Exploring Volunteering

The debate about measurement and efficiency in the third sector is once again coming to the fore, as the government talks up the ‘Big Society‘ while at the same time announcing widespread cuts. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate how our thinking about giving influences the way we conceive of the relationship between the government and the voluntary sector. In recent years, the government has moved away from a gift model, towards an exchange model in it’s approach to investing in public services and community development. For example, in semantic terms this means no more talk of grants, aid and funding awards, instead it’s all about commissioning, contracts and loans.

This growing move to make government funding of the voluntary sector more like a transaction, is changing the relationship between the two. [Commodity] exchange logic demands that the government, as a commissioner of services from the voluntary sector, makes payment contingent on results. Whereas in the past, the government’s approach was closer to gift logic: grants that were more like donations. Government funding in the past was often given on the basis of a long standing relationship or as more impersonal giver, as with giving to strangers, acting as a financial proxy between citizens and civil society.

I’ve been exploring what the difference is between giving and exchange systems on this blog over the last few months, but here cited in Peter Kollock “The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace“, Duran Bell in Modes of Exchange: Gift and Commodity [PDF] sums up some of the differences:

“[A] distinction between gifts and commodities is made by Bell (1991), who focuses on how individuals can increase the benefits of their exchanges. In a gift economy, benefits come from improving the technology of social relations by, for example, increasing the range and diversity of one’s social network. In commodity economies, the benefits come from making improvements in the technology of production. Thus, gift economies are driven by social relations while commodity economies are driven by price. It is also important to note that gift exchange and commodity transactions are ideal types, and any economy will be a mix of these two types of exchange as well as many intermediate cases between them.”

In this post, I’d like to discuss some the arguments that this issue of the relationship between the government and the voluntary sector provokes.

Rethinking public services

The way the social web in particular has led to the development of new communities has energised the rethinking of public services. Much of this is based on the power of the web to connect people and foster collaboration.

Dan Mcquillan was the final speaker at the myPublicServices event in London on November 26 2009 that discussed how the social web could help transform public services. This video was filmed by David Wilcox, Social Reporter. In this piece, Dan Mcquillan talks about how the transformation of services involves shifts of power. He mentions the idea of recuperation where ideas that are perceived as radical, are commodified and incorporated within mainstream society.

He also mentions the example of transition towns as a social movement that demonstrates the energy we have within. Transition towns are a response to the twin pressures of Peak Oil and Climate Change, where some pioneering communities in the UK, Ireland and beyond are taking an integrated and inclusive approach to reduce their carbon footprint and increase their ability to withstand the fundamental shift that will accompany Peak Oil.

I mention Dan Mcquillan’s talk and myPublicServices event (put together by Patient Opinion) because it’s a great example of this contrast between the culture of giving and collaboration on the social web, and the culture embedded now in most public services that in delivering services, these institutions and bodies are involved in some kind of commodity exchange. As an aside, it’s worth noting how recent this view of public services is. For much of the 20th Century, the predominant controversy was the clash between whether ‘command and control’ or free market mechanisms were the best way of delivering public services.

First point then, is that this discussion about transforming public services is a political discussion, not just an economic question of efficiency. It’s important not to lose sight of this, as many present the issues at stake in terms how to get the biggest bang for the taxpayers’ buck.

This is a more nuanced argument than it first appears. Arguments for focussing on economic efficiency are not just because the most efficient delivery of services costs less, but because it provides society with a clear mechanism for coming to collective decisions. As Oliver Kamm puts it:

“Moral values are incommensurable. They are not necessarily judged on the same scale. Arguments about efficiency are easier to come by and, thus, easier to come to a social consensus about.”

As moral values tend to be incommensurable, in other words, there is no straightforward way to compare one against another. For exchange to work, by definition, you need to be able to compare one service against another. Otherwise how would you know how to make the decision to exchange. Exchange logic craves comparative information. In fact, it’s driven by comparison. Gift logic on the other hand, is driven by the connection or relationship between the giver and the receiver.

Money measures, giving connects

One of the functions of money is as a measure that facilitates exchange. As modern giving activities have become increasingly dependent on wider monetary system, so money holds out the possibility to some as a way of measuring impact. It’s important to note that most measures of social impact come down to money as a measure. However, just because giving is supported monetarily (for example through monetary donations) is don’t mean that it makes any sense to measure social impact in terms of money. Giving is the different paradigm based on making personal connections and relationships. Money has developed in a way that allows transactions between people without creating personal connections and relationships.

Inputs and outcomes

When the government began to favour the policy of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) [later became Best Value] in the 1980s, the emphasis decisively changed. CCT meant that central forced local authorities to put various services out to competition. However, it promoted competition between tenders that could cut the input costs of the equation. Recently the focus has changed to measuring outcomes.

The 2020 Public Services Trust produced a report called ‘Better Outcomes‘ (PDF) which explores outcome commissioning that seeks to incentivise the achievement of specific outcomes, whether the delivery agency is from the voluntary sector or not. Both CCT and outcome commissioning are moves towards an exchange-based system whether that is through setting up tendering processes on the basis of cost, or through incentivising the achievement of specific outcomes.

A question of motivation

What’s ironic is that it’s an example of thinking in public policy and private sector spheres moving in very different directions. The problem with introducing hard outcomes at the social level, is that they crowd out the factors that motivate individuals to achieve those outcomes on the personal level.

That’s to say, policies that privilege hard factors like cost inputs or quantitative outcomes undermine the very thing the voluntary sector does better than the public or private sector: how it taps into what really motivates people to effect social change whether that paid staff, volunteers and service users themselves. To use the terminology of motivation theory: it’s moving the voluntary sector away from the intrinsic motivators towards the extrinsic motivators of competition on price and financial rewards for hitting key performance indicators.

This is just at a time where more and more research is urging companies in the private sector to look beyond crude extrinsic aspects of motivation and focus rather on intrinsic points like energy, enthusiasm and a desire to continually get better. Behavioural economists, educational psychologists, social psychologists among many others (Dan Pink, Dan Ariely, Bruno Frey, to name a few) have produced a growing mountain of literature on this. These are not new ideas and go back all the way to Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg and Clayton Alderfer amongst many others. It seems desperate that policy with regards to managing the voluntary sector is going in exactly the opposite direction.

Giving is all about intrinsic motivators such as doing what you feel is important and what gives you a sense of satisfaction. On the other hand, exchange logic is driven by extrinsic motivators like the price of a commodity, the cost of a service or the penalties of not making a particular choice.

Exchange thinking crowds out the reason to give

So what’s driving the voluntary sector away from what it does best?

Just last week I was talking with a worker from big UK charity that supports young people who are beyond the reach of mainstream routes into work or learning. What he told me encapsulates this phenomenon described above. Now his organisation is paid for every person who achieves employment at the end of the period of contact with the charity. The twist is that this is dependent on each young person remaining in that employment for six months. Once that’s achieved the charity is paid. It’s a nice clear hard outcome.

The result, though, is perverse. It incentivises the organisation to involve those who are more likely to achieve the target of being in work for six months at the end of the contact with the charity. In other words, it’s an extrinsic motivator (an externally agreed target) that crowds out the intrinsic motivating factors such as the satisfaction or challenge of building connections with the hardest to reach in our society. We give and respond to gifts from others for reasons personal to each of us, not because of impersonal and inflexible factors beyond our control.

Equivalence (league tables and all that stuff)

And so many have identified the challenge here as being about a separation between different levels. What if we could translate between the micro, individual or personal level on the one hand, and the macro, social and impersonal level at the other. There have been a proliferation of techniques that attempts to solve this ‘problem’ of translation.

An interesting one from the world of education has been to suggest that part of the problem of not being able to compare schools in this case, has been to factor in the starting points of each. If only we have a baseline, we can compare the value added of each school that allows for those whose kids are more affected by different social disadvantage.

Another translating technique is to establish equivalence. Examples of this approach is the VIVA audit in volunteering or the Social Return on Investment. VIVA seeks to translate volunteering from giving to exchanging, by drawing an equivalence between a particular volunteering role and a similar role that is remunerated. The method of Social Return on Investment (SROI) focusses more on outcomes than inputs (such as volunteering time). It allows charities to compare the total value of their outcomes against the value of the inputs needed to achieve those outcomes.

In other words, SROI enables charities to be able to explain the value of their work in the following way: ˜for every pound spent, we create ‘x’ pounds of social value’. Again SROI functions by being able to find equivalent activities in other sectors with established costs. For example, the cost of keeping someone in prison for six months or the cost of treating someone with a particular illness. New Philanthropy Capital have just written a position paper of SROI which goes into lots more depth. YouthNet has taken part in a project to explore the practical applications of SROI.

Equivalence leads to confusion

There are many concerns with these techniques in translation that explain giving against exchanged equivalents. One pointed out by Jayne Cravens on her post ‘dollar value of volunteers‘, is that people start to take the idea of equivalence too literally and overlook the very real distinctions between giving and exchange. In Jayne’s example, equivalence can lead to substitution with employers cutting paid staff because involving volunteers is such great value it saves money by substituting paid staff with volunteers. The equivalence that translation gives us between the world views of giving and exchanging should not be confused with the two being equal. They are fundamentally different.

Equivalence promises the unrealistic

Another concern raised on the blog Concrete Solutions by Liam Barrington Bush (found via i-Volunteer) is that searching for any equivalence between giving and exchanging is like ‘measuring water with a ruler‘. Liam Barrington Bush makes the point that (citing Glouberman and Zimmerman) it’s the complexity of social problems that makes equivalence impossible. Instead, the issue of trust between the funder and the charity receiving the funding is the key, rather than where a charity comes in a performance league table. The role of the state in fostering public trust is an interesting broader philosophical question. Onora O’Neil amongst others has looked at how we can develop a more practical approach to trust.

Martin Brookes from New Philanthropy Capital argues in The Guardian that need to provide ‘evidence of their impact’.

“If charities want to be the answer to helping build “big society” they need to get serious about demonstrating their impact. The best should be supported and scaled up. The less good might be earmarked for cuts. If ministers choose this path, meeting the twin goals of cutting the deficit and fixing social problems is a possibility.”

It’s surely the case that charities need to be able to explain their work in terms of how they are achieving the mission. However, it is not at all clear that a charity needs to be able to compare its impact against other charities or public services. Instead charities need to explain their work in terms of the relationship they have with all their stakeholders (service users, funders, volunteers, paid staff, etc). When you give to a charity (e.g. making a donation or volunteering) you’re not purchasing a social impact, you’re connecting with others to help bring about that social impact.

In the end, giving is all about personal relationships

The issue of trust, I think, brings us back to the importance of the connection and relationship between the giver and the receiver. In terms of giving, the relationship is everything whoever the givers and receivers are: government, business, citizens, state, civil society organisations, etc. For a system based on commodity exchange within a free market, comparison is everything, especially where your relationship with the prospective providers is weak or non-existent. However, for a system based on giving, the relationship you have with those you give to or receive from is everything.

In the end, the efficiency of volunteering and of the voluntary sector, can only make sense in the context of the personal relationships and connections that the giving and receiving between the stakeholders involved makes possible. What we are looking for are new ways to understand the significance and meaning of these relationships and make decisions collectively and individually about them. How the state supports the voluntary sector and volunteering is a very live issue which has to do with how we value the role of giving in our society and the common good. It’s not an issue that can be decided by resorting to arbitrary and confusing measures that institutionalise assumptions about the nature of social impact and economic efficiency.

“Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving, mercy?” Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.” Antonio Porchia

Both these quotes neatly make the point that it takes two for giving to take place: a giver and a receiver. It’s easy to focus on the giver, but it’s also crucial to understand the act of receiving gifts from others. After all, for giving to be meaningful, there’s a requirement for someone to receive it.

Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist, points out that there are different possible reasons why we might prefer not to receive gifts. First, it might have something to do with the fact that our need for the gift might place us outside the perceived social norm. As a result we might be embarrassed, threatened or even humiliated by accepting a gift.

Another reason might be to do with how giving creates connections between people. Some people might want the gift, but not the relationship that comes with it. In other words, some might not want to receive gifts because they don’t want to feel like they owe someone something.

Behavioural economists use the term ‘social utility’ to describe outcomes that are socially useful. In these terms, the person on the receiving end of a gift is accepting they owe something to the giver, and as a result the receiver is granting the giver social utility. This social debt (non-monetary) effectively represents a cost to the receiver. So this may explain why some people might wish to receive the gift anonymously to get the benefit of the gift, without the social cost of owing reciprocation to the giver. See Ariely’s example in the video above of the guy who prefers to enjoy the gift of the sweets anonymously.

An obligation to receive

In Western tradition, gifts are understood as free in the sense that they’re unsolicited, require no reciprocity and represent a private gesture (not a public/social gesture). French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s ideas from the time just after the First World War, ran counter to this tradition. He saw giving gifts as the pre-cursor to barter, because giving comes with obligations and is self-interested. He pointed to this cost when he set out the moral obligations of receiving and then reciprocating. For Mauss, there was an obligation on the receiver of the gift to accept. The three Maussian obligations are:

1. The obligation to give
2. The obligation to receive
3. The obligation to return

The point is that in the very idea of gift-exchange, the recipient has the obligation to receive. Not accepting a gift would imply that the targeted recipient does not accept either the relationship itself or the specific sentiment the gift conveys. Mauss’s particular theory for why this is so has to do with how he thought the gift someone gave came with the spirit of the giver. As a result, the receiver of the gift could not reject a gift. To reject it, would be to reject the person offering the gift themselves. In practical terms, this obligation to receive works because the receiver knows who the giver is and vice versa. It’s because of this personal connection that a social obligation’s formed. Not to respond would be to lose face. Moreover, to accept without reciprocating is to demonstrate inferiority.

However, as Dan Ariely has pointed out in his studies of economic behaviour, people go to great lengths to avoid accepting gifts. This old anecdote from V. Mihailescu, cited by Chris Hann in his article ‘The Gift and Reciprocity: Perspectives from Economic Anthropology’:

In Cristian, an originally German but now multi-ethnic village in Transylvania, a Romanian peasant gifts her Saxon neighbour a few new-born ducklings. I brought you some ducklings, I have way too many- the Romanian explains. The Saxon politely refuses. The Romanian insists, and, after a long ‘negotiation’ the two women agree that the Saxon will pay the countervalue of the ducklings. The Romanian leaves, slightly in doubt, and the Saxon explains to me: Imagine if I would have accepted! Who knows what she would ask me later on, and we’d keep endlessly going in this manner. But now, in this way we are even!

So the idea goes, while giving was more appropriate where people knew each other better and had personal relationships, i.e. with family, friends and neighbours, etc., giving was more problematic with those that they were not as intimate with or close to. In these circumstances where people knew each other less well, trading and commercial exchange were more appropriate. It meant that the relationship didn’t need to extend beyond the act of giving and receiving itself. You sell something to me, I buy it. That’s the end of the matter. There’s no obligation to do anything more beyond that deal.

As we leap forward in time, and look at giving and receiving on the web certain parallels apply. Peter Kollock explains this distinction between gift exchange and commodity transactions in his article, ‘The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace‘:

A gift transaction involves a diffuse and usually unstated obligation to repay the gift at some future time. Gift exchanges should not involve explicit bargaining or demands that the gift be reciprocated, but a relationship in which there is only giving and no receiving is unlikely to last. The contrast to a gift exchange is a commodity transaction, in which no obligation exists after the exchange is consummated – the bottle of water purchased at a convenience store does not create an obligation to buy something there again.

In addition, Kollock underlines the nature of the bond or connection that’s made through giving. Gifts are typically exchanged between people in an ongoing interdependent relationship. One person buys from the other, both are individual agents acting in their own self-interest. Kollock continues:

A gift is also tied in an inalienable way to the giver. This is to say that gifts are unique: it is not simply a sweater, but rather the sweater-that-Bill-gave-me. In contrast, commodities are not unique and derive no special value having been acquired from person X rather than person Y – a pound of flour is a pound of flour is a pound of flour when purchased at a supermarket.

Receiving what volunteers give

So how does all this apply to volunteering? As posted in the previous post, volunteering is a social construct. It’s developed to enable us to give to the strangers we live with and alongside in our urbanised societies. As Richard Titmuss showed in relation to blood donation, the aim has been to create a system that scales the Western concept of the free gift and makes it social. Titmuss said in his book ‘The Gift Relationship’: “Unlike gift-exchange in traditional societies, there is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint or compulsion, no sense of shame or guilt, no gratitude imperative¦“. Titmuss wanted to remove the element of social obligation from the act of giving.

People can give to the system, without creating personal obligations for specific individuals who may receive the gift. So in the case of blood donation, donors of blood can give without obliging those who receive the blood to give blood themselves. The obligation, in as far as it exists, is to a generalised conception of the wider community. People can freely give, receivers can freely receive. How many volunteers say they are giving back, but without knowing exactly who they are giving back to?

Volunteering as a idea, has developed along similar lines to blood donation. Volunteers can give to a cause, while the beneficiaries can receive without feeling obligated to specific individuals. In fact, these ideas have massively evolved over the 20th Century. In my own experience, organisations I’ve worked with have become increasingly conscious of the obligations that receiving gifts places on those who receive them (namely the service users).

Many vulnerable families have spoken of the importance of being able to give back to the projects they have received support from, and how disempowering having to rely on charity can become. I remember one man in Brussels from a street project I was connected with through ATD Quart Monde, said that the first time you went to receive free food it was great, the second time it was ok, but by the third, fourth, fifth time, having to receive food before you could eat was one of the worst things in the world. It loaded the vulnerable with social debt, with no way of reciprocating. The end result: the giving exacerbated the social exclusion it was intended to address.

As third sector organisations have better understood this obligation to receive and give back, increasing emphasis is made on the need for participation or co-production in the giving activities that are organised throughout the third sector. Essentially, these ideas are other ways to express the importance of being able to take on this obligation to receive and give back. It is incredibly difficult to build meaningful relationships with service users, and service users with service providers, when there is no way of reciprocating the gifts offered and received.

In an age of participation and active citizenship, it’s easy to forget that volunteering’s roots lie in an early form of enabling beneficiaries to reciprocate or in Maussian terms, to carry out their obligation to give back. For more on this recent history see Steven Howlett’s paper ‘Lending a hand to lending a hand‘ (PDF) that traces the development of volunteering (in particular the development of volunteer centres) in the UK since the Second World War.

In many cases, volunteers do not know the people who receive the benefit of the services they offer, while by the same token many recipients do not know the identity of the volunteers who’ve contributed to the goods and services they receive. The givers and receivers remain strangers to one another.

In the absence of any direct relationship between givers and receivers, there’s an argument that can be made that volunteer managers and supporters almost act as proxy receivers. Volunteer managers have many obligations, as they receive the services that the volunteers they manage offer, such as thanking them for their giving and finding suitable ways to reciprocate the gifts they receive on behalf of service users. The same goes for fundraisers who receive gifts and donations for the cause who, equally, must show gratitude and reciprocate in an appropriate way on behalf of the beneficiaries of the cause.

Managing inappropriate giving is often cited by volunteer managers as one of the toughest issues in volunteer management. How should you refuse the offer of service from a volunteer who doesn’t seem suitable for the role? How do you tell a volunteer that they are no longer required when their form of giving becomes inappropriate?

Obligation to support volunteers

It is certainly difficult to refuse an offer from a volunteer without turning the process into some kind of transaction. Many volunteers are surprised that it is so hard to volunteer. To the general public following gift logic, it makes no sense that their offer to give should not be gratefully received. Yet many in volunteer management use the logic of transaction, we [the organisation] can offer such and such support, if you [the volunteer] can offer this support. The controversy about volunteer agreements is not just about the legalities of ‘consideration’. It’s also about this clash between gift exchange and commodity transaction.

CSV’s policy of accepting all volunteers is an example of a distinctive approach to this particular issue:

At CSV we believe that everyone can be a volunteer. We reject no one. We believe that volunteering is about not only helping vulnerable or marginalised people but also empowering them to become active in the community, build skills and confidence and increase their options whilst making a difference.

CSV’s long standing policy, with its emphasis on supporting volunteering, makes volunteer manager’s obligation to receive explicit, even if volunteer managers are ‘receivers by proxy’. If we accept that prospective volunteers come bearing gifts, it can alter the way we see the issue of supported volunteering. Many supported volunteering initiatives take the logic of the volunteer manager’s ‘obligation to receive’ to its ultimate conclusion. We need to respect anyone who offers to give by volunteering for a project or service.

Supported volunteering reflects a broader social reality that if someone wants to give, it’s the responsibility of those who invite gifts from prospective volunteers, to do all they can to enable the volunteer to participate and give. In fact, the existence of supported volunteering as an idea is an acceptance of the fact that the line between the helper and the helped is not as clear cut as might be assumed. That’s to say, the relationship between service user and provider is often built on reciprocity and plenty of mutual support. For more of supported volunteering there’s Chances4Volunteering and Supported Volunteering London from GLV.

Receiving gifts of the web

In ‘The Power of Gifts: Organising Social Relationships in Open Source Communities‘ Magnus Bergquist and Jan Ljungberg look at how gifts on the web don’t necessarily have anyone who receives them.

Gifts are often not given to anyone in particular. They are made public (on web pages) and thereby made available to anyone who cares to make use of them. An application or some information does not really become a gift until someone finds it and makes use of it.

On the web the receiver is often unknown to the person offering the gift.

Gifts are placed on various homepages and ftp sites, and anybody can download a piece of information or an executable file and use it for various purposes. But this only counts for the Internet in general. The interesting question is in which social context gift giving on the Internet gets its social meaning. The focus for the production of meaning in the gift economy on the Internet is the various kinds of communities in which people share some understanding of the context they are involved in. They are not unknown to each other, which does not mean that they have to be personally acquainted.

The web mediates between the giver and the receiver in an interesting way. The fact that gifts online are often not given to anyone in particular, means the obligation to receive is much weaker than it would be if it was played out in the same way between two people face to face. It’s often time and space that separates giver from receiver online, while with more traditional giving through a charity it is an organisation that mediates the relationship between giver and receiver.

As the obligation to receive can be much weaker on the web, often giver and receiver are brought together only once the receiver decides to make the connection. Typically receivers can make use of the gift anonymously, should it be posted online on say a forum or a social network. This anonymity can allow the receiver to dodge the social connection should they want to. In this situation online, it’s the prerogative of the receiver to contact and connect with the giver. It’s a reversal of the process offline where two people give and receive face to face.

How will this new world where giving is driven by the receivers change the way we volunteer? This is an issue I’ll be looking at in a future post :- )

Further stuff

Giving makes our connections more meaningful. The groups and networks that we build and where we live out our lives, are strengthened by the giving that they sustain and foster.

Volunteering is a social construct. It is built on the more essential concept of giving (i.e. giving is part of what it means to be human), but volunteering is a very specific kind of giving. Volunteering, as the idea has developed through the 20th Century, is about our need or desire to have meaningful connections with those we share the planet with.

In fact, I think we can say more than that: volunteering is built on the idea of giving to strangers.

Take a common current definition of volunteering in the UK:

“Any activity which involves spending time, unpaid, doing something which aims to benefit someone (individuals or groups) other than or in addition to close relatives, or to benefit the environment.”

This is the definition used in the 1997 National Survey of Volunteering, it’s also in the Compact Volunteering Code of Good Practice (Home Office, 2005).

The 1997 Police Act says something pretty similar: a volunteer is ‘a person engaged in an activity which involves spending time, unpaid (except for travel and other approved out-of-pocket expenses), doing something which aims to benefit some third party other than or in addition to a close relative‘.

This phrase ‘other than or in addition to close relatives’ evokes this idea that volunteering is about giving to strangers. It is a suggestion that volunteering is about going beyond your personal networks of friends and family. Perhaps the term ‘close friends’ is omitted from these definitions because of how problematic it is to define the term ‘friends’. Certainly, it’s not hard to find earlier research that discounted activities that just benefited family and friends as being consistent with a definition of volunteering.

For example, from different research from the mid-1990s it possible summarise four key elements of a general definition of volunteering (Cnaan & Amrofell, 1994; Cnaan, Handy, & Wadsworthe, 1996; Wilson, 2000). See also “Public Perception of “Who is a Volunteer”: An Examination of the Net-cost Approach from a Cross-Cultural Perspective” 2000, Cnaan et al (PDF):

1. it is non-obligatory and performed of one’s free will;
2. it is not paid for or otherwise compensated;
3. it is an activity for the benefit of others (not family or friends); and
4. it is done either within an organizational context or as a long-term behavior.

Another way of describing this aspect of the definition of volunteering is Susan Ellis’s definition that came out of her book with Katherine Campbell, “By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers” (emphasis added):

To choose to act in recognition of a need, with an attitude of social responsibility and without concern for monetary profit, going beyond one’s basic obligations.

This idea of going beyond your ‘basic obligations’ is clarified by Susan Ellis on the Energize site as excluding “service done without remuneration, but within the reasonable expectations of being a family member (such as caring for a sick child or aging parent)” as being volunteering.

In “Who Cares? Toward an Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work” from 1997 by Wilson and Musick volunteering is defined as “unpaid work provided to parties to whom the worker owes no contractual, familial or friendship obligations“.

What is a stranger?

So if volunteering is not with people you know personally and intimately, sociologically how can we understand people we don’t know in this sense? Georg Simmel wrote in The Stranger (PDF) in 1908:

“The Stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people”.

Simmel concept of the stranger drew on his idea that space can be subdivided for social purposes and framed in boundaries. In contrast to natural boundaries, the social boundary is “not a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that is formed spatially“. Strangers come about when we’re spatially close, but socially distant. Strangers are both part of our groups and outside them.

Simmel was commenting on the social reality at the turn of the 20th Century of increasingly urbanised and industrialised societies. If you take the modern experience of travelling to work on public transport, it’s possible to get a sense of Simmel’s stranger, they are all people you are sharing the personal experience of commuting with, but they are also socially distant.

Simmel went further. He emphasized that “strangeness” as an element of social interaction was in all our social relationships. Degrees of closeness and remoteness are characteristic of all relationships, but what was different was the increased numbers of strangers in any modern society, i.e. people with which we have this particular proportion of closeness and remoteness.

Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, it can be seen that usage of the term ‘stranger’ peaked massively in 1840s-50s and then has declined through the 20th Century. Despite this, I think it provides insights into how we understand the more recent concept of volunteering.

Safety of strangers

In “The Stranger Transformed: Conceptualizing On and Offline Stranger Disclosure” by Mary E. Virnoche (PDF). These characteristics of Simmel’s stranger are broken down:

1. Not belonging – established by the stranger’s absence of physical presence in a particular locality or group at its beginnings.
2. Mobility – marked by the stranger’s fluidity of association: the likelihood that he will leave the area and discontinue the possibility of association.
3. Objectivity – of Simmel’s stranger is assured by a lack of long-term personal investment into the happenings of the group into which he has stumbled.
4. Abstract commonality – the commonalities that the stranger establishes are abstract in nature, such as nationality, race or occupation.

Virnoche picks up on these characteristics and points out that interactions with strangers actually open up safe space. This may hint at the reason for the success of volunteering as strangers, with service users who are strangers. The type of giving makes the most of the safe space that exists between strangers. This sense of safety comes from the fluidity, the relative ease of breaking an association. The control over the degree of anonymity if the contact is mediated, and the opportunity to select strangers based on what you have in common. Volunteering mediated by the web is particularly adapted to this situation.

“The characteristics of not belonging and mobility can be understood as factors contributing to a perceived safe space for interaction. Safe space is constructed in mediated communication through variation in the synchronicity of exchanges (temporal separation), as well as actual and perceived spatial separation between those making the exchanges.

In addition, the spatial separation generates an assumption of objectivity. Unlike Simmel’s stranger who maintained the control over mobility or locking in safe space, the strangers of mediated communication generally share this control. Control over safe space comes in the form of perceived and actual anonymity. How easy is it for a stranger to intrude into another’s everyday life once the association has been broken?”

To expand on this sense of historical context for this idea of volunteering to give to strangers, Richard Titmuss noted this sense of safety of giving to strangers when he wrote about blood donation in “The Gift Relationship“:

Unlike gift-exchange in traditional societies, there is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint or compulsion, no sense of shame or guilt, no gratitude imperative¦

¦(S)ocial gifts and actions carrying no explicit or implicit individual right to a return gift or action are forms of ˜creative altruism’¦They are creative in the sense that the self is realised with the help of anonymous others. (p 279)

It seems counter-intuitive to see the safety in the stranger relationship which may be behind the growth of the phenomenon of giving to strangers. The decline of hitchiking in the UK is put down, at least in part, to this reluctance to give to those you don’t know. Joe Moran, author of On Roads: A Hidden History, gives a number of reasons for this decline in hitchiking including this article in the Guardian (A guide to hitchhiking’s decline):

It is not that we became more selfish, but that the technological and economic changes of Thatcherism made it possible to withdraw from the world. The drivers of 1970s cars would probably have welcomed the company of hitchers to distract them from the boredom and discomfort of their dodgy suspensions and badly equipped cabins. Now cars have ergonomic driving seats, remote-controlled iPods and automatic temperature controls. Why would we invite a sweaty stranger into this snug haven?

Is it safety, or is it that we’re just too snug? In 2009, Paul Smith, a Guardian journalist, set himself a challenge. He wanted to see how far he could get by only relying on the accommodation and travel that followers on Twitter offered him. He called his project Twitchhiker. It was a fundraising challenge for money for Charity Water. In the end, he got to New Zealand. In his list of rules he did refer to safety:

If there’s more than one offer on the table, I get to choose which I take. If there’s only one, I have to take it within 48 hours. I’m not entirely happy about this bit. If any part of this challenge is going to see me dead in a ditch or under a patio, it’s this part.

Compare hitchiking with a web equivalent: Couchsurfing. CouchSurfing International is a not for profit organisation: “we envision a world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter. Building meaningful connections across cultures enables us to respond to diversity with curiosity, appreciation and respect.” This idea echoes the idea at the beginning of this post: giving creates meaningful connections.

In “Surfing a web of trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing.com” (PDF) by Debra Lauterbach, Hung Truong, Tanuj Shah, Lada Adamic. Here’s how couchsurfing works in a couple of sentences: Individual A may host B, but B need not reciprocate directly by hosting A. Rather B may host another member of the CouchSurfing community. Or, if B is not motivated to reciprocate, they may opt to not host anyone at all and instead only surf.

The website aims to develop a community, where members have reputations online which help others decide who to accept as a guest or who to choose as a host. Their instructions state, The vouching system on CouchSurfing.com is a security measure. We take it VERY SERIOUSLY. Respecting the significance of vouching is essential to the integrity of the network… It is very important that you ONLY vouch for people that you have met in person and know well enough to believe that he or she is trustworthy. This kind of vouching system is the web’s solution to the hitchiking problem. It’s ironic (Simmel’s association of the stranger with urbanisation) that reputation systems, such as that used by Couchsurfing, actually favour those who live in cities, over those living in more remote parts:

While this could be reflection of a healthy web of trust, there are indications that vouches may be given too freely. For example, many of the vouches were exchanged between individuals who had met through CS meetings, and were CouchSurfing friends. Anecdotally, many members complain on the site’s message boards about this issue, saying that these vouches artificially inflate the trustworthiness of those who have the benefit of living in cities with many CS meetings.

Onyx and Bullen (1997) found that social capital and cohesion was higher in rural areas than in the cities. It seems valid that social networks will be stronger in relatively ˜closed communities’ where face-to-face contact is frequent, there are small numbers of residents and few strangers. However, there is an argument that a key element of social capital is contact with strangers and the capacity to overcome differences and embrace diversity (Hughes, Bellamy and Black, 1999). This is something that Couchsurfing would seem to point to.

Jonas de Oliveira Bertucci in “Lien social et économie d’hébergement gratuit sur Couchsurfing“, suggests that Couchsurfing’s reputation mechanism is designed to challenge this modern paranoia of strangers through reducing the user’s sensation of insecurity, rather than as an actual security mechanism:

“si on comprend la peur de l’individu inconnu comme une paranoïa moderne, ne serais-t-il pas plus cohérent de parler de mécanismes de réduction de la sensation d’insécurité que de mécanismes de sécurité?”

At this point it would interesting to ponder what this experience might say about the debate about criminal record checks for volunteers and whether they reinforce or undermine trust between strangers who give- but I’ll leave that for another post.

Volunteering is about personal relationships

It’s Jacques Godbout in “L’esprit du don” (PDF) who traces the link between the growth of giving to strangers and the increase in volunteering and voluntary organisations:

D’abord, ces dons ne circulent pas sur les réseaux personnels d’affinités, de liens primaires tels que la parenté ou l’amitié, comme le font la majorité des dons dans la plupart des sociétés… Ce n’est pas le cas des dons aux étrangers… (p.87)

Dans quel sens peut-on alors affirmer que le don aux étrangers est propre au don moderne ? Il est probable que ce type de don a pris son origine dans les grandes religions, et notamment dans le christianisme. Mais le lien actuel entre le don aux étrangers et la religion est beaucoup plus lâche, et souvent inexistant… (p.87)

Les personnes de tout milieu social participent à ce don moderne, non seulement sous forme monétaire, mais aussi sous forme de don de temps : activités d’écoute, visites, accompagnement de personnes âgées, etc. Ce don est d’ailleurs souvent anonyme, voire caché, en tout cas non dit aux collègues de travail ni même aux proches. (p.88)

Before in history the primary bond for gift-giving was along lines of kinship or friendship (see Marshall Sahlins, Stoneage economics and ‘the original affluent society‘). The modern gift has its roots in religion, in particular Christianity, according to Godbout, but the link now is much looser if it exists at all. Now this kind of giving to strangers is something that people of all social backgrounds are involved in, as witnessed with the phenomenon of volunteering (giving time as Godbout calls it).

Given that so many definitions exclude the intention of benefiting family as volunteering, it’s ironic how important the idea of bonding like a family is to volunteer retention and support. For example, in this article, “Firefighters Volunteering Beyond Their Duty: An Essential Asset in Rural Communities” (PDF), it’s clear how important the sense of brotherhood is between volunteer and career firefighters alike. In the study one volunteer firefighter said:

We’re a great big family. That’s what it boils down to… He’s like a brother. I wouldn’t mind asking him anything I would ask my own brother.

This kind of association, although it’s commenting on the relationship between volunteers, could also be about volunteers and the beneficiaries of the service they offer. This sentiment suggests that it is not that simple to separate giving to family and giving to strangers. In fact, many volunteers and service users might agree that initially the two are strangers, but through the commitment of volunteering friendship is possible. This is undoubtedly the case, the question then is: is there a point where friendship between a volunteer and service users grows to such an extent that it is no longer volunteering under the terms of many definitions of volunteering, i.e. it’s no longer go beyond your basic obligations as a friend?

I’m sure many volunteers have been presented with this dilemma in all sorts of situations. And it aptly demonstrates the tension that Simmel set out to capture in his concept of the stranger: we’re close, yet we’re far away. Many volunteers who’ve developed a strong friendship through supporting and accompanying a person in a vulnerable time in their lives will understand this tension. It goes to the heart of what being a volunteer is.

Examples of volunteering as giving to strangers

• Advisors (helplines and online advice) – volunteering with an organisation like the Samaritans is a really good example of this kind of volunteering of giving to strangers. The anonymity afforded by the telephone and email service is crucial, both for the advisor and the service user. It enables the volunteer advisor to provide the user with the safety referred to above, during moments of extreme vulnerability.
• Mentoring and befriending – roles where volunteers befriend strangers, it’s key to set clear interpersonal boundaries that ensure a friendship doesn’t go beyond the volunteer’s role and protects the potentially vulnerable service user. The relationship is often time limited. At the end of the period other volunteers may replace the previous volunteer to ensure that the relationship remains appropriate. It a sense, the objective is to ensure that volunteer and service user remain to a certain extent strangers.

Caring: giving to family and strangers

In an article by Jennifer Wilkinson and Michael Bittman, “Relatives, Friends and Strangers: The Links Between Voluntary Activity, Sociability and Care” (PDF), they explain why people are prepared to care for complete strangers, through informal care which takes place beyond the private and intimate circle of friends and family.

There are two kinds of explanation of this caring for strangers. One is the particularistic model (care based on caring for those closely connected), and the other is a civic model of care (care based on sense of common citizenship).

“According to the particularistic model, our ability to care requires reference to a concrete other and the partiality of our feelings for them. Carers view each recipient of care as an ˜individual with a concrete history, identity and affective-emotional constitution’ (Seyla Benhabib “Situating the Self“, p.159). According to Benhabib, caring cannot be understood in the abstract, only in the context of tangible experience and the uniqueness of certain personal relationships. It is because we know them and have feelings for them that we are able to care for them in a way which adequately meets their needs.”

According to this model, volunteering and caring for those beyond our private circle grows out of caring first for those in our private circle:

“Both Wuthnow and Noddings see caring as a propensity or attitude to act on behalf of the other which individuals first learn within the family. Care first arises ˜naturally’ or voluntarily in the course of our private relations with our intimates. Wuthnow tries to take this a step further by addressing the institutional means of exporting care into the public arena, arguing that volunteering has a key role to play in this process. For him, volunteering acts as the ˜institutional go-between’ linking the private and public world which allows care to flow on from private to public.”

The explanation then for caring for strangers depends on connections, in the words of Wilkinson, of “partiality or on concrete experiences of care… on the potential for human connection. Reflection leads to recognition of common vulnerability and shared human need. It is this which allows us to make connections with strangers.” This also explains how giving makes these kinds of connections through volunteering meaningful, i.e. because we can relate these experiences to what we have experienced personally.

The civic model of care is based on the concept of social capital developed by Robert Putnam in what’s effectively a communitarian approach. The concept of social capital can explain why “some ordinary citizens are able to reach out to others beyond their own households and the boundaries of their private worlds, to engage with what Michael Ignatieff (1994) described as ˜the needs of strangers‘.” Putnam’s work was an attempt to explain how citizens through civic connections build trust relations despite the lack of particularistic connections between them, i.e. they are strangers.

The first part of Putnam’s answer is generalised reciprocity:

“Generalized reciprocity refers to a continuing relationship of exchange that is at any given time unrequited or imbalanced… [generalised reciprocity involves]¦ mutual expectations that a benefit granted now should be repaid in the future. Friendship, for example, almost always involves generalized reciprocity (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, 1993, p.172).”

As with the classical theorists like Alexis de Tocqueville (who many associate with the beginnings of Communitarianism), the idea is that through engagement with civil society (strong civic culture) citizens understand how their self-interest is served by supporting fellow citizens. This civic culture encourages reciprocity:

I’ll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favour (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 2000, p.134)

This kind of sums up the one of the core principles of Couchsurfing that we mentioned previously. It’s system of vouching, was not just for the purposes of establishing reputations for the community’s members, but also for promoting generalised reciprocity. In the table below Wilkinson and Bittman compare the two models of care outlined above:

Wilkinson and Bittman emphasise the advantage of the civic approach over the particularistic approach, is that it provides for an equality of relationships. This rejoins something Godbout mentioned as a characteristic of the modern giving: “personnes de tout milieu social participent”, i.e. that it provides a level playing field for all to give. The civic approach holds that extending the principles of private care leads to familism and to hierarchical relationships of dependency.

Based on research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Time Use Survey in 1997 it’s possible to make the observation that “people with high needs and high dependence are more likely to receive care from close relatives. In contrast public generosity is more likely to be directed to needy but more independent friends and strangers”.

According to Wilkinson and Bittman this table shows that: “providing care and assistance to someone within your own household is associated with below average commitments of time to (any other kind of) volunteering. In contrast, providing assistance to persons living outside the private circle of co-residence increases the propensity to engage in volunteering”. In other words, there’s a link between one form of public engagement leading to other forms of public engagement. One kind of volunteering activity tends to little to more kinds of volunteering resulting in denser civic connections between citizens.

In fact, Wilkinson and Bittman are interested in Simmel and his concept of sociability “as the play-form of sociation”. Sociation refers to any process of social interaction which contributes to the formation of a social group. Simmel thinks that while some forms of social interaction are a means to an end such as marriage or joining a union, sociability exists for itself, and is and end in itself.

“As Simmel puts it, there is a sort of freedom possible as a participant of the group, the dynamics of which would assume an entirely different meaning in the context of a more intimate encounter with friends. In public gatherings, one adopts a certain style of conduct with others which requires putting one’s differences aside. For Simmel, it is this kind of connection which determines our relations with others in public. And it is this kind of connection which gives sociability the potential to build solidarity with strangers.”

This idea of sociability is what Wilkinson and Bittman believe explains the personal foundations of the civic culture that explains volunteering like caring. To evidence this they looked at television viewing habits of those caring for someone outside their household. The results showed that those caring for someone outside their household watched significantly less television, than those who lived with the person they were caring for. For Mitszal, sociability means ˜public relations between equals‘, gets us back to this idea of equality. ˜Public’ conveys the sense of a public sphere.

Wilkinson and Bittman reach two conclusions. First, caring for someone you’re living with is isolating and privatising in nature. As a result, people in this situation lose the impetus for making more generalised social connections with others. The second conclusion, is that socialising in public outside the confines of one’s own private home “promotes additional forms of social connectedness, and importantly a primary impetus for civil behaviour” which for Wilkinson and Bittman is the basis for a civic approach to care.

Web and sociability

In societies where we’re surrounded by strangers, giving activities, such as volunteering, are vital as they help to connect us with those we live amongst beyond family and friends. These concepts of sociability and social capital may explain how giving to strangers by volunteering helps build civic culture and a civil society.

It’s interesting that Wilkinson and Bittman used television viewing habits as a measure of the absence of sociability. This assumes that television is a passive activity. What though of the potential for using the web as a platform for sociability?

This leaves the question open as to whether those who care for a loved one they are living with are simply less able to get into volunteering because they have less time available and less opportunity. It’s important to take into consideration the opportunities the web opens up for carers to share and socialise publicly (for example Carers UK’s forums). What role can the web play in helping to develop the growth of civic culture? How can the web help those already giving heavily to family, also have the opportunity to give to strangers by volunteering? This is a question we’ll return to in a future post.

Further stuff

Theodore Zeldin, a philosopher, (author of Conversation) regularly organises what he calls Feasts of Strangers where people who don’t know each other can have conversations on all sorts of topics.

Miranda July on Strangers

Professionalism is interesting because it’s an idea that’s consistent both with relations that are exchange-based and relations that are gift-based. In John Craig’s publication for Demos, ‘Production Values‘, it covers how professionalism is changing in today’s society. For Craig, there’s a fundamental tension in the way we perceive professionalism.

On the one hand, professionals are neutral experts upholding certain ethical values that we hold dear as a society universally, while on the other professionals represent a narrow particular interest group in society in their role as producers of certain goods or services. To illustrate this Craig has two quotes from Tony Blair in 2005:

The best solution is to do what the police say they need in order to protect the country from terrorism.

Public service reforms must be driven by the wishes of the users not the producers.

These quotes allude to two further points. First, that professions that come together can influence the political agenda. Professionals represent a political force in society today. And second, that professionals authority is increasingly challenged by the relative rise in the clout of the consumer or service user. There is increasing pressure to organise services around those the professionals serve which is significantly changing the relationship between the professional and their clients.

The web in particular is playing a role in changing this relationship by reversing the information asymmetry (professionals no longer hold a monopoly on access to information). The web’s also connecting service users together, enabling them to more effectively challenge the professionals. They Work for You, Mypolice and Patient Opinion are some examples of this trend.

I’m particularly interested in how this idea of professionalism is influencing the development in the voluntary sector. According to Richard Reeves and John Knell, there are four principle ways in which professions can define themselves and which I want to explore in this post:

1. Restricting entry into the labour market, e.g. by requiring specific formal qualifications
2. Organising labour to maximise the profession’s political and economic leverage
3. Creation and articulation of a professional ethos (set of shared values by which the profession’s work is conducted)
4. Establishing recognition of the impact of the profession’s work

The following is paraphrased from Reeves and Knell’s article, “Good work and professional work” from the Demos publication ‘Production Values’ cited above:

Restricting entry into the labour market

Formal qualifications (like PGCE, MD, LLB, ACCA ONE and others) that restrict entry to a profession perform a number of functions:

1. It gives the profession a certain amount of control over who can claim to be part of the profession
2. It gives the professional recognition and a mechanism for identifying excellence
3. It provides the service user or consumer with assurance over the quality of the work of the professional
4. It forms the basis of trust between the service users and the professionals

Organising professional labour

Trade bodies (colleges, societies, associations and trades unions to a certain extent) can often act as powerful voices for the interests of a particular profession to maximise their political and economic leverage. The problem for these bodies is that they often blur the line between the occupational interests of their members and those of the users of their services.

In ‘The rise of professional society: England since 1880′ by Harold James Perkin:

Specialisation leads directly to professionalism. Specialists rapidly form guilds, association, clubs or unions to enhance their status, protect their skills from competition, and increase their incomes. That some become organised professions and others trade unions is due to a trick of the English language, aided by English snobbery. Profession… originally meant any occupation, and the more prestigious trades were distinguished by the adjectives ‘liberal’ (meaning gentlemanly) and ‘learned’ (meaning institutionally educated) professions.

By dropping the epithets the more prestigious occupations, chiefly the clergy, law and medicine, laid claim to the exclusive label of ‘profession’, which came to mean an occupation which so effectively controlled its labour market that it never had to behave like a trade union.

Creation and articulation of a professional ethos

What distinguishes a professional is not just their expertise and knowledge, it’s also about their motivation, i.e. it’s not a technical category, it’s about the values that back up the technical ability. The medical profession’s Hippocratic oath is one of the most celebrated expressions of a professional ethos. Take this quote from the oath for example:

Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

In many cases unlike the Hippocratic oath, professionals don’t always express their ethos explicitly, it’s more implicit in the culture of the profession and has developed over time. Scout law and Scout’s honour is an interesting example of this ethos in a voluntary setting. When a Scout Leader had a accident and made two scout’s in her care lie to cover it up, it was an example of the social significance of such an ethos whether the work is paid or not. The furore over MPs expenses is a more profile example of professionals perceived as breaking the ethos of their profession, if not always the letter of the law.

The word ‘professional’ stems from the way individuals with special responsibilities (often in religious settings) had to ‘profess’ their faith and commitment to their vocation. It was a public declaration. At it’s heart professional ethos is about the professional publicly committing to put the interests of others before their own. This professional integrity is the basis of the professional’s authority and status, to then serve societies needs for justice, education, health, etc. Without it, trust between the professional and service user is nigh impossible. At the same time, our attempts to hold professionals to account may be counter productive- see Onora Neill:

We are requiring those in the public sector and the professions to account in excessive and sometimes irrelevant detail to regulators and inspectors, auditors and examiners. The very demands of accountability often make it harder for them to serve public sector.

In ‘Alone Again: Ethics after certainty‘ (PDF) Zygmunt Bauman argued that ˜modern organisation is a contraption designed to make human actions immune from what the actors believe and feel privately’ (p.8). John Craig sums up these new personal demands on professionals:

Today our experiences of work have come full circle, with professional and personal values more closely connected than ever before. While for some this is a source of satisfaction, for others it can create stress and exhaustion. In order to support professional work, we need to help people to build new relationships between their personal and professional lives.

Establishing recognition of the impact of the profession’s work

Reeves and Knell explain this idea in reference to the teaching profession:

A teacher may have a PGCE, the National Union of Teachers may act effectively to secure her monopsonistic advantage, and she may have a strong motivation to equip the next generation for a fulfilling life. But she also has to succeed: the children in the classroom have to be educated.

There is a transformative aspect to the work of professionals. Their work effects real change. For some professions, articulating what this change is, is easier than it is for others. For example, a doctor ‘makes sick people better’. Increasingly though this simplification feels old-fashioned. Now doctors are “highly qualified, highly regulated experts operating in a specific, clearly demarcated occupational and institutional space”. So while impact remains crucial, it can be increasingly complex to demonstrate impact in the terms expected by service users and society at large.

New kind of professionalism

Reeves and Knell contend that throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, professional status and authority has primarily been built on restricting access to the labour market and organising collectively.

Increasingly though it is important to make the ethos and impact central. The relationship between users of professional services and the professionals themselves is changing. Users are better educated, have access to more and more information and have the means to demand increasing partnership where services are co-produced. The web is changing this balance of power, the culture of deference and the wider social context where users are much more connected. Professionals need to be clear about their ethos and what their impact is to ensure this new relationship is built on trust.

Professional identity has been based on good qualifications and good collective organisation. In the future it will need to be based more securely on good work. Good work is work undertaken with integrity as well as competence. A professional is someone who is demonstrably good at what they do, but also doing it against a set of fixed ethical benchmarks that the user can trust. Work, whether paid or unpaid, is the principal means by which we impact on the world. It is a transforming process. Good work consists of efforts to transform the world or the people around us in a positive direction. Good professional work additionally involves the exercise of a set of specific skills. This is where trends in professional identification coincide with a growing demand among individuals for work that is meaningful’.

On this point of co-production Charles Leadbeater in ‘Production by the Masses‘ looks to a post-industrial conception of our professions. Professionals currently oversee the mass production of public goods such as education and health. Instead, we need to look to how service users can be more involved in this process of production, and Leadbeater asks what the role of professionals should be in this process.

Leadbeater quotes Ivan Illich from his pamphlet, “Deschooling Society, Limits to Medicine, Disabling Professions and Tools for Conviviality”. Illich said:

The pupil is ˜schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ˜schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools and other agencies in question.

Leadbeater continues this point:

The triumph of modern industrial society, according to Illich, is the creation of institutions on a vast scale, which provide services such as education, health and policing that might have once been limited to just a few. These universal systems aspire to deliver services that are fair and reliable. Yet that in turn requires codes, protocols and procedures, which often make them dehumanising.

The paradox is that this industrial approach to establishing universal systems delivering public goods, comes with regulation to coordinate all the complex parts of the system. In time, Illich observed, this coordination through policies and procedures has a dehumanising effect. These massive systems could lead to counter productive results and a culture of dependency. It transforms citizens into consumers of these industrially produced public goods and services.

Illich wanted to achieve a delicate balance of the personal and the collective. A system dominated by the collective leads to dependent citizens, while one dominated by the personal was profoundly inequitable. For example, Illich wanted to transform education into a system of skills exchanges and directories where individuals could choose subjects based on their interest and propose others for discussion. In 1971 this was a pretty amazing precursor to the kind of system the web is beginning to make possible.

Essentially, Illich saw the role of professionals as crucial in this process of educating their users to be more self-reliant, and provide users with the means to self-assess the services that professionals offer. Instead, so often it is the professional who assesses what users need, assesses their entitlement and then inspectors evaluate. Illich saw it as vital to give citizens a greater role in service delivery.

Professionalism in the third sector

In ‘Double devolution- How to put the amateurs in charge‘, Nick Aldridge and Astrid Kirchner claim that the Third Sector is well-placed to take on the challenge of devolving the delivery of public good, with its ability to involve volunteers and citizens alongside professionals in building social capital and reforming public services.

Aldridge and Kirchner argue that the third sector tends to be wary of professionalism. They point to the low level of investment across the sector in its staff professional development.

The UK Voluntary Sector- Workforce Almanac 2007 Jenny Clark (NCVO and Workforce Hub): ”More than four out of ten voluntary sector workers (43%) are employed in ˜associate professional and technical’ and ˜managerial and senior official’ occupations. This professionalisation of the voluntary sector increases the attractiveness of the sector as a career choice.”

At the same time, work has been done to articulate standards in the third sector, for example Justin Davis Smith, Chief Executive, Volunteering England explains the importance of the National Occupational Standards for the management of volunteers:

“The redevelopment of these National Occupational Standards for the Management of Volunteers, together with a qualification framework for NVQs and SVQs, is a further significant step forward in enabling those concerned with supporting volunteers to make their full contribution to organisations and to develop their own skills and professionalism in this critical role.”

Steven Bubb, Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO), has campaigned for greater professionalisation in the third sector. In a lecture in 2007 ‘Building castles in the air: the case for professionalising the third sector’ (PDF):

“A growing sector, exerting power and influence whether in campaigning and advocacy, delivering services, or promoting civil society, needs to ensure high standards of professionalism in its leadership and organisation, and if the sector is growing then the public will expect to see greater transparency and accountability in charities.”

Bubb identifies a number of pressures on professionalisation in the third sector:

• Lack of investment in administration in charities due to fear of accusations of waste (criticisms of levels of pay)
• Romantic idea that volunteering activity comes at minimal costs
• Sense the large charities need to be smaller and more informal (State-funded charities should lose charitable status)
• Loose and outdated governance practices
• At present 80% of CEOs in ACEVO membership come from outside the sector, with the largest cohort from the private sector (this is potentially a limiting factor)

Broadly, Bubb believes that the third sector in its quest for professionalisation needs to respond to these pressures. It should defend levels of pay and call for more investment where needs are identified. It should be clear about the costs of supporting volunteering. It should defend charities right to grow in size. Governance practices should be overhauled and a new code of practice should be agreed. Finally, the third sector should embrace those with skills and experience from other sectors of the economy.

NCVO Third Sector Foresight adds these limitations and risks from professionalisation (particularly of volunteer management):

• Volunteering may be increasingly perceived as a means of developing skills and a career, especially for young people (see graphic below on full-time volunteering- though it’s not clear why this should necessarily be a result of the professionalisation of volunteer management. It might have more to do with the trend of volunteering to be more exchange-like (volunteering to achieve specific personal outcomes), and less gift-like (volunteering to achieve outcomes for others).
• Older or vulnerable volunteers may be discouraged from professionalised volunteering, causing a decrease in numbers of volunteers. The study that we mentioned in the last post looking at volunteer motivations found that the older volunteers were relatively more motivated by general sentiments like ‘meeting a need in the community’ and ‘making the world a better place’ than by learning new skills or career development.
• Rigid structures may discourage those who would prefer a less formalised approach (whether volunteering is over-formalised is a hot topic, but it’s important to question whether professionalisation of volunteer management necessarily results in more formalised volunteering- see this debate on e-Volunteerism). Ivan Scheier’s People Approach from 1981 is a good articulation of the different approach of volunteering, and how it doesn’t fit the formal model we have for paid jobs.
• Increased levels of complexity for organisations and particularly volunteer managers.
• Risk that innovation and spontaneity between volunteers and organisations are stifled.

Professionalism and volunteering

It’s important to distinguish professionalism in the voluntary sector with professionalism and volunteering.

First, there’s a type of volunteering referred to as ‘professional volunteering’ which is normally used to mean volunteers who are recruited specifically to roles where they will use their skills and experience as professionals, e.g. pro bono solicitors, etc.

Second, Leadbeater and Miller wrote about the concept of professional amateurs:

A Pro-Am [professional amateur] pursues an activity as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a professional standard. Pro-Ams are unlikely to earn more than a small portion of their income from their pastime but they pursue it with the dedication and commitment associated with a professional. For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory; it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.

Third, there’s the professionalisation of those who manage and develop volunteering. This has been a long running issue. For example, see this article by Susan Ellis back in 1997. In fact, Steve McCurley and Susan Ellis has just published (Jan 2010) an article online in e-Volunteerism where they’ve assessed the development of professional volunteerism associations (locally, regionally, nationally and internationally).

For the last decade, we’ve watched professional associations of volunteer program managers – on local, state/provincial, national and even international levels – launch, thrive, wither, revive or stagnate in dozens of countries. Our conclusion? There is still no consistency of purpose or success among these various groups, though the need for professional exchange remains as critical as ever.

One key point in the discussion has been whether people see volunteer management as a career, or just as a job. In the UK, Prospects the career website has a description of the role of a Volunteer Coordinator. But it is yet to be widely recognised as a field in itself. Part symptom, part cause is the difficulty that professional volunteerism bodies around the world have had in getting established.

Interestingly, despite the point made by Ellis and McCurley about the lack of consistency, volunteer management in the UK is advancing as a profession on the four points identified by Reeves and Knell set out at the top of this post.

Restricting entry into the labour market- new qualifications have been developed in volunteer management and the National Occupational Standards have been drawn up. However, these are more with a view to build capacity and provide formal recognition for volunteer managers, rather than restrict access to roles in volunteer management per se. There are still relatively few practitioners in volunteer management who have got achieved formal qualifications in the field.

Organising labour- the Association of Volunteer Managers along with other associations have been formed to give volunteer managers a voice and to increase the profession’s political and economic leverage. Sean Cobley AVM’s Chair has argued strongly for the professionalisation of volunteer management.

Creation and articulation of a professional ethos (set of shared values by which the profession’s work is conducted). In terms of a code, the Association of Volunteer Managers has a code of conduct for members. While in 2005 NCVO and the Charity Commission established a full blow code of governance ‘Code for the Voluntary and Community Sector‘. It follows the Nolan Principles established by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. They are Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty, and Leadership.

Part of the challenge here though is developing an ethos that is distinctive from the broad code for the voluntary sector on the one hand. And different from the field of Human Resources which is often held as the equivalent to volunteer management in the private and public sector. John Ramsey and Stephen Moreton have both argued against any equivalence being made on AVM’s website.

Establishing recognition of the impact of the profession’s work is one of the hardest things for the profession of volunteer managers to achieve. There is very little research into what the impact specifically is of those professionals in volunteer management. The research that does exists tends to focus on identifying the impact of volunteering in general. For example, the Institute of Volunteering Research’s Impact Assessment toolkit or using a broader technique like Social Return on Investment (SROI).

It’s an issue that AVM discussed at its last AGM in 2009. Here’s an example of one study on volunteer management from 2004 by Kirsten Holmes – “The impact of professional volunteer management on the volunteer experience: an exploratory investigation using the Volunteer Management Orientation Score (VMOS)”. The Management Matters survey also went some way to providing some baseline information on volunteer management in England.

Professionals and amateurs

Finally it’s interesting to contrast professionals and amateurs, because actually there is a lot in common. John Graham-Cumming in an article ‘A welcome bunch of amateurs‘, looks at the issue from the perspective of amateurs.

We’re all the children of amateurs: amateur parents. There’s no government department that will certify you as a parent (thankfully), nor a university department where you get your PhD in being a daddy, nor a professional body ready to strike you off for not following mothering standards. But any parent who’s held a newborn child in their arms has unconsciously taken the amateur’s oath: “I may not be a professional, but I’m going to do whatever it takes to act like one.”

It’s a pity that too often we associate amateur with amateurish, and dismiss amateurs as second-rate pretenders to a professional throne. What we should remember is that the word amateur has its roots in the French word for love: amour. And amateurs do for love what professionals do for money.

It’s crucial not to lose sight of where professionalism and amateurism intersect: values of good work (working for the common good, not just individual self-interest). The Work Foundation has set up a Good Work Commission to develop this idea. Amateurism without values of good work is leisure. Professionalism without the values of good work is wage labour. Final word to Reeves and Knell:

The professions need to re-connect with the deeper roots of their authority: why, how and to what end they do their work. Good work begets professionalism, and the future of the professions is dependent on their ability to remake and refashion good work.

In ‘The Origins of Virtue‘ Matt Ridley writes: Economists, who founded their whole discipline on the question ˜What’s in it for the individual?’, have begun to back away. Much of the innovation in economics in recent years has been based on the alarming discovery by economists that people are motivated by something other than material self-interest. (pp 131-2). It’s like the George Mallory school of motivation theory. Mallory is quoted as responding to a reporter’s question, “Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” with the words: “Because it’s there”. In the same way, do we just volunteer because we can?

Influenced by research in economics, do we have a tendency to overcomplicate why we give? Isn’t it really very simple? Matt Ridley again:

The virtuous are virtuous for no other reason than that it enables them to join forces with others who are virtuous, to mutual benefit. (p 147)

Certainly when we ask volunteers why they volunteer, the results of surveys seem to confirm the obvious. Take the recent Citizenship Survey (2009):

Or the Helping Out survey (2006-7) – it’s captured from this research bulletin ”Regular and occasional volunteers: How and why they help out” (PDF) published by the Institute of Volunteering Research:

Or the Do-it Satisfaction Survey (2009):

According to the research, ask someone why they volunteer, and most people respond: ‘to help others’. It’s a bit like asking someone why they eat bread, and getting the reply that it’s because they like ingesting food. It seems like a tautology to say people volunteer because they want to help others. Helping others is what volunteering’s about. Instead, it’s the values that underpin our concept of ‘helping others’ that are fascinating.

The discussion of values quickly takes this simple question about why people volunteer into the realms of morality. In fact, there aren’t many subjects that are more researched in volunteering than studying the motivations of those who give. But it’s rare for research, particularly recently, in volunteering motivation to focus on these ethical issues.

What we know about the motivations of those who volunteer

Why do we volunteer? By understanding people’s motivations better, so the thinking goes, we can improve the experience of those who volunteer and understand those who don’t. We need to know how to reach out to those who aren’t engaged by the volunteering we’re offering.

The psychology of motivation happens to be a subject that researchers from many different fields have been studying for many years. Why do we do what we do? What motivates us in our work? How can we be more productive? How can we be happy? The subject cuts across so many issues, but at it’s heart it’s a question about what it is to be human.

The Altruism-Egoism Split

There’s a philosophical split. One way to split a morality based on the values of altruism and egoism is to contrast the thinking of Auguste Comte with that of Ayn Rand.

When you talk about values and giving, sooner or later the word ‘altruism’ pops up. Auguste Comte was one of the first to develop a system based on altruism called Positivism. For Comte, altruism is an ethical doctrine that holds that individuals have a moral obligation to help, serve, or benefit others, if necessary, at the sacrifice of self interest. For Comte, we live for others. This is the definitive formula of morality (Catéchisme positiviste -1852).

Positivism alone holds at once both a noble and true language when it urges us to live for others. This, the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and of duty. Implicitly and indirectly it sanctions our personal instincts, as the necessary conditions of our existence, with the proviso that they must be subordinate to those of altruism. With this limitation, we are even ordered to gratify our personal instincts, with the view of fitting ourselves to be better servants of Humanity, whose we are entirely. (p.313)

Humanity, or living for others, is a superior moral value, to our personal (selfish and egoistic) instincts. This was forcefully opposed by Ayn Rand ‘Philosophy: Who Needs It?‘. Take this quote about giving:

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: No. Altruism says: Yes.

For Rand, this way of looking at the world amounted to ethical egoism. As an objectivist she stated: “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows” [source]. For Rand, the mysticism of altruism from a thinker like Comte, was a denial of who we really were as humans.

Altruism and this ethical controversy that surrounds it, can feel very distant from the everyday reasons why people volunteer.

Reciprocal altruism

Before we look at how these issues affect the way we think about volunteering, another way to understand this debate about value of altruism is to look at how the theory of evolution has shaped our understanding of how cooperation develops. Our modern conception of altruism has been enormously influenced by biology, and the growth of the field of sociobiology. This summing up from Wikipedia:

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is a profoundly powerful explanation of how evolution works; its undoubted success strongly suggests an inherently antagonistic relationship between unrelated individuals. Yet cooperation is prevalent, seems beneficial, and even seems to be essential to human society. Explaining this seeming contradiction, and accommodating cooperation, and even altruism, within Darwinian theory is a central issue in the theory of cooperation.

Theories on cooperation perhaps start with Peter Kropotkin whose book, ‘Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution’ sketched out how cooperation was just as significant a factor in evolution as competition. Richard Dawkins and the work he’s done points out that at the level of the gene, genes are selfish. But this doesn’t mean that individuals need to be selfish. Selfish genes may programme inidividuals to be altruistic. As Dawkins puts it: “Selfish at the genetic level, which may or may not programme altruism at the individual level”. Dawkins points to the work of WD Hamilton as demonstrating how evolution can account for helping others who aren’t necessarily close relatives. In terms of understanding motives for volunteering, the work of Robert Trivers, began to change the way we understood altruism as a function of reciprocity.

This profile of Robert Trivers in The Guardian provides some of the background to this thinking behind reciprocal altruism (I’ve added the emphasis):

“Trivers came up with the notion of reciprocal altruism. In plain language, this said that self-sacrifice could be understood as self-interest providing there was a chance the beneficiary would repay the deed in the future.”

“This kindliness became part of human nature, Trivers argued, because kind instincts were rewarded and this happened because our ancestors lived sufficiently long lives in small stable groups to keep track of who owed whom favours. The great originality of the theory is not that it says that we are under certain circumstances naturally benevolent. Plenty of people had made that observation before. What no one had seen was that this benevolence requires a very strong sense of fairness if it is to become an established instinct. Fairness, or justice, has its roots for Trivers in the determination to see that other people are not cheating us, and taking favours without giving anything in return.”

“The idea that we have moral sentiments because they are useful and profitable seems to many people to misunderstand or deny the nature of morality. The whole point of altruistic behaviour is that we do it without thought of reward – sometimes, without any thought at all, as when rescuing people from drowning, or pulling them back from an oncoming car.”

Trivers explains in these ideas in his own words:

“Altruism is suffering a cost to confer a benefit. Reciprocal altruism is the exchange of such acts between individuals so as to produce a net benefit on both sides.” – ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’

This difference is key, it provides a scientific basis for explaining how altruism can in fact benefit both the giver and the receiver. The distinction is the factor of time and the ability to keep track of these acts of altruism. He captures this in the statement below (my emphasis):

Under certain conditions natural selection favours these altruistic behaviours because in the long run they benefit the organism performing them.

We are changing our perspective beyond the individuals to the society made up of individuals. It is important to bring in the work of Robert Axelrod ‘The Evolution of Cooperation‘ who used Game Theory to demonstrate how egoism and altruism can be evolutionarily advantageous. Much of the social and political theory about cooperation today is heavily influenced by Axelrod.

A psychological understanding

In contrast to a Darwinian theory were altruism is or isn’t programmed, there’s potential to look at altruism at the level of psychological motives. There’s a Darwinian foundation, but it is crucial to look at social history to understand the particular forms that altruism actually takes. Just as now we’d argue against Kant’s idea that benevolence comes out of our sense of duty to pure reason, so we require an explanation of altruistic acts that goes beyond genetic programming. Theories of cooperation cross over with our understanding of psychology. Another way to understand the issue of altruism, and why we might be motivated to carry out altruistic acts, is by analysing what’s happening psychologically. Looking at the theory of someone like Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs gives a flavour of this. His classic quote from The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (p.238):

Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.

Maslow’s work brought the ‘highest values’ back into the debate. May be it was possible for people to simply help because they want to help. There is a massive literature in psychology of research that looks into what is commonly termed prosocial behaviour. It’s fascinating to consider all the external factors that can affect the likelihood of one person helping another, e.g. witnessing the accident makes people more likely to help, the amount of other potential helpers, etc. Tom Farsides, a lecturer in Social Psychology from the University of Sussex, has a really useful lecture presentation that gives a good overview of the recent psychological research on helping others. Farsides recently co-authored with Sally Hibbert a report for NCVO on Charitable Giving and Donor Motivation (PDF).

Tom Farsides’s associated paper (PDF): “How we can help rather than Give us your money – some implications of psychological research for increasing charitable giving”, looks at those who give for egoistic or altruistic reasons.

When egoistically motivated, people are likely to respond favourably to exchange opportunities that they think work in their favour. To increase ˜giving’ from people with egoistic motives requires promising to give them more of what they want in return for their greater level of investment. They are likely to respond unfavourably to requests or demands for help that do not seem to work in their favour.

When altruistically motivated, people are likely to respond favourably to communal opportunities, i.e., opportunities to work co-operatively with others who share their altruistic motives. To increase giving from altruistically motivated people requires promising that their extra help will be necessary and sufficient to improve the welfare of those they are altruistically motivated to help (but without involving ˜excessive’ costs to them or to others they care about). Altruistically motivated people want to help. They are likely to resent suggestions that they will ˜help’ only when it is in their own self-interest to do so. Unless they can clearly see potential benefits for those they care about, people with altruistic motives are likely to respond unfavourably to suggestions that their help can or needs to be ˜bought.’ People with genuinely altruistic motives will help as much as they can, whenever they see an opportunity to do so, and they will do so gladly.

Farsides argues that it’s impossible for charities to appeal to both successfully, because the two are mutually exclusive. In the long run, it’s in the interests of charities to focus on those with altruistic motives and develop by creating more opportunities to give. This is a conclusion that seems to chime with the idea of ‘crowding out‘ that we touched on in the previous post.

Motivations of volunteers

The work of the group including EG Clary, Mark Snyders, RD Ridge, Arthur Stukas and others on the motivations of volunteers has become a key reference point in the literature of what motivates people to volunteer. In their work “Understanding and assessing the motivations of volunteers: A functional approach Clary et al“, they summarised the different motivations into the following categories:

For the final part of this post I’m going to focus on the fascinating study conducted by Judy Esmond and Patrick Dunlop. It was called “Developing the Volunteer Motivation Inventory to Assess the Underlying Motivational Drives of Volunteers in Western Australia”. The final report can be found here (PDF).

Over a period of a number of years, the project developed a unique Volunteer Motivation Inventory (VMI) consisting of the following categories (these are direct quotes from the final report). These categories group together similar reasons for why people volunteer:

“1. Values (Va) whereby the individual volunteers in order to express or act on firmly held beliefs of the importance for one to help others (Clary, Snyder & Ridge, 1992). This scale consists of five statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because I feel it is important to help others’.

2. Reciprocity (Rp) whereby the individual volunteers in the belief that ˜what goes around comes around’. In the process of helping others and ˜doing good’ their volunteering work will also bring about good things for the volunteer themselves. This scale consists of two statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because I believe that you receive what you put out in the world’.

3. Recognition (Rn) whereby the individual is motivated to volunteer by being recognised for their skills and contribution and enjoys the recognition volunteering gives them. This scale consists of five statements, e.g. ˜I like to work with a volunteer agency, which treats their volunteers and staff alike’.

4. Understanding (Un) whereby the individual volunteers to learn more about the world through their volunteering experience or exercise skills that are often unused (Clary, Snyder & Ridge, 1992). This scale consists of five statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because I can learn how to deal with a variety of people’.

5. Self-Esteem (SE) whereby the individual volunteers to increase their own feelings of self-worth and self-esteem. This scale consists of five statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because volunteering makes me feel like a good person’.

6. Reactivity (Rc) whereby the individual volunteers out of a need to ˜heal’ and address their own past or current issues. This scale consists of four statements, e.g. ˜Volunteering gives me a chance to try to ensure people do not have to go through what I went through’.

7. Social (So) whereby the individual volunteers and seeks to conform to normative influences of significant others (e.g. friends or family) (Clary, Snyder & Ridge, 1992). This scale consists of five statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because people I’m close to volunteer’.

8. Protective (Pr) whereby the individual volunteers as a means to reduce negative feelings about themselves, e.g., guilt or to address personal problems (Clary, Snyder & Ridge, 1992). This scale consists of five statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because doing volunteer work relieves me of some of the guilt for being more fortunate than others’).

9. Social Interaction (SI) whereby the individual volunteers to build social networks and enjoys the social aspects of interacting with others. This scale consists of four statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because volunteering provides a way for me to make new friends’.

10. Career Development (CD) whereby the individual volunteers with the prospect of making connections with people and gaining experience and field skills that may eventually be beneficial in assisting them to find employment. This scale consists of four statements, e.g. ˜I volunteer because I feel that I make important work connections through volunteering’.”

Motivated from without or within

It’s worth looking at the questions that interviewees were asked by Esmond and Dunlop (see list below) to measure what was the mix of motivations for each volunteer. What’s interesting is that the top two stand out as pretty much the only two where the emphasis is outwards. In other words, volunteering to meet “a need in the community” and “make the world a better place”, are both examples where what is happening to others is primary, and what is happening to the volunteer themselves is secondary.

Many of the other questions reflect motivations based primarily on what is happening to the volunteer, and world without is secondary. For example, volunteering because of how it makes me feel (treatment as a volunteer, how useful they feel, how good the volunteering makes them feel, etc.). Another example of this is the motivation to volunteer because of what can be acquired, e.g. friends, skills, knowledge, networks, etc.

Here are Esmond and Dunlop’s questions used in their studies (note that they are ranked here based on the results of their research, i.e. statements, that interviewees agree or disagree with, at the top of the list were ranked as more important to their reason for volunteering):

Developing the Volunteer Motivation Inventory: Rank order of importance for all volunteer motivation index items

1. I volunteer because I believe I am meeting a need in the community in my volunteering role.
2. I volunteer because I feel that volunteering makes the world a better place.
3. I volunteer because I believe that you receive what you put out in the world.
4. I volunteer because I feel that volunteering gives me a better understanding of what life is about.
5. I like to work with a volunteer agency which treats their volunteers and staff alike.
6. Being appreciated by my volunteer agency is important to me.
7. I volunteer because volunteering makes me feel useful.
8. I volunteer because I feel that volunteering is a feel-good experience.
9. I would very much like my children to follow my volunteering experience.
10. Being respected by staff and volunteers at the agency is not important to me.
11. I do not see volunteering as part of my value system.
12. I volunteer because I feel that volunteering has given me the opportunity to appreciate the differences in people.
13. I have not made many friends through volunteering.
14. I volunteer because I believe that what goes around comes around.
15. Volunteering has had little effect on my self-esteem.
16. I volunteer because volunteering makes me feel like a good person.
17. I do not need feedback on my volunteer work.
18. I volunteer because I do not believe the community is doing enough to help those I assist as a volunteer.
19. I volunteer because I do not believe the government is doing enough to help those I assist as a volunteer.
20. I like to help people because I have been in difficult positions myself.
21. I feel more settled in myself after volunteering.
22. I have not changed as a person through volunteering.
23. I volunteer because I believe everyone should volunteer.
24. I volunteer because volunteering provides a way for me to make new friends. (inwards)
25. I volunteer because volunteering keeps me busy. (inwards)
26. I often relate my volunteering experience to my own personal life. (inwards)
27. I do not think it is important that the skills I acquire through volunteering will help me in my employment. (inwards)
28. My past experiences have nothing to do with my reasons for volunteering.
29. I feel that it is important to receive recognition for my volunteering work.
30. The social opportunities provided by the agency are important to me.
31. I volunteer because volunteering gives me an opportunity to build my work skills.
32. I volunteer because I feel that volunteering is a way to build ones social networks.
33. I volunteer because volunteering fits in with my religious beliefs.
34. I volunteer because I look forward to the social events that volunteering affords me.
35. Volunteering gives me a chance to try to ensure people do not have to go through what I went through.
36. I volunteer because volunteering makes me feel important.
37. Volunteering helps me deal with some of my own problems.
38. I volunteer because my family has always been involved in volunteering.
39. I volunteer because I feel that I make important work connections through volunteering.
40. I have no plans to find employment through volunteering.
41. I volunteer because I feel that volunteering will help me to find out about employment opportunities.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

This discussion of sorting out the motivations that have an internal focus and those that have an external focus, should not be confused with the debate in behavioural economics about intrinsic and extrinsic factors of motivation. Intrinsic motivation coming from factors that the individual can control, e.g. the amount of effort put in, and extrinsic motivation coming from factors that are beyond the individual’s control, e.g. incentives and obligations (carrots and sticks). The work of Bruno Frey is a great example of some of these issues.

It designates those activities which are undertaken ‘for their own sake’ (Deci, 1971). The reward thus lies in the activity itself and does not come from the outside as is the case with extrinsic motivation.

This touches on the enormous debate about the role of intrinsic and extrinsic factors in motivation theory. Edward Deci’s theory of self-determination is a really interesting example, with many potential parallels with volunteering. Deci, with co-authors Koestner and Ryan, have looked for instance at the role of intrinsic and extrinsic factors in motivating students and pupils in educational settings.

When we ask whether volunteering is a means to an end or an end in itself, we’re essentially asking about the role of intrinsic and extrinsic factors of motivation in volunteering. It provokes all kinds of questions, such as, is it appropriate to use extrinsic factors if they crowd out intrinsic factors? It’s this crowding out effect that ultimately worries Farsides in his discussion of altruism and egoism and the motivations of givers of donations to charities. Appealing to the egoists, crowds out the altruists.

The role of the web in motivating us to volunteer

How do we square theory about extrinsic and intrinsic motivations with the results of research into what motivates people to volunteer? How can external factors, i.e. one’s volunteers have little control over, be the one’s that are the main drivers for people volunteering?

One explanation might be that volunteering can convert extrinsic factors into intrinsic factors. In other words, what might feel like extrinsic factors, i.e. things beyond an individual’s control, are changed by the nature of the volunteering and the structure of the volunteering project. The way the volunteering is designed and carried out can influence what we understand as factors within our control and factors beyond our control.

Volunteering can change the extrinsic factors, into intrinsic factors. Volunteers are then chiefly motivated by external factors because those are what gives individuals the sense that by volunteering, joining with others, they can begin to affect issues and factors that on their own they feel are beyond their control. Volunteering driven purely by looking inwards would not be satisfying.

So volunteering is about empowerment, it’s about self-determination as Deci calls it. Reciprocity, as identified by Trivers, is one of the key ways for givers to be able to take on extrinsic factors. It’s about understanding the reciprocal links that potentially exist between us, about living for others, and understanding how that benefits each of us individually. Volunteering at its best is a practical altruism attuned perfectly to what we find most motivating in the world.

The web it seems to me has a role to play in helping to convert extrinsic factor beyond an individuals control, into intrinsic factors that are within our control. By creating networks and groups, we can suddenly mobilise enough numbers behind factors to break them down and take them on.

One day, it might really be as simple as enough people deciding to bring about social change, for that change to come about. One day.

Further Reading

Helping others, helping ourselves: Psychologists are studying why people volunteer, and how organizations can hold on to volunteers in the long term.

Volunteer Function Inventory Scale- Clary et al: The Functional Approach to Volunteers’ Motivations (PDF)

Correlates of Satisfaction in Older Volunteers: A Motivational Perspective – THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF VOLUNTEER ADMINISTRATION – Marcia A. Finkelstein (PDF)

Motivation and volunteer participation in the «Athens 2004» Olympic Games (PDF)

Understanding Volunteers’ Motivations – Katerina Papadakis (PDF)

Empathy, External Rewards and the Motivation Crowding Effect: Impact on Volunteers - Sharmi Surianarain (PDF)

Giving Time, Money, and Blood: Similarities and Differences – Lichang Lee; Jane Allyn Piliavin; Vaughn R. A. Call – Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3. (Sep., 1999), pp. 276-290. (PDF)