Dr. Rob Macmillan
Third Sector Research Centre
University of Birmingham
5 th ESRC Research Methods Festival
St. Katharine’s College, Oxford
2 nd July 2012

‘Larch’
• Deprived ex-mining village – housing and communitybased regeneration
• Heritage Centre, Youth Club, Village Hall, successful community shop/café, new social enterprise
• An uneven landscape of participation, e.g. ‘Brown hair turning grey’
‘Birch’
• Secure local advice agency growing through local authority funding and additional contracts
• Annual surplus to ‘weather the storm’ and for service development
• Anticipating possible outsourcing opportunities

Overall aim
• To establish, maintain and analyse a qualitative longitudinal sample of third sector organisations, groups and activities
• Access and engagement - experiences and dilemmas
Research structure and timing
• Diverse set of 15 core case studies plus a range of related
‘complementary’ case studies
• Spring 2010 to Summer 2013: five waves of interviews, observations and documentary analysis
Purpose and research questions
• Understanding how third sector activity operates in practice over time
• Fortunes, strategies, challenges and performance
• What happens, what matters, and understanding continuity and change

Methodological/theoretical basis A contextual baseline
The promise of seeing things differently?
• Growing interest in qualitative longitudinal research - snapshots and moving pictures
• Taking time seriously – rhythms and change in third sector life
• A ‘field’ based understanding of the third sector – context, relation and
‘room’
A great unsettlement - a third sector in transition?
• ‘Shaking-out’ and ‘Shaking-up’
(organisations being more
‘enterprising’, demonstrating value and ‘reconfiguration’)
• Changing economic context – impact of recession, austerity and cuts
• Changing political context – partial decoupling of sector and state

• A large national charity delivering services – anticipating a changing funding and policy environment, and preparing a cutback plan
• A specialist mental health charity – concerned to maintain its distinctive services amidst public spending cuts, the personalisation agenda and new models of intervention
• A new social enterprise – pursuing growth beyond its local community
• A co-operative sports club - trying to sustain initial enthusiasm and impetus
• A local support project for teenage mothers – surviving an internal crisis, preparing for longer term sustainability
• A parish plan action group – seeking to implement ‘quick wins’ in the village

‘Larch’ (then)
• Deprived ex-mining village – housing and community-based regeneration
• Heritage Centre, Youth Club,
Village Hall, successful community shop/café, new social enterprise
• An uneven landscape of participation, e.g. ‘Brown hair turning grey’
‘Larch’ (now-ish)
• Unsuccessful funding bids – youth club closes
• Utility bills and winter damage -
Heritage Centre closing down?
• Contracting infrastructure support
• Shop/café and new social enterprise still developing

‘Birch’ (then)
• Secure local advice agency growing through local authority funding and additional contracts
• Annual surplus to ‘weather the storm’ and for service development
• Anticipating possible outsourcing opportunities
‘Birch’ (now-ish)
• LA reviews provision and cuts basic funding, pending recommissioning
• Birch forced to consider closing services in hiatus
• A debate on tactical responses
• Reprieve, redundancies and reorganising structures and services – ‘transition’?

A picture dominated by cuts for some…
• From anticipatory anxiety to the experience of public spending cuts
• Restructuring and redundancies
• Ongoing uncertainty about the scale and scope of cuts, and emerging policy agendas
• Thwarted plans and contained ambitions
But not for all…
• Organisations planning growth
• Re-positioning and the development of new ventures and services
• Relative insulation from the changing context

• Narrative profiles, storylines and ‘process tracing’
• ‘Organizing’ as perpetual motion
• Exploring the quality of change - experiencing and narrating change
– Endogenous/exogenous
– Fast/slow
– Rough/smooth
– Deliberate/imposed
– Anticipated/unforeseen
– Incidental/consequential
• Stability and change in strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012)
– Organisations-as-fields, organisations-in-fields
– Sources of stability and change: interdependence, sensitivity and proximate social fields – ‘a stone thrown in a still pond’
– Unsettlement and resettlement: of positions, norms and institutions

• ‘Real Times’ is being undertaken by a core team of five researchers at
TSRC: Rob Macmillan, Andri Soteri-Proctor, Simon Teasdale, Rebecca Taylor and Malin Arvidson
• Macmillan, R (2011) Seeing things differently? The promise of qualitative longitudinal research on the third sector
TSRC Working Paper 56, March 2011
• Macmillan, R et al (2011) First Impressions: introducing the ‘Real Times’ third sector case studies
TSRC Working Paper 67, November 2011