ABSTRACT
In the wake of the Wolfenden Report, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) invited Professor Charles Handy, the doyen of British management education, to chair a working party on Improving Effectiveness in Voluntary Organisations. The subsequent ‘Handy Report’ (NCVO 1981) gave notice that voluntary organisations could not escape the management revolution which had begun to permeate British institutions since the late-1970s. Established service organisations were finding the classic conventions of charity administration ill-suited to the demands of an increasingly turbulent social and resource environment. Structures and procedures inherited from earlier eras of philanthropic endeavour no longer sufficed. In a similar vein, newer groups involved in issue-based advocacy and community self-activity were discovering that principled commitment to empowerment, collective working and grass-roots democracy did not, in itself, guarantee success in the changing circumstances of the 1970s and 1980s (Landry et al. 1985).
