The final products of the five case studies, media analysis and quantitative data analysis are two-fold, and the work presented here culminated in the development of significant contributions to the field on both theoretical and methodological fronts. Firstly, the models and theory offer a new window from which to examine, understand and map nonprofit relationships with for-profits in Australia; secondly, the concept of linguistic threads opens up methodological doors to bridge organisational communication metaphors and augment existing qualitative analysis tools. This chapter presents the theory by progressively building the models, illustrates the importance of a broader frame of reference for language and organisational collaboration, reviews the importance of linguistic threads as a methodological advancement and argues a variety of perspectives from which the work could be extended, developed and refined. The contributions and significance of this work are summarised thus:
v Theoretical
§ Models
¨ Process theory
¨ Static state model
§ Extensions to literature
§ Circuits of language
v Methodological
§ Linguistic threads
There are three major theoretical contributions to
emerge from this work. The first
consists of two models—a process theory representation of language and power in
nonprofit/for-profit relationships that has evolved from an inductive approach
to the research questions and a static state model as an amalgamation of
linguistic thread interaction presented in each of the chapters on individual
case studies. These two models
represent the first level of theorising on the topic. The second area includes various extensions to current
literature. The third is the
integration of the first two into an overall theory of the circuits of language
that characterise the processes through which the nonprofits studied here
engaged with their for-profit counterparts and the role of language in
reflecting and shaping these experiences.
Each of these three theoretical contributions will be explored
separately in the sections below.
All of the theory building began with a series of
questions. To reiterate the
research questions were as follows:
1. Does the language used by nonprofit staff and in organisational documentation relating to relationships with for-profits reflect and contribute to the reproduction of the power relationship between the organisations?
1a. What elements of vocabulary, narrative structure and syntax constitute a 'language of inequality' between the private and third sector?
1b. How is this language different in genuine power-sharing relationships?
1c. To what extent is this linguistic space shared across nonprofit organisations engaged in similar relationships with for-profit firms?
1d. How is the structure of that language transmitted throughout the organisation?
2a. Do relationships affect the organisational capacity of nonprofit organisations?
2b. Do relationships affect the social agency of individuals?
2c. If so, to what extent can balanced power-sharing arrangements contribute to increased organisational capacity and/or social agency?
3. Does the media aspect of the institutional context of relationships in which nonprofits operate affect the social agency of individuals and the capacity of nonprofits?
3a. To what extent are staff members in the nonprofit aware of the constraints on them of this aspect of institutionalism?
In order to ascertain whether or not the research
effectively answers these questions, it is important to maintain methodological
consistency by beginning with the data.
The process theory model will be built using the research questions as a
guide and the data gathered from cases as the links in the chain of evidence.
In framing the theory, it is very important to solidify and reassert assumptions about language and definitions of linguistic threads upon which these results were based. The primary construct of this research is language. As such, it is crucial to identify how language was defined and understood in the context of the interviews conducted in the case studies, the quantitative triangulation and the media analysis. Secondly, linguistic threads that emerged from case study analysis were defined iteratively as data was collected and applied to all the cases.
Language was conceptualised as having two important properties.