ABSTRACT
The purpose of this collection of papers has been to increase our understanding of employment issues in the nonprofit voluntary sector in the light of its relationship with state funding bodies. In doing so it has sought to address two key areas of interest:
How the process of outsourcing is impacting the internal and external labour markets of voluntary organisations; and
How employers, employees, and their representatives deal with the tensions and contradictions from outsourcing, including the effect on service quality.
These questions have been pursued in the preceding chapters by reference to three overarching foci: the policy and labour market contexts within which the expansion of the role of voluntary sector organisations in the delivery of public services has been occurring; the way in which the employment policies and practices of such organisations have come under challenge and have been reformed; and how the work experiences of those employed in the voluntary sector have been changing. These questions have further been explored through analyses that have focussed on UK developments, particularly in relation to the first two of these themes, and on those occurring in a number of other Western industrialised countries—Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States—that have undergone similar processes of outsourcing to the third sector.