Community work at the urban periphery: searching for legitimacy

ABSTRACT

The restructuring of public welfare provision across Europe in recent decades has brought new actors into the governance of welfare and social work practice, including non-profit organizations. In Sweden, the role of non-profit organizations in social service provision has been less significant than that of profit-oriented enterprises. Despite a continuing shift towards greater welfare pluralism, non-profit organizations engaging in social work find themselves struggling to find their own spaces and legitimacy. This article examines two organizations engaging in community work at the peripheries of the Stockholm metropolitan area, focusing on how they understand, perform, and communicate their roles as both civil society actors and social work providers. Our data demonstrate that the organizations have developed different legitimation strategies related to their understanding of what type of organization they are and what type of work they do. Furthermore, despite some differences in their perceptions of the underpinnings of community work, both organizations make an important contribution to developing community work in Sweden as a collective practice binding local communities together with mutual support and the sharing of knowledge and identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Nonprofit organizations
• legitimacy
• community work

Introduction

In recent decades, following profound demographic, economic and political changes, Nordic systems of social protection have become penetrated with marketization, consumerisation and managerialisation (Sivesind and Saglie 2017). In the 1990s in Sweden, a series of neoliberal reforms began in all key sectors of welfare service provision, including primary and secondary education (Thøgersen 2017), elderly care (Moberg 2017), healthcare (Blomqvist 2020), and employment services (Ennerberg 2020). As in other Nordic countries, the reforms aimed at diversifying service delivery as well as enhancing bureaucratic transparency and cost efficiency by introducing or expanding competition-based contracting of services and enabling user choice. In practice, citizens select their welfare service providers from among publicly approved private sub-contractors who are paid from publicly allocated funds. This has not only led to a significant growth of for-profit providers, but has also entrenched civil society in welfare production (H. Johansson, Arvidson, and Johansson 2015; Reuter, Wijkström, and von Essen 2012), continuing a long-term shift from advocacy to service delivery (Lundström & Wijkström 1995).

Earlier research demonstrated some positive consequences of the reforms, indicated by increased availability of services and higher user satisfaction (Hartman 2011). There is, however, also evidence that the structure of economic incentives does not necessarily stimulate good quality of provision and that contractual and regulatory challenges persist (Hartman 2011., see also Blix and Jordahl 2021). Intertwined with growing socio-economic inequalities and spatial segregation, privatization has led to increased inequality in access to services and to variation in their quality, favouring large cities and well-off suburbs and creating institutional deficits in geographically peripheral urban areas with high unemployment rates, low incomes and overall low socio-economic status (Allelin et al. 2021). In such areas, non-profit organizations (NPOs) figure prominently, and in some cases, they are the only service providers (Arvidson et al. 2018; Sjöberg and Turunen 2022), although they are generally underrepresented in the emerging welfare market (Sivesind, Trætteberg, and Saglie 2017) and often have few resources to develop long-term efforts.

In recent years, some well-established NPOs have launched targeted projects in marginalized urban communities, addressing urgent local needs and involving local citizens in welfare provision (Kings 2022). The ambition is to infuse contemporary locality-based social work with Swedish civil society traditions, combining professional service delivery with democratic participation. Both civil society and professional social work focus resolutely on societal change (Braye and Preston-Shoot 2006), with the former’s tradition of philanthropic and humanitarian work and the latter’s modern emphasis on working with people rather than for them (Sewpaul 2005). However, these spheres operate under different professional standards and norms, mobilize different resources, and are shaped by different regulations and conditions vis-à-vis the state. The aim of this article is to explore how NPOs engaging in community work in peripheral and marginalized urban areas in Sweden manage the pressures originating from their complex environments of social work and civil society.

We approach this aim from the perspective of institutional theory, invoking the concept of legitimacy to conceptualize organizations’ relations to socially constructed systems of norms (Suchman 1995) and behavioural patterns, ensuring their functioning and survival (Puljek-Shank 2018). The question guiding our study is: How do NPOs construct their goals and present their structures and procedures to convey the legitimacy of their community work? By illuminating legitimation efforts, we contribute to an understanding of the significance of different environmental elements for community work initiatives as they are implemented, made sense of, and evaluated by NPOs.

Preconditions for non-profit community work in Sweden: welfare state, social work and civil society

Historically, the universal character of the welfare model in Sweden was ensured by broad service coverage, irrespective of citizens’ labour market performance, and benefits providing generous levels of income replacement. Funded by taxes and publicly managed, the Swedish system succeeded in attaining high levels of income equality, on par with other Nordic countries (Esping-Andersen 1990). Social work was legislatively highly regulated and carried out by elected municipal and county councils and their professional bureaucratic administration and staff (Elander and Montin 1990). In this context, the margins for charitable work were low (Lundström 1996) and voluntary/non-profit social work became predominantly self-centred/self-expressive. Little opportunity existed for community-oriented social work or for cooperation between public and voluntary organizations (Sjöberg and Turunen 2018).

Since the 1990s, conditions for social work have changed significantly, with the universal model for welfare provision transforming into a competition-oriented and less strictly regulated mixed welfare model (H. Johansson, Arvidson, and Johansson 2015). The neoliberal reorganization of welfare led to increased poverty, social exclusion and spatial segregation, which created greater need for interventions (Jönsson 2015). In addition, social work practice has been influenced by the neoliberal governing strategy of new public management (NPM) (S. Johansson 2005). NPM emphasized measurable and standardized performance and accountability as well as financial restrictions in social work organization (Harlow et al. 2012). Its focus on economic and managerial rationality found synergy with the knowledge management paradigm known as evidence-based practice (EBP), which requires the formalization and standardization of organizational principles into guidelines and manuals for ‘pre-packaged solutions’ (Ponnert and Svensson 2011). Together, NPM and EBP embody the political orientation towards the market in organizational processes and structures, also encouraging the ‘technification’ of social work practice through a positivist approach to knowledge and expertise (Herz and Lalander 2018).

Extending into non-profit/non-governmental welfare provision, these influences went hand in hand with the professionalization and marketization of civil society, and with an erosion of the institution of membership. In the last 40 years, as internally generated labour and funding decreased, civil society began generating resources from external sources (Papakostas 2011). In such situations, NPOs working with social service provision often struggle to raise funding and are forced to compete for procurement contracts and subsidies (Blomqvist and Winblad 2019) as well as beneficiaries and competent personnel (Herz 2016). Without consistent funding for their work, they become dependent on temporary financing, focusing on project-based activities and operating under conditions determined by various donors (Herz 2016).

In this context, community-focused interventions and provisions face the challenge of ‘de-collectivization’ (Sjöberg et al. 2018, 565), the shortage of collective approaches and strategies in social work and civil society. Nevertheless, local welfare delivery that relies on NPOs has developed a broad variety of forms of engagement and organizing, responding to the specific needs of local communities and increasing the participation of local citizens in the process of institutionalizing new structures of welfare provision. Community work can take many forms: the provision of family centres (familjecentral) for multi- and interprofessional cooperation for family wellbeing (Turunen 2018); community projects for social inclusion through artistic co-creation (Lundgren Stenbom and Turunen 2018); and rural activist groups that run their own facilities for childcare and residential care for the elderly, establish schools and housing associations (Forsberg 2018), or launch urban clinics where hired professionals offer psychotherapy to child victims of abuse and other trauma (Kings 2022). Funded by national or European grants, membership fees, corporate donations or revenues from entrepreneurial operations, these activities may remain local or develop into nation-wide movements.

Earlier research has described the variety of grassroots initiatives, projects, and organizations as they manifest the specificity of community work theory and practice. Conceiving of community work as the intersection of social work and civil society, we draw on the outlined body of research by exploring the challenges emerging from the necessity to adhere to individual-oriented professional standards of social work on one hand and, on the other hand, to fit into the mould of the project-based funding structure that dominates civil society.

Bringing together theoretical perspectives on community work and legitimacy

Theory-building in community work research has generated a variety of explanatory models that explore variation in community work across various institutional contexts and over time. Considering northern Europe specifically, Turunen (2004) located the ideological underpinnings of community work with actors representing the three main societal spheres – the public sector, the market and civil society – thus asserting that various models of community work can be carried out simultaneously in the same institutional setting. Turunen’s synthesis of three ideal-typical models of community work – social activism, social planning and local development – is especially relevant for our study.

Turunen explained practical differences between the three models based on how various groups’ social interests are perceived and what legitimate ways are available for them to realize those interests. Social activism encompasses community work, grounded in conflict-oriented and extra-parliamentary mobilizations for (radical) structural change; social planning, in contrast, aims for consensus-driven parliamentary cooperation for resource re-distribution; local development relies on political and market instruments for improving service infrastructure and empowering citizens for voluntary/associational engagement (Turunen 2004, 18). However, working with ideal types presents the challenge of capturing the normative heterogeneity of community work as a ‘borderland between public and private domains’ (Fraser 2005, 288).

The plurality and complexity of the meanings, beliefs and standards that belong to the practice of community work manifest the plurality of ideals, assumptions, values, and behavioural patterns specific to the state, the market and civil society, also known as institutional logics (Thornton and Ocasio 1999). The competing influences of the three societal domains on how community work organizations formulate aims and goals, select target groups and work methods, manage resources and evaluate performance are not isolated but concurrent (J. W. Meyer and Scott 1992). The potential incongruity of institutional logics may threaten an organization’s survival, as categorical institutional distinctions between the sectors do not allow for the reality of multiple organizational norms, forms and activities (Evers 2005) and may be a challenge to align (Pache and Santos 2010).

Here, we draw on institutional theory and suggest that NPOs manage the normative demands related to professional social work and the pressures related to their broader non-profit work and identity by creating a ‘roof’ of legitimacy (M. Meyer, Buber, and Aghamanoukjan 2013, 169) that ensures their survival and the attainment of their goals. Legitimacy can be conceptualized in different ways, addressing its role as an operational or symbolic resource, as a proof of rationality, effectiveness or compliance with worldviews and patterns of interpretation (M. Meyer, Buber, and Aghamanoukjan 2013). For the environment to confer legitimacy, organizations need to demonstrate that their ‘goals and/or outputs [are] valid, necessary, and worthwhile’ and that their performance in pursuit of those goals is effective (Hannigan and Kueneman 1977, 126).

In his seminal work, Suchman (1995) drew an important distinction between different foci of legitimation, namely, an organization’s conforming to the norms of legitimacy and to the norms of operating in a legitimate manner. The author distinguished between three broad types of legitimacy based on a generalized perception of what is desirable, proper and appropriate within three dimensions of organizational behaviour. Thus, pragmatic legitimacy can be conferred when an organization’s stakeholders receive some benefit or influence, moral legitimacy rests on perceived conformity to social values, and cognitive legitimacy is claimed when an organization and its activities are perceived as meaningful in the context of what they strive to achieve.

Following Suchman’s multidimensional operationalization of legitimacy we explore how different institutional logics enter organizations’ legitimacy management process through different operational dynamics. We also recognize that organizations facing conflicting, inconsistent norms can maintain legitimacy by emphasizing practices that conform to accepted social norms while masking those that are more controversial (Elsbach and Sutton 1992). Because legitimacy is demonstrated through accounts that address different stakeholders, including donors/funders, members/employees, users/beneficiaries, and peers, we approach the study of legitimacy construction by examining the accounts NPOs give to various audiences.

Data and method

In the Nordic countries, the academic literature has heralded the rebirth of community work as ‘the small-scale, local, bottom-up approaches to contemporary societal challenges’ (Sudmann and Breivik 2018, 407). However, for many organizations, community work initiatives are usually part of a broad repertoire also including such activities as advocacy, service provision, and opinion building, which makes it difficult to estimate the scope of community work and to use it to inform a probability-based sampling procedure. Following a case study tradition, now well established in this field of research (i.e. Fryk and Stenberg 2018; Krüger 2018; Lundgren Stenbom and Turunen 2018; Turunen 2018), we combined convenience-based with purposeful sampling focusing on Stockholm metropolitan area, specifically the boroughs of Rinkeby-Kista, Skärholmen, Spånga-Tensta, and Farsta. These boroughs have been shown to represent the geographical segregation in Sweden, generated by unequally developed public infrastructure and enhanced by liberalization of the housing market and bifurcation of the labour market (Sandberg 2023).

Our sampling strategy aimed at identifying typical organizations meeting the preconditions for community work identified above while also achieving variation in type of community work (Seawright and Gerring 2008) (see Table 1). Both organizations on which we chose to focus established themselves as prominent advocacy and service providers over the course of the twentieth century and are the only organizations of that scope of operation that in recent years launched locality-based projects in the above-mentioned boroughs in Stockholm. They also exemplify one of the significant current trends in the development of civil society in that they are run by professionals for the benefit of an interest group external to the organization itself. The first organization operates as part of an association of location-based autonomous organizations working with a group of beneficiaries broadly defined as those in need of welfare support (autonomous organization, henceforth AO¹). It provides a broad range of social services, including counselling and leisure activities, labour market training and other types of education, and direct economic support and housing, and it relies on professional paid staff and volunteers – approximately 500 and 350 individuals respectively, according to the latest annual report from 2021. The second organization is a national section of a global membership-based movement working with a specific target group (national section, henceforth NS). In 2021, it had approximately 60,000 members organized into local chapters and about 400 paid staff professionals. In Sweden, NS’s core activities focus on expert knowledge production, advocacy, and public opinion building as well as direct interventions and support to the target group.

Table 1. Sample organizations.

	Autonomous organization	National section of a global organization
Staff
professional/paid	yes	yes
other	volunteers	members
Definition of the target group	broad	specific
Community work projects	for the target group	with the target group
Community work funding	donations	contract-based cooperation with private enterprises

Both organizations run community work initiatives for children and youth. AO organizes facilities for children, adolescents and families exposed to risk and poverty, providing therapy, education, economic advice and support. Summer camps, playgroups for small children, and structured and unstructured extracurricular activities for older children are also arranged. NS provides venues and infrastructure for activities developed by or in consultation with the target groups; the character of the activities varies but is generally aligned with the organization’s overall priority of education and empowerment. AO funds its initiative exclusively by means of donations, which are gathered via partnership with the Swedish Donation Control (Svensk Insamlingskontroll), an NPO that aids and provides oversight in soliciting donations from individuals (direct transfers or bequests) and organizations.² The majority³ of NS’s funding for community work initiatives, on the other hand, is raised through partnerships with business enterprises, including such companies as a global professional services provider, a furniture manufacturer and a state-owned pharmaceuticals retailer.

As the research question posited in our study connects organizational legitimation strategies to organizational environment, the case study approach allowed us to take contextual conditions into account and to combine different materials accumulated during the data collection period (Eisenhardt and Graebner 2007).

Data collection took place from the autumn of 2018 through the spring of 2022 and was based on iterative gathering of promotional/fundraising materials and official reports via organizations’ websites (2018–2022, in total, 845 pages for NS and 594 pages for AO), observations at public events (2018–2019) and participatory observations within broader cooperation between Södertörn University and NS⁴ (2020–2021), as well as informal communications and in-depth semi-structured interviews with both organizations representatives, three project managers and four financial officers (2018–2021). While all these sources informed the analytical process, in this article we include only openly available documents and the seven interviews, because the interview format allowed us to provide the participants with detailed information on the purpose of the study to receive their explicit consent to participate. The interviews lasted on average 1.5 hours; they were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. No personal information was divulged during the interviews, and all identifiable information about the interviewees and organizations was de-identified. Confidentiality and anonymity in the handling of data were guaranteed in accordance with current EU data protection legislation.

To learn about the legitimacy strategies employed by organizations, we focused on how they justify their ‘views to others’ (Tetlock 1983, 74). The data were explored through a within-case analysis and an across-case synthesis, describing cases along several dimensions (Gerring 2004) of implementation of community work initiatives including stakeholders, target groups, funding sources, activities, communication, partnership, and competition as well as local community needs and opportunities. After the initial examination of all materials, open coding allowed for content reduction while thematic organizing connected empirically derived coding categories to theoretical concepts (Forman and Damschroder 2008; Hsieh and Shannon 2005). In order to avoid the challenge of ensuring intercoder reliability, the first author was solely responsible for conducting the coding; the second author reviewed the results, compared them across the data, and assessed the quality of categorization.

Findings

Being a legitimate community work organiser

In the most general sense, when an NPO with a long, well-established history of advocacy and political representation initiates social service provision and introduces community work into its repertoire of activities, it must be able to claim legitimacy. The discursive managing of meanings that aims to generate perceived legitimacy rests in part on the organization’s ability to represent itself as plausible and acceptable. One way of doing this is to refer to the organization’s records of knowledge and experience, which are outputs of previous legitimation efforts. Both AO and NS claim not only experience but also uniqueness of expertise accumulated over time, especially in comparison to public/municipal agencies operating in the same field. One of the interviewees recognizes that their organization’s uniqueness is rooted in fulfilling individual needs rather than adhering to the standards of public welfare provision:

Of course, we work with community; however, here we build our knowledge from the individual perspective, and not from the [perspective] of welfare services supply […] Even people living in [the most extreme deprivation] have a right to quite a few things. (AO interview)⁵

The conformity to individually oriented standards imposed by the EBP rationale (McNeece and Thyer 2004) is supported by confidence generated over years of cooperation with public organizations. ‘Confidence’ and ‘trust’ in the organization’s brand is specifically used as a marker of successful engagement with various stakeholders. Although a distinction can be made between trust and legitimacy as analytical categories (Kaina 2008), the pursuit of trust is linked with legitimacy through accountability for performance (Suchman 1995). Here, it is used as an asset acquired through previous activities and now available to garner support for community work. As some community work engagements are initiated by public actors, NPOs’ representatives emphasize that their involvement in such activities becomes essentially automatic:

They turn to us because they were satisfied with our previous cooperation. Just because of that – we have instilled confidence then, and they know that we know how to do a budget the way they want it, and [we know] how to communicate with them. (AO interview)

Where local communities are concerned, expanding an organization’s activities beyond the limited scope of project-based initiatives, which are common among both municipal and non-profit social service providers (Herz 2016), is seen as a factor generating trust among its members: ‘We are looking forward to demonstrating that [the local development work] is permanent, we are here for the long haul’ (AO Annual Report, 2018, p. 10). AO is constructing itself as an organization that is competent to deal with a specific situation and that has cultivated long-lasting relationships with other actors in the field that recognize its conformity with general standards of operation.

Competency accumulated through continuous presence and commitment to community development translates into ‘the right kind of’ professionalism, one which cannot be described in standards of professional social work and does not rely on formal education or training. Rather, it rests on an organization’s ability to incorporate first-hand experiences of marginalization, which can enable individually oriented interventions. For NS, this is manifested in ‘hiring differently’, employing individuals with experience from the local (or a similar) community who have been touched by economic hardship. Unlike traditional social work providers, the NPOs in our study construct themselves as representatives (förtroendevalda) of their target groups that share an emotional bond; this is antithetical to the ‘bureaucratic professional distancing’ that public welfare epitomizes. The respondents repeatedly asserted that any potential bureaucratization associated with the status of a well-established large organization is compensated by internal democratic processes that align its activities with the interests of the target groups.

While different in many respects, AO and NS project a similar identity: one of qualified actors whose experience has been confirmed by the public authorities primarily responsible for welfare provision. The two organizations also systematically reaffirm their belonging to civil society, although they underscore different aspects of what that belonging means. In their official accounts they invariably identify as a volunteer-driven organization (AO) and a membership-based social movement (NS). Following the tradition of the people’s movement (Lundström and Wijkström 2012), both AO and NS emphasize that they offer constituents – members, employees, volunteers and beneficiaries – influence over their activities. Both grapple with the need to formulate how they also conform with a strong expectation to represent their constituents.

Earlier research has highlighted that civil society organizations in Sweden traditionally operated as political actors, challenging hegemonic societal debates and driving special interest policies (Wijkström and Lundström 2002). Community work carried out by the organizations often encompasses service provision, including welfare services, sports and leisure activities, education and training. In academic as well as everyday discourse, service provision is often juxtaposed with NPOs’ advocacy role (Clemens 2006). AO reclaims the connection with the traditional norms of the people’s movement by emphasizing that service is a prerequisite for their critical policy work:

It would have been so much easier for us if the things worked better at [public] youth centres, if there were […] labour market interventions that saw a person, and not only the employment position they are supposed to get […] then we wouldn’t need to focus on services. If school were doing well, if the interventions that exist did not discriminate, did not undermine children’s development, then we could focus on what we do best – work with mobilisation, empowerment and so on. (AO interview)

The ‘complementary’ role is emphasized in NS’s statement that the aim of service delivery is not to take over for the state but to influence the development of welfare services by making sure they are available to those who are most vulnerable and marginalized (NS Annual Report 2017, p. 41).

NS also identifies with another aspect of civil society as an institutional field, namely engagement with and support for all forms of civic organizing, including less well-established organizations as well as formal and informal local initiatives. Recognition of common identity entails an understanding of necessary differences between actors with different histories and scopes, which does not challenge their common idea-based (ideell) mission; as one of the NS informants reflected, it is the responsivity of well-established organizations, indeed of the civil society as a whole, to support small local initiatives.

In sum, the NPOs in our study seek legitimacy by forming the image of the ‘right’ organization to carry out community work based on appeals for recognition on cognitive, pragmatic and moral grounds (Suchman 1995). Broad expertise and experience, especially in developing activities that incorporate an individual-focused perspective, do not explicitly invoke EBP but nevertheless articulate those EBP standards that have established themselves in public and professional discourse. The offer of representation and influence in exchange for constituents’ trust and confidence is presented as a response to their needs. Finally, associating themselves with other civil society organizations and assuming the role of catalyst for local social mobilization implies conformity with a set of norms that give legitimacy to civil society as a whole. The following section demonstrates how different understandings of the grounds for conferring legitimacy on community work efforts can be traced to what those efforts entail.

Doing legitimate community work

In legitimation management, presenting an organization as being of the ‘right’ type intertwines with efforts to demonstrate that its actions are meaningful, trustworthy and aligned with its mission. In accounts of their activities, organizations in our study emerge as distinct examples of two of the above-mentioned ideal-typical models of community work: local development and social mobilisation (Turunen 2004). Although the general aim of all community work is to activate inactive citizens through regulated forms of participation (Shaw and Martin 2000), the level and agency of regulation may vary substantially.

An approach oriented towards local development is crafted as an organization’s response to the perceived needs of potential beneficiaries. AO reports that the rationale for their activities grew out of a survey contracted by the local municipality (Annual Report 2018, p. 10). The results were translated into a series of everyday care, leisure and consulting services for children, adolescents and families aimed at ‘seeing, providing relief and initiating change’. The targeted geographic area has a significant population with an immigrant background, and this informs the organization’s understanding of change as the integration of beneficiaries into society. The focus of local development is thus on building relationships within a specific community while at the same time providing knowledge about the broader society, including alternative public services and opportunities for participation.

As an advocacy organization, AO’s mission, and civil society’s role in welfare governance in general (Trägårdh 2007), is to challenge state authorities’ legitimacy or award it to those same actors. AO articulates its mission in relation to society as ‘highlighting social problems and challenging politicians to act and change what is not working’ (Annual Report 2019, p. 32). However, as gatekeepers to a significant pool of resources (Elander and Montin 1990), municipal authorities also have a mandate to confer legitimacy on the recipients that depend on external funding, particularly on state procurement and other programmes. A noteworthy duality emerges when AO addresses this mutual dependence. On one hand, AO draws legitimacy through contrasting itself with public service providers, asserting that it runs higher reputational and financial risks in case of failure:

If we fail with our [project] it means much more for losing prestige than it would for a municipal authority, which can be good in a way; it keeps us on our toes. (AO interview)

On the other hand, the organization constructs fundraising efforts as a strategic part of their mission rather than as a reaction to a funding opportunity. Discussing the rationale for applying to state funding programmes the AO representative further reflected:

We are talking about culture here, what kind of signals we are sending when we are responding to every call for applications that the state announces. Even when we do apply for funding, how do we present it? Do we [do it out of] desperation [for money …] or do we have project ideas that came from the people, and we say ‘Well, this call for applications will be a good fit for this specific idea’? [In the latter case] we show that we have done our job beforehand and know what needs to be done.

The organization acknowledges its dependence on external resources and the institutional pressures that accompany them but aims to demonstrate a strategic approach to selecting funding opportunities and to managing those pressures (Oliver 1991). This is achieved by using donations to fund local development initiatives and then generating new projects rooted in community-based knowledge that can be funded through state-run programmes, thus separating community work from state funding.

Similarly, for NS, construction of the role and meaning of external resources for the organizational mission is an important part of legitimacy management. The ability to control resources is related to the ability to recruit respected entities from its environment not only as funding sources but as contributors to the mission. As mentioned above, the organization funds community work through partnerships with business enterprises. In their annual reports and other public documents, they emphasize that partner companies are expected to live up to the symbolic capital they gain via their association with NS by supporting the target group in their own work. Partners’ representatives are expected to be directly engaged in the implementation of projects/programmes that they support. For instance, in 2019, a pharmaceutical company provided their retail facilities for a broad fundraising campaign, and created and ran several health-themed workshops with families in targeted geographical areas (Annual Report 2019). This type of engagement is presented as a condition of cooperation. As one of the informants explained:

We started talking [to partners], Once a year you send us a million crowns, and we send you reports about happy [target group] and you get to use our logo, and we get to include [the cooperation] in our sustainability report […] but really, how do you contribute [to the mission]? (NS interview)

In addition to recruiting donors for its activities, NS frames beneficiaries’ involvement as a prerequisite for those activities, providing a proper response to inequalities and social exclusion. Community members are offered venues and resources to organize into interest groups – often called forums, schools or simply meeting places – where they discuss everyday issues such as parenthood and stress, family economy and schooling, citizenship and democracy, neighbourhood safety and feminism. Such activities are intended to increase presence in public spaces, provide outlets for creativity, and build knowledge and skills for civic participation, thus framing NS’s community work as a bottom-up social mobilization process. The target group’s contribution to developing interventions is presented as a means of creating local ‘ecosystems’ (Annual Report 2017, p. 41) that involve different stakeholders and bind communities together ‘so they can experience that they can work on social change themselves’ (NS interview).

Striving for legitimacy, both organizations make substantial efforts to account for not only the inputs but also the outputs and outcomes of their activities. In the structure of annual reports, information about community work is not distinguished from other types of activities when it comes to finances, organizational structure, contribution to sustainable development, communication or risk analysis. It is included in quantitative indicators measuring attendance at implemented events and is covered in more detail in narrative descriptions of activities and cooperations with stakeholders. The difficulties of quantifying the immediate and long-term effects of their work echo throughout interviews with representatives of both organizations. Even financial officers who spoke of their substantial competence in dealing with requirements of quantifiable accounting as a prerequisite of being a legitimate community work organization did not consider such reporting to be a reliable way of evaluating such work. While complying with the reporting requirements imposed by donors, the AO representative stated that the very concept of effect measurement is foreign to community work:

In some way I understand what it means and can agree [with the demands of effect measurement from donors]; at the same time, I think it is exaggerated […] we fill in all those numbers without really knowing why and if they will be used for anything. […] I am convinced that during these three years we have really changed people’s lives, but we will need at least 10 years to – I don’t even want to use this word – to ensure the effects of [this work]. (AO interview)

For NS, involving partner enterprises and beneficiaries in community work implementation allows for engaging them in negotiations about, and in the development of, an original effect-measurement approach. In addition to immediate output of specific activities (attendance, satisfaction), it aims to capture participants’ long-term development and changes in local environment (Annual Report 2018, p. 69). Through dialogue and debate about goals, indicators and survey instruments, donors and beneficiaries become recipients of a ‘sideways’ instead of ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ accountability, respectively (Taylor and Warburton 2003, 325). In this way, NS can legitimize the dismissal of quantitative indicators of perceived qualitative transformation at the individual and community levels.

According to our findings, two types of legitimation strategies emerge as the organizations claim legitimacy for their actions. On a pragmatic level, both organizations present themselves as able to respond to the needs of their target groups and recruit various stakeholders, many of whom confer legitimacy, into the process of implementation of social services. Thus, they demonstrate the ability to influence stakeholders as well as to offer the opportunity to exert influence. On a cognitive level, the organizations show conformity to the standards of quantitative result- and effect-measurement procedures while seeking stakeholders’ understanding and cooperation in the development of new approaches to accountability. Thus, the ‘right’ community work activities are presented as grounded in expert knowledge and the participation of beneficiaries that can be approached using standard NPM logic; however, they should be evaluated on a long-term basis accounting for individual, local and societal effects.

Discussion and conclusion

This article aimed to explore how NPOs engaging in community work in peripheral and marginalized urban areas in Sweden manage the pressures originating from their complex environments of social work and civil society. Such navigation entails interactions with various stakeholders with the aim to impart meaning to their activities and to foster credibility. For analytical purposes we distinguished between legitimation strategies related to organizational essence and those related to actions. Here, we demonstrate that these elements reinforce each other (see Table 2).

Table 2. Legitimation strategies.

	Essence (being)	Actions (doing)
Moral	Consequential through civic mobilization
Cognitive	Taken for granted due to expertise	Comprehended through evaluation
Pragmatic	Exchange of trust and expertise	Mutual influence through representation

Both organizations claim moral legitimacy through belonging to the tradition of the Swedish people’s movement, interpreting community work as a necessary extension of advocacy: delivering social critique and calling for social change requires helping to make this change a reality. However, it is in this dimension of the legitimation process that the ideal-typical differences between expressions of ‘progressive communitarianism’ and those of ‘radical communitarianism’ (Fraser 2005) appear; these represent understandings of change as incremental reforms or as a transformation of power structures and relations, respectively. Claims of cognitive legitimacy rest on balancing self-representation as an a priori meaningful actor and doing a posteriori meaningful work. However, the managerialist concerns embedded in standardized accountability procedures (Herz and Lalander 2018) are problematized as leaving no room for strategic planning for social change or prevention of social problems.

Finally, relationships with stakeholders, including direct beneficiaries and donors, are at the core of pragmatic claims for legitimacy. Experiences outside of community work are invoked as sources of trust and confidence bestowed as a result of NPOs’ demonstrating the ability to both represent beneficiaries’ interests and deliver on public contracts and other externally funded projects. Obtaining legitimacy in this dimension of organizational operation is important for the purpose of mobilizing resources for the future (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978) from the same and other sources. In addition to conformity, some measure of control is also demonstrated when the NPOs strategically select donors (Oliver 1991) and attempt to convert them from recipients of hierarchical accountability into co-creators of horizontal accounts of activities.

The findings demonstrate the merits of examining legitimation to deepen our understanding of how NPOs engage with the norms of the complex institutional spheres of civil society and professional social work (cf. Gates 2014). The analysis demonstrated that in their legitimation efforts the NPOs handle different pressures by invoking different organizational dynamics (Suchman 1995). The processes that characterize civil society and social work intertwine, making it difficult to distinguish their specific influences. However, evidence that the organizations define target groups as clients (AO), maintain involvement in professional practice (AO and NS), perceive social problems through an individual lens (AO) and focus on efficiency (AO and NS) reflects the influences of NPM, EBP and resource dependency in community work; these multiple influences impact both organizations’ processes in a way similar to their linked impacts on both social work practice and civil society (Salamon and Toepler 2015).

Our findings have also revealed variations in organizational legitimation practices related to differences in overall approaches to community work. Despite the limitations of the convenience-based purposeful sampling, we can suggest that observed differences between local development and social mobilisation can be related to the consensus-oriented and conflict-oriented ideological underpinnings of community work (Turunen 2004). In a consensus-oriented mode, community work is approached as a series of interventions for the target groups through mediated representation, a selective approach to sources of public funding and conformity to the individualisation of solutions to socio-economic segregation. An intervention begun from the conflict-oriented perspective is introduced with the involvement of private enterprises and a structural conceptualization of social problems.

The contribution of the institutional theory to community work research is in allowing us to demonstrate how a common understanding of community work emerges through the outlined legitimation claims: community work introduces and sustains collective practices for mutual support, knowledge and identity sharing, bringing people living in geographical proximity together into ‘a localized social system binding social groups and institutions’ (Pradeep and Sathyamurti 2017, 59). This aligns with the assertion that to practice professional social work is to be guided by ‘concerns about the common life of a community’ (Bisman 2004, 117). However, the emphasis on ‘alternative’ professionalism amounts to what Turunen (2004, 17–18) called ‘anti-professional’ social work and, in the sphere of welfare provision, raises the issue of distancing non-profit collective action from statutory social work (cf. Hardwick and Worsley 2007). While the external pressures imposed by social work and civil society overlap, we suggest that further analysis could focus on whether non-profit community work challenges and is challenged by standards and norms of professional social work. The consequences of these challenges for community-based and community-oriented social work practice also merit closer examination.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Part of the data collection (interviews) by the second author was funded by Vetenskapsrådet, grant 2014-1557.

Notes

1. Anonymisation was requested by the interviewees. In addition, using labels allows focusing on the structural and procedural aspects of organizations rather than the specificity of their work and position in the civil society.

2. According to the 2019 annual report, approximately 70% of donation revenues come from individuals and 11% from business enterprises.

3. To be more precise, the 2017 annual report asserted that 88% of funding for NS’s community work efforts came from this source, while 12% came from direct private donations (also via the Swedish Donation Control).

4. The purpose of the meetings was to develop case studies for use in a master’s level course during fall 2020 and fall 2021.

5. All quotations were translated from Swedish by the first author.