This study explores how one highly institutionalised organisation, namely The Salvation Army engages with policy discourses, how it responds and how it is shaped by its engagement with government. The move from a unified public service to the use of third sector organisations such as The Salvation Army to deliver public services represents a major shift in institutional relationships. This study focuses on the introduction of market discourse throughout the contracting process, in particular how this discourse seeks to reconstruct service users as ‘customers’, and the Salvation Army’s response to this reconstruction. By exploring the ways in which this religiously and socially motivated non-profit organisation sought to mediate neo-liberal discourses of competition and consumerism, this study seeks to reveal the processes and pressures affecting faith-based and other non-profit organisations which increasingly find themselves acting as agents of government policy under the principles of New Public Management (NPM). The altered relationships brought about by the shift in institutional relationships depend upon new institutional forms to deliver government services, and these new relationships are manifestly displayed in the Job Network. This study focuses on the ways in which The Salvation Army mediates social policy within this new institutional relationship. The changing relationship between government and The Salvation Army, as manifested in the development and implementation of employment policy in Australia between 1998 to 2007 is explored in this study. Neo-institutional theory provides the theoretical framework of this study. Neoinstitutional theory addresses the impact of shifts in the relationships between government and third sector organisations such as The Salvation Army via contracting out of government employment services. This changing relationship between government and The Salvation Army, as played out in the specific institutional field of the employment service through the creation of the Job Network is explored in this study. Within a constructionist approach, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is deployed as the analytical technology. This study uses textual material as its main source of primary data, including extracts from job network contracts, internal and public Salvation Army documents, and utterances by government. The study explores the ways in which The Salvation Army has attempted to mediate social policy and the organisational tensions that arise as the Army seeks to maintain organizational independence. This study reveals that though government as the creator of the new quasi-market and purchaser of services in that market is perhaps the most powerful actor, the new institutional relationships are not completely a master/servant relationship; third sector organisations such as The Salvation Army do have the capacity to influence government. Additionally, this study calls into question the notions that the third sector and the government sector are differentiated realms and suggests that new paradigms should be developed to explore the institutional relationships that are now developing in the provision of welfare services in Australia. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/233108 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Garland, Dennis, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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