bloghead ponders doing away with the "third sector"

No third sector. 

The main speaker at the annual conference of the Association of Charitable Foundations is Nick Hurd, MP for Hillingdon and Shadow Minister for the Third Sector. He is eager to outline his priorities should he “get the call on that bright new dawn”.
 
Priority Number One, it would seem, would be to do away with the third sector.
 
Or rather, the ‘third’ ‘sector’. Nick’s no fan of either word. Third = third rate,” a far cry from the truth”. Sector = homogeneity, rather than diversity and difference.
 
Fair enough. IVAR itself has, of late, returned to using ‘voluntary sector’, albeit with caveats, get-out clauses and special dispensations. The slippery nature of the terminology available allows, even demands, free movement between descriptions. Is the answer, however, another rebranding of the sector, or ‘sector’?
 
In a recent essay on this very topic, Framing the Field: Civil Society and Related Concepts (Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 4, 684-700), Marti Muukkonen suggests that we might benefit from shifting our attention from a preoccupation with categorisation to a more pluralist (Wiitgensteinian) idea of organisations having ‘family resemblances’: “Some of them have characteristics similar to the market (e.g. co-operative banks) some, in turn are closer to public organisations (e.g. private road co-operatives), some act like religions (missionary societies), some are like families (fraternities) and some are just informal networks”

It’s not impossible that, this time next year, there will be a new Office for Civil Society. Much will be written about the term used, much too inferred from the choice. But once the dust of change has settled, whoever forms the next government might think less about launches and logos for their new label and more about what lies beneath. That is, the extent to which organisations in this realm are able to understand and articulate their identity and mission; and the extent to which the state, in turn, can accept and enable that mission to be realised.