What's in a name?

What's behind the endless renaming of our sector? Especially when most of it is made up of community groups. It may sound siolly but why aren;t community groups just called well, community groups?

A few years back it was the Voluntary and Community Sector - and most of the money was in the hands of the voluntary sector (hence prestige and power, hats off to those who used it wisely)

Then New Labour used the term 'third sector' imported via the USA and once again someone else gave us a makeover with a view to getting the state to do less and others a whole lot more re the running of services (fine for those who want to do that but what happens to those for whom it is not appropriate or desireable?)

Longside this you had the rise and rise of social enterprise, (Leadbetter 1996) not that co-ops and mutualism were novel ideas but it comes to something when Independent Tory Philip Blond feels able to say that all groups should be social enterprises (quoted from SEC AGM 2010) so do the math, the current 62,000 SE's only need to grow 18-20 times more to takeover the other 950,000 third sector bodies

Then not so long ago NCVO switched to talking about civil soceity organisaitons which includes trade unions, public schools and mostly it means unassociated community groups but the almanac can't get an accurate description of how many of these there are - could be 600,000, but is certainly more like 1 million (Elsdon 1999)

So for now it looks like civil soceity will win out because whereas third sector was code for 'contract' civil soceity is code for there's no money and you're on your own - we'll have a new dept for civil society in the cabinet office by the end of this summer

However this distance between the many and the few continues - the community sector went inot recession years ago according to the OTS 3rd sector review, because by 2007 it was clear small and medium sized charities had actually got smaller at a time when the 3rd sector was growing by 25%

For a sector that prides itself on fairness what name should we give to that?