The Care & Share Association is a membership-based state-wide peak body in one area of community services. The majority of its funding comes from project-based government initiatives. It runs one for-profit insurance program in-house and supports and assists its members through service development assistance, government lobbying and training programs. The insurance program is comprised of three parties—the Association, the underwriter or insurance company and an intermediary broker who negotiated some transactions between the two. This three-way interaction was important to understand in order to fully appreciate how the relationship operated between the nonprofit and the for-profit broker and insurance company.
The Association was established in 1989 in response to shifts in government policy toward such services. It has viewed itself as a strong advocate of client needs and sometimes found itself in opposition to government policy over the fate of member services. The Director has been with the organisation from its inception.
There are eight staff members: Director, Policy/Project Officer, Management Training Officer, Project Officer, Finance/Administration Officer, Insurance Officer, Clerical Assistant and Receptionist/Administration Assistant. The Management Training Officer, Policy/Project Officer and Insurance Officer report to the Director. Project Officer reports to the Policy/Project Officer and both Assistants report to the Finance/Administration Officer. For this case study, the Director (Barbara), the Policy/Project Officer (Melissa), the Insurance Officer (David) and the Project Officer (Anne) were interviewed. Pseudonyms are used to maintain informant and organisational confidentiality.
The relationships with business studied here include the for-profit insurance arm of the Care & Share Association and a separate project under which the Association worked with three separate corporate entities on one joint initiative. The three companies would be easily identified by the services and products they provide; therefore, for confidentiality purposes, the nature of their activities has been omitted from discussion. The three businesses involved with this project are labelled Biz1, Biz2 and Biz3 respectively.
The initiative was intended to be a statewide enhancement of service, starting off as a pilot and then expanding throughout the state. The relationship was based on provision of products by the corporate bodies under exclusive contract for reduced rates to clients.
The linguistic threads that occurred in this data were language matching, social identification and understanding the relationship-building process (comprised of the sub-themes of conflict of interest, personal contact, mutual benefit, values and future alliances). Each thread is first defined and then connected to the appropriate research questions. This section then explores and presents evidence for the linguistic threads in the case of the Care & Share Association.
One linguistic thread that appeared in several instances was a process that is dubbed ‘language matching.’ This describes how staff in the nonprofit shift their linguistic patters to match those of their for-profit counterparts. The matching can be simply narrative (that is, changing words, phrases or figures of speech), but is most effective when it is structural as well (that is, shifting into the syntax patterns of the other). Language matching is one mechanism that links directly to the following research questions:
1a. What elements of vocabulary, narrative structure and syntax constitute a 'language of inequality' between the private and third sector?
2a. Do relationships affect the organisational capacity of nonprofit organisations and the ?
2b. Do relationships affect the social agency of individuals?
In the Care & Share Association, language matching appeared to be both conscious and subconscious. This means that the concept of language matching refers to a process that results in parallels between the languages of nonprofit and for-profit environments.
Some language matching is conscious, as in Barbara’s example here when she decided to speak to a business manager in a particular way to exert episodic power over him. In this scenario, Barbara rang the her corporate contact to discuss concerns over whether or not the firm was adhering to commitments that had been made to the Care and Share Association in writing:
And I remember at one stage thinking I had to ring the corporate relations manager, and I was planning in my head what I was going to say, and I was going through all this we believe, I think, we feel, and I thought no, no, no, can't do this, I'm about to talk to the corporate relations manager in…this multi-million dollar megacompany, and it came down, the facts are, this is what you said, this is your letterhead, we're about to launch it, are you aware of what the implications are. And he said I'm perfectly aware of the political and the economic implications. He said I'll have to, but I can't do anything…I have to talk to the CEO. And I said OK, a copy of this letter has gone to [the CEO] so he knows what it's all about. Um, so I had to actually stop and think, I don’t talk the way I normally talk within the community sector, I had to change.
In the first example, the choices that Barbara made in this situation were both narrative and structural. On the one hand, she modified the words she use