Civic engagement is the part of the gift economy that struggles with the often contradictory nature of giving relationships, many of which have formalised over time and become steeped in tradition. When does the promotion of giving spill over into forcing someone to give? And anyway, how much sense does it make to force someone to give?

Civic engagement lives on the edge of the gift economy in a starker way than the other activities. Free will is, after all, a knotty problem that philosophers have taken on down the ages. Civic engagement wrestles with the not insignificant question, posed originally by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 treatise “The Social Contract“: can you be forced to be free?

whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence

A discussion of the finer points of Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ are way beyond the scope of this post, however it points to the issue at the heart of civic engagement and volunteering: the relationship between citizen and state.

In 2006, Linda Graff led on the writing for Volunteer Canada of a discussion paper ‘Volunteering and Mandatory Community Service: Choice – Incentive – Coercion – Obligation‘.

Mandatory community service is mandatory unpaid (or paid less than the prevailing wage) work undertaken in the community, usually to the benefit the community other than those performing the service.

The Volunteer Canada paper tackles the confusion and blurring of notions of volunteering and community service. It argues that community service that involves effective coercion, through significant penalties or compelling incentives, warps any sense of acting freely. Freedom, so the argument goes, is a prerequisite to being able to volunteer. As a result freedom becomes the marker separating volunteering from community service.

Susan Ellis and Steve McCurley rightly (as it’s turned out) observed in 2002 that the oxymoron of the ‘mandated volunteer’ would steadily increase as governmental policy across different countries looked more to compulsory community service programmes.

What’s interesting is the report highlights a great number of models of community service, all come back to the relationship between citizen and state. In most of the models cited, it’s the state that is curtailing the liberty of its citizens giving activities by enforcing obligations, constituting threats and presenting incentives. Whether it’s through court mandates, school rules, or social security conditions, the involvement of the state tends to produce giving activities that achieve beneficial social impact first. Concerns for personal freedom, such as there are, come second.

An offender taking part in community service may be giving back to the community (social impact), but the fact that they’re ordered to give by a court sentence obviously waters down the extent to which community service for offenders can be judged a free expression (personal freedom) of their desire to give. However, the sense of freedom is not extinguished entirely. There may be an element of choice for the offender in the type of community service they do depending on the sentence and degree to which they throw themselves into the spirit of giving.

Role of the state in promoting giving

The role of the state in the gift economy is hugely controversial. So often government policies aimed at promoting giving, resort to heavy-handed carrots and sticks. Attaching such artificial pros and cons to giving opportunities often cannibalize volunteering activities’ social impact at the expense of the giver’s personal freedom.

In the UK, the Government’s Community Payback scheme, run by the Probation Service, brands community service as punishment. Offenders work on projects, some of which are nominated by the public, that provide tangible benefits to local communities. The scheme demonstrates why state-sponsored giving is problematic: it tends to reduce opportunities to give, down to straightforward transactions. Rebranding community service as ‘payback’ is an obvious attempt to counter the uncertainty of community service as a giving activity. For example:

  • What’s the value of a gift to the community from someone who’s been coerced into giving it?
  • How can giving service be a punishment for offenders, when in plenty of other situations giving service to the community is an honour and a privilege for free citizens?

Community Payback is an attempt to couch community service in more certain terms. The metaphor of ‘payback’ is tantamount to a formal exchange, with the offender paying off their debt to society. This tactic is clearly an attempt on the part of the Government to resolve the anomalies of forced giving. To take the two questions above as examples. In response to the first, Government policy appears to be saying the value of the gift is irrelevant, the experience is a punishment with the state stepping in as guarantor to ensure that is the case. In response to the second, Government policy appears to be saying this service is not on a par with the service offered by free citizens. To underline the point offenders are required to wear orange high-visibility jackets marked ‘Community Payback’.

Community Payback as a scheme is not unusual in taking this approach. Giving activities become straightforward transactions between citizens and the state, with a view to maximising their social impact. It’s ironic that as the state’s increasingly reductionist approach to harnessing the gift economy (reducing ‘giving’ to ‘exchanging’), many in the private sector are increasingly expanding their exchange relationships with customers to include the gift economy.

Google and cultivated reciprocity

Take Google for example. This is a company that is investing significantly (certainly relative to others in the search market) in the gift economy through embracing the philosophy of open source projects and programmes. This is actually not that surprising as Google’s core business, online advertising, has developed thanks to ‘cultivated reciprocity’ (that’s reciprocity that can be assured to a greater degree than generalised reciprocity left to grow in the ‘wild’ in unstructured gift relationships- we’ll return to this concept in a future post).

Here’s the deal with their search product.

  1. You give Google your eye balls.
  2. They say, “thanks, that’s potentially useful to us. We can sell advertising based on you letting us know what you’re looking for and doing it on our pages. We’ll give you a great search experience”.
  3. It’s a reciprocal relationship, not a formal exchange as no money has to change hands between us.
  4. The money that sustains the giving comes from a third party (the advertiser).

It’s a model termed the ‘three party market’ by Chris Anderson in his book ‘Free’, and it’s known by economists as a two-sided market. It’s very similar to the model used by free newspapers and ad-supported television, only it’s more attuned to the nature of the web. It scales more effectively on the web for Google as they don’t have to pay for content creation or distribution/broadcast. In addition, as this two-sided market model scales on the web there is some equivalence with gift economies.

Google has an incentive to give back: greater user experience, more users, more revenue, and so on. The same is true for the RSPB with their Garden Birdwatch activity that we mentioned in a previous post. The RSPB has an incentive to make the results of their data available: greater user understanding, more users engaged, more data, better collective understanding of bird populations, etc. The obvious difference is that most users of Google search are not conscious that they are giving Google anything, or at least don’t factor that in to the way the use Google’s search product. With the RSPB we are very consciously giving the organisation our information.

Another point is that Google’s scale means it can leverage the best of both the worlds of giving and exchanging. It gets the scaling potential of giving, combined with the high degree of certainty associated with exchange relationships due to the way it cultivates reciprocity across its network of users. In other words, the more total users there are running searches, the greater the probability that they sell AdWords, the less pressure to sell to individual users, the closer the product gets to being a gift without strings attached (generalised reciprocity).

This level of certainty is beyond the reach of most charities, who work on a very different scale. Certainly nowhere near millions of users! First though, let’s consider the similarities of giving through volunteering for a charity or nonprofit.

  1. You give the charity a helping hand.
  2. They say, “thanks that’s potentially useful to us. We can meet our objectives and perhaps get support for our service users and perhaps further charitable funding to support our mission goals. You’ll get a great volunteering experience.”
  3. It’s a reciprocal relationship, not a formal exchange as there’s no contract, no money changes hands between us.
  4. The money that sustains the giving comes from a third party (the charitable funder).

The big difference between Google’s model of cultivated reciprocity and volunteering with a charity, is that volunteering with a charity typically hits scaling issues. Each new volunteer comes with a resource implication, in that their involvement needs to be managed and supported. It is easier for Google to scale and cultivate reciprocity because there is much higher degree of consensus around what makes a great search experience, than there is around what makes a great volunteering experience.

Language problems

A big part of the controversy surrounding the issue of mandatory community service and volunteering, is due to the fact that often community service is inaccurately presented as volunteering. This is probably due to the fact that as volunteering is the best known form of giving for the uninitiated, so different giving activities are frequently confused with volunteering. Giving is rarely used as a word to describe volunteering activities, as it is a word that has become a euphemism for giving money or making a financial donation.

Volunteering has, as a result, been increasingly used as a way of simply conveying the message that a giving activity is taking place. Even though very often it is very difficult to explain just how giving is reciprocated, due to the unknowns involved. We resort to big, well known terms from the gift economy. To be sure, there aren’t many that cut through the mainstream. So the few words that are broadly understood, like volunteering, seem to get recycled a little too often.

The Volunteer Canada paper reflected a general worry that partly due to lazy use of language a “careless blurring of the distinction between volunteering and mandatory community service may pose a significant risk to the long-term well-being and availability of volunteer resources in Canada”.

Language matters, but the issue cannot be resolved by clarifying the meaning of volunteering alone. It requires a better understanding of the broader context in which volunteering takes place as a whole.

Honour and duty

The word volunteering, in the UK at least, stems from a tradition tied up with the concepts of honour, duty and service to the community. It’s worth noting that many of the more traditional volunteering roles are often carried out more in the spirit of civic engagement, than as hands-on volunteering activities.

An example of volunteering blended with this aspect of civic engagement is the role of trustee or member of the board of a not-for-profit. Civic engagement frequently encourages giving through appealing to an individual’s sense of status or prestige. Especially when it comes to taking on a role that is usually more about providing strategic oversight, than services direct to service users.

The history of volunteering in the military, in healthcare and the emergency services point to the deep roots of giving in civic engagement. In many more established roles in civic engagement, the person involved receives money as an allowance, such as councillors (local government representatives in the UK) and magistrates (magistrates or Justices of the Peace (JPs) deal with around 95 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales). However, in many cases, attempts have been made to stick to the principles of giving, even though many of these civic roles have developed more in line with the exchange model.

In many cases, the language used to describe payments harks back to a tradition of giving, using words such as allowance, reimbursement and stipend. Money and payments is after all, a red line for most definitions of volunteering. If you receive payment beyond the reimbursement of out of pocket expenses for your activity, this is an exchange relationship rather than a gift relationship. But where does this notion come from? To get some insight into this, it’s worth returning to theories of giving.

French sociologist Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift in 1923-4, was fascinated by why gifts were never “free”. In this book he asked the question: “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” (p.3)” Mauss’s answer was:

The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: “the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them” (The Gift, p.31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status… [quoted from Wikipedia article]

Mauss provides another way to distinguish between exchanging and giving that helps enlighten the debate about civic engagement.

In a commodity economy there is a strong distinction between objects and persons through the notion of private property. Objects are sold, meaning that the ownership rights are fully transferred to the new owner. The object has thereby become “alienated” from its original owner. In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are “loaned rather than sold and ceded”. [quoted from Wikipedia article]

From this perspective, civic engagement is an attempt on the part of the state to counter the alienation of citizens from their surrounding community caused by the dominance of exchange based on commodities. Interestingly as well, if there’s no such thing as a ‘free’ gift, if giving can nudge those who receive to reciprocate, giving activities are political acts.

Civic Engagement and Participation

What’s interesting is the amount of policy proposals that link civic engagement with the new participation agenda, inspired, in part, by the growth in participation driven by social media.

Governments move slowly. Social media and the web moves fast. As a result, it’s not government-sponsored civic engagement that’s leading the way in social media adoption. It’s certainly true that since the success of Barack Obama’s US election campaign in 2008, politicians of all colours have become much more aware of the role of social media in campaigning. However, it’s a new looser, broader range of individuals and groups motivated by social and political change that are leading the way in social media adoption as a way of reinventing giving relationships in civic engagement.

There are a whole host of online communities using social media to build platforms to affect change on issues and problems people care about as citizens, some on a local scale, some on a global scale. Change.org, Causecast, Global Voices Online, Idealist.org, NetSquared and #4Change are a few examples that suggest the range of approaches taking place.

Activism is certainly a dominant subset of this, leading the charge in the adoption of social media tools as a means to effect social change. Critics question the practical application and effectiveness of social media in activist cause aka ‘slacktivism‘.

It’s important to be conscious, therefore, that giving activities in the area of civic engagement may take place beyond the state’s agenda, but may actually directly challenge it.

Further resources

John Searle visited Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book ” Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power.” This event took place on October 30, 2007 as part of the Authors@Google series.

More From paddaniels

paddaniels has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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  2. Giving activities – Part 2: Professional amateur
  3. Lessons for volunteer engagement: Plymouth Twestival
  4. Giving paradox: personal freedom and social impact
  5. Mapping giving relationships