How does a Community's Civic Infrastructure Influence Volunteering?

• In Event: Volunteering and Organisational theory

Abstract

Why are some places more civically engaged than others? While an extensive body of research examines the individual determinants and processes of engagement, social science scholars increasingly recognize that “the character of civic involvement must also be understood in terms of the social ecology of entire places, rather than as an attribute of individuals or families alone” (Sampson et al., 2005, p. 679). This paper examines the relationship between a community’s organizational infrastructure and volunteering.

Organizational context, what Marquis and colleagues refers to as the “community-level institutional infrastructure”, is not just derivative of community social characteristics but also produces community characteristics and shape the behavior of individuals within communities (Tolbert, Irwin, Lyson, Nucci 2002. Sharkey and Faber 2014; Sampson 2011). While this seems to flip the traditional paradigms that describe organizations as arising from social processes, such as interpersonal interaction and local social integration (McQuarrie and Marwell, 2009, p. 262), it represents a return to a central concern of the social sciences—what effects do organizations have a society (Marquis et al., 2013, p. 39)? This shift focuses on the productive capacity of place-based organizational infrastructure to shape individual action (McQuarrie and Marwell, 2009, p. 262).

Integrating concepts from organizational theory and community ecology, we argue that community organizational infrastructure structures individual volunteering behavior (McQuarrie and Marwell, 2009, p. 247). While this relationship may seem obvious, the evidence supporting it is mixed. Expectations of a positive relationship rely upon assumptions that all community organizations integrate people into their communities in ways that support voluntary behavior. However, organizations are sometimes divisive and may not promote broad collective action.

We examine the relationship between various dimensions of the organizational infrastructure (focusing on public versus private nature of the group, other-serving or self-serving, and elite versus general welfare) and volunteering. We offer hypotheses that posit that communities that foster civic engagement (civic communities) not only have a high density of associations, but an appropriate array, which serve as a public resource through which they create an ecology of volunteering (Lee and Bartkowski, 2004, p. 1023). We use the United States’ Current Population Survey Volunteering Supplement (2002-2015) to test these hypotheses.

Our study makes several contributions to the study of volunteering. Most studies of the contextual determinants of volunteering focus on the density of the population of organizations. Few studies incorporate characteristics of the organizational infrastructure nor distinguish between types of community organizations, limiting our capacity to develop a conceptual framework of the civic infrastructure of volunteering. Many studies ignore how community organizations support civic capacity (Sampson et al., 2005, p. 678). Drawing upon organizational theory, specifically organizational institutional and diverse studies of community ecology emerging out of urban and rural sociology to develop our hypotheses, we offer and test a conceptual framework. This advances our understanding of how and why organizations matter. These findings have important implications for not only understanding the variable capacity of communities to mobilize volunteers but also how to leverage organizational infrastructure to build civic communities.

References

Lee, M. R., & Bartkowski, J. P. (2004). Love thy neighbor? Moral communities, civic engagement, and juvenile homicide in rural areas. Social Forces, 82(3), 1001-1035.

Marquis, C., Davis, G. F., & Glynn, M. A. (2013). Golfing alone? Corporations, elites, and nonprofit growth in 100 American communities. Organization Science, 24(1), 39-57.

McQuarrie, M., & Marwell, N. P. (2009). The missing organizational dimension in urban sociology. City & Community, 8(3), 247-268.

Sampson, R. J. (2011). 11 Neighborhood effects, causal mechanisms and the social structure of the city. Analytical sociology and social mechanisms, 227.

Sampson, R. J., McAdam, D., MacIndoe, H., & Weffer-Elizondo, S. (2005). Civil society reconsidered: The durable nature and community structure of collective civic action. American journal of sociology, 111(3), 673-714.


Sharkey, P., & Faber, J. W. (2014). Where, when, why, and for whom do residential contexts matter? Moving away from the dichotomous understanding of neighborhood effects. Annual review of sociology, 40, 559-579.

Tolbert, C. M., Irwin, M. D., Lyson, T. A., & Nucci, A. R. (2002). Civic community in small‐town America: How civic welfare is influenced by local capitalism and civic engagement. Rural Sociology, 67(1), 90-113.

Authors

• Rebecca Nesbit, University of Georgia

• Laurie Paarlberg, Indiana University School of Philanthropy

• Suyeon Jo, University of Arizona