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.

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.

More From paddaniels

paddaniels has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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