Understanding Volunteering Impact and Legacy, a Sustainability Approach
Authors: Adams, A. and Deane, J.
Pages: 319-331
DOI: 10.4324/9780367815875-30
Abstract:Volunteering has not always concerned itself with the issues of legacy and impact. Located predominantly in the domain of leisure, volunteering has perhaps been dominated by the pragmatic business of understanding and managing human activity based on ‘organising around enthusiasms’ (Bishop & Hoggett, 1986). Taken from a serious leisure perspective (see Chapter 33 for a brief overview), volunteering is often viewed as akin to unpaid work (Stebbins, 1996, 2013) and is subsequently determined by the potential for an individual to persist with their enthusiasm building and developing the necessary skills and/or knowledge to be able to build an enduring engagement in a chosen volunteer activity, often referred to as a ‘career’ (Stebbins 1992, 1996). In taking a lead from Dean (2015), we focus on volunteering as primarily an individual activity that is often collectively organised. We do not seek to examine particular voluntary organisational contexts other than to locate them in the ongoing “marketisation and individualisation” (Dean, 2015, p. 140) that tempers considerations of volunteering. This chapter examines legacy and impact of volunteering and in so doing locates altruism and instrumentality as competing contexts that underpin the potential of volunteering to be sustainable. Critically, for this analysis we argue that whilst altruism and instrumentality compete, legacy and impact appear to exist in a state of ‘coopetition’ (Bengtsson & Kock, 2000).
Source: Scopus