This Article Contributes to the Debate About Voluntary Sector and Volunteering Management in Different Organisational Contexts

Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures

This article contributes to the debate about voluntary sector and volunteering management in different organisational contexts. Focusing on participant- observation research into the contradictory world of UK charity shops, it looks at three different uses of the word 'professional', In response to the third meaning of professional, senior managers in charity shop organisations display three distinct attitudes to voluntary sector management: strident commercialism, limited professionalism and vibrant professional voluntarism. Organising cultures: voluntarism and professionalism in UK charity shops

Richard Goodall, Department of Geography, University College London

Introduction attitudes to voluntary sector and In present-day Britain and its voluntary volunteering management. This is not sector, the word `professional' and its an academic debate about definitions derivatives (professionalism, of a word, but a discussion about professionalise, professionalisation) ideas and actions that are relevant to are potent. Like the word `charity' in the concerns of practitioners. the recent past, professional is usually equated with good. To be professional UK charity shops is generally seen as a positive thing. Charity shops are fascinating places. But what does professionalism actually They are both retail outlets and places involve? What should a professional of voluntary activity; both charities and voluntary sector look like? And how shops. And they contribute much to a should professional voluntary discussion of professionalism because organisations be organised? they straddle the boundary between commercialism and voluntarism. This article looks for answers to these Those who work in charity shops could questions from within the world of UK be said to operate on the borders of charity shops. It uses participant- the voluntary sector. They perhaps observation to discuss meanings of feel the conflicts between voluntarism `professional' and attitudes to and professionalism more keenly than voluntary sector and volunteering senior managers, who are nearer to management. Senior charity shop the centre of UK voluntarism. The managers are seen to use experiences of these frontiersmen and professional in three different ways. women may contain lessons for the And in response to the third of these rest of the sector. uses, they display three distinct Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures

Traditional charity shops (those selling senior management with mainly donated goods; Goodall and commercial retail experience Blume, 1997) are significant retailers and centralised organisational in the UK, with over 7,000 outlets, and power. this has made them something of a British institution. They also contribute I question why this process has been significant funds to the UK voluntary called professionalisation and identify sector, generating over £80 million a three main approaches to voluntarism year from a turnover of over £400 and voluntary sector management. million; and they deploy around The first two approaches maintain that 125,000 volunteers, who contribute professionalisation has corroded three-quarters of a million work-hours `voluntarism': the volunteer spirit, a week, or nearly £150 million a year caring people-management, and a at the minimum wage (assuming a view of charity shops as community fifty-week year). The economic enterprises and social services. contribution made by volunteers is However, the approaches differ in their worth almost double the entire sector's attitude to this supposed corrosion. contribution to charitable funds, and of The first believes that professionalism course many volunteers perform is good because it has corroded duties worth far more than the voluntarism. The second believes it is minimum wage (Goodall, 2000a, bad because it has corroded 2000b; Phelan, 1999). voluntarism too much.

Over the last two decades, most The third approach disagrees that charity shop organisations have professionalism and voluntarism are undergone a process of change that is mutually exclusive. It sees often called 'professionalisation'. This professionalism as complementary to has involved a transformation from: voluntarism and, indeed, as the best way to develop voluntary • entirely voluntary and often organisations. The article explores idiosyncratic single local these approaches in some detail, with initiatives only one step reference to specific charity shop removed from a jumble sale, organisations. selling shabbily displayed donated goods from dark, old- Existing literature fashioned, temporary, rent-free Three streams of literature contribute premises directly to this discussion: academic studies of professionalism, studies of into: voluntary sector and volunteering management and studies of charity • chains of modern, brightly lit, shops. neatly fitted retail outlets with a commercial rent, selling smartly Professionalism displayed, high-quality donated Most academic studies of items and sometimes bought-in professionals and professionalism new goods, run by paid focus on `the professions' such as law managers, sometimes and medicine (e.g. Larson, 1977). employing paid retail They show how professions maintain assistants, and often supported their status by limiting entry to the by paid area managers, paid discipline, by guarding their areas of regional managers and knowledge and by regulating and relatively well-paid head office disciplining members.

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Much everyday use of the word into the voluntary sector. Scott et al `professionalism' refers instead to (2000, page 32) highlight the disquiet competence, efficiency and felt in some parts of the sector at this effectiveness, whatever the activity. process by including this quote from There is a lively literature, especially in the chief executive of a small voluntary the USA, about the professionalisation ethnic minority support organisation: of managerialism (e.g. Bledstein, 1976; Chandler, 1990; see Hall, 1996, The working culture and practice of for a discussion relating to the US non- voluntary organisations has changed profit sector). considerably over the past decade ... senior voluntary sector professionals This article aims to develop the have necessarily colluded in turning literature on professionalism through a charitable effort into corporate critical analysis of the use of the word organisation. in everyday contexts. In this article I will relate the two Voluntary sector and volunteering tendencies in studies of volunteer management management to the charity shop There has been some impressive context and develop the discussion of research into the management of voluntary sector management by volunteers, not least that published in assessing how the attitudes of `senior Voluntary Action(e.g. Cameron, 1999; voluntary sector professionals' differ. Carroll and Harris, 1999; Holmes, 1999; Rochester, 1999), often drawing Charity shops upon key texts from the 1980s and Charity shops have recently become 1990s, such as Billis (1984, 1989, quite a subject of academic research 1993), Davis Smith (1996), Harris (Home, 2000; Parsons, 2000) and an (1998) and Hedley (1992). annual survey of charity shop performance is published in NGO I see two main tendencies in this body Finance magazine (Phelan, 1999; of work. One tendency attempts to Goodall, 2000a). improve the management of volunteers by treating them in similar Two texts relate directly to our present ways to paid staff. The other tendency discussion. Maddrell has researched attempts to improve the management the challenges of volunteer of volunteers by stressing their management, including the difficulty of differences from paid staff. This squaring 'increasingly professionalised involves questioning the value of retail practices' with volunteers who applying the workplace model to `frequently objected to charities volunteers (Davis Smith, 1996; Carroll spending money on improved decor and Harris, 1999, page 16; Rochester, and display' (2000, page 132). In a 1999, page 18). similar vein, Whithear asks:

But voluntary sector management is Will charity shops become so not limited to managing volunteers. It "professional" that volunteer effort is also involves managing voluntary shunned? (2000, page 2) organisations, including paid staff (Drucker, 1990; Handy, 1988; Hudson, Both writers address the conflict 1999). Hudson manages to ignore between professionalism and volunteer management altogether in voluntarism (Maddrell, 2000, page his book on voluntary sector 132; Whithear, 2000, page 3). This management. Such texts signal the article explores these conflicts in more introduction of a managerial culture Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures detail and shows that sometimes main charity. It focuses on supporting professionalism and voluntarism may rather than managing volunteers. not be contradictory. Findings 1: Three meanings of Methodology `professional' The research consisted of participant- Three meanings of professional observation with three organisations relevant to UK charity shops emerged and in-depth interviews with fifteen from the research: charity shop chief executives. Professional as ... The participant-observation was with three charity shop organisations of 1. paid, as opposed to unpaid or differing sizes and cultures of voluntary or amateur organising, where I observed practices and talked to head office staff, charity 2. a member of a specific expert work shop workers, regional and area community, as opposed to a non- managers and van drivers collecting professional stock. 3. broadly competent and business- I have given pseudonyms to the three like, as opposed to `unprofessional', organisations studied. ShopsCom is incompetent and not business-like. large, with over a hundred shops, and the most aggressively commercial of These meanings clearly relate to one the three. It is centralised, has paid another, but are also fairly distinct. managers in every shop plus They compete over the term. They intermediate management levels (i.e. should not be seen as neat, black-box area/regional managers) and is run as definitions, but rather as an far as possible like a profit-making approximation to different uses of retail operation. The shops 'professional' in practice. Using organisation is mostly independent of examples from the research findings the main charity. we now look at each meaning in a little more detail. HospiShop is small, with fewer than ten shops, raising money for a Professional as paid hospice. It has paid managers in In sport, professionals are paid and almost all shops. The head of shops amateurs are not. The term has sole responsibility for the shops 'professional' indicates someone's paid and has daily contact with them status, not their level of competence, because there is no intermediate their business-like approach or their management. Unlike her counterpart membership of an expert work at ShopsCom, she also has daily community (although these contact with the actual charity because other meanings are common her office is in the hospice building subsidiary associations). Amateur is itself. She is as likely to be pricing not necessarily equated with charity shop stock or chatting to a 'amateurish', because the best hospice nurse as making strategic amateurs can be better than business decisions. professional sportspeople.

VolShop, of unspecified size, differs In charity shops, the status of unpaid from the other two in its strong ethos ('amateur' or 'not professional' in of voluntarism. Its shops are staffed meaning one) is regularly equated with entirely by volunteers and the shops incompetent ('amateurish' or operation is fully integrated into the 'unprofessional' in meaning three). In Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures other words, because they are unpaid develop a personal identity based on and not of professional status, their work status. They delimit an area volunteers are sometimes assumed to of special knowledge or skill and self- be less competent than their paid regulate membership of the counterparts, which is manifestly not profession. the case. This use of professional occurs in a Whithear looks at the 'mixing' of paid number of contexts in the charity shop and unpaid workers in charity shops, world. In HospiShop, the head of noting that: shops explains how the hospice is managed more generally: if volunteers and paid staff are seen to be doing the same work, it may also Oh yes, there's four directors in the lead to questions about the purpose of hospice. And that all goes back to volunteering (2000, page 8). commercial backgrounds . . . in commerce YOU DO NOT HAVE four He argues that where there is: people at the top. It just DOESN'T WORK. There's only ONE managing some differentiation in professional director at ICI . . . the buck has to stop expertise between the two, then the somewhere. There are FOUR iniquity of job substitution ... can be directors here, ALL obviously with their avoided ... but if the volunteer own thing. There's the medical workforce disputes the significance of director. There's a nursing director. that expertise, tensions are likely to There's a social work director, and so arise (2000, page 8). it's not difficult to say what THEY do - and then there's the administrative It is generally viewed as easier to director who does everything else. So manage paid staff than independent- she doesn't deal with nurses, she minded volunteers, and pay is said to doesn't deal with doctors and drug be a guarantee of good performance, orders. She deals with everything else but this view 'is likely to rankle with the that isn't one of those three very volunteer workforce' (2000, page 8). specialised professional areas.

Professional as member of an expert Administration is not portrayed as a work community profession. The managerial vacuum is This second meaning of professional caused by a real sense of territoriality is about defining a group of experts. and poor co-ordination between the Larson argues that professions are territories. It is interesting that she attempts to: implies a lack of professionalism (third meaning: competent and business- trade one order of scarce resources - like) despite the large number of special knowledge and skills - into professions represented. She another - social and economic rewards compares the hospice directly and (1977, page xvii). unfavourably with a commercial business. The boundaries of professions are usually policed, especially by `formal' Different professions exist inside examinations. The professions ShopsCom. The marketing manager mentioned below (marketing believes that the profession of managers, doctors, social workers, marketing is not appreciated: nurses, surveyors and retailers) all operate in similar ways: they convince others that their work is expert and Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures

Some people think I am here, as Professional as competent and marketing manager, to produce businesslike posters! The final meaning of professional is the most common, the most The charity shop organisation, ambiguous and the most interesting. especially the `field' (as the actual This is 'broadly competent or retail part of the shops operation is businesslike', as in phrases such as: known), is controlled by 'die-hard retailers' and exerts an inordinate He'll do a good job, he's very influence over the shop organisation professional. as a whole. They have little time, she feels, for the `yuppie profession' of It needs doing professionally. marketing. The many examples of this meaning of This reading of events in ShopsCom is `professional' found in the charity backed up by the property shops sector highlight the breadth and development manager. He shrugs his ambiguity of the term. Here an shoulders as he tells me that: interviewee discusses staff: the charity shops are run by I think that the calibre of staff in the professional retailers - and voluntary sector actually tends to fall accountants, of course. into two headings. Those people who see it as a soft option and, er, play a He deals with this through the security game with you. And those people who of his own professional identity as a are QUITE the reverse. Are intensely surveyor. His area of expertise is not committed and intensely professional. challenged within the shops The secret is not to hire the former! organisation. The same interviewee refers to himself The other professions - marketing, 'as a professional. Both these uses are surveying and accountancy - usually about competence, about being good just talk about 'the retailers', while the at one's job. The next quote shows retailers see themselves as how this meaning becomes stretched 'professional retailers. One to include degrees of quality and interviewee, from a large commercial standards, particularly of organising. charity shop organisation, wove the The head of a large chain identifies the story of his entry into the charity shop biggest challenge facing his charity sector around his professionalism shops: under this second meaning: To become more and more I was a retail professional as such. So professional is a challenge. To KEEP I was hired on the back of being a improving our standards so that we retail professional, and the make up all the ground that we've lost organisation feeling that it needed that over the last fifteen or so years . . . But sort of specialisation. at the same time, you know, keeping the workforce and the volunteers on The retailers also act like a profession our side. A lot of people, particularly if by recruiting their own. Almost all of they're elderly or volunteers, resent them explained how important it was change. So it's important to convince to populate their organisations with people of what we're doing and why other `retail professionals'. we're doing it.

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So professional is here being used to this involves having things `right' and describe something of a high standard, being `businesslike', intelligent and something organisationally 'good'. He sensible. also highlights the fact that the professionalisation process is not Let me now conclude this analysis of always easy. The volunteers and the the uses of professional. Three uses paid shop managers can act as a have been observed in action. When brake on 'progress' and it is difficult to people talk of the professionalisation persuade them of the importance of of the charity shop sector they are professionalisation. referring to all three meanings of professionalism: more paid workers, Others are less concerned about greater use of professions such as carrying the current workforce with law, accountancy, surveying and them and would rather repopulate their `retailing', and a more competent and organisation with people like business-like management style. themselves. This is well illustrated by the chief executive of a large and Although the idea of the different commercial chain. Here he discusses meanings of professional and its his ideal area manager: derivatives appears obvious when we look at the detail, my argument is that The old area manager was [mimicking this 'obviousness' is forgotten in our a silly, weak-sounding female voice] everyday lives. There is an `Come on, Phyllis, let's get going, assumption that in common usage the we're all in this together. Where are meaning of professional is fixed and the black bags? Let's hump `em universally understood. This around a bit.' You know, we want to assumption leads to move AWAY from all of that ... towards misunderstanding, and also tends to this new breed of area managers favour some meanings of we've been carefully cultivating, a professionalism, and some people, younger breed, doesn't want to be over others. We must remember to hands on, doesn't want to go in the recognise and criticise this dangerous shop and hump bags. Wants to go in assumption and to ask people to the shops with a very professional clarify what they mean by professional. manner, with the right necessities, the right brief you know, and with the right Findings 2: Three approaches to seeing eye, picking up all the damage voluntary sector and volunteering and all the things that are wrong. And management relating to the shop managers in a We turn now to three approaches to very business-like and professional voluntary sector and volunteering way. Looking at all the key management. Each grows from a accountability activities, all the key different attitude towards the third performance indicators, talking that meaning of professionalism and its detail through in an intelligent and relationship with voluntarism. sensible way, and applying perhaps a little bit of budget ... intelligently to The first approach sees staffing decisions and so on. professionalism as successful in corroding the traditional, voluntaristic 'Professional' retailers want to style of charity shops, which limits surround themselves with other progress. Professionalism is therefore `professionals' and positive and necessary if charity shops are to be freed from the hindrance of voluntarism. This strident commercialism is an organising culture Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures found amongst senior managers in retailing techniques to the charity shop ShopsCom. sector. This involves standardisation of shops, centralisation of power, the The second approach also sees introduction and implementation of professionalism as responsible for universal procedures and the limiting corroding voluntarism, but views this of local freedom over decision-making. as a negative process beyond a Knowledge and competence are certain point. Professionalism is a presumed to reside in the boardroom, process that is necessary only to a which therefore holds power and degree. This limited professionalism is authority. The voluntary, aged, an organising culture found in traditional, colloquial and feminine HospiShop and is also found amongst culture of the shops is viewed almost volunteers and paid staff at shop level as threatening to the top management in ShopsCom. and damaging to the organisation. This culture is dubbed unprofessional The third approach refuses to see and incompetent, and power is taken professionalism and voluntarism as from it. mutually exclusive. It believes that they are complementary to each other. Techniques brought to ShopsCom as This vibrant professional voluntarism is part of this strident commercialism an organising culture found in include: VolShop. • high levels of stock generation Of course, each of these organisations and turnover, including large- actually displays a multitude of scale household collection and attitudes, opinions and perspectives, strict criteria before stock not one single 'organising culture'. I reaches the shop floor am emphatically not suggesting that • centrally decided prices to each organisation neatly typifies one maximise income and end of the three approaches. The 'charitable' pricing approaches are general tendencies • substantial investment in shop rather than cultures overwhelmingly fitting and the selection of top present throughout the organisations. class high street retail locations (with rents to match) What do these approaches to • weekly and annual sales voluntary sector management actually targets and complex data- entail, and how are they expressed in reporting procedures the three participant-observation • in-house personnel, computer studies? support, property, marketing and accountancy functions Strident commercialism • the use of consultants at head In ShopsCom, the view is that charity office for a wide range of shops can be successful only if they activities are organised like commercial • perhaps most crucially, paid retailers. The senior charity shop regional managers, paid area management claim the term managers, paid shop professional for themselves, using it to managers and paid shop refer to their area of specialist assistants to implement, knowledge: retailing. For these people, maintain and develop these professionalism is retail methods, along with written professionalism, and charity shop staff policies and well-used professionalisation has been a disciplinary procedures. process of bringing commercial Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures

think those that take their power away People with commercial retailing are not. They want limited backgrounds have often already professionalism: modern-looking learnt, before joining the charity shops charity shops, high quality stock and sector, to distrust shop staff and to be possibly a paid manager, but local especially suspicious of independent- control, a caring and relaxed attitude mindedness. In fact, as Whithear to staff and volunteers, a friendly and noted, volunteers are particularly supportive working atmosphere, and renowned for this trait. No wonder generally lower costs, especially for senior charity shop managers with shopfits and at HQ and in regional and commercial backgrounds head straight area management. into conflict with volunteers, viewing them as an obstacle to overcome or This attitude is also found within an enemy to defeat. This is how this HospiShop. The head of the chain first approach to voluntary sector resists the process of management expresses its attitude to professionalisation without resisting volunteer management. the meaning given to it by the strident commercialists: Limited professionalism On the shop floor at ShopsCom, I don't like this over-professionalisation however, perceptions are different. The distinction between experts and that's going on, and this corporate non-experts is maintained but image, and spending twenty thousand reversed. The paid head office staff pounds on shop fitting ... I don't like are still referred to as professionals, the way they spend their money on but only because they are paid, not as promotion. I don't like the fact that I'm a compliment to their membership of a making 70p in the pound and they're profession or to their competence. The making 30p in the pound. And I don't volunteers and shop managers view like the fact that the public don't know themselves as the competent ones, that. and the competence of head office staff is constantly questioned. A She works closely with her paid shop ShopsCom shop manager says of the managers and is regularly elbow-deep head office staff: in second-hand clothes. This hands-on approach is what the chief executive of They have NO idea what they are a large and commercial chain quoted doing, NO idea what it's like to even above believed was unsuitable even BE in a charity shop for more than five for his area managers. The head of minutes, let alone RUN one day in day another fairly small chain of shops out. develops this perspective in interview:

What the head office staff call And the danger always is, you lick professionalisation, the shop floor staff your lips, you look at Barnardo's, look call centralisation: the wresting of at Oxfam, what wonderful exteriors, initiative and local control from them to what wonderful fixtures, lovely, some distant, overpaid hierarchy that beautiful, look at our decrepit looking has no competence in running a shops, our old-fashioned looking charity shop. They believe that the shops. Lick your lips, let's sweep it processes and techniques they have clean, let's make it new. But what is it employed in the past are, in the main, that makes us successful? ... Because the right ones, and while they accept there's an image of `Oohh, that looks that some changes - under the banner rummagy. That looks exciting. I must of professionalisation - are useful, they go in there' ... I call it the rummagy Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures factor. They like to rummage. And you sector contexts. The attitude of limited know, whatever you do to improve a professionalism, displayed by shop shop, you shouldn't improve it in such staff in ShopsCom and by HospiShop, a way that it becomes sterile. accepts and understands this. What I am arguing is that assuming The relatively small size of these two commercial practices are always chains means that their top managers better and always appropriate is poor are closer to the public, and share the organisational management. Such public's resentment, or at least assumptions tend to march beneath mistrust, of the use of large sums of the banner of professionalism. All charity money to refurbish a shop those who care about the (Tonkiss and Passey, 1999). For these independence, vitality and charities, professionalisation has a effectiveness of voluntary limit precisely because the context is organisations and the voluntary sector the voluntary sector. Charity shops should keep watch for this kind of should simply not be too like a thinking and refuse to allow business. And customers appreciate themselves to influenced by it. this. This argument is developed further by A lesson to remember here is that the third approach to voluntary sector being `competent' is not the same as management. being 'businesslike' But they are often assumed to be identical when hidden Vibrant professional voluntarism behind or within the term `professional: Because of its strong ethos of This is dangerous, for it gives those voluntarism, VolShop questions with commercial `business' experience whether charity shop professionalism the confidence or opportunity to is about retailing and produces a new impose their solutions in voluntary version of that professionalism based sector contexts when such solutions on the distinctiveness of the voluntary may be ineffective or damaging. sector. To VolShop, professionalism means charity professionalism. This The difference between competence involves running the organisation as and being businesslike may seem democratically as possible, as obvious as it is portrayed this paper. inclusively as possible, devolving But it is shocking how often the terms responsibility to the volunteers in the are treated as interchangeable. In my shops, and stressing the importance of view, the future of the voluntary sector volunteering as a principle. depends in part on its ability to argue effectively and audibly that The top managers are not really top organisations can be well run and managers at all, or at least they try to competent without being businesslike. avoid that role. They want to be And being businesslike must not be support staff for the volunteers that fill confused with being exactly like a their charity shops - and this business - a lesson charity shops offer organisation has one of the highest to the rest of the sector. levels of volunteer contribution per shop (Goodall, 2000a). Knowledge None of this is to say that business and competence are presumed to practices are always inappropriate for stem from the back rooms of these voluntary organisations; that would be shops, where the key business a gross misinterpretation of my decisions on stock selection and argument. Clearly there are many pricing are actually made. commercial business practices that may be of use in many voluntary Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures

A head office staff member at VolShop values: to raise money for the cause, told me an anecdote that illustrates the to raise awareness of the cause and to importance of democratic organising. support and develop volunteering. For When she first came to the the majority of charity shop organisation she experienced a culture organisations, although there is a shock at being told what everyone in belief that being on the high street the charity was doing all the time. She does raise the profile of the learned to send people 'information' organisation, there is no real sense and 'suggestions' rather than 'memos' that the shop is a place from which or 'diktats: Last year she typed a education and campaigning can be or memo to inform the volunteers in the should be run. And few if any charity shops how the charity was responding shop organisations see the support to the Kosovo refugee crisis. This in and development of volunteering as a itself was very unlike the commercial key strategic aim. VolShop is in some companies she'd worked for, where ways unique. Its paid managers do not senior management would never see find this multipurpose situation easy to fit to inform the masses what was deal with and they are not completely being done at the top. After typing the successful in challenging the memo, she performed a grammar commercial retailing that they check and was warned by her word- themselves tend to have 'in their processing software that she'd used a blood'. But they do challenge it, passive style. At her old job she'd have consciously and conscientiously. changed her memo. Now, she smiled and thought, 'Passive is perfect!' VolShop is an example of a charity shop organisation that offers a broader Unlike many other charity shop definition of professionalism: well run, organisations, VolShop and its shop democratic, pro-charity, inclusive, management (or support) structure is committed, pro-volunteer and fully integrated with the main charity multipurpose. and is subject to the same 'formal cultural arrangements' as every other Summary part of the charity. Formal cultural The word 'professional' is powerful, but arrangements are organisational it is used in at least three different elements such as value statements, ways in the charity shop sector. The vision statements, mission statements third meaning - being competent and and various employment and business-like - is the most common, marketing policies. VolShop is part of most ambiguous and most interesting. a charitable organisation that It is usual to assume that professional undergoes constant strategic review has only one meaning and it is rare to and has a strong sense that its stated challenge its use in everyday contexts; missions and values are more than but this dangerous, because it is mere impostors for the profit motive. currently used to justify very real Some staff and volunteers take pride practices in voluntary sector and in the mission and values and have a volunteering management. genuine sense of personal commitment to these and to the Charity shops offer lessons to the rest organisation. of the voluntary sector because they are precariously positioned on the For most charity shop organisations, border between commercialism and making money is the one and only voluntarism. They have also goal. VolShop, however, finds itself undergone a rapid transformation with three competing (or, one might process often called argue, mutually supporting) key professionalisation. This process has Voluntary Action Volume 3 Number 1 Winter 2000 Organising cultures involved all three meanings of Bledstein, B. (1976), The Culture of professional: more paid workers, Professionalism: the middle class and greater use of the professions and the development of higher education in more competent and businesslike America, W W Norton a Co. management. Cameron, H. (1999), 'Are members Three approaches to voluntary sector volunteers? An exploration of the and volunteering management can be concept of membership drawing upon identified in UK charity shops: a studies of the local church', Voluntary strident commercialism, a limited Action 1 (2), Pages 53-66. professionalism and a vibrant professional voluntarism. Each of Carroll, M. and Harris, M. (1999), these treats the third definition of 'Voluntary action in a campaigning professional - being competent and context: an exploratory study of businesslike - in different ways. Greenpeace', Voluntary Action, 2 (1), pages 9-18. But being competent is not the same as being businesslike, and these two Chandler, A. (1990), Scale and Scope: terms tend to hide under the term the dynamics of industrial capitalism, professionalism. Voluntary sector Harvard University Press. organisations can be competent and effective without being run according Davis Smith, J. (1996), 'Should to the business model. And being volunteers be managed?' in Billis, D., businesslike is not the same as being and Harris, M. (eds) Voluntary a business. While some business Agencies: challenges of organisation practices may be of use to the and management, Macmillan. voluntary sector, simply emulating the practices of commercial business must Drucker, P., (1990), Managing the never be seen as a panacea for the Non-Profit Organization, Butterworth- sector's organisational challenges. The Heineman. future of the voluntary sector depends in part upon innovative practitioners Goodall, R. (1997), The Public using and developing these Perception of Charity Shops, Charities distinctions. Advisory Trust.

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