Nightlight is a youth services organisation in the inner city. Started by a number of social workers as a lobby group, the organisation was initially funded by the Cabinet Office in response to a survey on youth issues. The service opened in 1984. In 1999, the organisation closed some of its services to provide more appropriate assistance to young people. Nightlight caters for about 600 youth a year, the majority of whom are self-referred. Nightlight currently runs a range of services to address individual client needs. It is still funded from government sources, although in 2000 10% of its budget came from non-government sources including private business. Staff at Nightlight include an Executive Director, four case workers and one part-time administrative assistant. The Director (Stephen) and two case workers (John and Carolyn) were interviewed.
Up until 1992, Nightlight was a collective organisation in which consensus decision-making, general distrust of the ‘system’ and a sense of progress in the face of conservatism dominated. Although this has shifted somewhat in the last decade, Nightlight remains committed to strong advocacy for its clients and somewhat distrustful of the corporate sector.
In Nightlight, three informants were interviewed using the same protocol as in the pilot study. This chapter follows the same patterns of identifying linguistic threads, offering examples from the data and exploring how the strands combine to link language, power, social agency and organisational capacity in nonprofit/for-profit relationships.
Linguistic threads of language matching, social identification, intra-organisational communication, understanding the relationship-building process, leadership, anchor shift and recognising the institutional context were the primary themes coded in Nightlight.
The relationships that Nightlight has with business are based on sponsorship arrangements. In return, corporate supporters receive publicity in some local press for their engagement in the community. However, the exchanges is not formalised into a contractual partnership.
Language matching is the process of parallel language from the nonprofit to the for-profit, where staff use terminology that is more closely associated with business enterprise. All the language matching in interviews with informants from Nightlight was conscious, in contrast to the subconscious matching that occurred in positively skewed relationships that the Care & Share Association had with for-profits. Two examples from Nightlight illustrate this. In the first, Stephen discussed how he would have acted differently if the interviewer had been a funding body:
Stephen: [Discussing how his office would look different] I think it kind of looks good to tell you the truth if people come in and there's a few logos of corporations on the wall.
Interviewer: Why do you think it looks good?
Stephen: Aw, it means you play the game. Y'know. It's a bit like if you were from one of the funding bodies I'd probably clean my office. It's part of the image. And y'know, a few signs up that y'know, no harm in having [a well-known corporation] or someone else's logo on your door.
The phrase ‘it means you play the game’ indicated Stephen’s awareness of shifting into a different organisational space in order to attract and maintain legitimacy in the eyes of funders. Once again, the interviewee puts distance between how Nightlight ‘usually’ is as an organisation and how it must match external expectations for funders. This is a clear indication of the power differential between a nonprofit organisation and the bodies that hold funding control over them, including corporates who are deciding whether or not to sponsor a community organisation. This example of language matching is structural rather than narrative, because it refers to the objective funding situation in which the nonprofit finds itself.
John provided the most blatant example of how a nonprofit ‘should’ act in relationships with business:
Uh, without being too specific about who they were and what was involved I think probably what we learned as an organisation is that we need to have business minded people on the Management Committee…and particularly people who are au fait with corporate law, just to ensure that we're not taken for a ride as an organisation by business. Yeah, they used our goodwill…and raised or done joint advertising with that name and haven't actually given us much back. As Ross has probably told you. So the lesson from that is be prepared and to contract business, you have to be very business-like to do business. So the whole concept of goodwill and good citizenship is, it's about needing checks and balances essentially to make sure business is doing the right thing, isn't just looking for a quick tax dodge or worse.
John added to this vision of how to match language with corporates specific instructions on what an ideal relationship might entail:
OK, ideal relationship with business would be one that's roped in by contract. Professional, just like you're in a partnership with them as they are with their suppliers and their business partners. If they want to give you something for nothing that's fine, I want it in writing I want it signed with the corporate seal on it, thanks very much. And yeah you can get the tax advantage and we'll put you in the annual report and at the back of your annual report you gave to [Nightlight]. I think we just need to tighten it up a lot. And it takes resources to do that, resources we don't have. Needs to be monitored at a Management Committee level.
In this example, John was explicit about the purpose of language matching in terms of setting up contractual arrangements with for-profits. This part of the discourse shared some history about how acting ‘like a nonprofit’ (i.e. less business-like, more trusting) led to a compromising situation for Nightlight in which its goodwill was misused by a corporate sponsor. To avoid a recurrence of these circumstances in the future, John was adamant that Nightlight should pursue arrangements that hinge on the ‘contractual’ language of business. Once again, this language matching included an awareness of the legal implications of relationships.
As with the Care & Share Association, there is a mechanism through which language and power implications reflect and construct the social agency of Nightlight staff. It works in the following manner:
1. Recognition of the differences in language and the futility of using ‘nonprofit’ vocabulary, combined with the need to assert power in the situation
2. Adaptation of vocabulary and strategy
3. Outcome in which the power shifts from an ‘asking’ to a ‘demanding’
The primary difference in the way that language matching played out in Nightlight compared to the pilot study is a deep streak