“Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Contradictions of Volunteer Committing in an Refugee Resettlement Organization in New Zealand”

• In Event: “Making Do” With Volunteering: Committing to Organize

Abstract

The emergent literature on the organizational socialization of volunteers presents commitment as a sequential process: commitment results from heightened emotional involvement and skill acquisition but eventually wanes as highly involved volunteers burn out emotionally or become bored, exiting the organization (e.g., Haski-Leventhal & Bargal, 2008). The assumption of linearity does not admit the possibility that committing must be instantiated in multiple, competing ways that impel the volunteer to simultaneously act for and against the organization’s mandate and codes of conduct. Based on an empirical study of volunteers and volunteer managers for a refugee resettlement organization in New Zealand, this study documents how organizational representatives used boundary-setting to increase and limit the ways in which volunteers committed time and resources, while families employed guilt as a strategy to “make volunteers do” more within the family relationship, exemplifying the contradictions and fragmentation inherent in volunteer committing.

Author

• Kirstie Lynd McAllum, Universite de Montreal