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Scholars who study nonprofit volunteering often focus on its presumed voluntariness. But Nina Eliasoph, associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, questions whether that focus hides its complexity and distracts from what is most valuable about volunteering.
As she points out in her chapter, “What Do Volunteers Do?,” for the new third edition of The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, the everyday experience of volunteering can inhabit a spectrum of values and forms. The most fruitful way to understand how volunteers pursue social goods, Eliasoph suggests, is by examining how volunteering functions, both within nonprofit organizations and in the larger economic, political, and cultural context.
Merely categorizing volunteering as paid or unpaid is too simplistic to capture all its dimensions, according to Eliasoph. People may feel they have no choice but to offer their services for free on the job market—for instance, an unpaid internship might offer the best route to a permanent position. Similarly, government can coerce people to work for free. In the Soviet era, citizens were mandated to join unpaid Saturday work brigades (subbotniki). Social custom compels villagers in Nordic countries to routinely pitch in to repair local roads after a harsh winter or face ostracism. Some teens volunteer to help emotionally challenged youngsters because they need to polish their résumés for college admissions or are required to do community service by their schools. And paid social workers aren’t considered volunteers but often spend many unpaid hours outside work helping their clients. Conversely, Peace Corps and AmeriCorps “volunteers” get paid, so are they truly volunteers?
“It may well be that many of the ambiguities and dilemmas I described can’t be quantified,” Eliasoph says. Defining nonprofit volunteering by its voluntariness or by volunteers’ motivations not only may be challenging but also may be missing the point. Perhaps the focus, Eliasoph suggests by appealing to the pragmatism of John Dewey, should target the social goods that the researcher cares about.
That approach could be tricky, suggests Lester M. Salamon, professor emeritus of political science at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. “If I confine my definition of volunteering to activities that produce certain social goods, then I will assuredly be able to show that all volunteering produces those social goods because I have excluded from my definition activities that fail to do so.”
“The questions are both about how people interpret their volunteer work and about how the voluntary sector fits into the larger society,” Eliasoph says. Confining her study to what she calls “the ‘small’ side of the question,” rather than more philosophical and moral aspects of volunteering, Eliasoph offers several different ways of focusing research on volunteering.
“I was trying to show the importance of volunteers’ own meaning-making processes, and the importance of asking how their volunteering is related to other institutions such as the market and customary mores,” she says. Volunteering offers its participants many ineffable and varied lessons and benefits—such as civic action, democratic participation, social solidarity, or a spirit of connection—so scholars can focus on the benefits that most interest them.
One avenue could highlight institutional control and its consequences. Eliasoph provides the example of Appalachian miners who reluctantly belonged to a corrupt, undemocratic union in the 1970s, but once they were able to get a more democratically run union, they embraced their newfound political voices and became eager to participate.
Another route is to focus on nonprofits’ styles of interaction, and whether particular styles foster the social good in which the researcher is interested. An interactional style can highlight or downplay conflict, or it can encourage or discourage discussion of systemic social change. The author cites Danish organizations aimed at helping immigrants and refugees. One group tries to persuade citizens to make immigrants feel welcome but discourages discussions of social conflict. Another seeks to change immigration laws, which requires talking about social conflict. The researcher who focuses on a group’s interactional style, then, can more clearly see how a group is shaping the market, the state, and the customary moral order in relation to each other.
Alternatively, a researcher could distinguish between volunteering with living beings versus with objects—short-term, occasional volunteers can often do more harm than good to living beings but may be better candidates for picking up trash in a park. This approach reveals yet another path: focusing on actors’ time spent on-site. Spending quantity time with recipients of help leads to a higher-quality outcome than intermittent plug-in help from different actors—a distinction that becomes more important, Eliasoph suggests, than considering whether the actors are paid staff of a nonprofit organization or unpaid volunteers.
Nina Eliasoph, “What Do Volunteers Do?,” from The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, Third Edition, Walter W. Powell and Patricia Bromley, eds., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020.
Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.