Entering the lists: what can we learn about the voluntary sector in England from listings produced by local infrastructure bodies?

In England, several organisations, generically known as ‘infrastructure’ bodies, provide advice and technical support to the voluntary and community sector. They typically maintain listings of their members and of other contacts both within the voluntary sector and beyond. This article presents an analysis of what can be learned from such listings. In particular, there is a discussion of the characteristics of the organisations (including unregulated third sector organisations) that appear on these listings, of variations between infrastructure bodies in the kind of information they capture and of differences between the kinds of regulated third sector organisations that appear on the listings and the ones that do not. The article discusses the implications of these findings for research that uses the listings as source material to investigate the activities of the infrastructure bodies or the characteristics of the local voluntary and community sector they serve.