Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein – A Short Film from Ian MacKenzie on Vimeo.

In this post, I thought I’d just paraphrase Charles Eisenstein (rough and ready transcript) from the video above. He’s an engaging writer and speaker on the role of the gift economy today.

I’ve pulled out the part of the explanation which is particularly pertinent to a lot of the subjects I’ve raised on the blog. For example, how volunteering connects with the idea of the gift economy.

“A new story of self…

Money is an agreement. It doesn’t have value all by itself. It has value because people agree that it has value.

Scarcity is built into the system. On the most obvious level this is because of interest bearing debt. Any time a bank lends money into existence, there is a corresponding level of debt. And because there’s always interest payable on the money, the amount of debt is always greater than the money in existence. It essentially throws people into competition with one another -for never enough money.

Growth is another thing that is built into our money system. If you’re a bank, you are going to lend to those people who are going to create new goods and services, so that they can profit and pay you back.

You’re not going to lend to people who don’t create goods and services.

So money goes to those who will create even more of it.

Growth means you need to find something that was once nature and turn it into a good/commodity; or find a gift relationship and turn it into a service.

You have to find something that people once got for free, or that people did for one another for free. You take it away from them, and then you have to sell it back to them- somehow.

By turning things into commodities, you cut people off from nature, in the same way that we’re cut off from community (when gift relationships are transformed into relationships between service user and service provider).

(The money economy encourages us to) look at nature as just a bunch of stuff. This leaves us very lonely. And it leaves us with many human needs that go unmet.

(One way we) fulfill this hunger (is) through purchasing, through buying things.

We know life is a gift. Well, if we know we have received a gift, then our natural response is gratitude.

In a gift society, if you have more than you need, you share it. This is how you build up status. It’s also how you build up security too. If you build up gratitude, then people are going to look after you too.

No gifts, no community.

(For this reason) you can’t just have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other.”

More here: Charles Eisenstein

It occurs to me that with the changes currently taking place with volunteering, that we could be going through this process for a second time.

We’ve already seen the money economy take things we did for one another as gifts, and turn them into paid-for commercialised services.

An example Eisenstein frequently cites is food preparation. Rather than cook for one another (in our families and communities) as was the case, it’s more typical now to eat food that we purchase and that’s been prepared outside our home by others.

In this way, Eisenstein suggests, the gift economy has been displaced by the expansion of paid-for services.

However, with the recent growth in volunteering, the gift economy has struck back.

Meals on Wheels are services typically driven by volunteers, who give their time to help distribute and offer meals to the vulnerable in our communities. It’s a gift economy solution to a gap, left by the trend that’s transformed food preparation from gift into a paid-for service.

Gradually, voluntary services that sprung up spontaneously as expressions of the gift economy spirit, are being encouraged to present themselves as services. This is the money economy reasserting itself.

For example, anecdotally there are many cases of volunteers being told that for the sake of financial cost and economic efficiency, they should cut down on the time spent having a chat and fostering a relationship with those they deliver to.

The influence of the money system is deep and profound. It has changed the way giving relationships make our society and economy what they are today.

Arguments for the value of volunteering

The first is to argue that volunteering has a social utility, and the second is to argue that volunteering has an economic utility. Traditionally, people have tended to use the first line: that the merits of volunteering lie in its value to society. However, over the last quarter of a century or so the second line, pointing to the economic value of volunteering has gained credence.

As the 2008 economic downturn bit, a curious thing happened. These arguments became enmeshed. Many people in the voluntary sector began to argue the economic value line when it came to inputs (what’s needed), but continued to argue the social value line when it came to outputs (what results). Conversely, many policy makers began to argue the social value line when it came to inputs, but went on to argue for the economic value of volunteering when it came to outputs.

This is how it worked:

Volunteering advocates

As investment in volunteering came under pressure with the downturn, so advocates for volunteering highlighted even more vigorously the need for financial investment in volunteer management and infrastructure. The reason they cited for this financial investment was the social value of volunteering, not the economic value of volunteering.

In fact, when it comes to economic value, many in volunteering were resistant or even sceptical about the merits of expressing volunteering’s outputs in economic terms, pointing out it exposed volunteering programmes to all kinds of unwelcome comparisons involving job substitution and exploitative work practices, devoid of social value.

Policy makers

On the other hand, policy makers seized on the need for volunteering to become much more socially acceptable and valued as an input. This new embrace of volunteering across society they argued was vital at a time of economic fragility. In fact, the economic situation meant we didn’t have any other choice. If policy could remove the social barriers to volunteering, it made economic sense as a value for money solution. In fact, volunteering could actually produce a return on investment.

So how did we get to this point?

The search for clues as to how volunteering advocates and policy wonks got their economic and social value arguments intertwined, takes us back to the 1960s. In the 1960s, economists started to become concerned with the decline in the UK’s manufacturing base and the relative growth of the services sector.

This concern grew and grew into the 1970s and 1980s.  Economists at this time had become used to dividing economies into three parts:

• the extraction and production of raw materials
• the transformation of raw materials into products
• the provision of services to consumers and businesses

With the growth in the relative importance of the services sector of the UK economy, attention was turning to the cost of labour in delivering services. While increasing labour costs could be covered by productivity gains in manufacturing, in services where productivity was often flat, it was not so clear how an increase in wages could be paid for out of productivity growth.

An artist’s labour

In 1966, a couple of American economists called William Baumol and William Bowen published a study called: Performing arts, the economic dilemma: a study of problems common to theater, opera, music and dance. In it they argued that the arts faced a problem in how in it covered the costs of input (wages), through earned income from the output of the arts. Baumol and Bowen argued that this was because an artist’s labour could not be rendered more productive, as was the case with manufacturing industries.

To illustrate this, Baumol and Bowen used an example that has become seminal in modern economics. The example, they chose was a string quartet performing Mozart. This string quartet, they said, requires the same amount of labour today as it did 200 years ago. It requires the same amount of people and same amount of time to perform.

From this standpoint, the classical musician is as productive today as they were 25 years ago, while a technician in a car production plant is many, many times more productive today than they were a quarter of a century ago. Baumol and Bowen concluded, in what was later termed Baumol’s cost diesease that the arts, which is intrinsically labour intensive, is destined to have a flat productivity rate, now and going into the future.

Baumol and Bowen were fascinated with how despite having a flat rate of productivity, the performing arts managed to survive as its costs increased. Conventional economic wisdom explained that manufacturing industries could afford to pay higher wage costs to those providing the labour through increases in productivity.

This productivity growth was often based on at least five factors:

1. Technology improves over time
2. Capital investment
3. Skills of labourer develop
4. Management of production process is refined
5. Economies of scale can be made

Industries with productivity growth can afford to pay higher wages without always charging higher prices. However, more labour intensive services such as education, health and social care face an income gap as they increase wages to keep up with other sectors of the economy. The result is that industries where productivity is flat, costs and prices just keep going up. This affects everything from football tickets to repairing worn out products through to nursing.

Baumol’s cost disease

Baumol’s cost disease helps explain this sense that there are two economies, rather than one. There’s one where we’ve got used to paying less for more for manufactured goods (such as from supermarkets or clothes shops), while we pay more for the same for services (such as the theatre, child care or train fares). Labour intensive services can become more efficient.

They can improve their use of technology, invest in new equipment, skill up, improve management and merge. However, in labour intensive services where productivity is flat, these measures tend to only have a marginal or short term impact. Instead, sooner or later, and particularly in an economic downturn when money’s tight, attention turns to measures that reduce the cost of labour (typically services biggest single expense). Other than increasing productivity, this can be down in a number of ways, including:

1. Decreasing the quality of the service
2. Decreasing the quantity of the service (supply)
3. Increasing price charged for the service
4. Increasing amount of unearned income (e.g. grants, donations, etc)

There was also a fourth way to combat higher service costs without huge increases in productivity. In the economic jargon of the time this was to increase the non-monetary compensation of those offering their labour to provide the service. This meant offsetting wage costs with non-monetary compensation such as training or perks, but it also meant involving volunteers and interns.

Volunteering and the services sector

As the services sector grew in the UK, so volunteering and interning began to become sucked into economic strategy. The idea that you could attach an economic value to volunteering, suddenly took it out of the gift economy and placed it squarely within the services sector. As the services sector of the UK has expanded, so did many voluntary and non-governmental organisations who began familiarising themselves with the growing sector they found themselves in.

As volunteering expanded through the 1980s and 1990s, it had begun to catch the eye of policy makers and think tank wonks. Increasingly policy makers became interested in the economic value of volunteering to the UK economy. The focus on the economic value of volunteering also suited the interests of those in the up and coming volunteering sector who wished volunteering to better recognised and appreciated.

Having a better way of understanding the economic value of the output of volunteering, provided the evidence base they required for arguing for greater financial investment in volunteer management and infrastructure. As Susan Ellis, a key volunteer management advocate put it: “Many resent the hold that the dollar has on our thinking and would prefer to live in a world in which human activities would be assessed and esteemed on the basis of their contributions to others. But we don’t live in such a world yet. Only things we value in dollars and cents get the attention of decision-makers.”

Economic value of volunteering

Many recognised that it’s the economic value argument that holds greater sway with policy makers, than the social value of volunteering argument as many in the volunteer management profession prefer.

Gradually, since 2000, more and more work has been done to establish the economic value of volunteering in the UK. The UK Civil Society Almanac in 2007/08 put the economic value of formal volunteers at an estimated £22.7 billion to the UK economy.

Kakoli Roy and Suzanne Ziemek in ˜On the economics of volunteering explained the idea: develop a conceptual framework to measure the economic contribution made by volunteer labor, thereby hoping to raise its societal appreciation. At the same time, governmental organisations were keen to highlight the economic value of volunteering. In 2001 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on governments to establish the economic value of volunteering.

Then, in its 2005 resolution on the follow-up to the Implementation of the International Year of Volunteers, the UN General Assembly further encouraged Governments, with the support of civil society, to build up a knowledge base on the subject, to disseminate data and to expand research on other volunteer-related issues, including in developing countries  (UN General Assembly, 2005b).

In a 2008 resolution the European Parliament encouraged Member States and regional and local authorities to  recognize the value of volunteering in promoting social and economic cohesion. In 2011, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) published its ˜Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work that aimed to make it easier to include volunteering cross-national comparative analysis in economic statistics.

The economic crisis

As volunteering embraced the economic value argument, the economic climate changed. In 2008, the banking crisis in the UK led to the first signs of pressure on an unprecedented period of growth in voluntary sector services in the UK. As a result of the economic crisis, the old underlying tension surfaced, first identified by Baumol in the 1960s.

Sooner or later, the pressure of labour costs catches up with labour intensive services. As with the 1960s, the policy makers faced six possible responses. The wonks scratched their heads and went through the options. While critics pointed to signs of decreasing quality and quantity of services and increasing costs (charges), policy makers attempted to offset these through recourse to finding alternative sources of unearned and earned income, productivity gains (so-called efficiencies was a buzzword for all political parties) and the increased use of labour that’s compensated through non-monetary means, including volunteering.

In 2011, the UK Government published its Giving White Paper. It highlighted alternative sources of income, pinpointed new technology and productivity gains for giving to charities, and went on to promote volunteering. It was exactly as the theory had predicted. What was novel was that it used a social value argument for volunteering.

The White Paper announced that the government would lead by example and volunteer in the hope that it would inspire people to do what they can to support their communities and will demonstrate that social action can fit around people’s busy lives in ways that benefit both the volunteer and the chosen organisations. Volunteering, in other words, was something socially valuable that all (even Ministers) should input into.

Included in the White Paper was a commitment to developing impact reporting and a mention of the work of New Philanthropy Capital (NPC). NPC, according to its website, was set up by Goldman Sachs staff who were trying to find the best way to give away money to charity. NPC is part of growing movement of philanthrocapitalists who believe economic and financial knowledge can be applied to help resolve social problems. In short, they apply economic value to entrenched social problems.

Based on this philanthrocapitalist approach, policy makers began to reverse engineer the economic value argument, starting with the output they wanted (hardheaded, independent, high-quality information to be able to decide where to invest their capital). They had ended up with a social value of volunteering argument for the input where everyone, even the Prime Minister, should take the time to volunteer.

Reducing labour costs

At the same time, since 2008 and the banking crisis, volunteer management and infrastructure has come under increasing financial pressure as with the rest of the service sector. This pressure has manifested itself in different ways. In particular, these growing comparisons between the volunteering and rest of the service sector have led to tensions.

For instance, many services across the service sector are relying increasingly on internships and work experience (e.g. the government’s work programme) to reduce labour costs, often drawing comparisons to volunteer programmes. As cuts are made to services, comparisons are being made by trade unions, statutory bodies and others, between the roles of volunteers and the roles of paid staff made redundant to reduce labour costs.

Many advocates for volunteer management and infrastructure, have rebutted these comparisons by employing the social value of volunteering argument. Essentially, this rebuttal rests on the point that it’s not valid to compare paid roles to volunteer roles, because paid roles are justified on an economic value basis, while volunteer roles are justified on a social value basis.

Likewise, it’s not valid to compare internships or work experience with volunteering, because one follows an economic rationale, while the other has a social value one. It’s as if the social value argument puts a firewall around volunteering during these pressures resulting from the economic downturn, while an over reliance on the economic value argument for volunteering exposes volunteering to complex dilemmas such job substitution.

Curiously, it’s the reverse of the policy makers position. Volunteering advocates seek to argue for the economic value of volunteer management when it comes to input, by campaigning on the message that volunteer management merits an appropriate financial investment. Yet volunteering advocates frequently turn to the more traditional social value arguments when it comes to outputs, even though they tend to emphasis the need for economic recognition when it comes to funding volunteer management.

Conclusion

This current economic downturn has revealed how closely enmeshed the arguments for both the economic value and social value of volunteering have become. It’s demonstrated that those policy makers calling economic-style outputs for volunteering, should logically also be much more open to social value type outputs. It’s also demonstrated that those calling for increased financial investment in volunteer management, should be more prepared to explore the dilemmas that the use of economic value inputs logically implies for outputs, alongside the more traditional social value arguments for volunteering.

What’s happening to volunteering? It’s an oversimplification to say volunteering is becoming increasingly institutionalised. However, something is definitely afoot.

In this post, I’m going to try and break down what this process of institutionalisation of volunteering might mean.

I think it’s possible to identify different levels so I’m going to present six possibles.

Whatever the case, what’s happening to volunteering is complex.

Institutionalisation covers a lot of ground. It’s important to see it as a continuum. In the middle of the process it’s hard to categorically say whether this or that kind of volunteering is “institutionalised”. At the extremes, it tends to get clearer.

Institutionalisation is also a gradual process. It’s been developing over many decades, if not centuries.

Looking at the kinds of volunteering around today, the picture is clearly very mixed. The extent to which institutionalisation of volunteering is happening, probably depends on more immediate factors like the nature of the volunteering in question and the scale on which the volunteering is taking place.

Setting out the levels can be useful to help us better understand what’s influencing the development of volunteering today.

1. Networks – modes of giving (non-financial)

A key sign of institutionalisation is the shift away from giving to people we know, such as with one-to-one giving or communal giving that’s rooted in specific communities. With institutionalisation there’s a distinct shift towards giving to people we don’t know, through intermediaries like an institution such as the church, the state or an formally constituted organisation. In fact, as this aspect of giving has become more institutionalised, we’re often giving to people we don’t know, even after we’ve volunteered. For example, a volunteer giving blood will rarely know the specific individuals they are helping.

• Give to people we know (communal or one-to-one giving) – direct reciprocity (level of a community)
• Give to people we don’t know (via institutions, state, organisations) – indirect (generalised) reciprocity (level of a society)

This dimension of giving to strangers is an important feature of the institutionalisation of volunteering. Many definitions of volunteering deliberately exclude giving to relatives, the effect of this is to focus volunteering on the more institutionalised type of giving.

In the Giving Green Paper, we highlighted a number of schemes across the country which facilitate and promote sharing between people who may never have met before – for example, time banking and complementary currencies. [Giving White Paper - Cabinet Office, UK Government]

Mutualism and self-help which by most definitions are recognised as volunteering, tend to be based on a model of giving that’s more aligned to direct reciprocity. Close-knit, smaller scale communities where givers and receivers know each other and reciprocate in turn, are a far cry from the more institutionalised volunteering of giving to strangers, that’s behind most common usage of the term ‘volunteering’ today.

Indirect giving: service user and provider

There’s a growing assimilation culturally, of this principle of a more generalised reciprocity. The growth of this principle is connected to the development of volunteering where people frequently step forward to help those they don’t know. We don’t even expect to meet or get to know those we help directly. And if we do get to know them, we often assume there’s not a direct gift relationship between the service user and provider.

It’s ironic, but this change is often framed by the language we use. When it was introduced, the term ‘service user’ jarred with the notion of gift exchange where both participants are giver and receiver, both are users and providers.

It’s the norm that the giver doesn’t expect the receiver to be able to help them in the future and reciprocate. The rise of the concept of social capital is an attempt to quantify this proliferation of generalised reciprocity, driven partly by the development of volunteering.

Institutionalising reciprocity: filling the tangibility gap

The growth of giving on the web has reopened this discussion about these different kinds of reciprocity: direct and indirect, in human relationships. Technology seems to offer new ways to render reciprocity more tangible, something policymakers aspire to. When a reciprocal relationship is direct the impact is usually very tangible. Tangibility has become an issue because of the push to more indirect forms of reciprocity, behind this is the trend for greater institutionalisation. It feels like we turn to institutionalisation to fill this tangibility gap.

Online communities are opening up new opportunities to forge ‘giving’ networks across and beyond societies in new and different ways. Much online giving in this way has challenged the presumption that giving will become increasingly institutionalised. The rise of the language of participation presents a renewed challenge to the presumed dichotomy between user and provider.

Online communities either provide new ways for givers to connect with receivers and reciprocate, or it enables gift economies to scale without the need for formal and traditional intermediaries such as a charity, state agencies or religious entities.

2. Resources – financial capital

The next level is understanding the growing importance of financial resources in enabling volunteering to take place. Volunteering that’s financed through free (libre) donations (without strings attached) is not institutionalised. Often these donations are small gifts in kind, where it’s the volunteers themselves who pick up the costs incurred as part of their volunteering. However, the greater the operational costs and the bigger the need for financial certainty, the more institutionalisation is on the cards. It becomes a cycle: growing volunteering, requires more resources, which in turn require higher volunteering outputs, which down the line need yet more resources.

Volunteering at scale often requires an investment that needs to be resourced by mechanisms such as:

• grants that are formally agreed,
• service contracts that are commissioned,
• services that are purchased/transacted, or;
• funds restricted to a particular charitable purpose

While these costs are diffuse and low level, volunteering activities remain largely uninstitutionalised. However, as costs and scale of demands increases, so does the pressure to institutionalise the volunteering doing the heavy lifting. Moreover, there’s often pressure institutionalisation creep from those entities that agree to bankroll the development of volunteering.

• Volunteering as an end in itself – financed by free/libre donations not linked to actions (generalised)
• Volunteering as a means to an end – financed by commission, contract or transaction – linked to actions (particular)

Over time, these different models of funding, whether by grant or by commission, seep into the way we talk and think about volunteering. For instance, describing volunteering as a currency (see complementary currencies as referred in the Giving White Paper), a type of gift exchange or means of achieving an organisation’s mission. These developments are a direct response to the changing nature of the way volunteering is financed. This growing requirement to finance volunteering at scale, has led to greater institutionalisation.

Scaling and distribution of volunteering

Once again, the web presents opportunities to rethink this model by reducing the costs of scaling volunteering, distributed giving and linking the giver with receiver. These elements effectively counter the trend towards approaching volunteering a means to an end. If the same scale of volunteering impact can be achieved through distributing the workload across a network of volunteers, there’s the prospect of new funding models where the burden of funding volunteering can also be distributed. Currently, the ways in which these models can be applied to volunteering is being explored, but it offers a possible route to funding high-impact volunteering in a less restricted, less institutionalised manner.

Where volunteering activities are primarily financed by libre donations that are unrestricted, volunteering can afford to be primarily an end in itself. However, as funding begins to become increasingly tied to more and more specific outcomes and deliverables, so volunteering becomes primarily thought of as a means to an end, and takes on the feel of greater institutionalisation. Institutionalisation, after all, comes about largely because it is a means to an end.

3. Aims: rights and duties

Volunteering as a gift relationship is built on the twin ingredients of freedom and impact: positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact.

The motivation for volunteering can be explained in terms of rights and duties. On a very simple level, volunteering balances the right of the individual to be able to freely give as they wish, with the acceptance of the duty to bring about beneficial social impact. All volunteering activities are a mixture of these two principles in varying amounts.

• Volunteering as a way to give as you wish (rights-based)
• Volunteering as a way to achieve socially beneficial outcomes (duty-based)

Volunteering that’s low level and on a short time scale, may often not be able to demonstrate tried and tested impacts. However, they have enormous value in that they are based on people freedom to respond to needs they identify and wish to tackle. At the same time, it’s this kind of volunteering that tends to be less institutionalised.

On the other hand, volunteering activities as they become more established and embedded in a community, engender a duty to maintain and support this work on the part of its volunteers, where the beneficial impact is a matter of record.

An example of a voluntary activity that has become thoroughly institutionalised over many years after becoming a key civic duty is jury service. In ancient Greece, jurors were selected from volunteers. Today, it is barely recognisable as a volunteering activity, given the sanctions available to the state to enforce it. However, it is still a service with no pecuniary reward to the individual carrying out their duty and responding to their jury summons. The juror takes an oath to give “a true verdict”. As such, this is still a giving activity of sorts, but one so weighted towards duty that it has become profoundly institutionalised. Despite its historical roots, it is no longer volunteering in any meaningful sense.

History is full of these kinds of examples where voluntary action has emerged out of the liberty to respond to a social need, and once established has become a question of service and civic duty. From the police to firefighters, from the military to medics, from holders of political office to religious leaders. Each have very distinct histories. All though show how volunteering can become institutionalised over time, by making the transition from individual responses to immediate need, through to an acceptance of an established duty.

4. Ethos: culture of volunteering

As volunteering becomes more institutionalised it is increasingly possible to codify and articulate the ethos and moral values central to it.

• Amateur: uncodified ethos, unorganised labour, unrestricted access to the labour market (no regulated training and qualifications)
• Professional: codified ethos, organised labour, restricted access to labour market (regulated training and qualifications)

The term volunteering is value-laden. However, these values whilst they remain uncodified are a matter of individual preference and public debate. Once they become codified, there is a body that is credited with the authority to adjudicate and make substantive decisions about what that ethos is. It’s no longer simply recommended good practice, it’s enforceable practice.

As institutionalisation progresses, this authority restricts access to the labour market by enforcing sanctions and upholding quality standards. For example, the General Medical Council can decide which medical practitioners are registered, while Ofsted can decide which childminders are registered to provide childcare. Professional bodies can organise labour to leverage political and economic power to achieve its strategic objectives. Qualifications and training are no longer simply added value, they become the minimum requirement to entry.

At this point volunteer management has a body of knowledge and different professional codes exists around the world, there are no professional qualifications that serve as a minimum requirement. There are more and more people who see themselves as volunteer managers, knowledge of ethical codes and professional standards is not high.

5. Structure: formal and informal volunteering

How volunteering activities are structured is one of the most obvious and explicit forms of the institutionalisation of volunteering.

• Informal: individuals, groups and unconstituted associations (subject to general law)
• Formal: (formally constituted) organisations, charity, state, corporations, companies (subject to specific law)

There is a clear range of structures starting with individuals on their own and groups that are completely unconstituted, right through to other structures such as charities, companies and state agencies that are formally constituted and legally recognised. These more formal structures provide legal and bureaucratic frameworks in which volunteering takes place. Formal volunteering is in this sense closer to being institutionalised.

6. Need: Services

Volunteering provides services addressing the needs of the people using these voluntary services.

• Particular: volunteering that addresses the needs of a specific community
• General: volunteering that addresses the needs of all society

There is a range of these needs from those providing ‘particular’ services, to others providing ‘general’ or ‘universal’ services. Volunteering activities have traditionally been understood as adding value to public services. The difference has to do with the how widely those services are understood to hold moral responsibility to those in need and be publicly accountable to them.

Services that aim to provide particular services to specific users, have a limited moral responsibility to a specific community. However, over the last 50-60 years in the UK, public services have traditionally been delivered by the same agency (the state) that accepts this broader moral responsibility to all those in need across the whole society (whether that extends just locally or nationally).

An example might be the difference between the UK Neighbourhood Watch network and the police. Neighbourhood Watch provides a service in particular communities where people volunteer. The police service takes on a more general responsibility across all society in the UK. While Neighbourhood Watch might be able to reasonably argue their accountability is restricted to where they’re present, the accountability of the police is much broader, i.e. they’re an institution. The greater this moral responsibility and accountability of voluntary services extends, the closer it comes to institutionalisation. Another interesting case in point is the relationship in the UK between the RNLI’s (voluntary) search and rescue responsibilities and the responsibility of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (state).

The policy ideas floated along with the Big Society have courted controversy precisely because they seek to shift the moral responsibility of voluntary services from limited sections of the community, to taking on moral responsibility for the needs of society as a whole. For example, while a voluntary services might in the past seek to add value by filling the gaps not met by public libraries, now voluntary services are aiming not just to fill the gaps, but to take over the public library itself. Once it does, it takes on a wider moral responsibility for all users needs. In addition, volunteering is positioning itself as a means to an end and angling for commissions to deliver specific services. This all adds up to greater institutionalisation of volunteering.

Conclusions

So how can we identify institutionalised volunteering? Why would we want to?

This is not about oversimplisticly labeling institutionalised volunteering as bad, and volunteering that isn’t institutionalised as good.

It’s about fighting for a balanced approach to volunteering that includes both volunteering that’s institutionalised and volunteering that’s not. Neither is necessarily better than the other.

In practical terms we need to encourage:

• Policymakers to address volunteering in the round, and not just focus on an institutionalised outlook of volunteering and giving
• Researchers need to spend more time to understand and analyse the complex relationship between volunteering and institutionalisation
• Those working and volunteering in the voluntary sector need to develop networks and resources that span the whole of the volunteering sector
• Those in the media need to discuss and communicate a more rounded version of volunteering that includes both the non-institutionalised and the institutionalised aspects of volunteering

Towards the state’s sphere of influence

Different volunteering projects, programmes and initiatives may fit one or more of the six levels of institutionalisation outlined above. However, it’s interesting to note how these factors stack up. In particular, how as volunteering leans towards institutionalisation, it’s also in many ways more within the sphere of influence of the state.

For example, with institutionalised volunteering the following factors prevail:

1. Volunteering that’s oriented to a mode of giving that’s based on indirect reciprocity
2. Volunteering that’s financed through exchange/transactions such as commissions, agreements or contracts, and as such, is developed as a means to achieving a specific end
3. Volunteering that’s well established and fosters volunteers primarily by appealing to their sense of duty or service
4. Volunteering that’s developed within clear codified professional values and ethos
5. Volunteering that takes place within the structure of formally constituted organisations
6. Volunteering that aims to deliver services with a general remit and a sense of moral responsibility for the needs of society in general

Conclusion

Institutionalised volunteering is no better or worse than volunteering that’s not institutionalised. The reason for understanding this distinction is to ensure we maintain a broad approach and an open mind when considering different types of volunteering.

All too often, it’s the more institutionalised volunteering that attracts debate, resources and thinking. As a result, it’s this volunteering verging on institutionalisation that dominates when we think about developments in volunteering. In particular, it is certainly worth looking at whether this is due at least in part to the increasing influence of the state on the development of volunteering in the UK.

If we allow this one-sided view of volunteering to dominate, ultimately we’ll become more fragmented as a sector. If we learn to include these alternative approaches to volunteering, the development of volunteering in the future will be all the more rounded for it.

"Attlee - the institution" -> Photo Credit: sludgegulper (Flickr)

“We shall always have alongside the great range of public services, the voluntary services which humanize our national life and bring it down from the general to the particular.” – Clement Attlee

This quote from Clement Attlee, quoted in Briggs and Macartney, Toynbee Hall: First Hundred Years (1984) 35-6, via An Introduction to the Voluntary Sector – Eds. Justin Davis Smith, Colin Rochester and Rodney Hedley (Ch 1, The Voluntary Tradition, J Davis Smith).

“Many of us have been in this business of labelling and re-labelling the concept of voluntary service. I now find this process irritating – politicians labelling and re-labelling, capturing and re-capturing something which anybody with any sense knows that, regardless of government or regardless of the results of a General Election, is the essence of English society – the concept that people go out and do things which they are not forced to do and which they are not paid to do.” – Douglas Hurd

˜Society’s responsibility for the irresponsible individual’, Friday 23 October 1998, by The Rt. Hon Lord Hurd of Westwell CH CBE, Chair of the Prison Reform Trust

Summary

The relationship between the state and voluntary sector has been a source of controversy for many years. Frank Furedi believes that the state’s close interest in volunteering has led to it becoming institutionalised. Does the prospect of official and unofficial volunteering threaten to split the voluntary sector in two, between those who cooperate with the state’s agenda for volunteering and those who don’t?

The following post started off life as an off-the-cuff analysis of Frank Furedi’s recent article in the Australian, “Do good, but do it our way” (3rd December 2011). You can’t read it there (unless you subscribe to that paper), but you can read the full version on his website.

Furedi’s opinion piece touches on the thorny issue of how the state promotes and supports volunteering. If (for arguments sake) you conflate volunteering and voluntary services, this is not a new issue, as the quote from Attlee intimates.

Ironically, Furedi’s criticism is that volunteering is precisely not doing what Clement Attlee identified as voluntary services’ great contribution when he worked at Toynbee Hall over a hundred years ago. Attlee famous for presiding over the creation of the modern welfare state in the UK, worked at Toynbee Hall as Secretary for around a year early in his career. Furedi asserts that voluntary services are effectively being constrained by the state in how they can ‘humanize our national life’ and how they can go from the ‘general to the particular’. Not to put to fine a point on it: volunteering is becoming institutionalised.

There’s confusion about how we resolve the issues that arise, the more the state gets involved in the development of volunteering and voluntary services. Issues such as independence, influence and professionalisation of the voluntary sector are just some examples. Meta Zimmeck and Colin Rochester’s recent summary of the issues with the Compact (an agreement between government and the voluntary and community sector first published in 1998) provides more practical examples of the kinds of issues in formalising the relationship between government and the voluntary sector.

We’ve come a long way since the antipathy and suspicion of the Thatcher years, the formalised partnerships with the Deakin Commission and the Compact under Blair, the grand plans under Brown, and the cuts and optimism with Cameron’s Big Society. However, while prime ministers come and go, volunteering appears to be on an inexorable rise on the policy agenda. But is this evidence of a creeping institutionalisation of volunteering as Furedi suggests?

Although I don’t buy Furedi’s central argument about a golden age of volunteering and public virtue, behind his column lies a pertinent question about the institutionalisation of the voluntary sector. We ignore it at our peril.

• What are the implications of the state’s steadily growing involvement in the volunteering agenda?
• Is institutionalisation an inevitable part of the government and the voluntary sector working closer together?

Since the 1970s in particular, governments across the world have taken an increasing interest in volunteering, providing it with greater recognition and financial assistance. Is institutionalisation the next step in this evolution of the relationship? Will the state get a greater and greater say in the kind of social order and rules that govern volunteering?

In 2009, Colin Rochester set out the positions in the debate about state and volunteering as follows:

State can play a role in the development of volunteering

• State is both benign and competent: for example, state can set strategic direction for volunteering; (issue is one of making technical improvements to policy and implementation)

State can not play a role in the development of volunteering

• State is neither benign nor particularly effective;
• Volunteering is – and should be – every bit as anarchic, ungovernable and untidy (Dahrendorff; Kearney) – “if government has a role, it extends no further than ensuring that there are few, if any, obstacles to volunteering. Otherwise it needs simply to ˜get out of the way’”

Panel Session- NCVO conference: Making a difference? Reviewing government’s involvement in volunteering, ˜Losing Soul’: Should we be concerned about the independence of volunteering?’ (PDF), Colin Rochester

The contrast between how the state-volunteering issue is usually discussed, is that Furedi’s tone is substantially more pessimistic. He has no time for the achievements that have come from this closer working relationship between the voluntary sector and the state. A forward looking analysis must assimilate both the benefits, as well as the costs. What Furedi does do that’s helpful, is to sound a warning shot to all those currently rethinking the nature of the relationship between state and volunteering in the future.

Just yesterday, the Policy Exchange published a report (PDF) by Anthony Seldon which called for a revived Big Society. It was laced with the kind of institutionalised version of volunteering we’ve come to expect from policy proposals (emphasis added):

• “retired people should volunteer and continue to be actively involved in helping others in their communities”.
• “dramatic boost to volunteering and training schemes should be urgently introduced to ensure that every young person can be occupied in meaningful employment”
• “All schools to have compulsory volunteering afternoons: those children who volunteer when young are more likely to continue when older”

It’s a quick step from “should volunteer”, to volunteering “as occupying time”, to “compulsory volunteering afternoons”. Is a world where volunteering becomes an institution desirable or not?

• Can volunteers be trained to combat terrorism?
• Can access to the police be made dependent on prior volunteering?
• Can state benefits be linked to volunteering?
• Can volunteering be the condition of access to subsidised transport?

These are just some of the examples of current practice by UK government. But at what point do they effectively institutionalise volunteering?

I feel like this question gets to the nub of the issue and reveals the shifting tectonic plates in how volunteering is developing in the UK.

On the one hand, there’s the cause for greater professionalisation in the voluntary sector that could be advanced with the greater status and recognition that institutionalisation confers. On the other hand, the cause for a fuller appreciation of volunteering’s potential is set back by its institutionalisation.

Let’s face it: we have difficulty enumerating volunteering’s secret sauce, let alone bottling it.

The question of insitutionalisation alludes to a very real tension that’s ratcheted up, each time volunteering climbs higher the policy agenda.

I don’t pretend to have the answer to such a fundamental question, but I feel like it’s an issue that needs airing outside the political arena. Thinking it through helps to articulate the juncture that we’ve reached in volunteering today. A fork in the road where we run the risk of seeing officially recognised volunteering and unofficial unrecognised volunteering splitting the voluntary sector in two.

Supporting notes

I’ve written up my notes for this blog post below, including a running commentary on Furedi’s original article on volunteering’s institutionalisation.

Furedi is an academic (Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent). He’s widely published across the media who appreciate his combative style and headline-friendly polemic. This is no accident, given his political activist background. I think it’s fair to say that he’s a seasoned critic/skeptic of government’s policy towards volunteering over the last decade or so. Very broadly, he argues that public policy which promotes volunteering, actually undermines, more often than not, the essence of what volunteering is. Although I think it’s also equally fair to say that a narrative on volunteering hasn’t (until recently) been one of his central concerns.

In recent years, Furedi’s growing concern about volunteering has really manifested itself in his criticism of the extension of the reach of Criminal Record Bureau checks which he cited as negatively impacting on volunteering. This attention to volunteering really features as part of Furedi wider thesis about a developing “culture of fear” (‘Culture of fear: risk-taking and the morality of low expectation‘; first published in 1997).

Culture of fear

His concern can be summarised at the level of the state: volunteering has been co-opted by the state in an attempt to address the state’s own crisis of legitimacy. In the ‘Culture of Fear’, he says:

“During the past decade, successive governments have actively encouraged volunteering and have increasingly sought to use non-governmental organisations to deliver services.”

He goes on:

“Official patronage of advocacy groups represents an attempt to mitigate the effects of the loss of legitimacy previously enjoyed by the political class.” [p.186, Culture of Fear]

In turn, his concern is also at the level of the citizen: as a result of the co-opting of the voluntary sector by the state, citizens have been encouraged to view volunteering as a means to further narrow self-interested goals. As he states in an article, “It’s time to stand up for courage and conviction“:

“Now call me old-fashioned, but when I was young you volunteered because you believed in something. You wanted to help people; you wanted, for instance, to give blood. You didn’t do volunteering because it looked good on your CV.”

Furedi fears volunteering has become a mere transaction, rather than a transformation.

Moral maze

Coincidentally, in a year when the sector has faced unprecedented cuts, Volunteering England, invited Claire Fox, Director, Institute of Ideas, to their AGM in November to discuss: ”What is volunteering for? Is the volunteering movement so taken up with current needs we’ve lost a vision for the future?”.

Claire Fox is a fellow member, along with Furedi, of the so-called informal Living Marxism network. She has been echoing fairly similar arguments. You can get a flavour from this opening remark she made on a recent episode of Moral Maze on the relationship between the state and the charity sector (23rd Feb 2011).

“I have been worried about the dangers of crushing the lifeblood out of a very distinctive part of society, civil society, which is the third sector, by the fact that often I can’t tell the difference between it and the state. So the idea that it is going to do even more work commissioned by the state seems to me to be destroying the very voluntarism of the voluntary sector.”

So we kick off this discussion of Furedi’s recent article:

Volunteering has been turned into an institution that is promoted on the grounds of its benefits for the volunteer and for the community, and its meaning has been thoroughly transformed.

Ok. Here’s what Furedi contests: that volunteering has been turned into “an institution”. I take this to mean that volunteering is somehow less human now. In other words, it’s really human for people to want to help each other. Helping each other doesn’t need to fit a formally agreed definition of volunteering, to be legitimate cooperative behaviour.

It’s worth being wary of a sociologist’s use of the term ‘institution’. It comes packed with significance. There’s not much more in the way of clarification from Furedi about what he means exactly by the word ‘institution’ in the context of volunteering. But from his comments, you can hazard a guess that he’s particularly concerned with how volunteering is being used as a way of enforcing a layer of social order and rules in how people help each other, which is needless in his view.

“the culture comprised of attitudes and norms that is aligned to the formal and official complex of tasks and rules might compete with an informal and unofficial culture that is adhered to by a substantial sub-element of the organisation’s membership” [standford.edu]

Here’s the rub: with institutionalisation of volunteering, there’s a sense in which there’s a right way to volunteer and a wrong way. One example of how this plays out is in moral disapproval meted out to those not at the standard expected. The other is through the law where legal sanctions have been used against those engaged in bad practice.

“It is sometimes claimed that in addition to structure, function and culture, social institutions necessarily involve sanctions. It is uncontroversial that social institutions involve informal sanctions, such as moral disapproval following on non-conformity to institutional norms.” [standford.edu]

Of course, it’s not often as simple as that. At present, volunteering is often impacted by the law in unintended ways, in part because many of these laws are not drafted with volunteering specifically in mind. For this reason, many of the legal implications on volunteering practice is open to the interpretation of courts, tribunals, lawyers and the government. This situation has led to controversial decisions particularly in employment tribunals.

This predicament has everything to do with the issue of institutionalisation. The solution legally is to opt for greater clarity. However, greater clarity comes with greater codification of the rules, norms and values surrounding volunteering, i.e. greater institutionalisation.

For this reason, most balk at greater legal clarity, despite it often leaving volunteers with less protection in situations of bad practice. A case in point, is the recent debate about volunteer rights and whether greater regulation of volunteering is needed. Many called for powers for a volunteering ombudsman to be able to adjudicate in cases. Others saw this as a step too far towards institutionalisation. It’s ironic that on the issue of volunteer rights it’s often the volunteering professionals who are reluctant to pursue further institutionalisation, while it is volunteers on the receiving end of bad practice who advocate greater institutionalisation.

I say ironic because Furedi argues it’s actually the professionals who want institutionalisation, rather than the volunteers. We’ll explore this further later in this post. Anyway, back to Furedi:

Not so long ago, volunteering was associated with a genuine ethos of service and with an act of altruism.

To paraphrase, I understand this as: ‘Volunteering was (note the past tense) previously based in our common humanity (our sense of altruism) to a much greater degree’. Can institutions be altruistic? I don’t think they can. This argument feels like a distant cousin of the ‘forcing people to volunteer’ debate. So I think Furedi’s point here is about this kind of denuding of volunteering (it used to have a ‘genuine ethos’ and now it doesn’t).

Mislaying altruism

It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of language and the use of word ‘altruism’. It was more than a little ironic that Sir Stephen Bubb, Chief Exec of ACEVO, mislaid the word altruism when trying to pinpoint the defining factor between the state and the charity sector live on Radio 4′s Moral Maze. Bubb’s oversight revealed why the charge has begun to stick: that the state has so set the volunteering agenda that the sector has lost sight of why people want to volunteer.

To digress for a second, the programme also highlighted the difficulty where the issue of the state’s role in volunteering, is overshadowed by the higher profile issue of rolling back the state. For example, Nick Seddon’s work to highlight state funding of charities. This blog post is an attempt to show how it’s broader than the question of funding. After all, this issue of charities compromising mission is equally true for those accepting large donations from rich individual philanthropists who can influence the volunteering agenda. However, the issue of the institutionalisation of volunteering hints at an even more profound (though less discussed) dilemma in the relationship between state and voluntary sector: institutionalisation (can you bottle volunteering’s secret sauce without undermining it?)

Added to this discussion of altruism, comes the idea of ethos (moral character). The issue of ethos gives a critical nuance to this debate because it makes the link between how we get from volunteering to a state’s claim to legitimacy (volunteering and the sense of citizenship). Volunteering as a route to citizenship has always held a certain attraction for politicians of all colours. I think it was Douglas Hurd who was first to utter the phrase the ‘active citizen‘. Other examples has flowed from this close connection in the minds of politicians: the citizenship survey to track volunteering, corporate citizenship and earned citizenship for refugees through volunteering. Interesting to look at ”Volunteering, Active Citizenship and Community Cohesion: From theory to practice” by Angela Ellis Paine, Institute for Volunteering Research; Michael Locke , Centre for Institutional Studies, University of East London; Veronique Jochum, National Council for Voluntary Organisations (July 2006) [PDF].

If a state can claim it underwrites an ethos (or moral disposition/beliefs) that provides a key part of today’s cooperative social order, it begins to get a say in what the ethos is or what those beliefs are. Previously, other long established social institutions such as family or religion could have claimed to underwrite an ethos of giving, now as their influence wanes, the state seeks to fill the gap with other forms of cooperative social order. Increased state funding of volunteering clearly not only supports the development of volunteering, but has lead to the state influencing the kind of volunteering that develops as a result.

What endowed volunteering with an attractive moral quality was that people performed an action or provided a service to others without any compulsion. This was an act based on one’s own free will and motivated by the conviction that it was the right thing to do.

So to pursue this thought- the natural consequence of this institutionalisation of volunteering for Furedi, is an increased tendency to constrain interpersonal relationships. He doesn’t say this directly here, but I’m assuming that he sees the growth in formalised processes and structures around volunteering (such as legal entities like charities or government), as unnecessary intermediaries between people in the pursuit of volunteering.

The act of volunteering continues to retain its inspiring moral qualities to this day, and we rightly regard the volunteer who helps others as more virtuous as someone whose behaviour is entirely dominated by self-interest. When the ethos of service appears to be conspicuously absent in much of public life it is not surprising that volunteering is celebrated as a highly valued accomplishment.

Ethos in service

So this is where Furedi shifts gears.

He praises volunteering (and by extension those promoting it). He gives a nod to ‘moral qualities’ which seemed implied by his previous reference to ‘ethos’.

Despite this it feels like it’s praise reluctantly given. Even if volunteering is not as human as it could be, less human is better than actively antagonistic to others (or as Furedi phrases it- ‘entirely dominated by self-interest’).

This praise comes with a sting in the tail.

This celebration of volunteering by the state, conceals an even greater bureaucratisation/institutionalisation of service in public life (I’m guessing this is behind his claim that there’s an absence in the “ethos of service”). Frustratingly, Furedi doesn’t get into why government can successfully co-opt volunteering’s ethos of service, but not the ethos of service in public life. The argument, I think, is that the state can co-opt the ethos of volunteering through influencing charities, but has no such proxy for co-opting the ethos of public service.

Regrettably, volunteering has been turned into an institution that is promoted on the grounds of its benefits for the volunteer and for the community. Consequently the meaning of volunteering has been thoroughly transformed. When governments self-consciously promote and administer volunteering schemes it is evident that it has nothing to do with the exercise of free will.

Now this is where Furedi begins to reveal his hand. His problem is not just that volunteering has taken the wrong path (towards ‘institutionalisation’), it’s that governments are co-opting people’s better instincts for the governments’ own benefit. This goes to the heart of Furedi’s argument. For me, it’s the strongest part of his argument.

The list of failed government-sponsored volunteering initiatives is long for sure.

Yet, I can’t help feeling Furedi profoundly fails to diagnose where the incompatibility lies between government and volunteering.

In government-sponsored initiatives, the element of personal freedom is often overpowered by the focus on social benefit. But this is not to say free will is non-existent.

Take the organisation Volunteering Australia. It was established by the government’s Office for the Not-for-Profit Sector. Volunteering Australia claims to represent the diverse views and needs of the volunteer community while promoting the activity of volunteering as one of enduring social, cultural and economic value.

Volunteering Australia denies this is how it was established in it’s formal response to Furedi, and stresses that it is an independent non-for-profit, yet it doesn’t go into details about how it is currently funded in its response. Looking at it’s accounts for 2011 (PDF) though, it seems clear the vast majority of its funding comes from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

State funding

The issue seems to be how we in the volunteering sector recognise the extent to which our work to develop volunteering is influenced by our state funders. It’s worth remembering that this is not just an issue with state funding of volunteering, it important to consider corporate influence over the ethos of volunteering through how and what kind of volunteering development it funds.

The preposterous concept of a volunteer community is testimony to the professionalisation of what was at one time perceived as a spontaneous act. A community of professional volunteers would be a clearer representation of the lobby that Volunteering Australia speaks for.

Volunteer community

To me it’s curious that Furedi picks up on the weakness (relative lack of cohesion) of the ‘volunteer community’. The notion of a ‘community of volunteers’ is problematic for a whole range of reasons. For example:

• volunteering covers a huge range of activity, so many of the most cohesive volunteer communities are built around specific activities, rather than an aggregate of volunteering;
• volunteers don’t often self identify as volunteers, they identify with the cause, issue, or people directly in need they volunteer to serve

As a result, the idea of a volunteer community, on balance, remains more latent than actual. This latent volunteer community exists to the extent that many volunteers (across issues and activities) have shared values, goals and interests. Yet, making this latent community a practical reality is one of the greatest challenges for organisations, such as Volunteering Australia or Volunteering England, that seek that seek to bring together those involved in all kinds of volunteering.

In many sociological definitions, the concept of the ‘institution’ actually presupposes the existence of a community. As a result, this relative incohesion of the volunteer community, would seem to undermine Furedi initial assertion that volunteering’s becoming an institution. That’s to say: institutionalisation implies the idea of a volunteer community is becoming more feasible, not more preposterous. Furedi can’t have it both ways.

What’s even more disturbing is that volunteering is advocated not because it is something that is good in itself but because the Australian government recognises that it delivers a number of key social and economic benefits.

Is it more “disturbing” that volunteering should be seen as either a means to ‘economic and social benefits’ or as a good in itself? Volunteering is best understood as both. It’s a means to an end and an end in itself. Any approach that focuses on any one motivation or impact of volunteering to the exclusion of the other, simply undervalues or misunderstands what volunteering is.

Means to an end?

The challenge is to understand how to balance these two aspects of volunteering. Furedi’s argument leaves no room for such an idea. What’s interesting is that what Furedi is actually highlighting is the real problem that the government-led volunteering agenda often over-emphasises volunteering as a “means to end”. For example, government volunteering have included making volunteering’s a means to: reducing youth offending, getting offenders to pay back to the community, getting the unemployed back into work, turning immigrants into fuller citizens, etc.

The institutionalisation of volunteering destroys the meaning of an altruistic act. Anyone visiting the website of Volunteering Australia could be excused for interpreting volunteering as an instrument for skills acquisition and enhancing one’s career opportunities. The website declares that good quality, appropriate training and skills development is something (that) Volunteering Australia champions. It runs a National Volunteer Skills Centre and places a great emphasis on training people to be volunteers.

So the basis for this comment from Furedi, partly has to do with his general distaste for volunteering as a means, rather than an end. The example he gives is volunteering to improve your CV, rather than simply to help others or change the world. But he’s also doing something else that merits our attention. He’s conflating how we understand volunteering at the level of the individual, and how we understand it at the level of the society. Can an institution be altruistic? You might equally ask can an institution be egoistic? How altruism at individual level translates into cooperative behaviour at the level of the community is a huge jump and involves levels of complexity that I think Furedi is in danger of glossing over.

Developing training opportunities (that don’t oblige volunteer to remain for a minimum period), can allow people to understand better what it is they’re volunteering for and how to get involved. As a result, training and skills development, can actually enhance people’s freedom. Cooperative behaviour can be organised. There’s a crucial balance to be struck between the necessary organising that facilitates cooperation and unnecessary organisation that hinders cooperation. This is yet another example of this tension between the individual and community level that Furedi simply skates over with the phrase ‘institutionalisation destroys altruism’.

As a volunteer, you have the right to be provided with sufficient training to do your job, it tells potential candidates for the volunteering profession.

And just in case you are worried about paper qualifications, Volunteering Australia provides certificates I, II and III in active volunteering, which it claims are the first of their kind: nationally recognised qualifications for volunteers.

Volunteering Australia’s Paul Lynch makes a similar point in his response to Furedi: “The impulse to ‘do good’ does not guarantee you will know what to do, have the equipment to do it, or know how to use it as walls of flames approach the local community hall”.

The official promotion of volunteering is motivated by the recognition that the disengagement of large sections of society from public life represents a very real challenge for governments. Attempts to confront the problem of civic disengagement often turn into desperate efforts to invent quick-fix administrative solutions to what is a fundamental cultural process of social and moral disenchantment.

So at this point Furedi returns to his central narrative: civic disengagement has led governments to use volunteering in response.

It is worth noting that policymakers throughout the Western world have embraced volunteering as something of a big idea for getting the public to re-engage with society. The European Union designated this year as the European Year of Volunteering. Speaking a language that echoes that of Volunteering Australia, the EU’s official document asserts that volunteering can provide people with new skills and competencies that can improve their employability. It adds that this is especially important at this time of economic crisis.

Furedi singles out this view of volunteering, by many governments, as a means to improving employability of citizens. It’s clear that governments have an agenda. In fact, most funding on volunteering has an agenda such as that coming from corporates or foundations that volunteering advocates should be alert to. The way forward is for the volunteering sector to fight for a better understanding of volunteering by all those promoting it, whether passionate individuals, state representatives or corporate supporters. Furedi is not really interested in developing volunteering for it’s own sake, he seems more interested in using it as a means to bash certain policy-makers over the head.

That said, he does highlight a question that many volunteering advocates have ignored for too long: how can we ensure that it’s the volunteering need that drives the funding response, and not the agenda of the funders that drives the volunteering on offer?

Unfortunately, the bureaucratisation of volunteering makes it hard to promote as a public virtue. People who genuinely feel inspired to volunteer do so because they feel strongly about the need to contribute to their community.

A sense of social obligation to the community and the desire to help others has encouraged millions of people to volunteer in the past. Today’s volunteering professionals do not believe that people can still be expected to serve others out of a sense of civic duty.

In the so-called volunteering community, acts of solidarity motivated by altruism are often caricatured as traditional volunteering. Terms such as anachronistic and traditional are used to disparage volunteering that is driven by the impulse to do good for others. The ideals of selfless volunteering are dismissed as a luxury that only the rich can afford. Civic virtue has been recast as an elitist indulgence.

This final few paragraphs connects this opinion piece with Furedi’s broader thesis: that traditional virtues are denigrated in today’s culture of fear. It would be really interesting to know exactly what he’s referring to when he says that terms such as ‘traditional’ are used to disparage volunteering.

In Britain, advocates of the professionalisation of volunteering argue their so-called inclusive approach permits the benefits of volunteering to be enjoyed by people on low incomes. Their advocacy of a more inclusive approach to volunteering is based on the patronising assumption that, unlike the great and the good, working-class people need economic incentives to act virtuously. It overlooks the fact, historically, people suffering deprivation have been more than ready to sacrifice their time to support causes in which they believed. What drove the unpaid union organiser or the official of a co-operative society were strong convictions and a sense of civic virtue. They did not require a certificate I in volunteering to give up their time to help others. The so-called elitist traditional approach was far more inclusive than contemporary schemes that bribe people to pretend to volunteer.

Necessary organising vs unnecessary organisation

Again, Furedi raises the debate about necessary organising vs unnecessary organisation question without any recognition of the complexity. Different challenges call for different approaches. Over time informal relationships tend to formalise. Volunteers are motivated by their ability to meet the need of those they seek to help. Sometimes formal organisations can play a role in supporting this type of volunteering, other times too much formality and organisation suffocates the ability of individuals to step up and volunteer.

There are situations where paying a volunteer’s expenses is simply good practice. It’s about recognising the value of what people offer as volunteers. There are situations where volunteering takes place on a small scale (or short time scale) informally and where a group not being able to repay expenses or have formal processes in place should not stand in the way of volunteering taking place. This has been a debate in volunteering since the year dot.

There’s another debate that Furedi is failing to mention. Much of what he’s referring to here finds parallels in the debate between the distinction between volunteering and community service and how we understand civic engagement. I contest there’s a trade off in terms of whether we choose to eschew giving- weighted towards achieving social benefit, and giving- weighted towards the individuals personal freedom to act (here’s a previous blog post with more details).

What is truly tragic about the professionalisation of volunteering is that it implicitly evades the challenge of motivating people – especially the young – through appealing to their sense of solidarity and community. Society needs to motivate its youth to possess a sense of civic duty precisely because it is good in and of itself. We can’t always do good, and certainly not all of the time. The impulse of self-interest is always an important element of human behaviour. But self-interest notwithstanding, a vibrant community must always attempt to foster a climate where altruistic behaviour is accepted and affirmed.

Furedi’s lack of balance ultimately leads to a flawed conclusion: a social solution (society promoting civic duty) is the right response to a problem framed at the individual level (altruistic behaviour not accepted).

Thankfully, despite the attempt to bureaucratise a fine old civic virtue, real volunteers are still doing the business. They are those unassuming and often anonymous individuals who don’t possess paper qualifications as mentors or facilitators or animators. Let them thrive.

Yep we knew that. It’s the potential split between formally recognised volunteers on the one hand, and unofficial volunteering on the other that’s ultimately the issue.

The challenge is that these numerous tensions that volunteering bridges will clearly split the voluntary sector, if the state pushes ahead with ever greater institutionalisation of volunteering.

Jocote.org-When Volunteering Becomes an Institution

Reactions to Frank Furedi’s original article:

Jayne Cravens – OzVPMs

Martin Cowling – Cowling Report

Paul Lynch – Volunteering Australia

Online Community – Friends and Experts

The beginning

We often talk about how online community and social media can help promote services and increase their reach. What tends to get less attention is how online community itself can create a platform for delivering information and support services, not simply raise awareness about these services.

What do we mean here?

First, when thinking about how online community can deliver services, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical questions about the delivery mechanism. However, looking at online community through a tech perspective can only get you so far in how it can help deliver information and support services.

It can be more illuminating to explore this potential through a more sociological or psychological perspective, i.e. focusing on how people relate to each other in online communities, beyond the tech that enables these relationships.

Universal and holistic

In YouthNet’s case, the challenge it was founded to address back in the 1990′s was about opening up access to information and support for young people. The web has become a key way to making YouthNet’s approach both universal and holistic.

Holistic – across a broad range of issues

Online communities join up issues affecting the lives of young people, making it easier to put issues into a personal context. For example, tackling issues in the round means you can set an issue like housing support in a wider context of relationships and mental health, or an issue like drug use in the broader context of debt and sexual health.

This is an important difference that online communities have brought about in information and support services. For instance, while advice givers or information providers often focus on issues (that’s how most advice services are structured), the young person’s starting point is often much more confused and complex. Set in a personal context of the young person’s life, the issues that are affecting them are usually incredibly fluid and interlinked. It’s often hard for person experiencing the issues just to be able to explain and make sense of them. Online community with a more holistic approach can play a key role here.

It’s interesting that in terms of how the web’s structured following the success of the ‘Google’ model, access to information and support has depended on just how well you as a user can express what you need in terms of specific issues or keywords.

Universal – for all young people 16-25 years old

At the same time, online communities are proving that they’re a powerful way of joining up the people. With regards, support and information services particularly of note is the way online communities link together those affected by the issues and preserve what’s universal about people’s experience of these issues. Issues we may have faced or recognise we could face ourselves at a future point in time.

Online communities joining up people in this way, reinforce the message you are not alone with the issues you face. In fact, online communities where you share only what you’re comfortable sharing, can be a space where people can feel freer to explore the personal context and common humanity behind what can be incredibly emotive and sensitive issues. One particularly important contribution of online communities is how this universalist approach can bring both those directly affected by the issue at hand, together in open discussion with those not directly affected.

In terms of how the web’s structured and the rise of the ‘Facebook’ model, it’s clear that online information and support is increasingly mediated through our own personal online social networks. The starting point many young people now have in the search for information and support becomes the people they’re connected with, not necessarily the issues you identify with.

Ideal advisor: Friend and Expert

Many years ago, YouthNet commissioned some research. It asked young people about how they got the support and information they needed.

Out of the responses I remember reading, came the idea of the ideal advisor -a blend of two distinct personas.

—      The advisor as friend – supportive, provider of emotional support, non-judgmental, a good listener

—      The advisor as expert – someone that knows what they’re talking about, is a source of accurate info and an external perspective

What’s interesting is that with this idea of the ideal advisor lies a basic intuition: when it comes to offering information and support- no one person is enough.

In other words, it’s communities where we’re together, not as individuals acting separately, that are best equipped to respond to young people’s info and support needs.

No one person can easily fulfil both the role of ˜friend’ and the role of ˜advisor’. Each has its limitations:

—      The friend’s intimate understanding often lacks external perspective.

—      The expert’s specialist knowledge often lacks a personal touch.

There’s a growing body of academic literature on characterizing social relationships in this way that’s developing theoretical frameworks to better explain why these should be distinct social roles. For example, the work of Alan Fiske and Nick Haslam is a case in point which identifies four forms of sociality: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. It’s interesting to note the strong parallels between idea of the ˜friend’ and that of Communal Sharing and Equality Matching on the one hand, and the idea of the ˜expert’ and Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.

Peer support and specialists

Online community adds something new to the mix between friends and experts. It can blend the values under which friends and experts operate. It can also challenge some of the age-old barriers that have existed between young people and support and info they need.

We know that online communities of friends can be strong – young people can express themselves online, they can feel heard, acknowledged, talking about the situation can help them make sense of their personal issues. Young people as friends online often re-evaluate their self-worth once they’ve supported one of their peers.

We know that online communities of experts can break down significant barriers that stand in the way of many young people’s access to the information and support services they need. Afforded anonymity, the time to express their issues in a way they’re comfortable with and on their own terms – young people reach out for expert intervention.

When you compare and contrast the values that ˜friends’ and ˜experts’ bring to online communities, it’s possible to detect the areas where these values merge.

For example, experts can learn about the benefits of encouraging discussion with the young people they want to engage. Through discussion and participation, experts can benefit from the hard-won insights of young people born of personal experience and knowledge.

Likewise, friends can gain a better understanding of the distinction between advice set out as balanced options grounded in empathy, and emotionally-charged discussion led by a well-meaning friend.

YouthNet’s changing role

If you’d asked us 10 years ago what the role of online community was, we would have probably have explained in terms of YouthNet’s role as a service provider.

In practical terms, that can mean many things: an editor, a moderator, a web developer, a volunteer manager, a partnership broker, and so on.

Today, the emphasis of these roles is very different.

As the idea of online community becomes more embedded in the everyday lives of young people, so it’s become a crucial means of opening up access to information and support for young people. It’s a special kind of service provision, which feels more like service facilitation rather than direct provision, i.e. with service providers on one side and service users on the other.

Facilitating community between friends and experts is in effect facilitating access to information and support.

How? In terms of roles:

—      Editors instil an editorial tone that balances the friendly warmth of a friend- with the eye for detail of an expert

—      Moderators help foster community understanding where there’s space for peer support alongside clear routes to the experts

—      Teams of advisors combine trained peers on the one hand with highly qualified specialists on the other

—      Volunteer managers develop support for volunteers -both from more experienced fellow volunteers and expert trainers or mentors

Online community is transformative

This subtle shift from provision to facilitation, shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s actually transformative when it comes to offering information and support.

For example, a transformation where those engaged in online communities understand and recognise that in the role of ˜friend’, they are themselves a source of support for their peers.

Or, a transformation where those in the role of ˜experts’ learn how to make their services more accessible to young people – in a way that overcomes young people’s practical and personal barriers that stand between them and the info and support they need.

In short, the tech behind today’s online communities may be new, but the challenge is the same.

Clearly, new technology brings with it plenty of new opportunities to take on this age-old challenge of opening up access to information and support for young people.

Whether we can seize this potentially transformative opportunity today, depends on whether or not we’re prepared to accept our new role: that of facilitating relationships and building community between the friends, experts, and the young people they seek to help.

Further info

Interesting examples of online communities blending experts and friends:

Netmums – Drop-in Clinic – online forum Parent Supporters (in the friend role) can refer questions to specialist partners (in the expert role)

YouthHealthTalk – is an online space for young people to talk through their health issues – linked to expert research of patients experiences

TheSite.org’s Discussion Boards – one of YouthNet longest established online communities

Video of this presentation is available here:

For context, Turkle’s talk was described in the RSA blurb as follows: “We begin to feel overwhelmed and depleted by the lives technology makes possible. We may be free to work from anywhere, but we are also prone to being lonely everywhere. In a surprising twist, relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down”.

Technology, illusions and our social needs

Turkle believes the level of connectivity and the ‘always on’ phenomenon we have is not socially sustainable. As examples she points to email overload and our expectation of ever-decreasing turnaround times. This problem is compounded by our a persistent fantasy that improved technology in the future will solve this problem, when in reality, Turkle contends, technology is what’s exacerbating the problem.

In ‘Together Alone’ Turkle compares and contrasts this connectivity issue with the growing use of social robots. Both point to how “we expect more from technology and less from each other”. After many years of research, Turkle’s come to the conclusion that our use of technology poses profound social and moral questions. She gave the following example in her RSA talk:

“I had a strong moral reaction to giving robots to the elderly, and having elderly people try to make sense of the story of their lives. Talking about the death of a child, death of a spouse to a robot that did not understand. But that performed understanding of what these elderly people were telling them.”

This idea of the performance by technology as the source of moral incertitude is something I’ll come back to. What struck me initially was where Turkle was responding to questions from the audience.  There was the following exchange:

Member of audience: “…I would think the simple answer to a lot of the why questions you’ve asked is that someone can make money from it. And then I would ask you about this idea that the identities we create online are really just commodities for a company to use, so that we create the content and they use it as something to send advertising to people. And I wonder, if you could comment on the complicity between big business and technology and how that changes some of these ideas.”

Prof. Sherry Turkle: “Well, let me just say this… yes, sir…”

Aleks Krotoski: “Just to say let me just gather the questions first….

Prof. Sherry Turkle: “But, I mean I can just… no, no this one gets a yes. That’s why this is so hard… that’s why this is so hard [sic]. In other words, the mobile web the fact that we’re using the web as we walk around, I mean the mobile web was a research project and then launched as a set of apps. I mean you know that… we’re busy talking about the mores we should be developing, but there is an industry that is developing the applications and technology to give us stuff to seduce us in. So it’s… you know, so the answer to that is yes.”

The questioner seemed to put their finger on something that had been missing from Sherry Turkle’s narrative up to that point. It wasn’t clear to me whether she was simply agreeing that a lot of technological development is driven primarily by commercial interests, more than social needs. However, by questioning the moral basis for this particular use of social robots with the elderly, she seemed to be asking what basis there is for this use of technology.

Yet when the questioner solicited Turkle’s thoughts about whether social robots and the like are an example of the commercial imperative taking precedent over our best long term interests her answer feels slightly incoherent. Her answer was effectively affirmative in form, but failed to really give us much of a sense of the extent to which she believes tech producers (as well as the consumers) bear responsibility in resolving such uncomfortable moral dilemmas.

Sleep, dreams and illusions

Thinking this over, it occurred to me that there were some curious parallels with a theme from Adam Curtis’ first in a his latest documentary series: “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace“.

Curtis had been looking at the political implications of our relationship with technology:

“What some people were beginning to see was that the computer networks and global systems they had created, hadn’t distributed power. They had just shifted it, and, if anything, they had just concentrated it in new forms. And some of the computer utopians from silicon valley were also beginning to realise that the World Wide Web was not a new kind of democracy. But something far more complicated- where power was exercised over the individual in new and surprising ways.”

He had described this kind of dream (or illusion) with a geo-political twist, in terms of our reliance on machines leading us into the difficulties we experienced during the 2008 financial crisis:

“The Chinese money had led America into a dream world. But the reason so few bankers and politicians questioned it was because of their faith in computers. They were convinced that it was the computers that had brought the stability to the system. The machines created mathematical models that parceled out the loans and then hedged and balanced them so that there was no risk.”

Again it’s like we fell for the performance of computers (financial robots in place of social robots).

This quote from Carmen Hermasillo – Humdog – “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace” (1994) that Curtis referred to extended this parallel with both what Turkle had and hadn’t talked about. Below are excerpts from the original post by Hermasillo that Curtis paraphrased:

“i suspect that cyberspace exists because it is the purest manifestation of the mass (masse) as Jean Beaudrilliard described it. it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle.“

This seemed to resonate with this question of the manufacture of social robots that perform understanding.

“it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality.”

“western society has a problem with appearance and reality. it keeps wanting to split them off from each other, make one more real than the other, invest one with more meaning than it does the other.”

This idea of splitting appearance and reality off from each other seemed to describe what was making Turkle uncomfortable with social robots: we are investing in robots who appear to be understanding us with more meaning than we should be. And so I was really struck by this part of Hermasillo’s original post (paraphrased by Adam Curtis) and how it unpicked the commercial imperative at work in the development of early online social networking. Just like Turkle’s questioner from the audience in the RSA, Hermasillo picked up (back in 1994) on how technology has become a means to commodify ourselves :

“i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called the means of production. capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment.”

The way Hermasillo put it was that with this new technology, we are literally selling our souls.

A warning in common

This relationship between technology and our social selves was explored back in 1973 by Guy Debord in the Situationist film: “The society of the spectacle“.

“Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings, and the efficient motivations of a hypnotic behaviour. To the extent to which necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains which ultimately only expresses its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of this sleep.”

The message is that we should be wary of technology’s capacity for performance. Here there may be an unlikely agreement between Debord, Curtis, Hermasillo and even Turkle.

The better the performance of technology, the greater the illusion’s disguise and our own alienation from ourselves.

Further info

Nexi (M.I.T. MediaLab) at Laval Virtual 2009 – video of people interacting with performing social robot ‘Nexi’

Update

Also heard the following quote from Sherry Turkle on Radio 3′s Arts and Ideas:

9.27- Sherry Turkle: …In the United States there’s a big technological movement to gameify the world, you know, gameify education, turn everything into a big technological game. Hello! You know, I don’t think so.

Int: That’s another variable that isn’t in the book (that’s not to complain) and that’s capitalism. This isn’t simply technology. This is agents that want to sell and structure experience so they can sell more. It’s not the technology that’s the worry here is it? It’s what humans are doing with the technology. And here I mean corporations.

Sherry Turkle: Yes, but the mobile revolution the corporation is selling you mobile connectivity so it can have you 24-7. I mean you had to invent mobile apps it wasn’t obvious that you’d want to be walking along the street connected all the time. So I’m saying hold on a second…

It’s not clear to me- Turkle seems to agree capitalism is part of the problem here- but declines to pose direct questions about how corporations behave, not just the people as consumers.

Credit: gonzalo_ar on Flickr

Volunteering defies definition.

Or at least attempting to define volunteering has been a pretty thankless task. It just seems to stoke passions and inspire indifference in equal measure. The discussions it does engender tend to produce more heat than light.

In the last year or so in the UK, one of the most concerted efforts to spell out what volunteering is comes from the Institute of Volunteering Research in its paper titled: “A rose by any other name ¦’ Revisiting the question: ˜what exactly is volunteering?” (PDF) penned by Angela Ellis Paine, Matthew Hill and Colin Rochester.

It’s a really interesting and thorough piece of work, pulling together a lot of research into volunteering. Yet it also illustrates the problem we face when seeking to identify the defining principles of volunteering.

The theorist’s need to anchor our view of volunteering on defining principles, risks marooning our understanding of volunteering in practice.

The paper pulls out three principles of volunteering: it’s an activity that’s (i) unpaid; (ii) undertaken through an act of free will; and, (iii) of benefit to others.

No surprises

I’ve no reason to particularly dispute the principles the authors have plumped for. My skepticism concerns the relative merit of the pursuit of conceptual clarity, if we limit the scope of that search to research within pre-defined material. Or to use a detective metaphor, the result of the police investigation ain’t much of a surprise if they just pull in the usual suspects for interview.

An understanding of volunteering that’s built on a body of knowledge (classified as volunteering research by underlying assumptions about what is and isn’t volunteering research), inevitably leads to limited conclusions. That’s to say, setting out volunteering’s defining principles can only go so far, if we’re basing them on a narrow seam of research that’s largely self-classified volunteering research. It’s to be expected then, that the conclusions of such an investigation turn out to be broadly consistent with the initial assumptions about what volunteering is.

The paper itself wrestles with this paradox. It signals a “lack of clarity about the boundaries of the field”, yet sets its goal as a “more nuanced understanding of volunteering” (P.5). So on the one hand, volunteering’s a concept that’s too fuzzy, but on the other, it’s a concept that’s too fixed. Why does so much inquiry into the nature of volunteering result in so much tail-chasing?

Open vs Closed; Fluid vs Static

Volunteering’s an activity that is open, broad-based and fluid. Yet searching for volunteering in amongst the small, niche and the latest literature on volunteering tends to edge us inescapably towards a view of volunteering that’s more closed, narrow and static. Volunteering boxed up into airtight containers may be convenient for academics, but it risks a certain understanding about volunteering getting packed away and forgotten about. This approach makes it harder, not easier, to relate this overly delineated concept to our actual day-to-day experience of volunteering.

So to repeat, if volunteering is an extremely open, broad-based and fluid notion it’s awfully likely that it’s a notion that’s got holes in it, that it’s vague and subject to change. All things that definition seekers can’t abide. As volunteering as a term has become more mainstream, I feel many of us have worried that these holes are increasingly inconvenient leaks we need to plug.

Far from it. I’d argue that we can equally see such fluidity and flexibility as a strength. Rather than leaching coherency, these properties of volunteering provide us with opportunities philosophically, to link our understanding of volunteering with many of the great debates and controversies of our era.

Let’s connect our ideas about volunteering

In fact, the work we need to undertake now is to connect our ideas about volunteering with others. We need to look outwards, not inwards. For academics, that means drawing directly on research across the fields of knowledge. For practitioners, that means taking inspiration from the experience of other sectors.

As an illustration of what I mean, a little digging uncovers how our ideas about volunteering are built on some of the most fiercely debated questions of the modern age. For example, one idea about volunteering that I’m particularly fond of is that it is:

“Giving time freely for the benefit of strangers”

It’s clear that to understand “giving time freely” there are plenty of parallels with the question of free will. The notion of giving time “for the benefit of” takes us clearly into the territory of thinking about social contracts. As regards giving time for the benefit of “strangers“, it an idea that sends us headlong into social questions that arise from industrialisation.

Yet why do we so rarely relate these wider issues to how we talk about volunteering? Instead, most discussions about the meaning of volunteering tend to be pretty inside baseball. The narratives are niche and little known or heard outside the volunteering sector. By the way, I’m not talking about rebranding or marketing volunteering differently. I’m talking about rethinking the way we conceptualise volunteering.

So let’s just look more closely at these other controversies and to get a flavour of what I’m referring to here. In this first post I’m going to kick off with a quick look at the concept of free will and how it relates to our understanding of volunteering.

Free will

The debate about free will goes back centuries. It’s fair to say, that it’s a problem that’s attracted the attention of some of the world’s finest minds. So how might we go about relating it to the way we think about volunteering?

Much of the controversy surrounding free will centres on two fundamental and seemingly incompatible intuitions we have as human beings.

The first is the sense we have that what happens in the world around us is caused or determined by certain conditions or laws.

The second is the sense we have that our lives face an open future and that we can intervene in what happens in the world by choosing to act or not to act in certain ways.

Are we really free to volunteer?

The first intuition that there are forces and laws of nature at work behind everything that happens, leads us to the logical conclusion that we live in a world where everything is determined in advance. As Albert Einstein put it:

“Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.”

Or take Charles Darwin:

“¦one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others.” “This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything¦nor ought one to blame others.

From Darwin’s notebooks, quoted in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, pp. 349-50.

If the determinists are right, who would volunteer? What would be the point of volunteering if our choice to volunteer did not actually make a difference? Or that we couldn’t meaningfully make a choice at all? It would surely diminish our motivation to volunteer. How could we motivate others to act? Why would anyone volunteer if they believed that life’s outcomes are predetermined?

In this sense, those promoting volunteering are libertarians. We believe the world around us is undetermined and our actions can make a difference. A possible determinist explanation of why people volunteer would be that it’s largely due to how it makes us feel (that we are making a difference), not because we can actually intervene and bring about real change.

What’s causes us to volunteer?

Yet we’re fascinated in what causes us to volunteer and extent to which volunteering is determined. We’re driven to analyse the reasons why we act the way we do. For example, if we could understand what causes someone to volunteer, we could better promote volunteering across society.

While most would passionately agree that we volunteer out of choice, we would not go as far as to say that whether one person volunteers or not is utterly unpredictable and random (as would be the case if we were totally free and the world was undetermined). Most of us would accept that there are reasons or causal factors why someone may feel impelled to volunteer. It’s for this reason, I think, we’re intrigued by the question about what motivates us to volunteer. We do accept a degree of determinism in our way of viewing volunteering.

Many of us almost unconsciously have adopted a position that philosophers would call compatibilism in the way we think about volunteering. That’s to say,. we believe that these two ways of viewing volunteering are compatible; determinism is compatible with free will. That is, we believe there are factors that can help determine volunteering and that this is compatible with believing we get a real choice about whether we volunteer or not and that we can make a difference.

Volunteering’s a belief

In a compatibilist account, the real significance of volunteering is the sense in which it is a very tangible expression of the belief we have as humans: that we can make a difference and that our actions have consequences. Members of religious groups that believe in predestination, have the psychological incentive to act graciously as it provides a kind of tangible evidence that the individual is predestined to go to heaven.

In this way, by volunteering we could be said to be voting with our feet on the moot question about whether we can make a real difference on the social issues we align ourselves with. In lieu of proof that we live in a free and undetermined world, acting as if it is, is the best way of ensuring it comes about. The compatibilist card we play as volunteers, is to say that whether the world is or isn’t determined is irrelevant to why we volunteer.

The volunteer manager’s paradox

However, as compatibilist philosophers have found, nagging doubts remain. In the case of volunteering, we often come up against this issue in its most acute form when it comes to accounting for ourselves in front of our funders and supporters. How can we be sure that our actions can be traced to actual outcomes? How has the volunteering we built based on nothing but the free will of certain individuals determined a range of solid outcomes that can be precisely measured? This and other paradoxes are the bread and butter of volunteer managers.

So next time, as a volunteer manager, you’re faced with reporting to a funder asking about how many volunteers you recruit and what impact they’ve made, remember you’re not alone. In fact, you are in excellent company. Some of the greatest minds of all time have struggled with exactly the same issue.

No more redefinitions

My serious point is that we should begin to look again at the bigger picture. We’re past the point of needing to constantly redefine what we mean by volunteering and question our identity as a community or movement or sector. Volunteering is mature enough as an idea for its value and sense of worth to be accepted by society. It’s time we started exploring the links and roots behind volunteering wherever that may take us -whether or not it happens to be clearly delineated and demarcated .

Sean Cobley, Chair of AVM (left) with Nick Hurd MP, Minister for Civil Society at AVM's first conference.

The Association of Volunteer Managers had its inaugural conference today (9^th March 2011) focussing on volunteer management and the Big Society. Nick Hurd MP, Minister for Civil Society addressed the conference setting out how he saw the role of volunteer management in the Big Society. He came armed with as many questions as answers, but the fact that he was there at all was surely testament to the recognition of volunteer management’s value to the Government’s current policy agenda.

A short synopsis of what Hurd shared: Big Society is about cultural change, it’s a long process and it’s going to be difficult.

“More than volunteering”

Interestingly, given the audience of professionals working in volunteering- he chose to underline the notion that Big Society is more than volunteering. That this point needs to be made at all, signals an underlying sense of how critical volunteering is to the Big Society. Volunteering may not be the be all and end all of the Big Society, but when all’s said and done it’s the idea of volunteering that often resonates the most.

Whatever the link between volunteering and the Big Society in the minds of policy makers, Nick Hurd insisted that volunteer management was a crucial part of the equation. He pointed to the funding specifically for volunteer management that the Office of Civil Society (OCS) is making available through the European Year of the Volunteer as just one example.

He shared a short anecdote about an encounter he had had with Baroness Julia Neuberger at the time of her work on the Commission on the Future of Volunteering. When he asked her for one thing that’s crucial to the future of volunteering she responded simply: volunteer managers”. This was a Minister keen to build bridges.

Contradictory policy on volunteering

He addressed questions from delegates flagging up aspects of Government policy that seem to run counter to this expressed support for volunteering in the Big Society. For example:

• Budget cuts to the voluntary sector including infrastructure will result in making it harder, not easier for volunteer managers to do their job
• By making public service reform such a prominent aspect of the Big Society, public perception is that the Government is asking volunteers to step into fill gaps left by this deliberate retrenchment of the state. This perception is making it harder, not easier, to recruit volunteers
• Mandatory work activity (JSA reform) runs counter to the ethos of volunteering and the voluntary sector. As a result, work programmes previously run on a voluntary basis with those out of work- would no longer make sense in the voluntary sector if they became mandatory. Again, this policy may lead to less volunteering, not more.

Nick Hurd’s response to the issue of budget cuts seemed to be: ‘we know it’s painful, but it is a temporary adjustment. It will be worth it in the long run’.

His response to the public service reform was to say that this public perception will change over time – and insisted that Government had a role to play in leading this change in perceptions and culture. In fact, he gave the impression that a large part of the Government’s approach to volunteering was in how it could be a vehicle for changing social attitudes to giving and social action. There are a number of policies designed to change the attitudes including the National Citizen Service that’s aimed at the attitudes of the nation’s 16 year olds, the “civic service” initiative which challenges civil servants to rethink their relationship to the communities they work with, amongst others.

In terms of contradictions in Government policy – at one stage Nick Hurd joked, welcome to government. But he did not accept the point about mandatory work activity and suggested this contradiction was more semantic, than actual, and could be overcome.

Investment in volunteering infrastructure

In terms of the Government’s role in fostering a vibrant and efficient infrastructure for volunteering in this country, Nick Hurd told delegates that he didn’t “need any lectures on the importance of volunteering infrastructure.

He agreed it was important, but was not clear on how it could be funded in the future. He believed it should involve Central Government to a degree, but also the Big Lottery Fund and local authorities had to play their part.

Interestingly, he also floated the idea that longer term umbrella organisations should receive much more of their funding direct from their members or customers. If this could be achieved, then Hurd believed infrastructure bodies would become much more efficient than they are today.

At the moment, Hurd emphasised, the complex and fragmented system of funding is too thinly spread to make it effective and that too much of volunteer managers’ time is spent fundraising to make it efficient. This issue of infrastructure was one of the big questions that Nick Hurd came back to repeatedly: what kind of infrastructure do we need to be able to improve and shape the quality of volunteering experiences?

The role of the private sector

Another strand of the Government’s approach sketched out by Hurd included more effectively leveraging the links between local businesses and the communities in which they’re present. He spoke about a new initiative to develop business connectors who could help establish fruitful relationships for both the voluntary sector and local businesses. This was separate from, but could run in parallel with, the idea to train community organisers to do the same kind of work forging links across communities.

Hurd made reference to the support the Government has given to Chris White’s Private Member’s Bill that aims to make social impact and value a key requirement in the commissioning process in future.

It will be interesting to see whether these kinds of measures will effectively open up the space necessary for volunteering and volunteer management to play a role in service provision that can compete with private sector providers. Some delegates flagged up concerns that services built on volunteer management models would not be able to compete against private sector bids for contracts on price alone.

Professionalisation of volunteer management

When challenged Hurd accepted the development of volunteer management required nudging organisations to change their behaviour, and that it could not all be resolved by establishing the right kind of infrastructure. On the issue of professionalisation of volunteer management, Hurd somewhat baldly stated that he had no interest in this agenda and this should not be the agenda of any government. This [professionalisation], he said, was a matter for volunteer managers themselves.

There were no huge surprises in Hurd’s words, but it was refreshing to have a discussion that centred on how the Government understands what role volunteer management can play in the Big Society agenda. It formed the basis for what was a really informative and productive discussion on the future of the role of volunteer management. Long may this dialogue and discussion with volunteer managers continue.

“the role of volunteering in public service delivery is to add value”

It comes with a caveat though: if no public service exists for volunteers to add value to, all bets are off. Up to now, that’s meant that volunteers that identify a social need (that no current public service meets), always have the last resort of mustering all the resources they can get their hands on and providing the service themselves.

New territory

This model of volunteering in public services built around adding value has developed over many years. In particular, the emphasis of adding value to established services seeks to avoid the spectre of volunteering roles substituting paid roles. Now with the Big Society we’re entering new territory. It’s a policy with the express aim of substituting public services that are publicly funded, with citizen-powered services that may be publicly and or privately funded.

As David Cameron restates in his recent defence of the Big Society:

“devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny; opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve; and encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community”

Despite these kinds of references to how volunteering is at the heart of the Big Society project, it’s still not clear what it’s impact on volunteering will be. One defining feature of Big Society policy is how public service reform will impact on how we think about volunteering.

Too often this debate has been framed as two competing assumptions about whether volunteering and voluntary action are:

• a ‘nice to have’ because they provide additional goods and services of public value; or,
• a fundamental part of our society because they are the way we can access many public goods and services at all.

These competing visions of volunteering are nothing new, and actually aren’t really in competition at all. Despite how they’re often presented. Now with Big Society reform on the policy agenda it feels like there’s a new impetus to better understanding the tension between how these two visions intersect. Changing how these ways of approaching volunteering come together could mean a radically redefined sense of volunteering, not just in public service delivery, but beyond.

Volunteers complement and supplement

When I saw Janet Fleming citing the ‘adding value’ mantra in her post, “Placing a volunteer in a key role raises many issues” for the Voluntary Sector Network’s blog, it struck me just how this prevailing consensus about volunteering is being challenged by the current Big Society debate.

Fleming illustrated the thrust of her argument about volunteering at a senior level in an organisation by quoting the agreement between Volunteering England and the TUC:

The involvement of volunteers should complement and supplement the work of paid staff, and should not be used to displace paid staff or undercut their pay and conditions of service;

The added value of volunteers should be highlighted as part of commissioning or grantmaking process but their involvement should not be used to reduce contract costs;

This agreement highlights why the mantra about volunteers adding value has featured so prominently in thinking and practice in the UK over the last decade: job substitution. For many years the emphasis has been on ‘involving volunteers’ in the delivery of public services. For example, in 2003 the National Centre for Volunteering produced a report typical of the time called “Changing the Face of Social Services – Volunteers adding value in service delivery” (PDF). It provided guidance on good practice for involving volunteers in public services:

First of all, it’s important to decide if you actually want to involve volunteers. Try talking to peers and colleagues in other social services departments or NHS Trusts to help you make your decision. You’ll need to ask:

• Are there specific projects or departments you’d like to involve volunteers in, and are there roles for them to complement your service?
• How will they add value?
• How will they help you to deliver your strategic plan and meet your objectives? [p.21]

In 2008, the Commission on the Future of Volunteering essentially reiterated this position, albeit in different tone, when it recommended that:

“…Where employers involve volunteers in their work, which many charities do as a matter of course. There is more scope for developing this in the public sector and, where it is delivering services on behalf of the state, the private sector (for example, care homes and prison services). The critical tests are that volunteers add genuine value and do not substitute for core service provision.” [p.11-12]

However, this position assumes we’re clear about what exactly ‘core service provision’ is. With Big Society and the very deliberate retrenchment of the state the official goal posts have moved. We’re now radically unclear about what current ‘core service provision’ is. In other words, where are the services and what future is there for the services that volunteers can add value to?

Big Society redefines volunteering

Big Society proponents appear to have another vision for the role of volunteers (otherwise known as citizens contributing to their community). Volunteers’ activity could well play a part in deciding where local communities draw the line between essential and non-essential services. Voluntary action may be both arbiter and agent- helping to decide what services exist and helping to carry them out too.

However, by giving volunteering such a double meaning risks politicising the act of volunteering to help with the delivery of local public services.

• If I volunteer for a public service that’s no longer considered as ‘core service provision’ and has lost its funding, how will volunteering with the service impact on the professionalisation of that provision?
• Will engagement of volunteers fill a short term gap in capacity to deliver a service? Or will volunteering with the service undermine the future case for scarce state funds?
• Will the costs of volunteer management be recognised and met by local authorities contracting out services?

In such a highly charged atmosphere where the issue of what services are part of core provision is debated, the choice to volunteer may well have ramifications beyond the volunteering role itself.

Many proponents of the Big Society seemed remarkably relaxed about this fundamental change in our conception of volunteering in public services and its possible politicisation.

Lord (Nat) Wei, a recently appointed politician, seems more relaxed than most. His comment, “there is a myth that Big Society is all about volunteering” sought to downplay the significance of a key Big Society advisor within government cutting down on his own volunteering. His response to the furore surrounding the announcement about his new working arrangment, was symptomatic of the Big Society argument that we need to loosen certain established ideas about what volunteering is. Yet it’s striking just how little debate there is about what volunteering will be like in the Big Society given how fundamental it is to the policy.

Stakes are big

In Greater London Volunteering’s (GLV) Principles of Volunteering:

“Volunteer roles should enhance the activities of a charity or social enterprise, unless, and particularly in the case of wholly volunteer-led groups, it would otherwise fail to have sufficient staff resources to conduct its activities”.

This idea of volunteers either “adding value” to services or providing them as a last resort (volunteering to provide services that neither the public or private sector provide) needs to be joined up. How they’re joined is crucial because it reflects the delicate balance in the voluntary sector between empowering volunteers and fostering greater professionalisation. Badly managed volunteering can undercut the hard won and often fragile professional development of the voluntary sector’s workforce. The fine details of this issue seem lost on many Big Society proponents whose first reaction is to assume a professional voluntary sector is some kind of tautology brought about by misguided Big Governmentalists.

Public service reform

David Cameron insists that Big Society is not related to the cuts in public services. It may not be connected with the need to reduce the public deficit, but it seems a curious thing to argue that a reduction in funding for public services is not connected to the idea of the retrenchment of the state. The upshot of this retrenchment, cuts or no cuts, means that we’re entering a period where the Government is effectively changing the terms about which public services the citizen should expect the state to underwrite.

Public service reform is to be driven, in part, by voluntary organisations and charities involving volunteers and delivering services. To facilitate this, the Government back in December 2010 removed the Two-Tier Code on public sector service contracts:

“The Coalition Government has committed to opening up government procurement and reducing costs. It has also set itself the aspiration that 25% of government contracts should be awarded to small and medium-sized businesses.”

SME’s, social enterprises, charities, voluntary groups and staff owned mutual providers are all conceived of as potential providers of public services. With a Big Society Bank to help finance and capitalise new service providers. This bank will be funded by commercial banks on a commerical basis. Cameron has pledged that charities will be able to competitively bid for public service contracts.

Charities will have the opportunity to exchange grant-based income with contract-based income and commercial loans. It’s a process that would seem to encourage charities to view the volunteering they foster as a means to an end (delivery of the contract), rather than an end in itself. The story of the WRVS volunteer-run hospital tea-bar in St Albans Hospital (via Karl Wilding) that’s making way for a private franchise high street coffee shop, seems such a poignant example of this transformation in the way volunteering may well evolve in organisations that adopt more contract-based practices. Experience shows that when we lose sight of volunteering as an end in itself, all too often it becomes undervalued and expendable. Can the idea of volunteering as an end in itself persist against a backdrop of contracts?

Redrawing the line

The offering of service contracts is linked to the policy of ‘payment by results’. Core services funded by right will decline, replaced by services where providers are paid by the results they achieve. This means that there will be increasing uncertainty about the future of different public services. Libraries are a prominent and controversial example of the redrawing of that line.

The government was advised in a KMPG report (PDF) to implement “aggressively, consistently and systematically” a new policy of payment by results. When it comes to redrawing the line on what deserves public financial support, the report’s authors Alan Downey, Paul Kirby and Neil Sherlock, all KMPG partners, cited the example of public libraries:

“Local government should seek to devolve to the most local level possible and to encourage communities to take over services. One example would be libraries. Libraries face funding challenges – in that they are more discretionary than other services…”

The give away is that when the authors talk about “encouraging communities to take over services”, in the next breath they mention “funding challenges”. The retrenchment of the state is quite clearly about reducing the amount of money spent by the state. No bad thing. However, anyone in volunteer management knows it is a mistake to see volunteering as a cheap option. As Jayne Cravens has succinctly argued on her blog – volunteer empowerment can be about many things- but if the overriding driver is “saving money”, then volunteer-powered solutions are not the answer.

New perspectives on an old debate

And so this takes me to a final reflection about how those in volunteer management are often curiously polarised by this debate about added value. Whether volunteering should focus ‘adding value’ to already existing public services or whether volunteering’s real value is providing safety net services in the absence of other public services is a matter a considerable debate.

As the Big Society debate deepens and policy is enacted on the ground, the implications of this policy on volunteering come up against new questions.

• Are we too locked into this view that volunteering is primarily about adding value when it comes to public service delivery?
• Are we in danger of advocating volunteering for the sake of volunteering, rather than for the sake of service delivery?
• To what extent is the Big Society forcing us to rethink the relationship between volunteers, voluntary sector professionals and public sector professionals?

Look forward to discussing these issues in the days, weeks and months ahead

Update

Interesting link to report commissioned by the Community Development Foundation about volunteering in public roles (mapping civic activists to use their terminology) – it complemented the ongoing national evaluation of the Take Part pathfinder prog.

Isn’t this just the question that lies behind today’s volunteering?

Hislop starts off looking at the examples of this Victorian do-gooding through six individuals (paraphrasing from the BBC website):

• William Wilberforce – his successful campaign to abolish slavery which was just one part of his campaigning (he also campaigned against duelling and helped found the RSPCA), gave a moral basis to this 19th century movement.
• Robert Owen and his model mill town at New Lanark in Scotland
• Thomas Wakley, founder of The Lancet, who exposed the fatal consequences of cronyism in the surgical profession
• George Dawson, inventor of the civic gospel which inspired a generation of Brummies to take responsibility for their city.
• Charles Trevelyan, who battled to make the civil service a meritocracy
• Octavia Hill, a pioneer of social housing, despite her opposition to cash hand-outs or anything that might create a dependency culture.

Volunteering: social change one step at a time

The concept that William Wilberforce and others believed in was that rather than a tumultuous social revolution at the top (in the mold of the French Revolution), the idea was that social improvement could be arrived at one small step at a time and everybody could play their part.

It strikes me that this is the moral basis and driving belief that binds our sense of the importance of volunteering today.

Each of the examples that Hislop picks out, help tease out the many tensions and contradictions that we’re struggling with today in the way we approach our thinking about volunteering.

What is the social good we’re volunteering for?

Wilberforce puts the question, “what is the social good?”, at the centre of our sense of citizenship and moral responsibility to others. What defines volunteering as volunteering today is our sense of social good. If we’re not clear about what is a social good, we’re not clear what is volunteering. I think the idea of beneficial social impact is one of the two fundamental criteria as to what is volunteering. There are echoes of this in the public benefit clause in charity legislation.

Trading individual freedom for the greater social benefit- at what point does it cease to be volunteering?

Does volunteering need to be voluntary if the social good imperative is high enough? Robert Owen‘s actions highlights the contradiction of obliging citizens to do good for the benefit of themselves. Hislop cites the example of residents committees appointed to inspect the cleanliness of tenants in the housing Owen provided workers in New Lanark. Many critics said it was a paternalistic and autocratic approach, it was the absolute opposite of freedom.

In other words, it a a criticism that highlights the tension between moral imperatives (social good) and freedom. This is interesting as today we consider positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact to be at the heart of volunteering.

What are the moral standards that join the professional and the amateur?

Thomas Wakley wanted to democratise access to information about current medical knowledge. Wakley’s work founding the Lancet shone light on the importance of ethical standards, scrutiny and accountability for the work that was supposedly in the wider public interest. This centrality of moral standards provides the nexus for the values behind the professional and amateur sense of honour.

What is our personal responsibility to meet social needs?

George Dawson – don’t ask what you can do – ask what more you can do. He was a believer in civic virtue. The civic gospel he developed was about being proud in your community and thinking about what you do for others in your community. Dawson’s questions go to the heart of our current soul searching about volunteering’s call to action- what responsibility do I have to contribute to remedying of the social needs of those around us.

Professional servants of the wider social good

Charles Trevelyan asked the question of the link between public service and the civil service. Seems to be something Cameron is harking back to with his phrase a civic service rather than a civil service. Cameron said in July 2010:

“I hope that over time, we can start thinking of civil servants as civic servants because all of you do the jobs you do because you care about the future of this country.

“And I hope we will have a permissive regime, where if you are taking part in the Big Society, you are involved in a project in your local community, or in a volunteering activity, that is something your workplace will actively encourage.”

Trevelyan’s callous line on the Irish famine where he blamed Irish families for the famine, underlines the moral controversy of basing actions on perceived social good.

For example, he described the famine as:

“The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. ¦The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people”.

While morality can provide a powerful driver for social change, it can also lead to the blaming of the victims of misfortune themselves if they don’t respond to the call to action and volunteering, branding them authors of their own problems.

I remember in a previous role in community development how the call to volunteer could easily become a double-edged sword. Those who volunteered would be generally praised, but it could equally lead to those who failed to respond to the call to be disparaged in the eyes of their peers. So the case of Charles Trevelyan reminds us that moral drivers can often also lead to social inaction or harmful social impacts, just as they can to beneficial social action.

It’s interesting to juxtapose this view with that of Robert Owen who believed in education and labour reform because it was the environment that people lived in that affected their life chances.

Honour and dignity between the servant and the served

Octavia Hill‘s experience highlights the issue of the relationship between the volunteer’s providing public service and those benefiting from the public service. Hill worked to improve what we now describe as social housing- not least through making the relationship between tenant and landlord more personal and professional along the lines of social work. Hill is widely credited with founding modern social work. This relation is all about finding the balance between one which is overly formal (rigid, inflexible,cold) and that which is overly informal (confused,biased,subjective).