Nonprofit Care Work as Social Glue: Creating and Sustaining Social Reproduction in the Context of Austerity/Late Neoliberalism

Abstract

This article will bring together the social glue concept of social reproduction and a feminist analysis of civil society to the study of nonprofit care work in order to cast analytic light on the dynamics of care work in the nonprofit sector and contribute to theorizing care work, to identify and theorize aspects of nonprofit care work which reproduce and sustain social glue, and to supplement theory on civil society. Drawing on qualitative interviews with nonprofit care workers in South Africa and Scotland, this article argues that care work, in general, and nonprofit care work, more specifically, are key components of civil society and central to the gendered social glue that holds societies together. We argue that nonprofit care workers are part a distinctive but porous set of social relations and have their own unique way of sustaining social bonds in the context of late neoliberalism. The article looks closely at three dynamics of social glue in nonprofit care work, namely, empowerment, emotional/personal costs, and unpaid work. We argue that nonprofit care workers find micro ways of resisting the erosion of social glue and reweaving the social fabric through care and relationship and further that these forms of resistance may sustain much needed social bonds until larger social transformation is possible.

Although significant bodies of feminist theory provide important insights into the work of social workers, nonprofit sector workers, and other care workers, it is difficult to find work-linked theory that captures the dynamics of care work in the nonprofit sector, particularly the social bonds that workers recreate every day in various forms and iterations. Many theories cast light on select aspects of care work, including a rich literature on care ethics (Baines, 2015, 2016; Baines & Armstrong, 2019; Kittay, 2013; Tronto, 2015) which explore the philosophical and relational aspects of care work. However, in this article, we explore two other bodies of feminist theory which have not been used in tandem to explore the complex dynamics of paid and unpaid nonprofit care work, namely feminist political economy (FPE) and feminist civil society theory. FPE reveals the interplay between the larger policy regime and the experience of frontline care workers (Bakker & Silvey, 2012; Bedford & Rai, 2010; Luxton & Bezanson, 2006) but does not illuminate the full complexities of meaning, identity, self-exploitation and resistance in nonprofit, and other kinds of care work. Feminist labor process theory is often used in tandem with FPE and provides a way to analyze the shifts in control between management, workers, and workplace resistance (Hebson et al., 2015; Rubery & Urwin, 2011; Vincent, 2011), but it does not engage with the concept of civil society. This truncates its ability to understand social relations that are beyond the workplace. Similarly, feminist civil society theory provides a way to analyze the seamless, overlapping spheres of the state, market, civil society, and family (Eto, 2012; Young, 1990/2000) but does not analyze workplace dynamics, the gendered relations of paid and unpaid care work, or the neoliberal policies currently framing the nonprofit sector within civil society.

Data collected in a recent study of nonprofit care work in South Africa, as part of a larger, international comparative study, underscored a need for further theory as we sought to analyze: the predominantly female workers’ explicit commitment to care and social development, even in very difficult conditions; the formalized but informal nature of the care work; serious challenges in funding, including a complete lack of funding; and a myriad of austerity-based government policies framing the workplaces and the sector. We noticed similar dynamics at play in data collected in the nonprofit social service sector in Scotland where funding cuts and personalized funding packages have driven austerity into the everyday lives of services users and frontline workers. Our data showed activities of care and social bonds in the nonprofit care work in South Africa and Scotland, despite austerity and the challenges of their own histories.

Seeking a way to theorize this complexity of care, work, and social bonds, we found N. Fraser’s (2013, 2016, p. 2) work on social reproduction and the social glue that “underpins social cooperation without which there would be no social organisation—no economy, no polity, no culture.” As FPE notes, this social glue and social reproduction wears are deeply challenged in the context of neoliberalism and austerity policies that valorize the private market, retrench the public sector, and jeopardize family life for all but the most privileged (Bakker & Silvey, 2012; Bedford & Rai, 2010; Luxton & Bezanson, 2006). The FPE concept of social reproduction is rarely used in the civil society literature though much of civil society pivots on reproducing various populations for the next day of work and life: addressing unmet needs, providing care, reducing isolation, providing venues for participation, and providing much of the social glue necessary for social life. Similarly, social reproduction rarely mentions civil society in any detail, except as one of the spaces in which social glue is maintained.

This article will bring together these two concepts, namely the social glue concept of social reproduction and a feminist analysis of civil society to the study of care work in order to cast analytic light on the dynamics of care work in the nonprofit sector and contribute to theorizing care work, to identify and theorize aspects of nonprofit care work which reproduce and sustain social glue, and to supplement theory on civil society. Drawing on qualitative interview data collected in South Africa and Scotland, the article will argue that care work, in general, and nonprofit care work, more specifically, are key components of civil society. They embody an ethos of social reproduction/social glue within a distinctive but porous set of social relations and have their own unique way of sustaining social bonds in the context of late neoliberalism.

The article begins with short sections on feminist theory in civil society and the FPE concept of social reproduction/social glue. This is followed by a discussion of the contexts, a brief overview of methods, and a discussion of social glue themes in the data. The article ends with conclusions.

Civil Society

Theory on civil society can be grouped into three clusters: (1) gender-blind separate spheres theory—the market/state/civil society/family are separate spheres with distinct functions with little overlap or shared effects (Edwards, 2009; Salamon, 2010); (2) feminist and postmodernist/post-structuralist civil society theory—the abovementioned spheres overlap and reinforce; they are multilayered, seamless particularly in terms of gendered effects and other forms of inequity (Eto, 2012; Young, 1986/2009); and (3) FPE—there has been a general, gendered extension of neoliberal market relations into the overlapping spheres of civil society, the family, and the state, reducing differences between and among them and expanding market logics and ethics to all aspects of social life (Baines, 2016; Bakker & Silvey, 2012; Luxton & Bezanson, 2006; Yeates, 2005). The latter two theories bear similarities in terms of being “critical of civil society and its conceptions because they perceive a discrepancy between conventional notions of civil society and the reality experienced by women” (Eto, 2012, p. 103). However, neither theory has the capacity to explain the complexity of nonprofit care work which operates in the overlapping gendered spheres of market/state/civil society/family but also extends and deepens neoliberal market relations in each of these areas. This article will argue that civil society is an interwoven, gendered site of multilayered, associational conflict and social innovation (Eto, 2012; Young, 1986/2009) and that the extension of neoliberal and market logics coexists awkwardly in the highly gendered, altruistic, and aspirational arena of nonprofit care work in South Africa and Scotland (Baines & Kgaphola, 2019; Hebson et al., 2015; Rathzell et al., 2015).

Social Reproduction/Social Glue

In the tradition of socialist feminism, which overlaps extensively with FPE, N. Fraser (2013, 2016) argues that the central issue of our times is the hollowing out of social reproduction or threats to the creation and maintenance of social bonds between generations, families, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and communities (p. 2). Socialist feminism is interested in the gendered interweaving of relations of production and reproduction across the multiple and largely indivisible spheres of society (Bakker & Silvey, 2012; Luxton & Bezanson, 2006). Although social reproductive capacity, like nature, is treated in capitalist economies as gender-neutral, something other than work and “an infinite reservoir” (Bakker & Silvey, 2012, p. 2), in actuality, it is a highly gendered form of work that is stretched to a breaking point in the context of thirty years of neoliberalism.

Numerous feminist scholars have argued that there is a crisis in care resulting from changes in the global political economy and the restructuring of homelife, the workforce, and social entitlements and provisions (Folbre, 2012; N. Fraser, 2016; Tronto, 2015). Like Fraser (2013), Folbre (2012) asserts that this crisis emerged, in large part from the privatization of public sector services and concomitant downloading of care responsibilities onto women at a time when most women were working long hours outside the home in order to meet household costs. N. Fraser (2016) argues that the “current, financialized form of capitalism is systematically consuming our capacities to sustain social bonds” which are the social glue that is essential for all aspects of social life (p. 3). These social bonds include intergenerational (among families) and horizontal ties (among friends, neighbors, and communities) including provisioning, caregiving, relationship building, and informal interaction. Although official economies are dependent on social reproduction, its relegation to the private realm of the family and disavowal in other spheres makes social glue difficult to legitimize as the central component of social life, deserving of attention and reward, rather than a taken-for-granted, unlimited, invisible resource.

Social glue, in a sense, becomes unstuck and needs to be remade, reknit, and reestablished over and over as contexts and social forces, such as neoliberalism, weaken relationships between people, organizations, and institutions. One of the spaces where this social glue is threatened as well as constantly remade is in nonprofit care work, nestled in the very permeable, contested and increasingly neoliberalized sphere of civil society. The remainder of this article addresses the dynamics and forms that this social glue assumes in the high-pressure context of late neoliberalism.

Contexts

Austerity

The comparison between South Africa and Scotland reflects Connell’s (2007) observation that solutions to international social problems are likely to develop in the Global South where struggles for social justice are long term and intense. Both countries were influenced or based in the British social welfare model but with very different histories and current circumstance, including the legacy of apartheid and colonialism in the case of South Africa and a deepening austerity state in the case of Scotland. Although significant similarities exist at the level of themes, notable differences also exist at the level of program and policy detail. These data are discussed and analyzed at both these levels.

Structural adjustment policies in the Global South (starting in the 1950s) and neoliberal policies in the Global North (starting in the 1980s) provided a pathway for the market to enter everyday life, including the reorientation of economies, substantial reductions in the public sector, and the widespread privatization of human services to the private or nonprofit sectors (Bond, 2016). Although pro-market, neoliberal restructuring processes such as New Public Management have been observed to have impacted differently in different kinds of welfare states and local contexts (Hood and Peters, 2004), the effects of neoliberalism in the social services were to standardize practices, de-skill much of the workforce, increase workloads, and reduce costs through lowered wages and conditions of work (Cunningham, 2016). Neoliberalism entered a new phase known as permanent austerity following the global financial crisis in 2007, in which citizens were required to sacrifice current well-being for purported benefits in the future (Clayton et al., 2015; Evans & Albo, 2010). The effects of permanent austerity included ongoing reductions in funding for nonprofit social services, increased caseloads, intensified work, and less resources for service users with no end date for these policy changes. As discussed in more detail below, in the nonprofit social services, these sacrifices frequently take the form of unpaid work and, in response, gendered resistance.

South Africa, Neoliberalism, and Nonprofit Social Services

The democratically elected postapartheid government in South Africa came to power in 1994 during a period of growing neoliberalism and strong international pressure to maintain a minimalist state. Under apartheid, a racially segregated private human services sector extended and supplemented public services for white people, while a small number of international nongovernment organizations worked to address the needs of those marginalized and harmed by policies of white domination (Budlender and Lund 2011). With the election of the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela as president, the challenges facing the new government were to build cohesion among diverse and intensely divided populations and to address the deep deprivation and suffering among black South Africans, in particular.

The new state introduced a pluralist approach (state, private, and community/nonprofit) to human service provision that emphasized community participation, shared decision-making, equality, human dignity, the advancement of human freedoms, nonracialism, and nonsexism (Government of South Africa, 1997). Significant state intervention was required by this rights-based approach, though the services were not intended to be top-down, bureaucratic solutions, rather they were meant to be based on the strengths and potential of communities to work together for society’s collective well-being (Gray and Mubangizi 2010). This generated the rapid expansion of nongovernment, multicultural, social organizations. Volunteers and social movement activists, for the first time, were paid for their work.

However, politically and economically, neoliberalism was gaining dominance in the global north and pressure was placed on the South African government to reduce their social state. In response to this pressure, the newly introduced minimum wage statutes excluded those employed in community work and instead instituted a stipend at roughly 60% of the minimum wage (Elson, 2010; Lund et al., 2010). Having not been paid for their work in the past, these stipends and social service funding in general were initially welcomed and thought to be blazing a new path. However, neoliberalism intensified, and funding became more unstable and constrained. Some evaluations assert that pluralist, community-based approaches have been diluted or displaced by processes dominated by the state (Van Staveren et al., 2014), while others argue that these policies have stalled due to the introduction of austerity and a reduced social state (Patel, 2015; Patel and Hochfeld, 2013; Xaba, 2015). Irrespective of the cause, funding and stipends have been unreliable, and the line between nonprofit social service workers and service users continued to be wavery and unclear. As discussed in greater detail below, the data show that though the social glue has had few supports and many reasons to thin, it continues to remake social bonds and solidarity in this space of civil society, alongside pessimism and deprivation among service users and service workers alike.

Scotland Introducing Austerity

Scotland is undergoing significant public sector restructuring through the cutting of welfare expenditure under the UK Conservative–led government’s austerity policies (Bach, 2012). With a bigger budget deficit than the rest of the UK (8.1% of gross domestic product, compared to 5.6%), Scotland faces challenging cost-containment pressures. Scottish spending experienced a larger public spending drop than the rest of the UK of around £300 per person, compared to £100 in 2013/2014 (Scottish Government, 2018).

Policy moves toward enhancing user choice through personalization have been introduced in parallel with the tendency toward crisis in public service expenditure in Scotland (Cunningham, 2016). The program of personalization in social care is based on a market ideology encouraging choice and control for users by allowing them to purchase services from a range of providers (Glasby, Glendinning, & Littlechild, 2006). Personalization can potentially complement the aforementioned public expenditure cuts as pilot studies of the implementation of individual forms of funding, or direct payments (DPs) have found local authorities are motivated by cost concerns rather than quality, leading to reductions in expenditure ( Ellis, 2011; West 2013). During austerity, Scottish local authorities may use lessons from these pilots and exercise their power to reduce resources allocated to individual budgets. Such local government actions would detrimentally affect the purchasing power of customers but also the income security of nonprofits in receipt of DPs.

Gendered Arena

The nonprofit social services are a highly gendered arena with female and female-identified people making up the majority of workers, service users, and volunteers. Nonprofit organizations tend to operate on the gendered assumption that employees are unencumbered and can work long and flexible hours unimpeded by care or social responsibilities (Acker, 2006, 2012; Themudo, 2009). Care work in the nonprofits bears several similarities to women’s unpaid work in the home and community, making it difficult to improve pay or conditions (Charlesworth, 2010). Like in the home and community, the majority female nonprofit care workforce is assumed to have an endless capacity to care, regardless of pay or working conditions (Matthew & Bransburg, 2017; Themudo, 2009). Under neoliberal restructuring and New Public Management, workloads have escalated and work has been standardized to increase efficiency and save costs. This means that care work is often tightly scripted and stripped of much of the open-ended interactions and dignity-enhancing practices that provide much of the meaning and social connection in this kind of work (Daly & Armstrong, 2016; Hebson et al., 2015). As will be discussed further below, rather than leave needs unmet, many workers in the nonprofit care sector participate in a unique, gendered, and contradictory form of resistance against uncaring funders, governments, and employers, namely unpaid care work. Alongside other care aspects of their work, they remake the social glue that tenaciously, though increasingly tenuously, sustains civil society and other sites of social reproduction. As N. Fraser (2016) notes, “struggles over social reproduction are virtually ubiquitous. They just don’t carry the label [of struggle]” (p. 6).

Method

The studies were part of a larger set of international comparative organizational studies focused on austerity and the nonprofit sector in four countries (Canada, Australia, the UK, and South Africa) and involved intensive, qualitative case studies (three in South Africa and four in Scotland) involving multiservice agencies providing a range of types of services including community support, children’s services, mental health, disability, and food security.

Seeking a broad cross section of perspectives, a total of 120 audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews (63 in Scotland, 66 in South Africa) took place with a range of participants including senior and operations managers (14 in Scotland, 18 in South Africa), frontline supervisors (14 in Scotland, 2 in South Africa); frontline care workers, including social workers, counsellors, and community support workers (26 in Scotland, 46 in South Africa). Participants were asked questions on changes in the nonprofit social services, why they chose to work in the nonprofit social services, what they found satisfying and challenging about their work, conditions of work, changes they would like to see in their work, innovative aspects to their work, and advice they would have for others.

Using criterion sampling (Glaser et al., 2010), study sites were selected based on similarity and difference, or what Patton (2012) called “predictable contrasts,” as we sought the richest possible data across the agencies. Interview participants were recruited through criterion sampling (senior managers, supervisors, frontline workers) and passive sampling (notices circulated through email and posted in the agencies). Like the sector, the sample was overwhelmingly female (roughly 80%). All had training certifications, diplomas, or degrees. Relevant policy documents, such as mission statements, human resource strategies, and personalization strategies were also analyzed.

In South Africa, the methodology paired researchers from Johannesburg with researchers from the Global North (Australia and the UK). This provided an insider and outsider perspective to assist in understanding local contexts, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions, and deepening data collection (Dwyer and Buckle, 2009). The participation of multilingual South African researchers also meant that interviews could be offered in the language of the interviewee’s choice (generally isiZulu, isiXhosa, or Xitsonga). The interviews were verbally translated in the presence of the interviewee to check our interpretation (most of the interviewees spoke English and corrected inaccuracies), thus permitting for richer and more complex data to be collected. In Scotland, the interviews were undertaken by university-based researchers with local knowledge.

Interviews were transcribed verbatim. Drawing on grounded and narrative theory (H. Fraser, 2004; Glaser et al., 2010), data analysis involved an open-coding procedure: After multiple readings of the transcripts, the data were fractured into stories and concepts, and then labeled and sorted. This process continued until no new themes or concepts emerged. Emerging concepts were continually compared to each other in terms of characteristics and dimensions, as well as to similar concepts in the literature, until a mapping of the interrelationships and patterns became possible (Kirby et al., 2006). Data were analyzed first within each organization, followed by analysis across the organizations and countries. Ethics approval was received from all institutions and universities involved in the study. Limitations include the small number of countries studied, the relatively small number of nonprofits in the sample, and the qualitative format which precludes generalization but provides for rich insights which may be useful across a number of contexts and situations.

Themes in the Data: Social Glue

For the purposes of this article, social glue is understood as activities that sustain individuals and communities and the bonds between them. N. Fraser (2013, 2016) provides further details, noting that social glue activities “contain an eliminable personal element. They are, by definition, interpersonal, involving intersubjective communication and in some cases, physical touching” (Fraser, 2016, p. 7). The dynamics of social glue were present in the strongest themes in our data, namely: empowerment/disempowerment, personal costs, and unpaid work as gendered resistance. Due to space restrictions, the quotes are provided without agency-specific descriptors as the experience was common across the organizations studied. Exemplar quotes are presented ethnographically, interwoven with theory and literature (Lillis, 2008).

The Empowerment/Disempowerment Dynamic in South African Nonprofit Services

Consistent with South Africa’s social development goals, research participants told us that the “peer-led, bottom-up approach aimed at encouraging autonomy in service delivery” meant that “many groups achieved remarkable things.” Workers commented widely on service users becoming empowered, “Now we’re actually at the space where we’re saying let’s give all these kids the information and with the information given, we see kids coming up and rising up.” Despite challenging working conditions, research participants reported that they worked in the nonprofit care sector because “it is very meaningful to help someone.” One long-term worker noted, “The only thing that’s driving you is just 'cos you love it and you see the impact.” Supervisors recognized the hard work of the staff and the importance of this transformational work as one long-term frontline supervisor noted, “I would like the staff to really see the contribution that they are making and own it, cos they make a lot of contributions to empowerment and never accept praise.”

However, relationships with the state undermined this empowerment. For example, nonprofit organizations regularly experienced what they called “the dry season” or delays in funding from the government, often extending to a month or 2 every year. During this period, agencies had to cut back on services as their funding failed to arrive and, sometimes, ultimately ran out. Identifying with service users, the workers felt very stressed during the dry season, arguing that “the community really, really needs these supports. It is so difficult.” Commenting on individual as well as community disadvantage, one worker told us, “I can’t bear seeing them hungry and not knowing if they will find new services or support.”

In a clear example of the state overlapping with and shaping gender in civil society, and as mentioned earlier, labor law in South Africa permits the nongovernment and nonprofit organizations to pay a lower minimum wage to the predominantly female workforce. Known as a stipend, technically this wage is paid to “volunteers” rather than employees and hence does not violate state law. This wage was roughly 60% of the minimum wage, which was too low to pull workers out of poverty. Staff reported that their depressed wages meant that their lives were restricted and limited and walked the razor’s edge between solvency and hunger. Reflecting the opinions of her colleagues, a frontline worker observed, “at the lower level, I think that our salaries are just ridiculous.” When asked what she would change in the sector if she could, another worker reflected the sentiments of many, “I would make sure they paid everyone minimum wage.” Raising them to the minimum wage, now paid largely to working-class men, would constitute a very significant raise of 40% for stipend workers.

Many workers told us that they found themselves living in conditions in which they were unable to provide food and basics for their families and debts piled up. Few workers had financial reserves, and many had existing debts making the dry season a desperate time period. Typical of many stories we heard, one worker told us, in tears, that during the dry season, she found it very difficult to visit the homes of service users, knowing that they would go to bed hungry and that so would she and her children. As she put it, “I know their pain. And I don’t know when it will end for any of us.” Referring to the shared condition of inadequate family finances for staff and service users, as one worker noted, “Sometimes everyone is hungry.”

Although some staff blamed management during times of precarious funding, many staff were acutely aware that their realities and those of the service users were shaped by policies and practices generated by state and market as one social worker remarked, “every day we experience the negative impact of the government policies and a private sector that is not willing to help us.” Reflecting an awareness of the role of the market in shaping civil society, one long-term worker noted, “the private sector here does not give back to society.” Consistent with the government policy emphasizing community-based empowerment, though staff worked hard to empower service users and communities through participatory approaches, they simultaneously felt disempowered as workers. We repeatedly heard a far-reaching sense of disempowerment among staff with the majority reporting that they had “no power” to change things for service users, themselves, or communities. Management shared this sense of disempowerment, using the same demoralized phrase, “we have no power.” This shared, contradictory discourse of empowerment/disempowerment seemed to exist alongside a persistent optimism.

Optimism as empowerment in South African nonprofit care work

Likely reflecting the nonprofit sector’s commitment to social development and equity, this optimism seemed to be a strong part of a collective identity as well as a counternarrative against formidable state and private sector neglect. In addition to the disempowerment noted above, research participants revealed hopes and ambitious goals. For example, one worker, who was the mother of a child with intellectual disabilities, hoped to develop a comprehensive training project for other mothers, so they could “learn how to advocate” for access to mainstream services and education for their children and for “full inclusion in all aspects” of social life. She had begun to develop this project within her paid employment and volunteer work and though there were no options for funding available, she maintained a strong conviction that they “would not give up until we win.” A community care worker told us that she planned to run an empowerment project aimed at young women who had experienced violence. She argued that, “those girls have suffered enough. They need power to get their lives together and not let their abusers win.” A relatively new worker (2 years in the job) told us that she was drawn to nonprofit care work because of “the positivity it brings to the community, especially social development.” Another longtime worker envisioned leading a project aimed at supporting child-headed families to stay in school and change their future opportunities. Many workers focused their hopes on supporting ground-up, empowerment projects, for example, “I would make more money available to the community. They know what they need, they just need some seed money to get things going and make big changes from small things.”

Subsection Analysis

Underscoring our argument that care work is a key component of the very porous, highly gendered, interconnected social relations of civil society, the South African data suggest that caring for, connecting with, and empowering others are something that the majority female workers expected of themselves, even in situations where resources, including stipends or wages, were low or not available. Erratic state funding and state policies of neoliberal constraint were felt at the front lines of nonprofit care work in the form of a lack of resources, legislated low wages, and sometimes a lack of wages. This further blurred the already hazy lines between paid and unpaid care work.

These funding conditions, and hence working conditions, were generated by a patriarchal state, with support from the private market and shaped the opportunities and possibilities of those seeking and providing nonprofit care in the context of advanced neoliberalism. The legacy of apartheid policies also continued to be felt in the poverty of service users and nonprofit care workers alike, while the optimism that underlay the introduction of policy on social development and the creation of a multicultural state seemed to have provided workers with hope that things would improve and that caring for vulnerable people was inexorable. Despite these challenging conditions, the data show that social glue was rebuilt and nurtured and that an ethos and practice of care persisted within the contradictions of empowerment/disempowerment.

The Empowerment/Disempowerment Dynamic in Scotland

In contrast to the social development model in South Africa, in Scotland, empowerment was largely viewed through the lens of personal choice and personalization funding policies. The literature asserts that “person-centered services provide users with ‘choice’, ‘voice’ and ‘independence’” (Kessler and Bach, 2011, p. 88; see also Hussein & Manthorpe, 2014). Most of the service users involved in this study agreed, “I would say it has changed my life 100 percent because I never used to go out. I never used to leave the house. Now I’m out and about. I’m independent.” A longtime service user added, “They let me make the decision what to do; like they come to my flat at half two and I say I like to go out for a walk, get out, go for a wee coffee, or just stay in and have a cup of coffee.”

Staff told us that they found new meaning in supporting clients to participate in innovative services and activities in inventive and less restrictive ways. As one mid-rank staffer noted, “a lot of the staff and myself especially are thinking out of the box a lot more and there’s less fear of the risk factor.” Some service users also felt that the new funding and service organizational model meant that they found their voice, “I would be comfortable to speak up now. They would listen to me.”

However, the experience of empowerment was not universal. Workers expressed serious concern that some service users had their funding cut, resulting in many hours spent alone without service or support. Workers worried about the day-to-day experience of service users, their safety, and their lack of voice and service, “What are they doing on their own for that gap that used to be filled? Does anybody know how happy they are? Has somebody spoken to them and said, is this working for you?”

This senior worker provided a frequently repeated story about funding cuts under personalization policies and their ramifications.

A lot of people have lost a lot of hours. I mean and it is quite lonely you know when you’ve went from having all that support to having minimal support. I was there when there was the sleepovers and there was the backshift and the early shift, there was a lot of support and lot of things were getting done. It was a really good service and now they are just getting by with minimum support…their hours got more than halved and there is nothing you could do about it.

Subsection Analysis

The Scottish data show that the dynamics of social glue in nonprofit care work were regenerated at the level of interpersonal relationships between workers and service users through the development and provision of innovative services. Social glue was also rebuilt through the unpaid labor of care workers, filling the gaps created by constrained and inadequate personalized funding packages.

Emotional/Personal Costs

The nonprofit/civil society sector is often presented as a more virtuous one than the public or private sector due to its associations with informality and fluid relationships outside the state and market (Frumkin, 2009). In contrast, Eto (2012) notes that though civil society contains groups that advance equity and the interests of female-identified people, it is also composed of groups that exclude or marginalize women and female-identified people (including men’s only and father’s rights groups), work against reproductive rights and equity (such as antiabortion groups), and make use of women’s labor while largely excluding them from leadership. The data show a similarly contradictory dynamic: While those who remake the social glue in this dynamic sector find positive meaning and identities in their work, they also pay a personal and often emotional price for working in austere and under-resourced contexts in which social need is sidelined and the private market is valorized. These costs include exhaustion, sometimes co-traumatization, living with low or no income and the stress accompanying this, and coming to work when ill.

South African Personal/Emotional Costs

The South African data show two main forms of personal/emotional costs in nonprofit care work: vicarious trauma and the dry season. Many service users lived in situations saturated with unresolved trauma, violence, poverty, and a lack of prospects or real hope. Known in the literature as co-traumatization or vicarious traumatization, exposure to this human suffering left workers feeling highly stressed and vulnerable. Putting words to a widespread concern, workers told us that “it is very hard not to take other people’s stories home with you at the end of the day, sometimes I cannot turn it off. I am up all night with other people’s pain in my head.” When asked about the source of this worry, workers reported that “some stories hit you very hard and come back again and again into your thoughts. You have nowhere to run.” One of the nonprofit agencies had a process for debriefing trauma, which provided the workers with an outlet for the co-traumatization, but the other two agencies did not. Workers from all three organizations told us that it compounded their co-trauma that they could, “only patch up bits and pieces of people’s troubles,” in the context of postapartheid and neoliberalism, and that there was little they could do to remove the pain or improve the prospects of most service users and community members. A longtime worker summed up the social nature of the commitment that workers had to service users in the face of traumas, “sometimes you feel like you must cry but you must be strong for the people.”

The crisis of the dry season was also a big source of stress for many workers who already felt deeply challenged by the seriousness of the issues they faced in the face of acute need and deprivation. In the words of a longtime care worker, “people have experienced very bad things, very bad and we want to help but when the dry season is here, we have nothing to give hungry people but our presence.” Noting food packages were not available during the dry season, another worker echoed the same phrase, telling us she felt “so angry that we have nothing to give. And many of the beneficiaries are very angry, too. Though most of them are still very happy to see us.” A longtime worker captured the commitment to care for others and the personal, emotional costs of the dry season, “I feel that I can’t continue with this work. It asks too much from us. And, yet I feel that I cannot leave.”

Scotland Personal/Emotional Costs

The data from Scotland also showed one main area of emotional/personal costs: working sick. Under the cash-for-care model of personalized funding, rather than being paid for a shift or whole work week, wages are fragmented as workers are only paid from each individual service users’ package for the time spent with that particular service user. For most workers, benefits such as sick pay no longer exist. This generated a dynamic of working sick or presenteeism, alongside evidence of a deleterious effect on health and well-being among workers. Workers worried that they risked infecting service users, but their precarious wages compelled them to work sick, “I know I’m going to make a service user sick, but it’s a worry me staying off and not getting paid because I notice the effect it has on my wage.”

Much of this pressure was exerted by employers as one worker told us, “I was off for a wee while and was really ill. I landed in hospital and was made to feel really very guilty…You’re made to feel guilty, very guilty.” The dynamic of working sick also included concern for service users’ well-being as without workers to provide support, they risked isolation and unmet needs. A long-term worker noted, “you do push sometimes when you are not well because you don’t want to let people down.” Another worker added, “I try and never phone in sick unless it was really like I couldn’t move out of bed.”

Analysis

In this section, these data suggest that remaking social glue in nonprofit care carries a variety of complex emotional/personal costs, alongside a sense of meaning in the work and commitment to the well-being of others. The ethos of care interweaves with concerns over a lack of wages and resources in the case of the dry season and concerns for continued employment, personal health, and the health of service users in the context of working sick in Scotland’s personalized funding regimes. Government in both countries, with support from the private sector, sets the policies that extract these costs from workers, limiting and constraining the social glue and civil society. Despite these contradictory tensions, workers continued to sustain social glue and provide human connection. The next section analyzes a widespread, gendered resistance practice in this sector that reestablishes social bonds despite the conditions of austerity and neoliberalism.

Unpaid Work as Compromise and Gendered Resistance

Unpaid work is central to social reproduction and underlays the gendered division of economic production and social life (Bakker & Silvey, 2012; Bedford & Rai, 2010). Work in the productive sector is paid and seen as employment, whereas the work of social reproduction is seen as a labor of love or an extension of what women do naturally, and hence does not attract wages or formal recognition. Consistent with themes in FPE, unpaid work in the nonprofit care sector spans the productive and social reproductive division as it is often work that used to be or would be paid if there were sufficient funds. Unpaid care work in the nonprofit care sector is a form of exploitation when it is demanded or expected by management. However, it is simultaneously a form of compromise on the part of works and a form of gendered resistance against social uncaring of the larger society that workers take on as an almost naturalized expectation of themselves and each other as caring people (Daly & Armstrong, 2016). Care’s indivisibility from femaleness gives it a highly gendered character.

In the tradition of labor process theory, Thompson and Smith (2009a, 2009b) argue that collective counteranalyses are a key aspect of worker resistance strategies. In this study, counternarratives were a way that workers symbolically and sometimes concretely reclaimed a degree of workplace control and social glue in the context of neoliberal and austerity policies that had shifted symbolic and concrete power to management (Thompson & Smith, 2009a). For example, workers uniformly spoke of unpaid work as necessary and important to service users. As a South African worker put it, “we do many extra hours of travel and work. We cannot just turn around and go home because we are tired, or the workday has ended. The beneficiaries need us. Sometimes they have no one else.”

Due to a dispute with the government funder, one agency was unable to pay its staff for 4 months, but the workers kept coming to work. When we asked why they continued in their duties without pay, management told us that it was because “they care about the beneficiaries and they hope we will solve this problem with the Ministry.” The workers had a similar narrative of persistence and care, “hopefully, they will work things out with the Ministry, and we will get back pay and extra food packages and benefits for the beneficiaries.” Another worker added, “the beneficiaries need me. I have some child headed families who have no one else left in the world.” The unpaid work underlying these quotes represents a form of resistance to uncaring and a commitment to something bigger than the paid work. Although largely unrecognized and unrewarded, the unpaid work is a sense of social solidarity that challenges neoliberalism’s emphasis on individual, rather than social responsibility.

In Scotland, workers also put in unpaid hours when personalized funding packages failed to cover the cost of care, and the nonprofit service provider was required to cut the workers’ hours. Some workers had strong emotional responses. For example, one worker was very upset for a service user who had recently been informed that her hours of service had been cut, telling us that when she first heard about it, “I was crying in my bed about it.” This worker and others felt they needed to check in with the service user, outside of normal working hours, to see whether the service user was safe and doing well. Telling us worriedly about funding cuts experienced by service users, one worker challenged us, “How would you feel? I know how I would feel.” Workers felt this neglect of service users was avoidable and unnecessary, “There’s a good few of them that are very like isolated and yes, it’s a shame, it really is in this day and age—you would think there’d be more money.”

Personalization packages also meant increased bureaucracy though workers were not provided with paid time to complete these tasks. Instead, time was drawn from additional unpaid work at home or during rest/lunch breaks. One worker noted that the lack of time to travel from one service user to another meant that lunch was normally spent and consumed on public transport. Although management were aware of this unpaid work, they felt that the personalization funding regime curtailed their ability to pay for this time or recognize it. Instead, it operated as a well-known coping strategy to stay on top of workload and avoid taking time from face-to-face caring with service users.

Some workers turned to their union for support and to lobby employers and governments to review funding levels. In this instance, workers employed by a nonprofit care organization, and clearly a part of civil society, though funded by the state, turn to another civil society organization, or their union, to mobilize in support of service users and challenge the state. This is a complex set of overlapping spheres and relationships. However, the workers were motivated by an ethos of care and solidarity with service users and used the avenues of change available to them, namely undertaking unpaid work for service users and calling on their union to defend the rights, not of the members, but of the service users.

Union officials were extremely concerned that workers were doing unpaid work for service users as their members could be open to accusations of inappropriate behavior. However, they had no way to stop unpaid work, and as will be discussed further below, it was widespread and motivated by an ethos of care. Instead, the union campaigned alongside the four organizations involved in this study to ensure that any funder-led reviews of services had to adequately evaluate risk and the impact on safety of service users and workers. Union representatives also marched and protested alongside workers and service users against the impact of cuts on services and lobbied government for positive change.

In this example, social glue was recreated across civil society institutions as workers from one section of civil society (union and activist groups) called on other civil society organizations (nonprofit care agencies) to defend service users and workers. Although the service users did not pay dues and by law are not permitted to be part of the union (for a discussion of labor law as a further axes of state and private business intervention, see Fudge, 2009; Fudge & Glasbeek, 1994), the workers used this vehicle to foster social bonds that are threatened by uncaring levels of state funding. Finally, social glue in the form of social solidarity was regenerated between civil society and the state as workers and their unions drew attention to inadequate personalized funding packages for service users and called on the state to provide funding that met service users’ needs, evaluated risks, and improved safety. In this case, social glue is a set of activist and service-connected social relations or an ethos of care that travels within spheres and across spheres, reknitting the social fabric and sustaining vulnerable and isolated individuals.

Representing a cross-sector thread, in the South African and Scottish studies, unpaid work shored up the meagre resources provided to some service users in civil society organizations (resulting from direct government policy) and extended the strands of caring beyond paid work hours to the unpaid hours of “leisure and family time,” or the very porous sphere of family and so-called nonwork/nonproductive time. In these examples, social glue is a form of care and resistance that glides along the gendered fracturing of production from reproduction, navigating the pathways in and among the spheres of family, civil society, state and market, and rebonding the ties between workers, service users, and communities.

Conclusions

The impetus for this article was our sense that further analysis and theory were needed to explore the highly gendered arena of nonprofit care work. Consistent with FPE and feminist civil society theory, our analysis asserts that nonprofit care work straddles the gendered division of production and social reproduction. Nonprofit care work is paid work and hence seems to fit with production and relations of the private market, but it focuses on nurturing the social bonds between people so they can live and possibly flourish in the days ahead. This simultaneously places nonprofit care work squarely in the realm of social reproduction. In this article, nonprofit care work has been analyzed primarily as a form of social glue that makes social life more livable for some of the most vulnerable people in society and those hired to work with them in the realms of social reproduction and production.

Similarly, nonprofit care work straddles the spheres of civil society, the state, the market, and family, crisscrossing and being shaped by each as it regels the social glue. Undertaken by a majority-female workforce, its loose boundaries between paid and unpaid care work, and the oppositional identities and narratives found in the latter, give it a highly gendered character with a strong ethos of social connection and care. Consistent with feminist civil society theory, the nonprofit subsector of civil society has been argued to be a porous set of social relations rather than a specific space. We have extended feminist civil society theory by linking these social relations to larger structures and arguing that these social relations are simultaneously shaped by neoliberal state policies that are supported by the private market and impact the family as the female and female-identified workers in nonprofit care work extend their care into unpaid, “family” hours in order to sustain caring links and relationships. These social relations travel across spheres, and social life is impossible without it.

In terms of the social glue itself, a concept used in FPE, our analysis suggests that care counts and is central to nonprofit care work and this set of social relations within and across civil society. This article analyzed care in terms of three themes that were central to our data in South Africa and Scotland, namely, empowerment, emotional/personal costs, and unpaid care work. Nonprofit care work or social glue travels across the gendered divide of productive and reproductive divisions as well as across spheres of family, state, and market to support others and to grow social bonds, despite the challenging conditions of neoliberalism and the postapartheid era. Our preliminary theorizing extends FPE and feminist civil society theory by suggesting that nonprofit care work is dynamic and generally has at least two contradictory aspects to it. In our analysis, this includes empowerment/disempowerment, emotional/personal costs and meaning, and exploitation/resistance. Care work is shaped and delimited by government policy and the dominance of the private market; however, it operates on gendered logics and an ethos of social reproduction and solidarity that persists despite working in the difficult conditions of austerity and neoliberalism.

We quoted N. Fraser (2016) earlier, who notes that struggles over social reproduction are ubiquitous and though generally sidelined as personal and family issues, these struggles could be a powerful impetus for broad-based social transformation, a clearer understanding of the failings of neoliberalism and recognition that the gendered split between production and social reproduction is arbitrary and contributes to the inequity of women and women-identified people and the disproportionate power accorded to men. Our data show numerous examples of workers who found micro ways of resisting the erosion of social glue and reweaving the social fabric through care and relationship. Supplementing FPE, we analyzed these micro acts as gendered dynamics that evade neoliberal policies and organizational practices that advance uncaring, instead straddling the porous social relations of economy and civil society, and reweaving the social fabric. Although small and generally overlooked, these everyday acts of rebellion against uncaring may sustain much needed social bonds until larger social transformation comes about. Further research should explore and further theorize the contradictory ground of these everyday gendered acts of rebellion and what fosters or inhibits them in the nonprofit sector and other sectors. Further research should also include international comparisons with other countries, policy contexts, and social struggles.