordering the social world, the definition of what is a private matter for the market
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or the domestic sphere, or a matter for experts, is crucial. This is because defining an issue, problem or policy area as a matter for the market or for families or experts indicates that it is not a political issue it should not be contested on political grounds.Thus defining a matter as outside politics, is a political activity itself (Fraser, 1989: 1689). However, we make a qualification to Frasers argument, noting that there are two aspects to defining what is political (not private): first, defining what is publicly a matter for societal or collective concern; and, second, defining what is politically available for political debate. It is the manner in which this is achieved through both the formal and the operational dimensions of governance that we focus on. In making governing practicable, it is essential for an issue or terrain to be defined as a public matter or activity, but not necessarily a political one.

From the voluntary and community sector to the third sector: governing through partnership
The process of rendering the governance of VCOs as both thinkable and practicable in the UK has until recently been directed through the formal dimension of governance: partnership with the voluntary and community sector. In this section, we explain how the discourse and practice of this partnership represented a specific attempt to institute a governable terrain in public service delivery. We go on to explain the significance of the post-2005 administrative and discursive changes to the partnership form. Partnership can be directly contrasted with the competitive contracting policy that dominated UKvoluntary sector relations up to the late 1990s. From 1998, the role of VCOs in UK public service delivery, and their relationship with the state, were considered to be governed by the Compact with government. This Compact outlines positions of mutual respect, and recognition of the independence of VCOs vis--vis the state (although it is without legal status). The UK version was internationally unique in emphasising the Compacts role in facilitating good relations for public service delivery (White, 2006: 61); a reflection of its origins as a response to the deterioration of VCOstate relations in the era of contracting-out of public services under the Conservative governments 1979-97 (Kendall, 2000). Indeed, the Compact had its origins in an independent review (Deakin Commission) of VCOstate relations, whose findings were welcomed by VCOs, who had found contracting-out profoundly constraining (eg Lewis, 1994; Deakin, 1996; Craig et al, 2002).The distinctiveness of the Compact(s) meant that Alcock and Scott (2002: 126) could argue that contracts have been replaced by Compacts as the overriding feature of voluntarystatutory relations. As Kendall (2000: 5446) has noted, the Compact, treating the fragmented charities, local groups and voluntary organisations as the voluntary and community sector (VCS), first institutionalised the idea of a single, unified social actor, with whom government and the public sector could deal. The term voluntary and community sector (VCS) makes the social and organisational foundations and origins of the sector evident; indeed, these foundations have often been highlighted as a defining and advantageous feature for public service delivery. The VCS was characterised as being neither market nor state, and, as such, offering distinctive value (Home Office, 1998).The key dimensions of this apparent distinctiveness were and are that it is independent, not hidebound by bureaucracy like
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the state, and therefore able to be innovative. It is close to users, and thus especially able to respond to their needs, generating trust from hard-to-reach social groups (eg HM Treasury, 2002: 16; Home Office, 2004b: 6, 1516; HM Treasury, 2005: 2334; Cabinet Office, 2006b: 910).The VCS comprises charities, voluntary organisations, local community groups and social enterprises, which are constituted as partners or potential partners with local or national government and public bodies. VCOs therefore have a special status as potential partners, distinct from the private sector. Key aspects of the institution of a single, recognisable and exclusive governable terrain of the VCS were therefore already being discursively articulated from 1998. The VCS could be treated as a single entity, and it even had identifiable interlocutors in the form of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) and other national bodies. The NCVO, along with many VCOs, not only recognised the terminology of VCS, but had effectively created it (through its adoption after the 1978 Wolfenden report). Further, the distinctive features of the VCS in relation to public services instituted an exclusive governable terrain: those included as subjects to be ordered and managed through its governance are defined by these rules of distinctiveness. Nonetheless, from early on, central to the institution of a governable VCS was its apparently shared values with the Labour government (Labour Party, 1997: 1; Home Office, 1998: 4; Hodgson, 2004: 141). This created ambiguity regarding its distinctiveness and independence. The civic and economic benefits of VCOs were frequently articulated in terms of the sectors capacity to provide public services in accordance with the governments goals.The discourse of partnership thus appears to unite voluntary organisations and public service agencies in the pursuit of shared goals and joint visions (HM Treasury, 2002: 3; also Home Office, 1998: 1). Independence from the state, central to the justification of the special (ie exclusive) character of this new terrain of governance, is paradoxically linked with the role of VCOs in pursuing the shared (ie non-exclusive) goals of social progress (Cabinet Office, 2006a: 13). Indeed, this paradoxical relationship was already evident in the Compacts reference to shared values (White, 2006: 51), but the provision of public services is not simply a matter of implementing those policy goals shared by some VCOs for the well-being of society. Instead, this mode of governance asserts and even assumes that VCOs have a crucial role to play in the reform of public services and reinvigoration of civic life (HM Treasury, 2002: 3; Home Office, 2004a: 7); through continual improvement of services,VCOs are integral to public services reform (Cabinet Office, 2006a: 16). The political character of this positioning of the subject category of VCOs is disguised by reference to VCOs traditional role in welfare provision, normalising and naturalising their position in partnership governance, and conflating the VCS and statutory sector as generic service providers (HM Treasury, 2002: 5). The discourse of partnership thus presents an illusory unity (Newman, 2001) of public and VCO services, disguising important disparities between them, while simultaneously lauding VCOs distinctiveness and independence. Indeed, research on partnerships with VCOs tells us that partnerships have failed precisely because VCOs are not generic service providers; they are profoundly shaped by their particular, and varied, social origins. There is strong evidence that the statutory regulatory requirements and structures, andVCOs concern about accountability and
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representativeness to their communities, mean that VCOs participation is limited to the few and better resourced mainstream organisations (Home Office, 2005c) and decision making is largely dominated by statutory partners (eg Taylor, 2001; Craig et al, 2004; Harris et al, 2004). Nonetheless, like any sectorisation, the social subject category of the VCS, with whom this partnership was to be developed, rested on an unstable fiction of the unity and similarity of purpose, organisation and structure of the multitude of organisations that comprise it (see Kramer, 2000: 36); the instability of this fiction continued to trouble government until 2005, and indeed beyond.The diversity and fragmentation of the sector are consistently presented as a policy problem, which various definitional exercises sought to resolve (eg HM Treasury, 2004; NAO, 2005; Home Office, 2005a: 910). A 2005 discussion paper (HM Treasury, 2005) provided a clearing ground for the articulation of a single, recognisable and exclusive terrain: it was here that the third sector replaced the VCS as the nomenclature; that this third sector was itself explicitly defined; and that its constituent subject categories and their roles were defined. A detailed mapping of the governable terrain of the third sector was provided, including, for the first time, mutually exclusive definitions of the subject categories to be governed, their possible role in public service delivery, and the terms under which they might be governed (ie charities,VCOs, cooperatives). There was even an attempt to design how data will be collected on this third sector and its constituent subject categories (HM Treasury, 2005: 6370; also 2006a). The polyvalent VSC was described, dissected and rearticulated as the apparently more neutral and more inclusive third sector, which despite recognition of the problems with VCS, was still preferred by VCOs and some public sector bodies (Home Office, 2005b). The third sector comprises organisations that are nongovernmental;value-driven (concerned with purposes other than profit per se); principally reinvest surpluses to further those purposes (HM Treasury, 2005: 17). This definition a formalised version of the neither state nor market adage makes some important discursive achievements. First, despite its reference to value-driven, it renders these values politically and socially neutral it does not matter what these values are, how they relate to the sociopolitical origins of an organisation, or even its purposes, as long as these organisations are not profit oriented. Second, it is extended specifically in order to include social enterprises, which, until that point, were institutionally dealt with as businesses, and part of the market, rather than the third sector (see Home Office, 2005a: 11; OTS/Compact Voice, 2007: 5). This definition has cascaded through all subsequent documents, which address VCOs in general, and the terminology the third sector is also universally applied (see Cabinet Office, 2006b, 2007; HM Treasury, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c).The Office for the Third Sector, based in the Cabinet Office, was created in May 2006, with a designated minister. This brought together the Social Enterprise Unit from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Active Communities Unit from the Home Office. Subsequently, the interim report on a 10-year strategy towards the third sector as well as an action plan on the third sector in public service delivery were published (HM Treasury, 2006a). At the same time, a new Commission for the Compact was established in late 2006, to act as a regulator-cum-advice centre for parties to local Compact agreements. It is in this Commission that the assertion of independence and mutual respect of the public
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and third sectors resides (HM Treasury, 2005; OTS/Compact Voice, 2007).Thus we see that in instituting the third sector as a governable terrain, there is in the formal dimension of governance both discourse (partnership with the third sector) and technologies of government (changes in administrative authority, redefinitions of the roles and relationships of departments and public bodies). Together these mark the outline of the terrain, the social subject categories to be governed, and their responsibilities (eg to coordinate and govern state actions in relation to VCOs and third sector organisations more generally). The promotion of partnership with the third sector in public services enables VCOs to be discursively constituted as a natural participant in government policy as generic service delivery organisation[s] (Cabinet Office, 2007: 5). As such, the third sector is also discursively constituted as part of a public domain, delivering public services, for the public good (because it is value driven, but only in so far as these values are shared with government), rendering its governance discursively practicable. Thus far, then, the third sector is instituted as a governable terrain although this governance is apparently apolitical, naturalised simply as part of what VCOs do and how public services are delivered.The institution of the third sector as a governable terrain has even been expressed as an attempt to engage VCOs in a political project: that of increasing the role of the third sector in service provision to assist in public services reform, and to create a competitive market of service delivery suppliers (Cabinet Office, 2006a, 2006b: 39ff). How explicit this agenda has now become, and how problematic this role is in relation to the ideals of VCOs as distinctive providers in partnership with the state, is explained in the next section.

Governing through procurement: contracts and the Compact

The 2002 review of the role of VCOs in public service delivery suggested that it was important to creat[e] a level playing field in competition for service delivery (HM Treasury, 2002: 25, 1516; 2006d: 9). Public service delivery is to become a fully fledged market, with providers subject to market-style discipline in offering their services. It was in the 2002 review that the recommendation was first made to introduce procurement contracts with VCOs, rather than grants, as the main mechanism to coordinate and ensure service delivery.At the same timeVCOs would get a commitment to three-year funding, and encouragement to charge for full costs (HM Treasury, 2002: 22; NAO, 2005; HM Treasury, 2006b, 2006d). Grantbased funding from public bodies is to be confined to community organisations promoting social cohesion and active citizenship (Home Office, 2004a: 7; Cabinet Office, 2006b: 524; DCLG, 2006: 59). For government, procurement introduces market-based competition, and thus overcomes the problem of there being too few suppliers (HM Treasury, 2005: 22), and in order to maintain the supply chain of services, it is also important to break down barriers to entry on the government market (Cabinet Office, 2006b: 5; HM Treasury, 2006d: 17). In addition, in order to ensure accountability to government over the new three-year funding period, procurement is said to offer the best mechanism for securing the governments risk (ie contracts mean that cost management must be borne by the service provider).
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Procurement can also act as a disciplinary mechanism over the wide range of relationships that exist under the term of partnership, and over the behaviour of commissioning authorities (HM Treasury, 2006a: 256). Indeed, there is considerable emphasis in the documents we reviewed on getting public authorities to behave in a more market-oriented manner (NAO, 2005; Cabinet Office, 2006b: 57), including the provision of guidance and exhortations on how to procure (eg HM Treasury, 2006b, 2006d), and the responsibility of local authorities and commissioning departments in managing market development (HM Treasury, 2006d: 17).A proposed enhancement of the Compact Compact Plus made clear the demands that partnership by procurement places on commissioning authorities as well as VCOs (Home Office, 2005a: 12), and offers an insight into how the institution of the third sector as a governable terrain also institutes the sector in relation to other actors.4 While social and environmental clauses can be included in the contracts (HM Treasury, 2006d: 23), the aim is clearly to organise the terrain of the third sector in a knowable and manageable way, a mode of organisation where VCOs facilitate contestability and competition on the government market to assist in efficient and cost-effective public services (Cabinet Office, 2006a; also HM Treasury, 2002: 15).The assumption underpinning this way of working draws on a market model, which prescribes competition between providers to drive down costs and improve efficiency and has the ability to deliver better results to the users of services, or customers (Clarke and Newman, 1997); better of course being defined by government. Following the 2002 Treasury review of working with VCOs, there was also increasing emphasis on securing medium-term funding for organisations that deliver public services so that VCOs in particular are able to plan ahead with some financial stability.Two policies have therefore been adopted to make three-year funding of statethird sector partnerships the norm (DCLG, 2006; HM Treasury, 2006a: 71), and to encourage third sector organisations to charge for their full costs (ie including overheads) (eg HM Treasury, 2002; NAO, 2005: 24). Both these policies have the potential to benefitVCOs by ensuring that when delivering public services they cover all their costs, and that they are able to plan their services and policies. However, these two changes, justified on the basis of improving government efficiency (NAO, 2005: 4), are promoted in conjunction with a move from grant-based to procurement-based funding. In addition, in this case, the market is a monopsony, and many VCOs are very unlikely to have resources to be actually bidding for contracts on an equitable basis, but may be compelled to bid for service contracts in a context of scarce resources, as well as having to introduce particular methods and modes of working, which can interfere with VCOs purposes and their engagement with their wider social basis (Taylor and Warburton, 2003: 335; Barnes, 2006: 98, 104). For the central state, procurement means that the same process is adopted for contracting-out service provision for all providers, irrespective of whether they are private sector (known as mainstream) or third sector providers. This disguises differences in ability, willingness or appropriateness of playing this field within the third sector, but it is not just the general promotion of procurement that attempts to contain the diversity of the third sector terrain. Not only does the definition of the third sector specifically extend to include social enterprises, but social enterprise has explicitly been adopted as a generic name for third sector organisations working in partnerships. It is, it seems, no longer different VSOs, co-ops and charities that will
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provide services in statethird sector partnerships. Rather, it is social enterprises, which, simply by virtue of being contracted by the state in new procurement arrangements, are constituted as quasi-businesses in the quasi-market: trading with the public body: undertaking specific activities in return for payment makes the organisation a form of social enterprise increasingly it is likely that the nature of public service provision providing specified outputs in return for payment will encourage the use of the term social enterprise for all third sector organisations contracted to deliver public services by public bodies. (HM Treasury, 2005: 19; see also 2006a, passim) The key issue is the idea of trading with the public sector as it is this which makes the delivery of public services a matter of business, subject to market rules and procurement, rather than grant funding (Home Office, 2005a: 10).5 Thus, social enterprises are no longer one among a series of categories of third sector organisations, part of the defining limits of what was to be governed in partnership (see HM Treasury, 2005). Nor are they businesses with a social purpose, dealt with as a special part of the private sector, as in the past (see Kerlin, 2006: 250). Rather, social enterprises are now discursively constituted as the generic public service provider, the main object to be governed through third sectorstate relations, and, at the same time, all VCO public service providers are to be social enterprises, behaving like business enterprises in a level playing field with the private and public sectors. This discourse, and the contractual tool of procurement that should institute it, combine to form an important part of the operational dimension of governance with two significant features. First, it involves the (attempted) institution of a market, in which not only the third sector is to be governed, but also the other actors in the market notably commissioning authorities.Yet conceptualising and presenting this governing as part of the promotion of an efficient market, providing value for money, occludes its political aspect that it is about central government attempting to steer the behaviour of the social subject category commissioning authority, ie executive agencies, non-departmental public bodies and especially local government. Second, this part of instituting the third sector as a governable terrain, renders absent not only the marked differences in the organisations that make up this sector, but also the differences between these (in purpose, origin, form and structure) and the private sector. This then makes the articulation of a level playing field and competition between sectors and organisations part of a market rationality, made to appear commonsensical as part of a specific agenda of public service modernisation. The relationship betweenVCOs and the state appears apolitical, or at least politically neutral, as it is governed through market rules albeit the oxymoronical government market in which the central state is the governing authority.

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Building capacity, creating professionals: governing through performance

If procurement and market creation form one part of the operational dimension of third sector governance in public services, the second aspect is that of the
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performanceevaluation nexus (Clarke, 2004). The way that the voluntary sector is expected to deliver services is subjected to a discourse pervaded by terms such as transformation, reconfiguration and revolution, but this is not merely about changing the way public services are delivered (ie through procurement and quasimarket competition) it involves changing how VCOs themselves are constituted in delivering these services. These new ways of working are generally framed in terms of building capacity, and there are specific funding streams attached to capacity building for the third sector. The emphasis in the policy and funding instruments regarding capacity building in the third sector, particularly in relation to public service delivery, is embedded in a new public management discourse, despite the range of possible meanings and motivations for capacity building, based on empowerment and community development (Harrow, 2001: 210ff). Building capacity in terms of increasing advocacy and support services and campaigning work is marginalised and subordinated to government objectives of increasing the capacity of voluntary organisations to deliver public services. Poor performance is thus defined in terms of VCOs capacity to deliver public services that is, to adhere to governments objectives, including how they do the business of service delivery (Cairns et al, 2005). It is not defined in terms ofVCOs capacity for work with service users, advocacy or other functions.All the specific policy tools promote business practices: IT resources and skills, human resources management, meeting skills gaps, leadership, volunteer management (HM Treasury, 2004: 55; 2005: 55; 2006c: 246). This construction of capacity building assumes a technical and market-oriented accountability, which simply ignores the conflicts such forms of performance accountability raise for VCOs given their need for other forms of accountability, as well as the cost of compliance (Harrow, 2001: 21517; Taylor and Warburton, 2003: 333; Barnes, 2006).VCOs are specifically not rewarded or given access to funding streams for pursuing those virtues that made them special service deliverers. Instead,VCOs are imagined as de facto businesses, selling their services and driven by private sector ways of working, presenting a productivist vision of their role. The emphasis is on selling services and responding to the customer flexibly (Home Office, 2004a: 26, 28; HM Treasury, 2002: 5). There are multiple ways in which performance can be measured, familiar from new public management discourse: evaluation, setting targets, audits, performance indicators and costbenefit analysis (HM Treasury, 2002; Home Office, 2004a; NAO, 2005; HM Treasury, 2006b, 2006d). Being performance driven thus offers a different set of logics and constraints for voluntary organisations work to being driven by altruistic motivations. The discourse of performance normalises the reshaping of VCO services around the imperatives of targets, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Efficiency orders the priorities on resources and action, expelling activities that do not contribute to the primary goal, and legitimates withdrawal from previously undertaken activities which become redefined as unessential (see Clarke and Newman, 1997). The discourse of performance thus sets rationing criteria; it establishes priorities between different services and groups of users, and the use of resources, but these appear as rational choices according to market-based logic, rather than political choices, which might otherwise be contested, even by theVCOs themselves (see eg Barnes, 2006). Evaluations, audits and performance indicators are furthermore presented as rational and scientific, and therefore distinctly apolitical; they
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appear to transcend the political agendas of different governments and thus present a system of fairness and objectivity that seeks to invoke trust in these techniques. Dean (1999: 1689) argues that such technologies of performance present themselves as techniques to create trust in the activities of VCOs, specifically here facilitating the legitimacy of their role as a public service provider, because they appeal to notions of accountability and transparency, albeit rather different ones from those historically articulated by VCOs themselves. The capacity to deliver public services, to be quality oriented and responsive to customers ie an organisations performance is frequently emphasised as being dependent on a highly effective workforce (Home Office, 2004a: 27), and various techniques for its development are suggested, both to promote good practice, and to organise the delivery of capacity-building funds. This discourse of performance thus produces a normative model or ideal type, which all organisations, if they are to be successful, must follow:
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[T]o ensure that they have real impact these organisations have to concern themselves with strategic planning and budgeting, staff recruitment and development, quality management, statutory reporting requirements, public relations, membership systems, more formal management of relationships with stakeholders. . . .(Home Office, 2004a: 19) To achieve this adherence to specific standards of practice, developing expertise and advanced thinking are required (Home Office, 2004a: 10):VCOs are advanced if they carry out their role as public service providers in the way government and professionals do.The proposed funding of hubs of expertise as gateways to good practice therefore imagines a path to professionalism, or a process of professionalisation, which can be realised by the VCOs, if they emulate government practice.This process can offer appealing new subject positions for VCO members; volunteers and voluntary sector staff are reconstructed as leaders, strategists, experts and professionals. Simultaneously, the discourse of professionalism enables government to facilitate a programme of coaching, shadowing and mentoringVCOs (Home Office, 2004a: 27) and providing secondments, to assist them and demonstrate competencies and standards (Home Office, 2004a: 9). Thus, intersected with the discourse of professionalism is the discourse of paternalism, with government presented as the teacher and the example setter, guiding, leading and nurturing the voluntary sector to fulfil its potential and capacity that is, its potential and capacity for being a public service provider (see Labour Party, 1997: 2; Home Office, 1998: 3). The emphasis on training and skills development and recruiting and retaining the right people providing appraisals and diagnoses of individual learning and skills needs (Home Office, 2004a: 27) also enables government to individualise performance. Thus, if these techniques are implemented, individual volunteers and staff are made responsible for organisations overall performance, and every individual is constructed as having a role in delivering the organisations objectives which in public service delivery, are those of the commissioning authority. The discourse of human resource management and scientism thus makes it possible to redefine the motivations and allegiances of volunteers and VCO staff (Clarke and

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Newman, 1997); altruistic motivations and activities are displaced by commitments to increasing capacity and performance. Importantly, the discourse also constructs new subject positions for volunteers and staff as (exclusively, and mutually exclusively) employees or managers, and therefore reconstructs relationships between volunteers and staff as relationships between employer and employee. Indeed, VCO members and workers as a whole are repositioned through this discourse as a workforce, part of the labour market, corresponding to their institution as the third sector, competing in the market.Voluntary activity is thus presented as a means through which people can primarily enhance their employability and gain skills and qualifications, generating management, leadership, team working, planning, and ICT skills (Home Office, 2004a: 27).The voluntary sector is thus constructed as a resource to be utilised and harnessed, making invisible the women who predominantly comprise this resource to be used, particularly in the fields of health, education and social services (Lowndes, 2000: 534; Newman, 2005: 8991), justifying claims that women volunteers bear the cost of attempts to cushion cuts in public expenditure (Bagilhole, 1996). The second aspect of the operational dimension of governance performance discursively closes off other possibilities of practice by presenting itself as the only right way of coordinating an organisation internally. Indeed, the documents suggest benchmarking organisations against each other; a technique that seeks to produce conformity with a model way of working.The logic of standards and good practice assumes that organisations must converge around a consensus of standards. Thus, the VCOs ability to offer varied and wide-ranging services, and its innovation and flexibility in both the services it provides and the way it provides them (so lauded in principle) is subverted by the operational dependence on the discourse and techniques of performance and professionalism.

Conclusion: instituting a governable third sector

In this article we identified the existence of an agenda that sought to increase the role of the VCOs in public service provision, and drew attention to how this political goal was rendered plausible and apolitical in two key ways. First, by the goal of (notionally equitable) partnership, and, second, through the assumption of shared, even universal, aims and values, which consequently neutralised differences between VCOs, and between VCOs and the public sector. It highlighted how partnership thus instituted VCOs as a constitutive part of modern governance, and therefore as a governable terrain, unitary, or unifiable, as the third sector. We noted that the reasoning for adopting performance management was structured specifically around the notion of increasing capacity that is,VCOs capacity to deliver public services. Thus the discourse of performance established the market model and its associated techniques of contracting and competition as the means to deliver public services, prioritising financial calculation and forms of economic rationality. We argued that the discourse of performance also implied the normalisation of VCOs professionalisation, and of forms of organisation that conform to business models, such as employee-manager. Our contention, then, is that the mode of governance outlined in this article, involves making a set of organisations, activities and relationships previously not
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considered an object of state governance VCOs into a governable terrain.Through the formal dimension of partnership and the operational dimension of procurement and performance, VCOs are to be drawn into and made subject to processes of state governing. Simultaneously, these same discourses, policy instruments and administrative changes occlude the extent to which this is a political development. This is achieved in part through the idea of shared moral purpose and vision that precludes engagement with political difference, which has been problematically evident since the late 1990s. The more recent emphasis on market creation for public service delivery, and the adoption of technocratic terminology and measures (with funding attached) to alter the ways VCOs behave, to be more like the social enterprises they are assumed to be, creates a coherent approach to governing the third sector in public service delivery, which is furthermore articulated as normal and rational. Indeed, we pointed out that while the third sector is instituted as a governable, and thus a public, realm, its accountability, procedures and activities as a public service provider remain a matter for technocratic evaluation by state actors, rather than a matter for political debate and contestation. This mode of governance positions the organisations that are supposed to comprise the third sector in a peculiar sociopolitical no mans land. It technocratises organisations activities by apparently dissociating them from the social context from which they have developed, in which they act, and to which they respond. As a result, the social foundations of VCOs, and the organisational imperatives that stem from these foundations, are disguised. The goal of partnership with the third sector appears to express a politically neutral collaborative mode of governance but in practice it enhances the ambiguity of third sector organisations position vis--vis the state as both a site and a form of organizing power (Clarke, 2004: 115). What we have not done in this article is to analyse the variety of ways in which VCOs have engaged with these discourses, nor how the widely varying implementation of such governance strategies by local authorities affects the governability of the voluntary sector in practice. Existing research on public sector partnerships and performance management in the public sector, of course, suggests that, in detail, such governance practices are likely to be negotiated, compromised and often messy in application, and it is not at all certain that the nomenclature of social enterprise will be recognised by those to whom it is now applied. It is also the case that some VCOs adopt and use these government discourses in order to gain resources for negotiation with their actual partner (the commissioning authorities). What remains to be investigated is whether ambivalence ever translates into resistance among both commissioning authorities and VCOs what form such resistance takes and, above all, what the consequences of acceptance, ambivalence and resistance are for the volunteers and the citizens for whom they do their volunteering. Notes 1 We refer to voluntary and community organisations, as it is these, as public service providers, that have been the explicit target of the policies and strategies under investigation here.We refer to organisations rather than sector in order to keep in mind the variety of aims, legal and organisational forms, economic position, size etc that can and have been included under the heading voluntary and community sector. When

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appropriate, we also distinguish specific legal or organisational forms, such as charities or social enterprise. This should not imply that VCOs are not subject to any form of legal regulation; charities, for example, are subject to regulation by the Charity Commission,VCOs that also trade as companies are subject to company law etc. As such, all formally constituted organisations are governed. However, our concern is with a new attempt to govern VCOs as a whole, via the mechanisms we identify here.
2

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This article presents a discourse analysis of all published government documents representing general policy towards VCOs since 1998. The citations presented are illustrative and not exhaustive. The analysis does not include policies, discussion documents etc developed for particular policy areas, such as regeneration, health or crime. This means that we necessarily exclude an analysis of partnerships organised for community empowerment and civil renewal. The latter is an important strand of government discourse, but we confine ourselves to the governance of VCOs in relation to public service delivery. It is, indeed, notable that the vast majority of statements of strategy, policy, action plans, reviews and guidance produced for and about VCOs in general, are articulated in terms of public service provision and the role of VCOs in delivering reform in particular.
3

This Compact Plus was eventually rejected byVCOs for demanding high-performance compliance and for privileging mainstream organisations that could meet its demands (Home Office, 2005b: 10-12, 28), and appears to have been dropped as a policy proposal.
4

This issue of trading seems to have been of concern in relation to the 2006 Charities Act, which introduced a new legal form for charities the Charitable Incorporated Organisation to facilitate charities trading, by offering limited liability while remaining under Charity Commission regulation, and therefore benefiting from charities advantageous tax position in relation to trading.As the details of this new legal form have yet to be published, we cannot evaluate its significance, nor consider its likely uptake.
5

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Emma Carmel, sssekc@bath.ac.uk Jenny Harlock, j.e.harlock@bath.ac.uk Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, UK

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