Professionalisation experiences of a ‘business-minded’ HIV targeted intervention NGO in India: an organisational ethnography

Shukla, Anuprita and Cornish, Flora ORCID: 0000-0002-3404-9385 (2024) Professionalisation experiences of a ‘business-minded’ HIV targeted intervention NGO in India: an organisational ethnography. Global Public Health, 19 (1). ISSN 1744-1692

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Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on the professionalisation of NGOs in the context of the rise of ‘business-minded’ approaches whereby donors establish a market environment in which NGOs compete for funding by demonstrating their achievement of targets and implementing globally recognised management models. Theoretically, we use the distinction between ‘economies of performance’ and ‘ecologies of practice’ to explore how NGOs simultaneously ‘perform’ themselves publicly as meeting expected professional standards while simultaneously producing themselves practically through ‘unprofessional’ means. Limited global health and development literature addresses professionalisation as an empirical practice and experience. We report on an ethnography of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded, HIV-targeted intervention NGO in western India, drawing on six months of participant observation and 17 interviews with NGO workers. The organisation meets ‘business-minded’ success criteria but does so through informal, personal, hierarchical arrangements at odds with the professionalisation model. Frontline workers are demotivated by their professionalisation experience, are suspicious of the performance of success, and find ways of achieving their vocation despite a system which they feel does not recognise the value of human relationships. Showing that ‘business-minded’ approaches do not necessarily rule out informal, potentially ‘corrupt’ ways of working, we argue against the ‘professional-unprofessional’ binary.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Methodology
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Date Deposited:	04 Sep 2024 10:06
Last Modified:	23 Sep 2024 16:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/125340

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