Abstract
A sociology of conventions perspective is used in this paper to examine how non-profit organizations make sense of their educational action in the field of training for employment. Both critiques of education that such organizations voiced and compromises that they had to establish at the turn of the 21st century are revisited here in view of the transformations that the field of training for employment has experienced in recent years. We show empirical data illustrating their discourses on education 20 years ago that were obtained through in-depth, focused interviews with trainers and management of Spanish non-profit organizations. Some critiques are highlighted that were prominent in their discourse at the turn of the century, when the ‘third sector’ was regarded as a promising actor that could amend some of the most concerning inadequacies of the education system. However, the transformative potential of such critiques is critically re-examined in view of the transformations that such an increasingly hybrid field has experienced since, transformations that allow for a new perspective into those once change-promising discourses.
Keywords
Introduction
Our research in the last three decades has focused on the changing space of non-profit organizations (hereafter, NPOs) providing inclusion through employment in Spain. It is indeed a heterogeneous field comprising local associations, cooperatives, charities, union and employer foundations, large federations, national organizations and more recently even international ones. Changes in the field have been manifold in the last 30 years, and such changes have certainly had a differential impact on NPOs depending on their characteristics and specific mission (Marhuenda-Fluixá and Molpeceres, 2020).
This paper examines the conflicts and changes experienced by a particular subset of organizations in this space – that is, those NPOs that define their primary mission and role as educational, targeting their educational work at unemployed people in the least qualified segments of the labour market.
The introduction to the paper provides some historical context on the involvement of NPOs in educational tasks, as well as some theoretical context on the perspective that will be used to analyse how these actors make sense of their educational action. In the next section it is argued (and empirically illustrated with Spanish data) that such organizations and professionals, at the beginnings of the 21st century, voiced powerful criticisms of the education system in an effort to legitimate themselves as an emerging actor in a privileged position to step in where traditional welfare states had fallen short. It is also argued and illustrated, though, how they also had to make some concessions in order to develop their everyday educational tasks in a strained field while retaining what they perceived as their main assets.
The last section discusses how the compromise discourses forged by NPOs 20 years ago may have let in and helped to legitimate some rationales that have substantially transformed the field of training for employment in the last 15 years and that may be threatening the very pillars on which NPOs justified their educational action not so long ago.
Non-profit organizations in training for employment
The formal education system has traditionally held and claimed a monopoly on education in modernity, partly because the formalization of modern school is grounded in an effort to be protected from productive requirements, ordinary social life and birth social positions (Derouet, 2005, 2009). However, such a monopolistic claim is difficult to sustain nowadays, when contradictions and shortcomings of the formal education system, as well as the evolution of the project of modernity, have opened cracks through which diverse social actors (from civic organizations to technology companies) have slipped in to provide services whose formative and socializing nature is undeniable. The expansion of a discourse on ‘lifelong learning’ has substantially contributed to bringing education out of the limits of formal education system, while the crisis of classic welfare regimes has fostered de-centralization, flexibilization and innovation all throughout the education system in order to accommodate the requirements of a labour market that demands and encourages such transformations (Ball, 2012). Such developments align with the unfolding of a third spirit of capitalism that replaces the civic-industrial arrangement on which welfare regimes were based with connectionist rationales and neoliberal political and organizational principles (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005).
In this context, a wide spectrum of quite different kinds of NPOs that are loosely referred to as ‘the third sector’ have been increasingly involved in educational tasks throughout the 20th and well into the 21st century (Haddock, 2017; Hanemann, 2021). However disparate such organizations and the kind of educational tasks they assume are, it can be argued that they have been mainly providing educational services of a compensatory nature – that is, the kind of educational services that the market or the state were not providing, were not providing well or were not providing often enough. This fact, together with the remarkable heterogeneity of such educational tasks, would fit a traditional ‘negative’ characterization of the third sector as ‘a sector of leftovers’ (Brandsen et al., 2005).
In particular, the third sector’s increasing involvement in educational tasks, as well as the know-how acquired through them, has focused on so-called ‘non-formal education’, a verbal label that was coined to set these kinds of educational actions apart from the formal education system, but it is also different and distinguishable from family upbringing or socialization, that may be rather called ‘informal education’ (Merino, 2019). In fact, ‘non-formal education’ is an umbrella concept that groups together different actions aiming at (i) education of schoolchildren in a space-time outside school, and in skills that are outside the formal education curriculum (e.g. leisure time education or extra-curricular activities); (ii) general or specific education of school-aged youth who are not properly served by the formal education system because they are particularly vulnerable or disadvantaged (e.g. compensatory reinforcement activities or local training and transition devices for drop-outs) and (iii) compensatory training of people who, because of their age, are beyond the reach of the formal education system (e.g. basic literacy programs or adult education).
In the last decades of the 20th century, when unemployment abruptly rose as a result of the crisis of the wage society that shook to their foundations classic welfare regimes in Europe, their diffuse status as an intermediate area between state and market, as well as their traditional role as a ‘sector of leftovers’ in the provision of social and educational services, let a range of NPOs into an emerging hybrid welfare system that tried to articulate new responses to an increasing number of people that were being excluded from classic tracks toward employment and social integration (Ariño and Cucó, 2001; Evers and Laville, 2004; Zubero, 1994). In this context, their acquired know-how in the field of non-formal education also gave some of these organizations a place and a role in an emerging inter-institutional, interdisciplinary field of training for employment (Marhuenda and Martínez-Morales, 2019). However, consistent with their trajectory, their participation in such a system mainly tended to focus on training and social integration of the most vulnerable sectors of society.
Therefore, NPOs have long been acting in the field of education and training, but essentially in the margins – that is, providing non-compulsory, non-academic education to those who were left behind by the formal system (Marhuenda-Fluixá, 2021). And the margins are places where tensions are harshly experienced and trade-offs are often required (Molpeceres, 2004). This is why a sociology of conventions perspective seems of great value to examine how third sector actors in this field make sense of their action.
The pertinence of a pragmatic sociology of conventions approach
Sociology of conventions (hereafter, SC) deals with the way social actors negotiate rules, values and trade-offs in joint action. Over the course of roughly 30 years, it has been applied to and it has shed light on the understanding of European education systems at least in three aspects: their ways of dealing with inequality and inclusion, their conceptions of quality and evaluation systems and their transformations or inertias regarding institutions and policies (Imdorf and Leemann, 2023).
NPOs engaged in educational action have a substantial need to argue for the added value that their participation in educational labour could provide because they are outside the formal education system, which has traditionally claimed the monopoly of education and training in modernity, and many of them have traditionally had a weak institutional coverage. Thus they feel the need to legitimate themselves as educational actors in the eyes of the formal education system, the institutions funding their activities, and the local communities in which they are providing educational and training services. In other words, they live in a perpetual ‘justification regime’ (Thevenot, 2001) because they cannot simply act out of habit or tradition, but they have to vindicate themselves as actors in the educational field appealing to some widely recognized common good.
In their effort to position themselves as educational actors, NPOs need to appeal to arguments and principles with some pretension of universality and objectivity if they aspire to be granted legitimacy by other actors in the educational field (Boltanski, 2012). The array of widely supported moral constructions or conceptions of the ‘common good’ in a given society is plural, but not unlimited. In fact, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) list and describe six such moral orders or ‘conventions of worth’ in contemporary capitalist societies: an inspired order, commonly found in the fields of art and religion; a domestic order, modelled upon the family; a market order; an opinion order, grounded on the value of fame and reputation; a civic order, modelled upon the modern Western state; and an industrial order, grounded on the value of productivity and efficiency. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) would later add an emerging seventh order of worth, the connectionist or project-based order, grounded on the consideration of activity as an end-in-itself. These widely understood and supported moral orders and action rationales are the basic options that NPOs have to argue for their legitimacy as educational actors.
Moreover, the reconfiguration of the educational field that the so-called third spirit of capitalism is effecting is not homogeneous all throughout. It is precisely in the peripheral areas of the education system that NPOs inhabit where flexibilization, decentralization, administrative deregulation and innovation in management methods has been greater and faster (Ball, 2012). Thus, such non-profit actors are also particularly likely to face continual trade-offs between classic education professional rationale and the kind of requirements that neo-liberal rationales impose upon education.
However, a plurality of rationales and diverse conceptions of the common good is not only a source of conflict and stress, but also a pre-condition for social critique and, eventually, social change (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). Therefore, it would be expected that these organizations, because of their marginal position in a hybrid space between education, employment and social integration, could become a particularly active source of criticism regarding education.
At the same time, joint social action imposes upon actors with different values and valuation systems the need to navigate disagreements and settle disputes so that they can act coordinately. One of the common ways to negotiate differences, according to Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), is forging a compromise. A compromise is a suspension of differences – that is, both parties agree on a sort of ‘hybrid’ discourse, device or arrangement that allows coordinated action to proceed because it effects the illusion that two deeply conflicting rationales are indeed compatible if not harmonious. Compromises enable actors to get along with people and tasks, but they do so precisely by avoiding to tackle conflict and differences, and thus inhibit the kind of change that critique might accomplish. It would then be expected that third sector educational actors, in spite of their critical capacity, would also be constantly forced to forge compromises that might easily deactivate the transformative potential of their critiques.
Finally, SC appears as a promising approach to examine educational action of NPOs, as it has proved particularly fruitful to understand the links between the micro, meso and macro levels of educational action, namely, (i) teachers and trainers’ professional identity and personal ethics, (ii) configurations, dynamics and strategies of educational organizations and (iii) broader policy and institutional arrangements (cf. Imdorf and Leemann, 2023 for a review). Third sector actors in the educational field, because of their extra-institutional and hybrid character, appear as a privileged observatory to examine processes of change that happen in the interaction between organizational rationales or strategies and broader policy trends.
Consistent with this perspective, our aim in this paper is twofold: (i) to consider in perspective if critiques voiced from the non-profit sector two decades ago have contributed to transformation of education and training in the sense that they intended and (ii) to examine the interplay between NPOs’ interests and strategies and the evolution of education and training policies. We will describe in the following section such critiques and interests first, to proceed to put them into perspective in the last section.
Making sense of educational work in the margins at the turn of the 21st century
In the early years of the 21st century, Western democracies in general and Europe in particular were going through a period of excited (and quite optimistic) public debate regarding the socio-political potential of the third sector in face of the crisis that welfare states had been dragging for some time then (e.g. Evers and Laville, 2004). The third sector was being required to adopt a leading role in the articulation of a new type of social solidarity, in the face of the decline of the civic-industrial compromise on which wage society and the welfare state were based, as well as the growing evidence of the failure of the Washington consensus to preserve equity. Right in the middle of that wave, from 2001 to 2006, we conducted a project to examine how non-profit actors made sense of their work in the field of training for employment. The empirical material that will be used throughout this section to illustrate the critique of education voiced by non-profit actors at the turn of the century was produced within that project.
Data and method
Empirical data were obtained through in-depth, focused interviews conducted with salaried workers who were employed in NPOs that managed a particular type of occupational vocational training program aimed at unskilled and vulnerable young people, during the 2003/2004 academic year in the region of the Valencian Community. We were able to access all the entities, which in that academic year numbered 10 (7 associations and 3 philanthropic foundations), mostly of small size and with a track record of three or more years in managing this type of training program, as well as all the professionals (33 in total, with 22 women and 11 men, ranging in age from 25 to 62 years old).
Two in-depth interviews were conducted with each participant that covered both (i) the way in which they made sense of their work as teachers and trainers and (ii) the way they managed organizational life, internal work relations and their relationships with stakeholders and users’ families. We chose to conduct two interviews of approximately 2 hours’ duration with each participant in order to allow for a more thorough treatment of the issues raised, as well as to enable the subjects to reconsider or renegotiate their qualifications and arguments in the second interview. The interview situation was conceived as a situation in which participants are forced to ‘give an account of themselves’, their decisions and practices, to the interviewer, and thus as particularly suitable for generating explicit justifications. The focused interview technique was preferred to other techniques that could also have been used to generate arguments and justifications – such as focus groups – in order to maintain a constant audience in front of which the interviewees articulated their justifications.
The literal transcriptions of all the interviews were then analysed in order to identify (a) the values and justifications of legitimacy that guided the educational work of our participants, (b) the critiques that these professionals made of traditional formal education and (c) the compromises that NPOs had to establish to develop their educational action.
The first step in the analysis was to pinpoint which ‘conventions of worth’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) underlay our participants’ actions and justifications, so as to contrast them later with those alternative orders of worth that our participants critiqued or compromised with. Conventions of worth, as previously discussed, are collective constructions of qualities and desirable social orders based on moral principles (Diaz-Bone, 2018), and there is a limited array of such moral principles that actors can appeal to. Particularly useful in the identification of such underlying values are (i) the ways actors name and qualify actors and actions in their discourse (e.g. referring to learners as ‘kids’ or ‘pupils’ would reveal a domestic rationale, while the alternative term ‘user’ is typical of an advanced industrial rationale); (ii) the repertoires of objects and devices that actors rely on to develop their everyday tasks (e.g. while numerical grades typically reflect the objectivation of performance that the industrial order aspires to, student assemblies are devices drawn from the civic world) and (iii) the ways actors contrast and hierarchize such elements to construct a coherent order.
A domestic critique of the formal education system
Our in-depth examination of justification rationales of non-profit actors in training for employment in early 2000s cast an interesting picture of how justifications, criticisms and compromises merged in the discourse of both trainers and management of such organizations (Martínez-Morales, 2006).
The main finding in our analysis of the discourses on education in which workers of NPOs participated at the turn of the 21st century was the remarkable domestic character of all of them. In other words, their arguments revealed a conception of educational action as an integral socialization task which preceded and exceeded what would be regarded as more specific goals, such as technical training or civic awareness. As one of the trainers put it 1 , ‘These people need to be shaken up, they need to adjust their lives in some way [. . .] The program is showing the kids a glimpse of what reality is like and is getting them involved in the dynamics of that reality; it's helping them in their life’ 2 . Any specific educational goal seemed to require, in order to even be considered, a more basic work of character formation (habits, dispositions) which could only be developed in proximity, community-like, contexts of sociality, blurring thus the barriers between classic professional education or training and what might be regarded as general socialization.
Such a domestic conception of education was deeply intertwined with denunciation of the rigours of classic public education, a system typically grounded on a civic-industrial compromise (Derouet, 2005, 2009). Formal education was a system that legitimized teaching action in official technical qualification and the status of teachers; that established a marked differentiation between education (primary, informal) in the family and local environments, and education (secondary, formal) in the school; that regarded impersonality and homogeneity (both of relationships and of the curriculum) as a guarantee of justice; which aspired to eradicate particularity for the sake of an egalitarian principle; that valued in the abstraction of academic disciplines their generalist potential, overcoming strictly contextual application (Apple, 1987; Gimeno, 2000; Hargreaves, 2001, 2003). All these principles and values of the civic-industrial school system were conceptualized by our subjects, without exception, as blatant inadequacies or errors, if not perversions of the very concept of education.
The figure of the civil-servant teacher, in particular, was conceptualized and denounced as the very antithesis of what an educator should be. Education was a task that is effected through a ‘person-to-person’ relationship and thus did not allow for compartmentalization of time and space; anything that concerned the relationship between educator and student was (or should be) part of this work, from activity within the classroom to confidences or conversations at lunchtime. Moreover, it was neither professional qualification nor organizational status what legitimized the exercise of educational action, but rather the possession of a certain disposition – that is, of a personal, global and non-transferable quality. If educational action itself was integral and moral, the assessment of those who carried it out should also be integral and moral (Penalva, 2006). Civil servants (be it compulsory education teachers or state-paid social workers) were described as people who ‘are clear about their schedule: they finish at a certain time, and it’s very difficult for them to enter the homes of people who are suffering, it’s very difficult for them to commit and get really involved, to get their hands dirty’, while ‘it’s only companionship what matters with these kids’ 3 . In short, the main figure of the civic-industrial compromise embodied by the formal education system, the civil-servant teacher, was thoroughly criticized by our trainers, who denounced them as impediments to an ‘authentic’ 4 and fair education.
This should not be taken to mean that our actors did not subscribe any civic or industrial values, however. In fact, when their discourses about work were examined, clearly articulated civic or industrial moral principles were found (Martínez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2006). Nevertheless, when it came to education, any civic or industrial rationale was ‘nested’ within the framework of a domestic rationale that made the essential notions of their discourses ‘hybrid’ notions or devices revealing an underlying compromise between different conventions of worth. Indeed, domestic rationale appeared as the basic matrix in which other principles were anchored, taking on new meaning.
Nevertheless, despite such clear domestic character of their discourse on educational action and despite their fierce criticism of formal education, the conception that our actors had of their educational action cannot be identified either with ‘upbringing’ or ‘parental education’. First, because they were fully aware of the professional nature of their action, and second, because they were also aware that they were doing a job that their families or communities of origin could never do for their trainees – that is, providing them with a key to social integration that would precisely overcome family and birthplace disadvantages.
It should be highlighted here that the third sector is often identified as a community space, distinct from the state (civic world) and the market (market world). But such a terminology generates confusion, as long as it leads to the inclusion of families and small communities (domestic world) in this ‘third sector’. What is commonly referred to as the ‘third sector’, however, does not correspond to the classic Tönniesian notion of ‘community’ as a space of ascribed roles structured by tradition and kinship relations. NPOs are located between the private space of interpersonal relations, which are the driving force of associative bonds, and the public space, which is the object and place of their projection (Laville and Sainsaulieu, 1997). What is often called the third sector (and perhaps should be called the fourth sector) is a heterogeneous set of social actors located in a hybrid space between the civic rationality of the state, the mercantile rationality of the market and the domestic rationality of the community (Brandsen et al., 2005). It therefore comes as no surprise that discourses on education shared by our actors had at their very core a hybrid character, combining different justification rationales.
Compromises and conflicts in educational discourses of non-profit actors
In this context, two main compromises were found in the discourses on educational action shared by these agents of NPOs working in training for employment.
The first was a discourse that regarded educational labour as attention to differential needs, and it may be characterized as a domestic-civic compromise. The second was a discourse that regarded educational labour as productive habit formation, and it may be characterized as a domestic-industrial compromise.
Education as attention to differential needs: A domestic-civic compromise
The centrality of the notion of the trainee’s need completely displaced the notion of ‘right’ in the discourse of our trainers. From different arguments, sometimes linked to different moral principles, our interviewees converged in a unanimous criticism of the school – the national formal education system had proved unable to ‘attend the needs’ 5 of these trainees, who had thus been excluded. However, this very criticism revealed both an implicit assumption of a civic principle of equal rights and an (at least partial) assimilation of the critique formulated by the theorists of reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1983) – that is, that the school system of the civic order, far from reducing inequalities linked to the class origin of the subjects, has accentuated them, legitimizing social inequality as differences of personal aptitude and presenting a fair and acceptable order of worth in industrial terms. The targets of their educational labour, in fact, constituted in the trainers’ eyes inescapable evidence of the failure of a system based on such principles –‘kids’ with difficulties ‘are kept there in a corner [in high school]. As they don’t know enough, they are just left there, or they are put in a separate classroom’ 6 and, as a result, they are ‘girls who have always been in a corner of the classroom, those who have long been regarded as those who don’t know, those who can’t keep up with the class, and with whom it’s impossible to work. They have been excluded from any kind of normalized education project’ 7 .
The impartiality that should govern relations in the civic order, and whose absence would compromise equality and justice, was re-signified from the domestic conception as bureaucratic impersonality and lack of humanity that disqualified for educational action. Likewise, homogenization and standardization of the curriculum, a guarantee of justice in the civic-industrial conception, were denounced by our subjects as a lack of sensitivity to the differential needs of the learners and an insurmountable obstacle to satisfying them – they felt ‘a bit absurd’ because ‘you can't give aspirin to all patients because it can kill you if you have a stomach ulcer. . . Likewise, not all students can receive pure and simple 9th grade of secondary education. It’s impossible. . . one size fits all, whether you’re obese or not. . . [. . .] it has to be a bit more diversified’ 8 . What is more, standardization of educational content and methodologies was not only ineffective, but also became a symptom of a ‘reification’ of people by the educational apparatus – hence their scorn towards quantification in assessment that was ‘imposed’ upon trainers by ‘the administration’, although they were ‘not going to engage in a dialogue with the kid about whether I gave him a 6 or a 5, because in the end, I don't really care. I don’t know if they do care, but I don’t’ 9 . In this framework, the value of abstract – distant or general – and concrete – close and particular – contents was inverted in the judgement about the contents to be given priority, which had to be those that were useful for daily life.
Their emphasis on the notion of need was interesting. To begin with, it accentuated the service provision character of the education system rather than its character as a guaranteeing device. Public education was regarded as a service – a public service, but a service anyway – whose essential purpose was to satisfy the needs of the trainees. In this shift, citizens were basically requalified as users rather than subjects of civic rights and obligations. On the other hand, if rights are universal and generally applicable, needs are, by definition, particular. Postulating the principle of attention to differential needs as an articulating axis of educational action implied, therefore, legitimizing differences in treatment and supply in the provision of this type of services.
In their discourse of education as attention to differential needs, the inherent fragility of any device of compromise was particularly evident. Confronted with the claim that homogenization of civic space and standardization in the provision of services threatened the very principle of general interest, favouring particular interests of certain groups over others, the civic order began to admit recognition of differences as a requirement for fair distribution. But introducing particularity shook to its foundations the architecture of a civic order that was built to deny and eliminate it. Our participants’ providentialist discourse of attention to differential needs, as a good compromise device, refused to confront the egalitarianism of the civic order with the particularism of the domestic order, but for that very reason, it veiled the contradiction that underlies the idea of admitting (or even encouraging) differentiation in order to ultimately guarantee equality. This contradiction is not alien to the unresolved tension that runs through discourses on integration and, ultimately, discourses on citizenship (Derouet and Derouet, 2009; Garnier et al., 2022).
Education as productive habit formation: A domestic-industrial compromise
The very field of training for employment relies on a civic-industrial compromise that associates citizenship with productive labour (Castel, 2003), and therefore it is not surprising that the acquisition of the competences required to enter the labour market with an adequate level of productivity would be regarded as an essential goal of educational action by our trainers. A common discourse was found that linked their action with the acquisition of skills, habits and productive rhythms – a discourse in which the recognition of the ‘real world of work’ 10 and the criterion of performance as the key to the labour market took a central place.
But this discourse was inseparable from the type of manual, low-skilled jobs that were the destiny of their trainees. Therefore, it was not exactly a discourse of technical instruction, of an industrial nature, but a discourse linked to a domestic-industrial compromise. The key notion that articulated it was not that of ‘competence’, but that of ‘habit’. And habits constitute the incorporation (in its most literal sense of fusion with and shaping of the body) of productive routines. It was not difficult to find references, particularly in the discourse of participants training in the craft, to disciplines, in the sense in which they were analysed by Foucault (1975) – that is, as a central device for training in jobs that are very physical and where incorporating the right postures and manners is fundamental. As one masonry trainer put it, ‘My rule is: 'Nobody sits here until I sit down'. Obviously I never sit down, so nobody sits down. I have never sat down in my life, unless it's a job that allows you to sit down. I tell them: 'If you are doing a job that allows you to sit down, then ok. . . But sitting or leaning on the walls, as little as possible. . . Guys leaning everywhere. . . that's out. Not here, not those habits'. I emphasise habits, I'm very tough and strict with that'’ 11 .
Domestic rationale converges with industrial rationale in productive habit formation because it is a kind of technical training which is, at the same time and indissolubly, a kind of moral education. Through the incorporation of habits of ‘punctuality, order and cleanliness in the execution of tasks’ 12 , the will to make an effort that defines the ‘good worker’ 13 is formed and revealed. For this reason, far from the competence-based learning paradigms linked to the advanced industrial order, the discourse of our trainers was a discourse of character formation, akin to the traditional and standardized modes of production that still govern secondary labour markets and low-skilled occupations.
Despite the emphasis on habits, skills and practice, however, educational space was not conceptualized in this discourse as an entirely productive space, nor was it really structured in the manner of industrial production order. Despite the obvious traces of disciplinary conceptions, material devices (machines, tools) were relegated to a much more secondary level than they are in the ‘real world’ of the workshop or factory; and, instead, personal, face-to-face relationship between master and apprentice in the process of acquiring the craft gained greater prominence. Personal relationship between the professional who masters the craft and the apprentice was an essential educational tool, insofar as it places the trainee in a dynamic of obligation, responsibility, collaboration and mutual recognition, rather than simply providing an ongoing practice whose fruit is entrusted to the inertia of material elements. Similar ambivalence characterized the attitude towards order in this discourse. While disorder was regarded as an undesirable disruption and obstacle to learning, a controlled degree of informality was regarded as desirable for the educational relationship and learning itself.
Moreover, our trainers were very familiar with differences. Not only they knew that there were obvious differences in capacity between their trainees, but, to a significant extent, their professionalism was measured by the degree to which they were able to assess and manage such differences. As one trainer (quite proudly) put it, ‘Experience is telling you how you have to deal with each person. . . and this one can do this job, because he is more capable, and this one can't do more than this. Your skill really shows in giving each one what they can do’ 14 . The unresolved tension and compromise between domestic and industrial rationales that characterized this educational discourse was also manifest here. Domestic order is an order of natural, ascribed differences, which can only be identified so as to assign to each person their corresponding ‘place in the world’. Industrial order, on the other hand, holds a more generalist approach to learning – that is, the appropriate sequencing of contents and the appropriate design of practice should make the required competences accessible to all people, whatever their origin or starting point (Derouet, 1989). The ‘productive habit formation’ discourse of our actors, as a domestic-industrial compromise device, always fluctuated in this tension between the optimization of each individual's possibilities and the recognition (and objective evaluation) of differences in performance.
Conflicting demands and tensions straining the third sector: Management discourses
NPOs were facing many disparate demands at the turn of the 21st century, as discussed above. Such demands were expressive of a basic tension in modern economy, where the need to create new links between public action and civil society contrasts with the growing tendency to commodify human services (Evers and Laville, 2004).
The third sector appeared as a particularly promising actor for the establishment of an emerging compromise that would replace the civic-industrial compromise on which the second spirit of capitalism was based (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Ambiguous or equivocal objects are particularly functional for stabilizing compromises, which are fragile by nature (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006), and third-sector organizations are, at their very core, this kind of equivocal object, bringing together elements derived from different logics of justification (Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010).
In their responses to the crisis of both employment and welfare provision in the field of social and professional integration of vulnerable people, NPOs had to change their methods to adapt to the constraints of business management and public subsidies (Laville and Sainsaulieu, 1997). Moreover, as discussed earlier, the third sector appeared as an actor that still had to gain legitimacy for their action and the added value they provided, as compared with the state or the market, that appeal to the more established civic and market rationales for legitimation. Thus, while partly assuming constrictions linked to market economy and state regulation, these organizations sought to differentiate themselves qualitatively from both rationales in their legitimizing discourses (Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010).
Disparate social demands placed on the third sector introduced elements of tension that forced them to reconcile different, and indeed conflicting, principles of worth. This plurality of justification rationales implied a great potential for criticism, insofar as the existence of different ways of understanding ‘what is fair’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) is a condition for criticism. But the need to overcome or obviate those tensions, that posed a challenge to the very survival of the third sector, also led to the establishment of compromises between conflicting rationales regarding the mission and added value of NPOs in the emerging social-educational field aimed at employment.
Underlying the two compromise discourses on education that have been described are two tensions that strained their employing organizations. The first was a tension between public-collective interest and private-particular interest that reflects a clash between civic and domestic principles. The second was a tension between third-sector organizations as service production establishments and third-sector organizations as spaces for close interpersonal relationships that reflects a clash between industrial and domestic principles. Such tensions were also tackled in our research through an in-depth exploration of the discourses of management of NPOs regarding their mission and added value in a post-industrial world (Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010).
Between general and particular interest: A domestic-civic tension and compromise
The third sector was being required at the turn of the century to play a mediating role between the public and private spheres, so that a variety of capitals (of an economic, cultural, social or professional nature) that did not belong to the state apparatus and could not be administered by it could serve the general good transcending particular interests, giving voice and visibility in that mediation to the plurality of identities that make up contemporary democratic society. Those ‘equivocal objects’ that NPOs are appeared as an ideal articulation of the general (insofar as they are collective action aimed at filling the gaps in democratic society) and the particular (insofar as their engagement is motivated by particular interests or sensitivities). Such a hybrid, mediational character accounted for both their creativity and their fragility (Laville and Sainsaulieu, 1997).
Classic civic critique of the domestic world focuses on the pretensions of collectives that demand differential treatment, denouncing particularisms that are opposed to the general interest. And indeed management of non-profit civic organizations was acutely aware of this potential source of conflict. As expressed by a project manager in an association promoted by families that provided mentally handicapped people with training for employment: ‘If you don't stand up to families, you have a problem. Because each one of them looks after their own situation. However, when you generate a project like this, you do it to tackle common problems. Maybe in the development of the project you can work on a case-by-case basis, but the aim is to work in the common interest. So, if the interested parties intervene, they limit you and you will have to be negotiating all the time. My role here is to look beyond their particular interests, for the good of all’ 15 (Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010: 38). Conversely, classic domestic critique of the civic world focuses on the exclusionary nature of homogenizing policies supposedly aiming at an egalitarian society, and such a criticism was also very prominent in discourses shared by project managers regarding the situation of disabled and other vulnerable people and groups, who ‘have many handicaps and need special attention’ 16 in a society that ‘is not prepared for people like these, who cannot work because of their degree of handicap or disability’ 17 (Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010: 38). The co-existence of criticisms grounded upon conflicting principles reflected the difficulty of NPOs to reconcile the domestic and civic rationales between which they were required to mediate. Such a tension was reconciled through a compromise discourse arguing that recognition of plurality and diversity was a necessary condition for a democratic and egalitarian society, so that failure to pay attention to diversity generates inequality. This compromise was articulated around the notions of positive discrimination and attention to diversity, as mentioned in the characterization of educational discourses (Martínez-Morales et al., 2015; Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010).
Between personal relations and service provision: A domestic-industrial tension and compromise
On the other hand, the growing importance of a service provision role for NPOs generated a pressure towards professionalization and effectiveness. As a result, managers of NPOs voiced a clear criticism against amateurism and good intentions that can be easily identified as an industrial denounce of domestic organizations. They were acutely aware that, in the non-profit sector, there may be ‘people who are not very professional [. . .] But we have to be careful. . . because an association is not only good intentions, but it also has to be a structure –a structure with a content, and with a philosophy, and with people who are concerned that things are carried out. . . otherwise, it all remains good intentions and things that, in the end, are not well done. I don’t mean trust and honesty, which is another matter, but trust in good work, in doing good work’ 18 (Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010: 29). However, such an emphasis on professionalization was combined with criticism of the lack of commitment and humanity of technocrats who treat people as objects, presenting thus NPOs as improved alternatives to industrial objectivism and reification in the realm of personal services. The other side of the coin of amateurism are ‘well-trained people who come here and, when they encounter problems and people, they apply techniques. You know what I mean? And it's very different. There may be techniques that can help you solve things with people, but it is companionship what works with people. I mean: there is no mathematical formula that says 'Two plus two add up to four, and I have solved the problem'. People are a different matter. . .’ 19 (Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010: 30). The combination of criticisms that relied on conflicting principles reflected the difficulty of NPOs to reconcile the domestic and industrial rationales that were required to develop what they perceived as the social mandate placed on them – that is, to provide personal proximity services, using their mastery of close relationships as an asset, but meeting professional quality standards at the same time. Such tension was thus transformed into a compromise device when an authentic personal relationship was presented as the main tool and symptom of professionalism, arguing that education is effected essentially through integral personal relationship, bringing into play what the trainer is rather than what they know or do (cf. Martinez-Morales and Molpeceres, 2010).
Re-examining the transformative potential of non-profit organizations’ critique of education in hindsight
Critique is a powerful motor for social change, but it does not automatically lead to actual institutional or cultural changes (Kern et al., 2017). The efficacy of critique has to be demonstrated through investigations that put it into time perspective (Wagner, 2014). This is why empirical examination of critique is a tricky issue – the transformative potential of such critique can only be assessed in hindsight, when there is enough perspective to assess if it has been able to effect the kind of change it intended. This means that data on discourse collected years ago can now take on new meanings in light of subsequent developments. This is what we think has happened with the original data on NPOs’ critical educational discourse that have been described in detail in the section above 20 .
The third sector in educational labour: The last believers
However pure or ‘monotheistic’ some of its incarnations may seem at first glance, the educational system in modernity has always been grounded on the promise of a workable compromise between different values and orders of worth. Be it the promise that particular interests are compatible with the common good, or the promise that full social integration and optimal productivity can be achieved in one and the same move, education in professional establishments and spaces has presented itself as the main requirement and the process through which the compatibility of such disparate principles could be achieved. Thus, in a sense, the manifold criticisms that the modern educational system has received during the 20th century may be classified in two categories (cf. Dubet, 2006):
(i) Some of them are believer reproaches that do not challenge the nuclear values upon which modern education was founded or the promise of their articulation, but rather the specific procedures and devices that were chosen for the materialization of such an articulated cluster of values, and that may be in fact hindering it in the eyes of the critic. These kinds of criticisms are indeed both potential productive inputs for improvement and evidences of the success of the very system they criticize.
(ii) Some of them, on the other hand, are rather disenchantment symptoms – that is, they express a more or less conscious perception that an articulation of values that seemed legitimate, consistent and workable is not so any longer. The critic somehow starts to sense or feel the disjointed sutures of the whole fabrication – joints and sutures that had always been there, but were not perceivable under the incantation of an elaborated set of compromise devices that veiled internal inconsistencies. The exacerbation of latent contradictions makes it inescapable a growing conscience of living in an increasingly torn and plural world in which tensions between disparate interests and values cannot be reconciled anymore.
From this perspective, criticisms of the modern education system voiced by our third sector actors at the turn of the 21st century were indeed believer reproaches. Our actors certainly believed that the civic-industrial compromise that inspired major social and economic developments for most of the 20th century was still workable, even if a substantial dose of domesticity had to be added in the formula to make it achievable. Moreover, they presented themselves as social actors in an ideal position to achieve what classic welfare states had already failed to deliver. They claimed to be the only actor capable of (at the same time and in the same process) providing services that were adapted to the particularities of the users and guaranteeing their rights in the context of an increasingly diversified citizenship.
However, many things have changed in the last 20 years in the field of training for employment – changes that are not alien to the emerging compromises that NPOs in educational labour were forging at the turn of the century.
Training for employment in the 21st century
Tensions between moral orders and justification rationales have never been alien to educational processes and policies, even within the formal education system (cf. Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Derouet, 2005 for diverse analyses). However, probably the specific form that these tensions adopt in non-compulsory, non-academic education, and particularly in the ‘hybrid’ field of training for employment makes it possible to see even more clearly than the focus on formal education where education is heading. This may be why such somewhat ‘marginal’ field of education between the state and the labour market, between civic and market rationales, has been particularly attractive for scholars examining educational policies from a SC perspective (cf. Brandl, 2022; Imdorf and Leemann, 2023, for reviews).
Training and employment policies in the European Union and other Western states have been characterized in the last two decades by an unrelenting progress along two axes – activation and flexibilization.
Activation aims at promoting the (more or less obligatory) participation of people dependent on social protection in work or training schemes, and it has been thoroughly researched in the last ten years (Crespo and Serrano, 2013; Heidenreich and Graziano, 2014; Heidenreich and Rice, 2016; Valadas, 2022; Whiteside, 2023). Active social and employment policies have strongly impacted the field of training and education, resulting in the design of individualized trajectories, the provision of client-centred training and skill development and an increasing role for personal counselling services (Heidenreich and Graziano, 2014). In the end, many analysts agree that activation policies, by means of contractual devices regulating the provider-user relationship, endow people with formal autonomy, while shifting onto individual responsibility the weight of constraints that operate at a collective level and making full citizenship something that has to be earned (Boltanski, 2012; Perez-Zapata et al., 2016).
Flexibilization of training aims at meeting changing labour market needs and targeting the needs of specific groups, particularly people in need for additional support that would not be able to digest the ‘full pack’ of traditional learning trajectories (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, 2015; Pilz et al, 2018). Qualifications are segmented in modules of competence, then nestled in training packages developed for particular industries and/or target groups, and finally bundled together by means of an accreditation and qualification system. It is an output-oriented model that results in a fragmentation of knowledge and an atomization of skill (Pilz et al., 2018; Wheelahan, 2016).
These two directions of development have taken strong hold on work and training policies all over Europe and have seamlessly integrated with policies in other fields because both activation and flexibilization serve well two of the most significant features of contemporary configurations of capitalism: (i) the optimization of productivity through an appropriate management of diversity (gone are the times when certain categories of people were deemed as completely useless or unproductive); and (ii) the commodification of personal dispositions as work assets (gone are also the times when only some features, abilities or activities were regarded as potentially productive) (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005).
There is a significant element, however, that sets work and training policies apart from other increasingly convergent European or international policies. In stark contrast with most economic and monetary policies that are subject to clear controls and sanction systems, the governance of social, work and education policies is essentially of a persuasive character – that is, it is based on so-called ‘soft regulation’, making use of guidelines rather than legally binding instruments (Crespo and Serrano, 2013; Sanz de Miguel, 2016). This raises the question of how such non-binding agreements can gradually become politically, socially and morally binding for the actors involved. Sanz de Miguel (2016) points to a ‘discursive regulatory mechanism’, whereby engagement and convergence are fostered by establishing a common interpretative framework that is implicitly or explicitly connected to policy solutions and approaches.
Such discourse needs to be assimilated not only by governments and policy makers, but also by third sector actors, insofar as they increasingly operate as ‘sub-contractors’ of the state in the provision of educational services and the implementation of social and labour active policies (Arqueros-Fernandez, 2022).
Moreover, as a result of active and flexible work and training policies, the demands laid upon education and training providers have been substantially altered. NPOs’ workers are becoming more and more agents of social-educational-employment policies rather than properly educators or trainers, and NPOs themselves are becoming more and more co-actors within wider networks of hybrid actors (in the interplay of civic society, the market and public administration) rather than educational (proximity) sites as such (Petrella et al., 2022). Due to the emphasis on individualized plans combining various resources (modular training and microteaching among them), those who were educators or trainers at the turn of the century have increasingly become ‘case-managers’, responsible for the coordination of a wide array of resources and devices intended to achieve access to employment for their trainees. As interconnectedness of stakeholders takes centre stage, the relevance of intensive socializing practice correlatively diminishes.
Now, how can it be that precisely those who advocated not long ago for an integral, personal, humane relationship at the core of educational action volunteer now through tendering-based procurements to be at the forefront of such managerial practices?
The paradoxical effects of critique
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) made a strong argument that contemporary capitalism is the kind of system that controls critique by incorporating it, thus mutating into an even more powerful form of itself. Theirs was an argument and a warning about the paradoxical (if not perverse) eventual effect of some critiques (e.g. the so-called ‘artist’ critique of capitalism in the 1960s), insofar as they may contribute to an unintended but major reinforcement of the very system they opposed. Moreover, as the new configuration of the system identifies with the critique that was thrown at it, that deprives critics who would like to oppose it of their own discourse.
Likewise, the justifications of third sector actors in training for employment that were described in earlier sections of this paper may have also opened up ways for emergent arrangements and rationales that threaten the very pillars on which NPOs legitimized educational action twenty years ago.
On the one hand, NPOs’ requalification of education as a service instead of a right, as well as their focus on particular needs, has opened the door for legitimization of the provision of differential care and protection measures, which might eventually disappear as they are not regarded as universal citizens' rights, but rather as contingent measures linked to a variety of changing conditions. Also the notion of differential standards of productivity and the aspiration to optimize each learner’s potential contribution was not alien to NPOs trainers, as previously discussed, thus making it easier to accept segmentation in education provision.
On the other hand, NPOs’ discourse arguing for authentic personal relationship and the willingness to transcend strictly professional limits as an essential asset in education paves the way for the commodification of aspects of the person which were kept outside the productive dynamic. It introduces elements into the production equation which in a domestic order would appear as gratuitous, and subjects to evaluation what in a domestic rationale would have been unevaluable, doing away with the dichotomy between personal sphere and occupational sphere. The idea, found in our actors’ discourse, that it is not primarily professional qualification what defines a ‘good worker’, but the willingness to make an effort and avoid ‘leaning on the walls’, makes the activation paradigm somehow easier to digest. Furthermore, discourses on intangible personal dispositions as a core asset for work and social integration also open up the way to new forms of ‘integral’ socialization or ‘work on others’ that largely transcend the self-limiting postulates that guided pedagogical and work relationships in classic civic-industrial systems (Bernad et al., 2013).
Therefore, even if anchored in a persisting faith in the 20th century civic-industrial compromise as a promise for social integration in advanced capitalist democratic societies, NPOs’ critique of public education has smoothed the path for third sector actors to engage in an emerging rationale whose eventual consequences are far from the civic principles of equality and social inclusion that underlay their discourse. They denounced the rigidities and unfairness of bureaucracy, and evolving policies have made them (both NPOs and their users) freelancers that self-manage, education brokers assessing resources and results, analysing employment niches and managing qualification trajectories; they have fragmented and conditioned the universal notion of citizenship that articulated the wage society; and they have reduced the entitlements and bargaining power of both training providers and trainees. They called for a more humane, integral, relational approach to education and work, and evolving policies have weakened their proximity and reciprocal bonds and ties (again, both those of NPOs and of their users); they have placed them in an ever-changing landscape of transitory devices and alliances; and they have turned ‘authentic’ personal disposition into the most precious (and priced) work asset.
Moreover, in this new landscape critique is not blocked in a direct, straightforward manner typical of totalitarian regimes. The kind of domination that contemporary critique faces does not preclude change, but it is precisely exercised through change – once the critic challenges the fairness of a test or established qualifications, the systems shifts, effecting a displacement that renders critique useless. Boltanski (2012) called this type of domination ‘managerial’, and warned about the increasing difficulty to fight it.
Which will be the new critiques that NPOs make of contemporary training policies, and whether those critiques will be ‘believer reproaches’ or ‘disenchantment symptoms’, is something that remains to be seen (and it constitutes the core of our current research project). However, we can probably predict that an articulated, coherent critique will be harder to find than it was twenty years ago.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper is the result of research approved by the Spanish Government, ref. PID2021-125912OB-IOO, ‘Cambios en la misión institucional y las bases de la implicación en el Tercer Sector de Acción Social – Formación para el empleo’, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER ‘Una manera de hacer Europa, UE’.
