ISTR Sixth International Conference Toronto, Canada / July 11-14, 2004 Contesting Citizenship and Civil Society in a Divided World

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Founders' Utopias and Dystopias; the paradox of complicity
by
Christina Schwabenland
University of East London

ABSTRACT Most voluntary organisations come into being because an individual, or a group of individuals have identified a social injustice or an unmet need that they feel strongly enough to devote time, energy, money, sometimes even at great personal risk. Therefore, the stories about the founding of voluntary organisations both construct and problematise the meaning of suffering and propose a vision of a world in which that suffering has been alleviated. They also promote responses to injustice; individual in the form of voluntary action and communal in the form of organisation. The stories can therefore be seen as setting out a theoretical position about the nature and circumstances of injustice and, by extension, what might constitute a more just society. These theoretical positions may not necessarily be consistent or well developed. However, they are revelatory of the underlying assumptions the founders have made about the nature of the social world and of their utopian ideal. The stories not only recount the way in which the social world is created but also contribute to the remaking and re-imagining of that world.

Storytelling in organisations has become an area that generates great interest (see Gabriel, 2000, Boje, 2001) but there is little research that focuses on voluntary organisations. This paper is based on interviews with 30 chief executives of voluntary organisations in the UK and in India carried out between 1998-2000. The research sought to explore the role the stories play in the creation of meaning within the organisation and what the stories might reveal about the social construction of the voluntary sector.

All of the stories evoke some particular vision of a better world. In this sense these stories can be seen as representing utopian thinking. This understanding of utopian thinking has a strong tradition (for example, Ricoeur 1986, Nandy,1987, Reedy, 2001). The founders’ utopian visions are not always clearly worked through (in many examples they are very partial) and they are sometimes only there obliquely.

When the founders take action to change a situation they are being critical of the status quo, of affairs in society as they currently are. In this sense utopian thinking is inherently subversive and the founding stories are tales of subversive activity.

However, the stories contain a number of paradoxes. Firstly, while the stories all function as a critique of the status quo, they propose as a remedy not only individual and collective action but also the creation of institutions – the organisation which is the object of the tale. And while the actions of the individual founders may be radical, the tendency for organisations to become conservative is well researched (for example Clegg and Dunkerly, 1984).

Secondly, while the founding events can be seen as subversive, in many of the interviews chief executives gave examples of using these stories to legitimate their own authority.

Thirdly, while each chief executive spoke convincingly about the successes of their individual organisations, in the larger context they did not always see improvement in the social problems they were aiming to ameliorate. Engaging in social action is a way for people to give expression to the anger and frustration they feel in the face of cruelty and injustice. However, if these stories are stories of hope they also contain intimations of despair. Ambiguity may serve to manage that despair.

Fourthly, while the stories express the desires of the change agents, the founders, to pre-figure the experiences of the oppressed they are not, in the main, the voices of the oppressed themselves. The stories ascribe the role of oppressed to the group that are the objects of that injustice. This group, as so constructed, is held captive in the story.

The ‘moral’ of the stories is that the concerned individual should take action against injustice to achieve a more desired state. This exposes one of the great problematics of the sector; the subject of the story is not the subject of the action. These are stories about people expressing their concern for others but it is not possible to do so without capturing the ‘other’ within their constructs. We are located in a continuum in which oppressor and oppressed are invented and reinvented by each other.

The founding stories, therefore, are a rich source of material for developing our understanding of the social construction of the voluntary sector. They reveal the founders’ theories in use about the nature of injustice and its remedy and propose the taking of action against injustice. They expose a number of tensions; between those who take action and those for whom action is intended and between radical change and stability. They also reveal a deeply imbedded paradox whereby those who seek to remedy injustice are, to some extent, complicit in the maintaining of that injustice through the structures of meaning they inhabit. The stories seek to explore new possibilities is in the construction of ethics. The subject of all the stories is the taking of ethical action. Perhaps the voluntary sector may be a space where people concretise, and thereby construct their contingent conceptions of ethical behaviour.

References Boje, D.M. (2001) Narrative Methods for Organisational and Communication Research, Sage, London Clegg, S. and Dunkerly, D. (1984) Organisation, Class and Control, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Gabriel, Y. (2000) Storytelling in Organisations: facts, Fictions and Fantasies Oxford University Press, Oxford Morgan, G. (1993) Images of Organisation, Sage CA Nandy, A. (1987) Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, Oxford University Press, New Delhi Reedy, P. (2001) Keeping the Black Flag Flying: Utopia and the Politics of Nostalgia, unpublished paper presented at the Critical Management Studies Conference, Manchester, England, 11-13 July, 2001 Ricoeur, P. (1986) Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G.H. Taylor, Columbia University Press, New York Spivak, G.C. (1996) Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, in The Spivak Reader, eds. Landry, D. and MacLean, G., Routledge, New York Spivak, G.C. (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, Macmillan, Houndsmill, Basingstoke

Date received: September 28, 2003

Copyright © 2003 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # camk-48.