Organisational Hybridity in a Post-Corporatist Welfare Mix: The Case of the Third Sector in Belgium

Although mixed public–private provisions of welfare have always been a typical characteristic of continental welfare states, recent international scholarship has pointed to a historically new process of institutional hybridisation, with a more systematic intermingling of rationalities of the state, market and third sector within one and the same organisation. In this article, we address two limitations in the current knowledge: first, the absence of an indicator-model for exploring organisational hybridity empirically; second, the lack of sensitivity to cross-national variation depending on the welfare regime. We develop a multi-dimensional analytical framework that takes regime differences into account and empirically assess organisational hybridity in a (post-)corporatist welfare regime. Based on a survey of 255 third-sector organisations (TSOs) in Flanders (Belgium) and using latent class analysis, we find three clusters of TSOs that reflect different types of organisational hybridity. Contextualising our results further shows that the positioning of TSOs in our cluster model to a large extent results from the institutional context in which TSOs operate.

Schweden: Vom „Dritten Weg“ der achtziger Jahre zur „globalisierten Sozialdemokratie“ des 21. Jahrhunderts?

There was an impact of neoliberalism on the Swedish model over the past twenty years. Its main political driving force was the social democratic party. It is argued that neoliberalism had a major impact first on the level of discourse and then, from 1990 onwards, on the policy level as well. As a result, the gap between the Swedish model and continental welfare states is found to be narrowing, the universalism of the model itself being undermined as those who can afford to do so more and more frequently choose to pay for better services on the market while others are relegated to means-tested social assistance and social services increasingly starved of resources.