In 2024, the Women and Equalities Select Committee in the UK Parliament published a report entitled Misogyny in Music. It included the recommendations that ‘music colleges, conservatoires and other educational settings need to do more to address the gendering of instruments, roles and genres and improve the visibility of and support for female role models’. While there is a dearth of policy levers available to implement this recommendation, this article critically analyses three existing policy/regulatory frameworks that could be used for its implementation in England. The article also highlights a significant limitation of the report – its exclusion of trans and non-binary musicians.

The global increase in extreme weather events in recent years has spurred political scientists to examine the potential political effects of such phenomena. This paper explores effect of flooding on electoral outcomes and offers evidence that the impact of adverse events varies with changes in political context. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy to analyse three consecutive general elections in the United Kingdom (2015, 2017 and 2019), the paper finds variability in partisan electoral benefit from one election to the next that calls into question the blind retrospection and rally-round-the-leader explanations which are often advanced to account for electoral reactions to natural disasters. Instead, changing party positions on environmental issues appear to account more convincingly for shifts in electoral support in response to flooding. This suggests that parties can derive benefit from, or be punished for, the positions they take on environmental issues when extreme weather events affect citizens.

We examine how societal-level institutional logics impact the way in which hybridity develops in nonprofit organizations using international, comparative and qualitative case studies of community regeneration organizations in England and France. The research applies theoretically based conjectures about types of hybridity to empirical data generated from 20 interviews, document analysis and observation in five nonprofits in the city of Lyon and five in Sheffield. We find that the French nonprofits are ‘blended’ hybrids that integrate state and community institutional logics, while ‘assimilated’ hybrids combining state, community and market logics are found in the English cases. Undertaking contextually situated analysis of institutional logics generates new knowledge on the influences on nonprofits’ rules, practices and narratives, so improving the level of knowledge about, and capacity to manage, this sector.

This paper juxtaposes the expectations of event managers and sports event volunteers in a case study organisation. These are understood within the theoretical framework of the psychological contract. Results show the distinctive contribution volunteers can make to events but also the distinctive challenges they present to event managers. For event managers, volunteers bring: enthusiasm, a good relationship and empathy with the public, and they provide a cheaper labour force. But a major concern is ensuring their reliability. For volunteers, important expectations include: flexibility of engagement, the quality of personal relationships, recognition for their contribution, and a clear communication of what they are expected to do. The juxtaposition of event manager and volunteer perspectives illustrates the need for a different approach to managing volunteers in comparison to paid employees. This reflects both volunteers’ expectations and the recognition that they have greater autonomy; not being tied to a contract by financial rewards or a related career progression. More generally the results illustrate the use of the theoretical framework provided by the psychological contract but that in using this it is valuable to compare the perspectives of managers and volunteers, using a qualitative approach to understand this social relationship.

Social housing in Western welfare states has undergone change over recent decades, characterised by greater reliance on private actors, market mechanisms and commercial capital. Within housing research, this shift has been described as a linear ‘migration from the public sector towards the private market’, and conceptualised as ‘modernisation’. While empirical change calls for conceptual renewal, the labels we apply to processes of change may limit or enhance potential to understand them. This paper explores the problem of conceptualising change in social housing, focusing on a key facilitator of market-based reforms: the mobilisation of private not-for-profit housing associations as social enterprises in the housing market. It explores their changing roles in English and Dutch housing provision, tracking state policy shifts and debate over their organisational legitimacy for insights into their emergence and trajectories. Contrary to linear ‘modernisation’, findings suggest cyclical movement. Over time, aspects of the work and identity of housing associations shift between public and private domains.

Discussion about, and analysis of, the question of definition and the third sector and civil society more generally has developed to a significant degree in recent years. This paper can be located in a new phase of recent research, which seeks to attend to the historical, cultural and politically contingent nature of this domain’s boundaries. The process of constituting the sector is discussed as the product of new discourses of decontestation and contention within third sector policy and practice. It takes England as a case study, drawing on evidence and argument assembled by the authors in recent and ongoing research efforts, variously conducted with the support of the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) and the European Commission. The paper proceeds by discussing relevant literature; describing recent patterns of policy institutionalisation; and then tries to draw out more analytically how this process of constitution has been associated not so much with a stable and consistent set of definitions and constructs, but rather with unstable and changing formulations, which reflect the playing out of a dual process of decontestation and contention.

Voluntary sports clubs (VSCs) account for about a quarter of all volunteering in England. The volunteers work in a mutual aid, self-production, self-consumption system whose main purpose is identifying and nurturing high-level performers. But the new HMG/Sport England strategies leading to London 2012 expects volunteers to make a major contribution to sustaining and extending participation. The study utilized six focus group sessions with a total of 36 officials and members of 36 clubs across the six counties of Eastern England to assess whether and to what extent government policy objectives can be delivered through the voluntary sector. The study focused on the perceptions and attitudes of club members about being expected to serve public policy and the current pressures they and their clubs face. The results lead the authors to question the appropriateness, sensitivity, and feasibility of current sport policy, particularly the emphasis on VSCs as policy implementers.

Typologies of government-voluntary sector relations mostly categorize nation-level situations, and omit consideration of intra-national differences. They are also rarely subject to empirical testing and subsequent theoretical development. This paper reports on research to apply Kuhnle and Selle’s (2002) relational typology, which characterizes the experience of “Britain,” to a study of Scottish and English voluntary organizations’ relations with government. Contrary to Kuhnle and Selle, the paper demonstrates—through survey data—a divergence between Scotland and England, within the “British” context, and advances the case for further testing of such conceptual typologies. The methodological challenges in moving from a theoretical framework to a research design capable of field application, using survey methods, are illustrated and discussed. Further directions for theoretically led work are suggested.

The role of voluntary and community sector organizations in the delivery of public services is increasing and these changes bring new responsibilities and benefits to organizations that have the capacity to participate. There are concerns within the sector about the implications for citizenship and participation. The sector is highly dependent on volunteers yet little is known about how organizational change in response to new relationships with the statutory sector impact upon the commitment and well-being of people who volunteer. This paper addresses that gap in knowledge for older volunteers. Drawing upon collaborative research with a voluntary organization in the north of England, the authors explore the meanings and aspirations of volunteering for older people, and explain how and why changes associated with closer engagement with public service delivery and less grant dependency can be disempowering for them.