Toward the plural sector: beyond the dichotomy between State and Market. Evidences from the Italian context.

From an historical point of view we live on the edge of a relevant decline in the public sector reputation and capability to face effectively the more several and complex primary needs of people, a challenge that NPOs seem to... [ view full abstract ]

From an historical point of view we live on the edge of a relevant decline in the public sector reputation and capability to face effectively the more several and complex primary needs of people, a challenge that NPOs seem to better answer to thanks to, among the others, their proximity with people and their dissemination over the territory, with respect to the rigidity of PA. Ever since the seminal study by Solomon & Anheier (1996), the drivers behind the rise in dimension and relevance of the third sector have been analyzed from different standpoints: with specific reference to the theories originally proposed in the 1996 piece, one of them is based on Trust as a main driver, since “non-distribution constraints make NPOs more trustworthy under conditions of information asymmetry, which makes monitoring expensive and profiteering likely”.
It is now relevant to analyse NPOs not only as substitutes or complements to “classical” economic sectors such as Government, but also the for profit sector (FPOs). In the past we had NPOs just because they were outside from both public (PA) and private (FPOs) sector, they were simply a “third” kind of organisations. Henry Mintzberg, in his recent works, argues that now, in order to “rebalance society” and gather the complex challenges of our time, we need “plural” organisations able to be both public and market, but in a new and different way with respect the past century. From the public side, they stimulate collaborative value generation (from coproduction to impact measurement) rather than formal procedures; from the market side, they encourage to produce under triple bottom line constraint and with an open approach where users and stakeholders find place in the centre of the value chain. That is why a plural sector emerges as the best pattern, an urgent next evolutionary stage, able to handle nowadays complexity.
In this paper we enquiry to what extent and in which term an effective collaboration is widespread in the Italian context and whether this affects the governance of processes concerning PA, NPOs and FPOs. To pursue these research objectives and build a general scenario, we employ recent data produced by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) – specifically, the Nationwide Census of Industry and Services carried out in 2011 and published in July 2013. We intersect this secondary data with a nationwide survey of Italian NPOs conducted in 2013, specifically designed in order to gain deeper understanding of the revenue structures, features of collaborative relation and quality of these relationships– that is, highly contingent aspects at the micro-level which the ISTAT census does not cover.
Our results highlight significant differences in:
- the NPOs income composition
- a qualitative analysis of the PA-NPOs relation
- connotative elements of plural organisations
Based on this initial evidence, we propose reflections and indications for future research in the discussion section.