Collection: Voluntary Sector Review Editors’ Choice
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Editors' Choice Collection Voluntary Sector Review
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This discussion paper considers reasons for a decline in formal volunteering in the UK, which include: a trend away from collective to individual social activity, an increase in inequality, a reduction in available time, and a crowding out of social values by market values. It then considers if this decline could be reversed.
This study explores how formal versus informal volunteering is related to immigrants’ identities in the US. We analyse 24 semi-structured interviews to investigate the identity-related influences of immigrant volunteering within and outside nonprofits’ auspices. We base our data analysis on the theoretical framework of individual mobility and a conceptual framework consisting of social identity theory and role identity theory. While past research has addressed how voluntary work affects immigrants’ social identity, we offer a comparative outlook by investigating how the associations differ for formal versus informal volunteering. Our findings show that immigrants who volunteer formally apply their immigrant identity to emphasise the integrative qualities of their volunteer role in US society, and that immigrants who volunteer informally apply their volunteer role towards the preservation of their immigrant identity.
Research on evidence-based volunteer management, especially regarding episodic volunteering, is limited. Thus, we examine the influence of individual traits of event volunteers and the management practices employed by non-profit organisations on their likelihood to engage in future events. First, we revisit the value of episodic volunteering within the framework of regenerative volunteer management. We then compare factors affecting the inclination of event volunteers to re-volunteer for the same or for a different organisation based on a path analysis of 10,148 survey responses from event volunteers in 19 countries. Previous episodic volunteer experience, responsiveness, appreciation from supervisors and satisfaction with the event experience increase the probability that event volunteers will re-volunteer for both the same and different organisations. Moreover, assistance, service quality and comfort contribute indirectly by enhancing satisfaction with the volunteer experience. Effective management of event volunteering replenishes a valuable volunteer resource for both event organisers and other non-profit organisations.
Corporate volunteering, despite its benefits for the enterprises, supported people, and the volunteers themselves, is still not popular in Polish medium-sized and large companies. In this paper, we explore how people with/without experience in corporate volunteering perceive circumstances that would encourage them to join this activity, and the benefits of it to employers, beneficiaries, and themselves. Our insight may help to plan corporate volunteering programmes, especially for employers and nonprofit organisations collaborating with enterprises.
Volunteering is an essential resource for European countries and can be an opportunity for social participation. Yet it can also lead to exploitation. Social scientific narratives on this object are important because of the role that scholars can play in the development and implementation of public policies. Drawing on the observation that older people provide a significant portion of volunteer work, this article examines to what extent and how the social scientific literature about older volunteers questions the risk of exploitation that is inherent to any form of voluntary engagement. We find that these discourses predominantly describe volunteering as a means to improve older people’s lives and as a needed contribution. Risks of exploitation are rarely addressed. To help avoid ageism in social sciences and in volunteering policies and programmes, we suggest that scholars should give more awareness to the volunteering-exploitation nexus in their studies of older volunteers.
China, a country with a long history of government-coerced labour among commoners, has seen a striking rise of volunteering in the past three decades. At the same time, civil society in China has been rigorously constrained by the authoritarian state. This makes dubious the usually supposed linkage between volunteering and civil society development. Analysing a nationwide dataset, this study examines Chinese citizens’ volunteer participation from the civil and political engagement perspective. It finds that individuals’ engagement with the state, neighbourhood, and civil society all helped predict their decision to volunteer, but only a few factors concerning engagement in the neighbourhood and civil society were positively associated with volunteer hours when they decided to volunteer. The article concludes with discussion on the rise of volunteerism in contemporary China and its implication for civil society development.